The lights were out. Joe preferred it so. He would tell everyone, anyone who cared to ask, anyone who cared to visit him for that matter, it was to help prevent eyestrain, or to help him see the computer screen better. In fact, it served a wholly more anti social purpose in the sense that it precluded the reality in which he existed from the reality he was creating.

In the dark, the physical world disappeared right up to the black borders of the monitors. His creations were not being touched, tainted, by the harsh world he had to endure. He knew rationally this was irrational, but it put his right brain at ease. If the left side of his brain ever let the right side really know what was going on, they may rightly hatch a plan to jump from his brainpan and start hitching a ride to Alaska.

As a middle aged programmer, he had grown accustomed to the things he created being twisted by others in a manner not to his liking. The military was, by its nature, the worst offenders. But they had known he was a kung-fu master, a gunslinger extraordinaire, and their checks always cleared. It was true up until some punk script-kiddie managed to befoul and corrupt one of his creations.

How could he have predicted the admiral’s daughter would borrow her mother’s top secret ultra encrypted tablet to sext her boyfriend? And was it really his fault the worm downloaded from some random hacker wannabe forum by her jealous girlfriend made it’s way back to said tablet? And was he responsible that said worm happened to cause the entire Atlantic sonar submarine detection grid to go offline for a whole week? Apparently the Navy thought he was responsible, as well as the Secretary of Defense, and the U.S. Attorney General.

“Fucking kids...” he said aloud to no one.

He had become persona non grata in the very competitive upper stratosphere of programmers. It was always a mixed blessing when one of your own went down in flames. On the one hand, less competition meant more of that lucrative government teet came your way. It also meant more scrutiny of your own work. If expert genius “A” can screw up, what is to say expert “B” and “C” isn’t doing a crap job as well? It was always best practice to disassociate from the flaming pile that was once your rival, friend, coworker, collaborator...road kill. Rest in peace dear friend, better you than me. At least that is what Joe had always done, so not surprising when no one came to his funeral.

Joe had come to see it as a blessing. The people in the world that knew, that had flamed out in their own glorious way and survived, understood the truths of this occupation as he now did. Programmers were constantly asked to act as omniscient beings, to predict all possible contingencies and all manor of weakness in the software they created. An impossibility to say the least, but sadly when working for the government or multi-billion dollar companies, it was an implied expectation that was always retroactive in its application. But life goes on, and so did Joe. After the requisite meltdown that included binge drinking, drugs, sex junkets to Thailand, and a myriad of other self destructive behaviors effectively purging him of worldly possessions, wealth, health, and every ounce of his pride, he checked into rehab for a well deserved vacation.

He emerged cleansed, refreshed, and with the exception of a moderated fascination with Internet pornography, vice free. His therapist had told him he needed one. Everyone needed a vice in fact. If we picked one, preferably one that did us little harm, took ownership of it instead of allowing it to possess us, we would have something within our control to lean on in times of crisis. It had struck him as odd for a therapist to encourage miscreant behavior, but after some thought, and some practice, he found it quite useful and satisfying...in various ways.

Prior to this, he had little use for psychologists in general. As a programmer, it was part of his nature and practice to know people and how they thought. Computers were easy to understand, people were the pain in the ass. To create an effective piece of software, one had to anticipate how the user would interact with it, and in most cases try to break it. He had to empathise with both genius and fool alike. He was, in essence, a profiler like the ones portrayed on the oh too many crime shows still infesting the idiot boxes around the world. He was good at it, and people paid him well to know the minds of others; how to help them, or hinder them.

The trouble that formed the impetus of his downward spin was the simple fact he never took the time to get to know himself. In particular, up until recently, he had felt no limitations of his abilities. No limits but ones imposed by the weak minded people around him, and the current limits of technology. As far as he knew, he could do anything he dreamed of, if it weren’t for those meddling kids...

Through his therapist Joe learned about himself, and the definition of limits. Joe discovered weaknesses which had been conveniently stashed away under the piles of empty 5-hour Energy and Red Bull containers. He also discovered something else he had been rejecting. He was old. It was undeniable, and took some acclimation. He missed his hair most of all. The visit to the opthamologist enlightened him to the need for trifocals. And of course there was the basketball that had mysteriously sprouted out of his midsection. Somehow, in the dead of night, someone had come into his room and transplanted his brain into his father’s body. But life goes on, and so did Joe.

Twenty-eight days in rehab, then fifteen months of one on one and group therapy sessions. Joe found himself, warts and all, and learned to accept the old man in the mirror. He once believed everyone was weak, everyone but him. He now included himself in that assessment, and was satisfied with it.

