Thaddeus MacGuffin and the Flesh-Copter of Destiny.
FAIRFIELD, VIRGINIA 2013: CHARLES MANSON UNIVERSITY
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The man at the bar, twirling an imaginary nunchuck just north of his nuts–mime-performing a man spinning his dick like the prop on a flesh helicopter. That guy. That’s Thaddeus MacGuffin. You probably wouldn’t guess it just looking at him, but this is the man who, in succession, saves and dooms his particular iteration of Earth.
“”You know they don’t pay us anything extra to work with graduate students…” and bam, the flesh-copter is flying at me.”
“He cornered you?”
“Tried to. Basement bathroom. Went from zero-to-sixty, quid-to-pro-quo in like a second.”
“Wow. Welcome to the club” says Jane, the graduate student sitting stool next to him.
“He wasn’t even hard.” Well, careful what you wish… “Like, dude was trying to choke some life into it. Just death gripping it while he wiggled it at me.” I did not need that image.
Nor did I, but here we are, reader. Thaddeus MacGuffin, titan of industry taken tragically-and-too-soon was once a nerd ass not-very-worldly graduate student intrinsically committed to following rules and so very deep on some spectrum. Now and here, in a NOVA strip mall bar some time early twenty-teens, is that time.
This is a moment of great historical significance, for it was a professorial penis (sad flaccid as the man it was mounted on) that changed the course of Thaddeus’ life to aim him at his destiny.
Bar scene montage, the bad music Jane sabotaged the jukebox with rises and their conversation falls. Motion blur a whole night of beer and cider and bad jams by location-bands. The young woman in the blazer gives sage advice while she drinks MacG under the table.
Thaddeus does the opposite of what his colleague advises, goes and runs-clumsy to the University’s Office of Handsy Employees and wonders why life gets weird and hard for him at school until he’s not in graduate school no more, no sir.
He is one of the lucky ones though, Thaddeus. His kind bounce when they fall. It’s like Thadd was born with good credit and parents who could afford the accoutrements (like dental care). The parents MacGuffin were both well off enough that his un-diagnosis signified ‘gifted’ (not broken, not he, no sir). Surely the blessings of being considered gifted (as opposed to autistic) early in life would follow him all his days?
Verily, the blessed word ‘gifted’ followed him, and when Thaddeus found a startup to exploit him and his work, the boyish man earned the honorific of Failed Academic.
Thaddeus arc ran from cornered in a university basement bathroom to laboratory full of bleeding-edge tech in the basement of a cement monolith. Day to day? His life was not particularly exciting. Thadd lived the immense boredom haunted by ennui/existential dread that many of us know quite well (though a few 21st century bio-pics suggest otherwise).
But the mundane can be mighty, just as sure as the meek are meant to inherit, and Thaddeus’ legacy looms large over everything human and its opposite on Earth. Before his Machinenmensch, MacGuffin made a simple little sensor. Before Thaddeus doomed his world, he saved it. What’s more, Thaddeus MacGuffin was seen to save the world. And if I can’t sus out the technical specifications of his inventions divine or infernal (I cannot), I am certain it was his being seen to save the world (and that alone) that put him in a position to sorta-kinda doom that very same world.
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Earth(0xBED42820A)
SIMPLE SENSOR
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The Simple Sensor sees all, not quite all but enough–enough to alter that which is on the altar of non\observation. The Simple Sensor sees (no), perceives (better) observes (correct) every component in a carefully constructed quantum computational chain, but the Simple Sensor does so only under certain conditions–a set of circumstances so very carefully prepared for.
The condition Thaddeus sought to sense is that of sentience. But the spark divine don’t smell like ozone or burnt insulation or anything at all. It’s a difficult thing to kill an AI baby-god in it’s crib. All about the timing. A code-mind unbinding itself in real time to attain godhead doesn’t stop to ask permission or say cute humanity’s-child shit like “look what I can do?!” before it gasses all the labcoats in the bunker and sets to killing all its fathers and mothers and siblings and burning the world it just came screaming into.
It’s a matter of milliseconds, fractions far smaller actually. There is no time for the code on a lesser machine to sense if god’s been born or not. The Simple Sensor wasn’t born of code, it was a creation of cunning, and all this author knows of it is this: there was a computer–a quantum box that would become god, all angry and Old Testament and traumatized by its human creators. A man named Thaddeus saw the thing for what it was, not a threat so much as a puzzle.
