Page 141 of Coldwire
“So what was it all supposed to be?” I ask. “Sometest?”
“Yes. I was testing you. And NileCorp was testing me.”
Chung, slowly, drinks from his own cup of tea. While my legs keep shaking up and down, he is the very picture of relaxation, taking a break during a busy afternoon spell. I’d believe he was a parent who’d just fetched a child from the preschool next door and was now getting dinner started.
“Do you know what a cold wire is?” he asks after a moment. “It’s thereturn route in a power supply. The opposite of the surging hot wire. It’s not a real kick-start itself. It’s just the mechanism to loop energy back to the source. Coldwire has the capacity to do anything to StrangeLoom. But you still need to know how to direct it.” Chung swirls his teacup. “An organic mind like mine can’t truly interface with it. I can only speak to the program, give it clear instructions to act on as though it is my chatbot assisstant. It’s hard to make changes when you have to understand what exactly you’re kick-starting first, isn’t it?”
“As opposed to what?” I ask, though I know already. “What’s the alternative?”
“Coldwire was built to interface with what I started in Atahua. The project that NileCorp shut down.”
Dou Dou barks, finished with the treats. Chung waves the dog off to play in the living room. I finally reach for my tea, taking a sip to order my thoughts. It’s warm on my palms. Bitter on my tongue.
“My dad said you performed a miracle.” I put the cup down. “The email you left in the floppy disk. You wanted me to see it.”
“I did,” Chung says shortly. “I wanted you to see how he behaved when we first started. That way you can’t accuse me of making up stories if what I’m about to tell you has such disparity to his current attitude.”
It’s not safe. You should have told me this had to do with Chung. I would have never let you be sent after him.
“You wouldn’t know it now,” he goes on, “but in the earliest years of the cold war, it felt like Atahua had limitless money to spend on technological research. Whoever ruled upcountry ruled the world: you know the catchphrase. Project Wit was one such research project. It could only be simulated, our findings written about. But I thought it had the potential to be so much more.” Chung sets his teacup down too. “A few years into my work, I had clearly hit a wall. It wasn’t that my supervisors didn’t like my research. It was that they didn’t like my name. Investors could see the appeal of the project, but they didn’t want to put my face on television if they went widewith it.” He scratches the side of his chin, his hand lingering. I understand the gesture, the casual motion. It’s the instinct we have to shrink in front of a crowd, hopeful that maybe the Atahuans won’t care just this once that we look so wildly different. “When the Medan government reached out with an offer to work for them under the table, I took it. They told me I should think of it as a boon for science. That they were just benefactors in the pursuit of knowledge. It wasn’t political.”
There is nothing in our current landscape that is no longer political. Even the color of someone’s shoes is political.
“You couldn’t have believed that.”
“Of course not, Lia. My generation may not have been born into the cold war as you were, but it did begin during our most formative years. I knew what it meant. I knew it was treason—I couldn’t have fooled myself if I tried. So I began living a double life. I made the pretense of working downcountry in the day and then came here every night to perform my real research. Medaluo bought me citizenship to Kunlun. They figured it was safer for me to be double-crossing my government if I wasn’t actually on enemy territory.”
The oven rings to signal that it’s still on. It’s warming up the kitchen. Sweat pricks at the small of my back.
“Did my dad know?” I ask.
Chung gets up. He returns the kettle, then hunches over to switch off the oven.
“No,” he says. “Not at first. Not until Eirale got sick.”
Eirale.Up until I saw it in Kieren’s second briefing, I didn’t even know her name.
“Project Wit started as a study. We weren’t targeting StrangeLoom yet, though the investors were certainly eyeing NileCorp as a source of funding. Wit was just a language model training on data to answer one overall question: Can it understand the nature of its reality? If we give it a virtual world, does it know that houses sit on streets? Does it realize that people go to work? Can it think of itself as a part of this ecosystem?”
I remember my feed search, the summaries trying to grasp why Project Wit was shut down. Of course NileCorp got threatened. If Wit could trulyunderstanda virtual world, then it could also replicate it in a snap.
“It seems,” I say, “a little silly to build AI that understands the nature of virtual reality andnotexpect it to target StrangeLoom.”
“Medaluo thought so too. Once they employed me, that’s what they angled for. Atahua was pulling all funding for Wit anyway—I suppose I was happy to comply. I started to build a new program with an eye toward usability. Something that understood human command so a person could alter StrangeLoom without needing to know the intricacies of the code themselves. Under Medaluo’s influence, Wit’s original template was transforming into the first prototype of a glorified chatbot that could understand the StrangeLoom system. It was becoming Coldwire. I thought I’d left Wit behind entirely.”
I can see where this is going. I look down at my hands, at my pixel-rendered avatar, and I know exactly what happens next.
“And then Eirale gets sick.”
“And then,” Chung echoes softly in confirmation, “Eirale gets sick. It’s terminal. Henry is distraught. He finds me in the labs downcountry with a huge stack of stapled paper. He tells me in a rush that he read my original report for Project Wit cover to cover after remembering a conversation we’d had. In it there was a proposal that Wit’s language model could possibly learn tobecomesomeone if it was built with comprehensive data. It could freeze them at a point in time: put an avatar of them in virtual reality. It would be as though they never died upcountry.”
Oh, Dad.
“I’ve never been able to say no to Henry. Whether he was trying to get us into trouble at the academy or asking me to be his best man at his elopement. His request intrigued me. Science calls for experimentation. No one has ever discovered anything new by flinching from the unknown. So I did it.”
I put my hands over my mouth, trying to keep my breathing controlled. A scream bubbles up into my throat. I don’t want to say something I’ll regret; I don’t want to scare away any part of the truth being given to me. The sound trapped inside me is molten, and it sears and it sears, but I keep it back.
“It worked. You shimmered into appearance inside this very house, Lia. It was glitchy in the early weeks. You would remember some days but not others. Hold on to certain memories but then recycle more important ones. You have to understand that when you were first created, the assumption was that you’d think exactly as four-year-old Eirale did and stay that way. No one has tried training a language model to truly believe it’s a human mind. It was all trial and error.”
