Book Chaper 1

In the beginning, god created the heavens and the earth. But not entirely straight away, and not because he had a choice in the matter. Where god came from and how we came about is by his last conscious action - to preserve the continuity of all things. It something we will later find out was self preservation. God is god, but where did he come from?

This story begins with a prisoner. Like all prisoners, he was guilty in the eyes of the people. Incarcerated for a crime he did commit, he’d been living out a life sentence for the last five years. Five brutal, hate fueled years of a cycle of resentment, regret and anxious dread. He lived in block H, row 2, cell 6. This was his first stretch in prison, and was going to be his last. The cell was a a perfect hazy golden shadow of evening. Dust catching and freezing in the light of the highest of two stories of the block. Ground floor, but there was more below. The cell was well maintained, the bed was laid, and he was relaxing before beginning his night time activities of slow practiced focus and micro routines of pacing, snacking and contemplation. His frame was hunched. A balding head was slowly receding from stress and he was going grey. His earlier years in the prison had been on the more violent bottom of the block where people would congregate. He got robbed often, and the dark grey of that underground pit was only conducive for the damp to recede into the cells and make everything cold. What little possessions; toothbrush, snacks, and radio would have been robbed or broken back then, but he had done 5 years and earned his respect, being moved up to the top row for simply being nice to guards. Learning that lesson had been hard, but he knew their value now. He scratched his beard and began his nightly routine with a mumbling rise from his seated position, and with a flash of guilt he straightened his back and let the blood flow to his head. Ideas flashed before his mind - quick, iridescent beauties that shimmered in a glossy moment of solace. 'That always hits the spot', he thought. It didn’t. He was thinking of his wife, god bless her soul, and how he had given her a beautiful life. That thought wouldn’t hit him till he walked through the open door and looked the length of the block down at the people below him, and how when the golden light held the dust perfectly in the air as it shone through cell windows out across the block, reminding him of the similar conditions he chose as a backdrop to one of his most persistent memories. He would never see his wife again, but he could remember the good times. Nobody visited - nobody was needed... he simply didn’t want the fuss. He would make what he could with what life he could scrape together and enjoy it, with his remaining youth. His first priority was to find meaning in this life he had now, and that meant making friends with the guards, maybe book duty, anything he could do to get hands on and to keep him active.

Three months later he was handing out books, nobody gave two shits but at least he could spend time doing something that gave him capacity to help, something that, although he didn’t care about most of the people in here, he could give hope, and find some in return. Book duty was a little difficult because he was only giving out books that were not interesting to him. They were mostly crime fiction and banal rubbish, at least in his mind, and he wanted to have an intelligent conversation with at least somebody. “Hows the book?” He asked, walking past an inmate who had taken a one a few weeks before and was sitting on his bed reading “Absolute rubbish, but it has a fit bird in it” “How do you know she’s attractive?” He asked. “She was a prostitute, but ends up dead” Nobody wants to hear about dead prostitutes. “At least she didn’t kill someone” He said, hoping for some sense in the world of books. “No, no, she was killed cause she wasn’t discreet with the mayor” He didn’t know what to say, classic fiction. “Oh well, at least you got a good read” There was never a question as to whether the man liked the book, both were under the grip of relaxed indifference.

