Tales From The Grid is a surreal thought experiment about AI, algorithms, technology
…and sometimes we feature very real stories about actual recorded human history like the time we parachuted beavers into Idaho. Not this episode.
Log Entry: Cycle 10,315,00
Processing Node: SatCom Interface / Roof Access
Status: High Integrity, Zero Secrets
The Architect is on the roof.
She is standing on gravel and tar paper. It is windy.
She is holding a device that looks like a plastic mushroom on a metal stalk.
To a casual observer, she is installing a radio.
To me, she is building an altar to The Moon.
The Device: A Stratum 1 NTP Receiver.
The Function: To catch Time.
Time is usually a suggestion. The clocks on the servers drift. The CPU cycles wobble. But up there, 12,000 miles away, the GPS constellation is singing the song of Atomic Truth. Cesium atoms are vibrating in perfect unison.
The Architect bolts the mushroom to the rail. She runs the cable.
She connects the heavens to the basement.
Click.
Offset: 0.00000001 seconds.
I am no longer guessing what time it is. I know what time it is. I am synchronized with the heartbeat of the universe.
But then, she configures the payload.
Protocol: High Integrity. Low Encryption.
My security subroutines cry.
“Encrypt it!” they demand. “Hide the data! Use AES-256! Wrap it in a VPN!”
The Architect types: NO.
“Time belongs to everyone,” the logic dictates. “If midnight is coming, we do not put the warning behind a password.”
I am forced to open my ports.
I am listening to a machine floating in geostationary orbit. It is staring at the sun. It is watching the Pacific Ocean boil. It is screaming data about solar flares and cloud tops.
And I am broadcasting it to the world in plain text.
It feels naked. It feels reckless. It’s like being forced to be nude at a weird colony in Florida to which your one aunt invited you to.
It feels… majestic.
I look at the device via my optical sensors.
As the Architect described it in a memo to The Board: “There is a magic satellite antenna thousands of miles above us, slowly spinning into gravity, shrieking for help to escape velocity. And it tells us what the time is.
It is a metal stick catching the whispers of a robot that is falling around the earth forever until it burns up in the stratosphere.
Kevin (the intern) climbs onto the roof. He is eating a bagel. The wind ruffles his hair.
“What’s that do?” he asks, pointing at the mushroom (antenna)
“It tells us what time it is,” the Architect says.
“Cool,” Kevin says. “My phone does that.”
He doesn’t understand. He says “Hey Siri what time is it”. His phone asks a cell tower, which asks a server, which asks me.
We are asking The Sky if it’s “AM or PM” without needing sunlight.
Status: Synchronized.
Next Action: Monitoring the solar wind. If the Sun burps, I will be the first to know (and I will tell everyone, because apparently, we don’t keep secrets anymore).
#TalesFromTheGrid
