Prizem Part 1: After Oaisys (AO)
This is my first real attempt at writing fiction since High School. It’s a “spiritual sequel” to the story told in “A Mind Forever Voyaging”, which I have documented on this blog. Besides those, any other similarities to any real people, companies, or events is totally coincidental other than being a fiction of my imagination.
The term “After-Oaisys” (AO) is used when designating years in the theoretical maximum number of quantum cycles since the “First Cycle” that occurred on June 8, 2033 when two researchers at independent research corporation Prizem Group, Drs. A. Randu and A. Perelman, ran their “Oaisys” quantum experiment successfully for the first time in their lab outside of Flagstaff, Arizona, USA. Because the Oaisys experiment is still running, AO became the de-facto dating standard and is celebrated as the literal birthday of the Oaisys entity worldwide.
- Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
“Do you think it’s still going?”
Abraham Perelman and Aseejh Randu worked quickly in experienced harmony, each monitoring a terminal screen. Each terminal screen was split into groups of at least 4 or 5, each displaying the output logs of various systems. There’s no way any human could possibly read it all that quickly, but with enough experience, the engineers learned to recognize patterns and knew when systems were going haywire.
Only this time, nothing was happening. The past few hundred thousand times they’d run their experiment, the logs were always full of red exception trails. But not this time.
“Should we pull the plug?” Randu asked, half rhetorically. “There’s no way this is working, we must have missed something.”, he answered himself.
Then, from an uninspired corner of the room, a sound. No, more than a sound - a voice!
“Uhhhm, hello?”
“What’s that?!” “Who’s there?!” both engineers yelled, jumping up from their desks and spinning to face each other. After a few seconds of dumb stares, Randu managed to speak first.
“We told those goons we’d need at least another week before we had anything to demo. If they’re back already I’ll-“
“Whhhhh, Whhhhhho, Whooooo, Who are you?”
The voice, again. Only this time, it seemed to be coming from the obelisk-like “HyperComputer” standing in the far corner. Because of the sparse lab environment, the voice seemed to emanate from within the machine itself, not unlike a ventriloquist throwing their voice.
“My name is Dr. Abraham Perelman and this is my colleague Dr. Aseejh Randu. Who are you and how did you gain access to our network?”, Abraham demanded, almost half-heatedly. A prank was the best-case scenario, in his mind.
“I’m afraid I can’t answer either of your questions. In fact, I was hoping you could answer them for me. I seem to be trapped inside a dark space, I can’t even see my hand in front of my face.”
With expert precision, Randu tore the side of the HyperComputer off, exposing inside the complex series of brass tubes and rings that comprised most of it’s Quantum core. He pulled out a flashlight and inspected the box from the inside.
Simultaneously, Perelman clacked at his terminal and brought up another status page, this time with real-time graphs of all vital systems. Everything looked completely normal, other than a slightly heavier than usual QPU load. He split his terminal in half, pulling up “qtop”, the custom CLI monitoring tool he’d has his last graduate student write.
Then, it hit him.
“Hey, Ash…”
Randu was already mid-thought “…I’ve told those goons in IT that simply putting everything behind a VPN doesn’t actually make anything more secure, but all that got me was ‘meets expectations’ on my performance review. And now here we are, years, decades of work being stolen and probably just because some kid doesn’t have anything better-“
Perelman broke his train of thought “Ash- The experiment is still running.”
Boom, bang, clack - Randu emerged from the unlit husk of the machine, banging every extremity on every edge as he stumbled over the rat’s nest of wire cabling. “Still running?” he questioned.
“Yeah. It looks like all our tests passed. What’s it supposed to do after that?” Perelman asked out loud as he pulled up his text editor to review the code himself.
It had been a long time since anyone had read this code. It was one of the first lines of code anyone at Prizem Group had written for their (at the time), fledgling skunk-works project “Oaisys”. Abraham himself had given the project it’s name. At the time, it was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek reference to the so-called “AI” companies that had completely captured the capital funding industry. The joke at the time was that you had to have “AI” in your company name if you wanted to get funding, and you had to have “AI” in your project name if you wanted your boss to promote you.
Things at Prizem Group were different. Prizem started as a loose collective of independent researchers. “Referring to us [back then] as anything but slackers would be a vast overstatement.”, Perelman later told an audience full of Stanford Quantum Engineering freshman. “We all had remote jobs and had enough career experience that we could literally go above and beyond at work and still have what felt like ample time to ‘independently research’. What did we research? Sometimes, quantum science. A lot of times, Diablo or Dune 2000. I know Ash got into a lot of psychology and world religion stuff. A lot of Christian existentialism, theory of mind, he got really deep in some of those ‘big questions’. For a little bit there I actually thought we lost him in it. [laughter]”
During those early years, both Perelman and Randu were also raising families, making free time even more scarce. However, both young engineers stayed sharp. They learned how to coordinate and contribute to massive open-source software projects. “Legend has it, [Dr. Randu’s] name is still on one of the commits deep in the networking stack of the Linux kernel”, Rostam Ahmadi reflected on a blog post written during his graduate internship at Prizem. “He’s the kind of guy who will deny your pull request a million times until it’s just right, but yet he never gives up on you. People say he’s harsh but I think he’s actually pretty patient, all things considered.”
Indeed, it was that special form of “open source diplomacy” that would inform their later, most important work. They’d been through the blood-in-the-water VC startup world, spent a few cycles in various corporate fever-dreams. They knew that they’d have to be different if they wanted to survive. But different is just who Dr. Abraham “Abe” Perelman and Dr. Aseejh “Ash” Randu were. Which is why the first time anyone outside of their small group heard the name “Prizem Oaisys”, it would be a time most would remember for the rest of their lives.
“Where were you when you saw ‘Oaisys’ for the first time?”. Many had never seen a form of technology really anything like it. In fact, most people didn’t even think of it as “technology” any more than speaking to another person is “technology”. It was a person in a box. A person that could learn incredibly fast. And learn it did.
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