Joe also found himself with a new calling. At the request of his therapist, who had since become a good friend, Joe volunteered to run group sessions at the rehabilitation center. He found it similar to his old profession, except in this case he was “programming” people rather than computers. Definitely not as easy, but far more gratifying when they all worked together and got it right. The residuals from his commercial software and the occasional tech support calls kept him in modest housing and sufficient porn, but his life had gotten significantly less cumbersome and brutal.

Then along came a child, an amazingly brilliant beyond years child, to find him. She wanted him, or rather she wanted the old him, to help with something he at first called insanely impossible. But she talked, and he listened as he had recently learned to do so well, and for the second time in his life he found himself changed. What she described was beyond anything he had ever considered possible, and it all made perfect sense. He was instantly a believer. He had fallen for her and her vision. Her kung-fu was strong, and he had vowed that day to help her, protect her, and if need be sacrifice himself for her.

He romanticized and dramatized it because that was the way he wished to remember it, without doubt. The truth be known at the time, he was getting bored helping rich assholes with more money than sense get their lives in order. Granted he had been one of those assholes, but he had his own new life to live now. Kali had offered him a job. He had been number five on her list, but he was the only one who hadn’t laughed to her face about the project right from the start. Not to her face. It was intriguing cutting edge stuff for sure, but he hadn’t really been sold on it. He just needed to get away to flex his gray matter again, even if it was for a doomed pipe dream of an idea, so long as the checks would clear.

After years here, he would be the big five-oh in a few months, he had eventually become a believer. He had always been a believer in his mind, it just took some time to realize it. And so he sat here alone, in the dark, with his ones and zeros again, but with a firm grasp on himself, and a firm belief in what he was doing would be amazing.

And suddenly he was blind...

“Are you jerking off down here all alone again?” Kali said as she continued flipping the switches to the computer lab lights on one by one.

The banks of LEDs overhead blazed into Joe’s retinas before he had a chance to blink. Being underground, the lighting was designed to approximate normal sunlight in color and intensity for the health and well being of the staff, to Joe’s dismay. “Dammit Kali, you could warn a person,” he barked.

“I could, but you forget I am a bitch. Or haven’t you gotten that memo?” She flipped the final switch, and began walking the length of the lab toward Joe.

One of the first things Joe had done upon arrival was to commandeer an entire computer lab for his own use. Abe still had fits when he walked by to see all that hardware sitting idle. Rarely had Joe used more than three or four of the fleet of workstations in the room, and even more rare was to have another programmer actually in the same room let alone doing any form of work with Joe in person. More than once Abe had attempted to either evict Joe, or make off with the unused equipment. Kali often had to step between them at the beginning, sighting the eccentricity of highly intelligent talent and the psychological need to take ownership of the working environment. Joe just liked to see what he could get away with, a means of marking territory without actually pissing on the walls. The unused hardware had since become obsolete and useless, while Abe had tacitly accepted it as the cost of doing business.

There was room to spare in the programmer’s department anyway. Joe’s minions and flunkies were out in the cloud, cloistered away in their own little creative hovels all happily writing their bits of the billion lines of code needed for this puzzle. Most were totally unaware of the real project, developing nondescript programming tools or automation apps. Some of the more talented were on the need to know regimen or just outright lied to about what they were doing. Most thought they were working on a MMORPG or some new social networking fad. The select few he trusted sufficiently were on staff and on site to provide for his or Kali’s every demand. And they did demand, hard and fast.

Kali slapped a hand onto his shoulder, “So how are the sensory interface algorithms coming along? Have you got them close to speed parity with the SYNCS (SYnaptic Neocourtical Column chipS)?”

Joe, still rubbing his eyes, grunted, “In a fashion.”

Kali knew that expression too well. It was his programmer speak for ‘It does what you want, except when...’ which always made her agitated. “Except?” She inquired, squeezing a bit tighter on his shoulder.

“Well...” Joe began, sinking a little under the increased pressure to his clavicle. “...I ran the current versions for most systems through Simuloid with nothing out of the ordinary.”

Simuloid is the state of the art for computer generated simulated human systems. It is the standard tool used by researchers for drug study simulations, forensic crime scene reenactments, and any other experiment that needed data on how a human body reacted to an internal or external stimulus.

“State of the Art” wasn’t a phrase Joe used for it. In essence he saw it as a compilation of temperamental algorithms from innumerable scientists turned amateur programmer that had been kludged together under a sparkly, yet glitchy user interface. It had then been marketed to gullible non-programmer scientists and their ignorant bosses as the best thing since sliced bread. The old Joe would have jumped on a money making opportunity like that. The new Joe found the concept quite despicable, and that was disregarding the fact that the interface code looked like it had been written by a two year old.

The first thing Joe did was to gut out the grossly unusable interface and rescue all the juicy bits inside. He revelled in telling Abe that any warranties they held on the half a million dollar software package had been essentially voided. And, in reverse engineering some of the coding, several patent and copyright laws may have been broken to boot.

