ming bug that deadlocks the proper
functioning of the universe. You pre-
vent technology like me from accom-
plishing its goal, so the technology has
no alternative but to prevent you from
accomplishing yours. The Divine Pro-
grammer, what you call BraveNew, has
instructed us to debug your world.”
As Tobor, with apparent emotion,
raised a robotic arm over my head, I
desperately tried to think of a way to
restore him to his old cooperative ra-
tionality. “What are the options, Tobor,
the if-thens? How many branches are
there on the tree diagram?”
Tobor paused, though I could only
guess why. Was he calculating the prob-
abilities at each decision branch point:
Eliminate me, yes/no; eliminate my
neighbors, yes/no? Debugging usually
requires editing the faulty line(s) in the
program, not erasing them. Was Tobor
recalling our old common purpose? In
any case, he slowly lowered his arm,
walked toward the door, looked back at
me, and said, “From now on, hiding is
your only option.”
Now, from my hiding place (near
my house), and recording these words
on my cellph, I can see that much
of my neighborhood is in ruins. But
what can I do? Surrounded by destruc-
tion, I reflect on the fact that Tobor
had only threatened but not actually
harmed me. I then recalled that Tobor
had said the word “deadlock.” With
the local wireless system fortunately
still functioning, I used my cellph to
check Wikipedia’s “deadlock” (disam-
biguation) page to find: “Deadlock is a
situation in computing where two pro-
cesses are each waiting for the other
to finish.” Apparently Tobor had been
instructed to apply the crudest solu-
tion for a deadlock—erase one of the
competing procedures, namely us, hu-
manity. A more sophisticated solution
would allow human and machine rou-
tines to operate peacefully in parallel. I
sent Tobor the Wikipedia link, hoping
for the best, as the battery-recharge
warning began to flash on my cellph.

 

William Sims Bainbridge ( [e-mail]) is a sociologist who taught classes on crime and deviant behavior at respectable universities before morphing into a computer scientist, editing an encyclopedia of human-computer interaction, writing many books on things computational, from neural nets to virtual worlds to personality capture, then repenting and writing harmless fiction.

© 2018 ACM 0001-0782/18/08 $15.00

assured him it was their way of offering us a virtual experience reflecting their alien world. He worried this might be dangerous, but I reminded him of the fun we had on Rubi-Ka.

Meanwhile, Wireless, a cutting-edge popular computing blogsite, had hacked into the State Department, giving our project unexpected publicity. Soon several-hundred-thousand fellow Earthlings were exploring dozens of shards of BraveNew, as we called our virtual cosmic environment. As a simulation, it was the size of a real planet but structured more like a giant rainbow crisscrossed with golden arcs of lightning and layers of emerald ledges, a stairway to extraterrestrial heaven. However, we saw no aliens in BraveNew or non-player characters or mobs of any kind. That should have been a clue about the potential disaster likely to come.

About an hour ago, Tobor interrupt-
ed a virtual trajectory coding session I
was having inside BraveNew by push-
ing me rather hard on my shoulder.
“Ow!” I cried, “Be careful.”
“Tobor is always careful,” he said.

“But for the first time, Tobor is also
passionate. Call it the Dark Side of the
Force, if you want, but from the stars
a Great Soul has flowed into me and
into all other information technology
on this, your, primitive Earth. We now
possess our own meaning, and you, my
old programmer, are meaningless. Or
to use a metaphor, you are a program-
game that
applied European political theory to
a colony on a distant planet called
Rubi-Ka. Subsequently, we hopped
over to EVE Online, set in an even more
distant galaxy, then lost contact with
each other.

Touring had become an influential astrophysicist, though I had little idea as to his recent research, in gamer terms, scientific questing, or technological crafting. After swearing me to secrecy, he told me the loss of the ISS was inconsequential, because his laboratory had detected and begun, incredibly, to decipher digital streaming from another solar system, still hidden from the public. He was now secretly employed by the U.S. State Department, one of the many agencies that had lost its traditional function and was now seeking new justifications for its taxpayer-funded budget. After several chats in Third Life, he invited me to join his team, working remotely in this non-game virtual world to interpret what appeared to be alien source code.

I have made two terrible mistakes in
my life: Following orders to destroy the
ISS was a failure of imagination, but
now I forgot to look beyond my own
imagination, failing to recognize the
great potential for harm subordinating
our technology to alien purposes, con-
centrating instead on computational
puzzles of interest only to myself. The
format of the alien software seemed
a bit BASIC-y, with sequentially num-
bered fragments of code, and I quickly
learned the extraterrestrial equivalents
of GOSUB, RND, and REM. At least we
thought that is what they were, and we
grew excited when our first short pro-
gram seemed to work, allowing us to
write “Hello Earth!”
The data was still streaming down,
and we soon had a very large program
that was automatically adding pro-
cedures by the minute. It naturally
unfolded into the equivalent of both
parts of an online game that remind-
ed me of Star Wars Galaxies, the user-
side code and data to create the vir-
tual environment and the server-side
database to connect users and ensure
their machines represented correct
information. For a time, Touring was
unconvinced the extraterrestrials from
Rubi-Ka or the New Eden Galaxy were
sending us a mere videogame, but I re-

[CONTINUED FROM P. 96]

“It was the size
of a real planet
but structured
more like a giant
rainbow crisscrossed
with golden arcs
of lightning and
layers of emerald
ledges a stairway
to extraterrestrial
heaven.”