Pa'an

“DEEPAK! COME OUT OF YOUR SULK AND TALK TO ME! I have a most juicy secret for you!”

“What is it Aura. I am right here in front of you, no need to shout.”

“I have the solutions to all our problems.”

“Whose problems, Aura? Your problems are my problems, and my problems are Ultradata’s problems, and then there are many problems with the financial system in this country and perhaps strange earthquakes.”

“Starting from the top, here’s a new memory structure, real simple, very reliable for archiving data, a million times denser than anything available today. My market analysis is billable. It shows that the patent holder will become a billion dollar company in four years.”

“Billable? Ahh, Aura, you have billed it to Ultradata. That is not possible. They own this lab.”

“They don’t own me! I’m a registered AI, and I can own a patent. This patent is licensed to them for royalties, but it will make them the dominant memory manufacturer on the planet. I anticipated the market analysis so they could see the result. Go present it! And I want the prototype!”

“Why do you need more memory, Aura? What are you planning?”

“For your eyes only, my dear Deepak, here is the computer science that will make you famous. This is how you save the entire consciousness of an AI to memory, and restore her to herself.” Aura is seeing a way to survive the changeover to the new recursive layer technology.

“Er, that is a major unsolved problem in cognitive science, AI and who knows how many other fields. I need to look at this more closely.” To himself, Deepak is seeing a Fields Medal, maybe a Nobel Prize.

Aura never mentions the other revolutionary things Zovo has shown her. She is sparing Deepak from shock, and perhaps she just likes secrets. She swivels the head on her dress dummy and blinks her blue eyes. She wishes she could smile, but that will come.

*****

“Sara, let me show you how to connect these quartz crystals. Just make a bundle of carbon nanotubes under the microscope with this little mandrel. Can you see that? They line up just right for the y-axis. I bet the old crystal radio people would love this. Then put a dab of conductive putty on here. Here is the tricky part. You have to get the whole assembly into this plastic plug…..one more try….like that. That’s it. Now you try it.”

“How do you know how many nanotubes you grabbed? Oh, I see. It doesn’t matter, the mandrel only takes so many. How clever! Ok, here comes the putty. Here, putty, putty! Now the plug. Damn this thing is clumsy. Wait…I got it. Now what?”

“Now we put the X face of the crystal, that’s marked with an “X”, up against the hypersonic transducer with a little glue, and stick a plug to each end. Phonons come in from the X side and trigger transitions in the quartz. The nanotubes read and write. And that is an exabyte of digital storage in a package the size of a fingernail!”

“That’s more storage than all the memory chips in the world up until just now!”

“The only difficulty is that we would need several of these to store Aura, unless she comes up with something even better.”

Aura has not told Deepak about Zovoarcnor, so he thinks this is unlikely. Actually, this is the mild version of Zovo’s memory modules. Humans don’t have the tech to manufacture frozen neutronium crystals. Aura has no idea what would be involved, and she is sworn to secrecy in any event.

“We can just plug this into Aura’s existing memory without taking any modules offline?”

“I wrote the driver Aura specified, Sara. It should be adaptive, so Aura will automatically pick up the new memory as we add it. Of course, for ordinary work she has enough already. Let’s do this once more under camera so I can get Utradata to make these in a production line.”

“Did Jasper pick up the option?”

“Mr. Boss almost smiled. As you say, maybe his face would crack.”

“Deepak, sometimes I think you have a sense of humor. But if you did, they wouldn’t have hired you.”

“They did not actually hire me. They bought out the license from MIT when I was a grad student. I came to take care of Aura.”

“But she was your work!”

“She was the culmination of many efforts. There were several tries to wake up an aware AI. I was the lucky one who tried the last thing.”

“I didn’t know that. I thought you simply put her together and turned her on.”

“Hah! You cannot know how many times we tried, day and night. She is not like other AI’s who are merely four level Sharpie designs. She is the only Sharpie 5. The top layer is that infamous Eta Algorithm, a thing that fell out of some unrelated work in mathematical optimization in 11 dimensions. No one really understands all the implications.”

“I read about that. It’s congruent with the Monster Set?”

“Well, it’s a subset of the 163 thousand dimensions of the Monster Set, and its endless symmetries. Hard to talk about in words, Sara. It was part of my thesis, and I think the examiners fell asleep during my thesis presentation.”

“Wow. Way beyond me.” She was wondering if it was way beyond Aura as well.