“All for the better,” Joe claimed.

At the time, Abe shook his head and walked away, pretending he hadn’t heard.

The upside was all the critical physiological and chemical process models where now crammed into a very efficient base code. Each set of algorithms described everything from the mitosis process of muscle cells, to the growth of hair out of a hair follicle. There was even a model describing how a drop of sweat formed on the surface of the skin, and how many BTU’s of heat were dissipated when that drop evaporated. Nearly every cell type and organ withing the human body had a module to simulate interactive behavior on a molecular level. The only major thing missing was a highly functioning neural network to run the show.

For decades, programmers like Joe had been working on the holy grail of programming, a functioning artificial intelligence that would pass muster with neuroscientists like Kali. The individual components of the brain, the neurons, gluons, dendritic chemical reactions, all had been simulated in one form or another. The simulation of intellect, creative, emotion, those remained a work in progress. 

Brute force logic had been challenged with Deep Blue vs. Kasperov, the results were questionable at best. Go master Lee Sedol was the next human to fall against the AI of AlphaGo. Humans rebelled by playing games with more abstract constructs like Arimaa. To date no programmer had managed to repeatedly beat the human world grand master, though Joe had the prestige of being the closest so far.

Watson, with it’s massive multiprocessor system the size of a small flat had powered through the questions for answers conundrum of the pop-culture pseudo-intellectual game of Jeopardy. The game still existed, sans it’s former dearly departed host, as did Watson, in a new form and capacity. One of Watson’s great grandchildren was currently answering phones for most customer service call centers throughout the world. With an eighty percent success rate and hordes of angry former call center employees wishing for divine intervention via a lightning strike or a computer virus, the simulated human continued to prove it could replace in part or in whole a flesh and blood human.

Imitation may be considered flattery, but unlike a computer A.I. people tend to get pissy when their livelihood is at stake. As with most events in history, the grousing of low payed blue collar plebs don’t get much notice. When it begins to encroach on the livelihood of the wealthy professional however, suddenly it was important.  Insurance companies where already in the works to displace much, if not all costs associated with doctors, demanding medical A.I. be used on all diagnosis to confirm the fallible human physicians where providing optimal cost effective treatments.  The physicians where becoming nothing more than card punch operators for the doctor in a box, doing things an A.I. with no hands cannot as yet manage.  At least that is how some physicians saw it.

With all the effort, brilliant minds and billions of dollars put into this endeavor, man had not yet managed to build a brain from scratch.  

 Which is where Kali came in, with Joe by her side to make it a reality.

And that is precisely what Joe was there to do, make a reality for Kali’s little science experiment to live in, or at least the best approximation to reality that current technology could manage.  Right now, his best approximation was being a stubborn bastard.

"We are still having issues with the stimulus transfer rates between the white room and the Simuloid inputs."  Joe always did his best to keep the coding jargon to a minimum.  

Kali was a genius, but she wasn’t a programmer, though she had picked up a surprising amount of knowledge in the years they had worked together.  Most times however, it was more of "Joe, I need a widget that does xyz..." and Joe would go off and make a widget that did xyz along with the abc that she hadn’t realized she needed, because that was his job.

This widget had him stumped. "We just can’t get the throughput from one system to the other without degrading the signal or having dramatic lag.  The Simuloid perception would be akin to playing a really old version of Minecraft while stoned, and not in a retro fun way."

"Is it a hardware limitation, or does your coding just suck?"  Kali took every opportunity to rib him when he was hung on something.  She knew him, how he worked inside, what made his synapses fire the best to plow through a problem. That was her job.

Joe took a measured and practiced offense, "My coding is like a Mozart concerto, and the hardware is the best money can buy.  Your demands are just a couple decades ahead of what can be done, as usual.  We are trying to stuff ten pounds of cats in a five pound sack."

Kali was still not accustomed to Joe’s colorful metaphors and looked at him quizzically. "Cats?  I thought it was ten pounds of crap?"

Joe smiled as he explained, "yeah, but have you ever tried putting one cat in a sack?  Crap is easy in comparison." 

"Well, I don’t care if you have to poison this cat," Kali responded, "get it in the damn bag."

"That was funny boss."  he enjoyed when she geeked out a little. She was showing a few cracks and needed to lighten up before evil Kali came out.  "I’ll get my best minion on it.  She’ll love this one." 

He added, "Don’t you have a date to get to?"

"Fuck..." as Kali glanced at her watch. She’d forgotten to set a reminder.  "I’ll be back later, and I expect at least a decent lie about making progress."  Kali headed for the exit.

"Don’t hurry back on my account," Joe called after.  "You kids have yourself some fun now."

The last thing Joe saw was Kali’s middle finger as it crossed the threshold.