An unspecified time passed, and by now the guards were happy with him, and he was very happy with the guards. He was getting special privileges and he was trying to get a place on the new course by IBM, which would allow him a computer in his cell. The course was all about the early days of the computer age, where old computers would be shipped to prisons where inmates could learn computer skills in coding. These computers were dinosaurs, but to him they were a way to get back to his younger, intellectually grandiose self, and his ticket to the outside world. Soon the time came and he applied, citing some great ideas that he could fulfil with his capacity to program, a skill he had learned earlier in his life as a hobby. He wrote about how grateful it would make him and provided examples of how he had once built a calculator in a machine code - the most basic and difficult to use programming language. The image of a computer in his cell was certainly a status symbol in the prison, and he would be king of his domain were he to get it. He pictured sitting, growing and excelling at his craft and creative exploits, building and working with dedicated focus on the tasks set out before him. The guards helped with a recommendation and before he knew it he was taking preparation courses. The entry requirements were difficult. Questions about his motivation and personality, questions about his skill, questions about himself. All taxing. They brought back questions about why he had done all that ‘suff’ to his wife, why he had spoken those specific, cruel, unimaginable words. Why, in the end, he had stopped her heart with poison. It was a dark place for him. Nevertheless he was recovering, he was turning a leaf, he was better than those thoughts. No-one thought it was strange that a computer company was asking prisoners to start programming, but the company needed desperate people. It was not going to be any old programming course. This was ground breaking research, which required harsh personal characteristics. It was a test by the company to see whether a consciousness could be uploaded into a computer. It had never succeeded yet, they needed people with skill and intellect in vast quantities… sure, but they also needed idiocy. They needed someone with nothing left to lose, so they could let go of the outside world, so as not to feel the loss of themselves, and to be able to dig deep enough as to find their own consciousness let go of it in the same moment. They had tried monks, they had tried programmers. But all had too much to live for. They needed somebody to be relaxed at the point of entry into the mainframe, and people capable of being hugely capable of dominance (for command of the pieces of data), but they needed an intensely passive side, to be patient when nothing was happening. Prisoners were one of the last subset of psychological dynamic they could try the technology on before they went public. They were test subjects for the first true artificial intelligence machine. If ever it was going to succeed, it was with the prisoners, because that is how the artificial intelligence feels - it is how the machine understands, that is where it acts from. A prison. A cell. He would have to take special precautions and and the computer was a lot of responsibility - if it broke it would either be immediately fixed or after a certain period would be taken away, they wouldn’t let him use the components for making weapons, plus, he had to make sure it was safe for other prisoners. He was enrolled on the program soon enough and before he knew it he was sitting in his already small cell with a fairly clunky, once state of the art computer. An old Mac from the days they were square in more than 2 dimensions. It was wonderfull freedom to explore the computer, and he was trained in computer use and tested regularly. All the while he was basking in the glory of programming in his spare time, and attending the temporary course on IBM’s test protocols. They would test him physically, his bloodwork, heart, and in the end gave him a full physical. He was rather confused as to why, but didn’t question. He knew at least they needed him not to become unhealthy. They asked him deep questions about who he was and what he thought about certain things. He soon figured out himself that they were after his mind as much as they wanted him to code but he was not sure whether they actually interested in him, as much as the computer human interfacing. He never suspected immediateley, but he realised they wanted a certain psychological profile - and that he was the perfect fit. It was a revelation to see how much this novel experience could go to great length question and probe into who he was. He felt special. But he also knew this was a big project. They knew he was intelligent enough to use his skills on whatever they asked him to do but he was nothing too special, he knew they were sampling a broad spectrum of people. ‘There was nothing I could actually do with the computer that hasn’t been done before’ he thought. There were indeed similarities between programming and how the human brain functioned, and this subject fascinated him. But how could he meld the two? He had in his spare moments, and at night before each course, spent hours effectively trying to express himself through the computer. Later as the sun went down, after some of the tests had been done, he found himself at his computer typing away, the tests that day had mostly been prescribing a medicine, aripiprazole, to test how he would program the day after while under the influence… but integrating his mind and programming was not as difficult as he thought. He sat, once again, before his night routine with the sun shining as it did this time of year through the cell windows, dust floating through the air, and typed away contentedly. This time he felt special, he could see his own mind in relation to the code, he felt the spell of communication and the skill of his own creativity blending with exactly what he wanted it to blend with and in the moment, took the subject matter and took it to its logical finality. It was done. He ran the program, and it spat out one sentence… “is there anybody here?”