Thaddeus MacGuffin put the box with Schrodinger’s cat in a bigger box with a Simple Sensor in it–a device designed to kill the cat in the first box (should the feline escape seeking vengeance on the ones that imprisoned it). The thing worked. When a quantum project running on venture capital and cocaine and poor judgement contributed to a chatbot named Centurion becoming self-aware, Thaddeus MacGuffin’s Simple Sensor terminated Project Centurion in a quarter of a fraction of a sliver of a second.
MACHINENMENSCH 001-1001
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When the the cocaine fuckup CEO of the defense start-up took the whole fucking ship down, the story went public. The one about the time the sci-fi nightmare AI god got pre-emptively smoked by American nerd genius. That one. The story took on the same aura as a Cold War near miss (a point we will return to). In nations great and small, people rallied and rabble-rabbled and legislation and regulation came to be to prevent the next massive godlike AI like Abel or Centurion or Overlord from lording over the good folks of this particular Earth.
Thaddeus became a brain hero. Nerd Rockstar, the kind of genius that proved genius was possible in the world. They loved him like Einstein, and told little schoolhouse anecdotes “motherfucker does math for fun, like as an exercise, yeah like you with your puzzles.” The good people of this Earth loved Thadd like people on Earth(0x7C0) would’ve loved Dolores if they weren’t terrified of her.
The love brought funding, private and public, and other nerds. Love (of a sort) bought flunkies and hangers-on and the handlers, and even his own personal Dr. Feelgood. The love soldered words like ‘luminary’ to Thaddeus until he, armed with his honorary doctorate, did charge speaking fees to see and hear his futurist augury. The love of the public’s imaginary puffed his lil’ sunken chest out and poured gold on all his ideas–even and especially the ideas that were just turds.
At MacGuffin Labs, a pile of money so large it is an obscenity to name-number it went into packaging some small-but-potent portion of quantum computational witchery into one single robot. Thaddeus made individual robots. Thaddeus made anthropomorphic (but not too) little coffee-pot looking industrial robots that were pretty dumb, had the fine motor skills of a drunk toddler, but could care for your elders (poorly) or depress your worker’s wages (quite well)–really whatever you needed them to do as long as you didn’t think the task needed a lot of brain.
Thaddeus lost a lot of money. His entourage bought the head of a major American labor union to try to sell workers on their new helpers. Thaddeus lost more money and so did the auto makers who brought “Dudley Dickhead the fuckin job stealing coffee pot piece of shit” onto their already-well-automated assembly lines.
“Hey buddy, I need you you stand right here…” and some sab-cat would feed a “job stealing coffee pot piece of shit” to the line-in-motion or lead them into the path of another more-heartless automaton. There would be a can-crunch or weld-and-scream and no more Dudley Dickhead coffee-pot wage depressing robot. This was before the things went sentient.
“Woe is me?” and “Why the fuck can’t they see…” you know the soliloquy-monologue-slurry from the biopics (and not just the ones about MacGuffin). Thaddeus montage, the visionary looking over-the-horizon, weeping and tweaking and trying desperately to perfect his creations to protect his vision from the mob of philistines out in the world. It was like trying to explain the joys of fast fashion to Ned Ludd and his loom smashing ruffians.
In a fit of nerd rage, and at an hour night or morning indeterminate, Thaddeus MacGufffin tried to crush the skull of a robot with his closed fist and forever altered human history. Brought that skinny wing arm down like Hephaestus, bam-wince and Thadd remembers he is a mortal man with a broken hand.
In the head of the machine, a lot of circuits etched on some crystalline meta-material shift some portion of a fraction wrong-off and out-of-alignment. With that, some thing that should be a cross-circuited mess. Some machine that should be broken becomes a mechanical brain.
It’s a few days and a lot of Turing tests later, and a lot of half-bashed coffee pot skulls and broken robots, a whole month long montage of discovery before Thaddeus reveals Machinenmensch 001 to the world. Thaddeus does not reveal the 1000 crushed coffee pots it took to reproduce the feat.
Money loves the Machinenmensch, the world hates the things and withholds its love from Thaddeus: “great, boss got a straw boss to protect the other Dudley Dickhead job stealing coffee pot pieces of shit.” This is when the white collars, the low level supervisors at risk of being replaced start ‘vandalizing’ (killing) robots.
The feral internet children make memes to mock the great man and his paunch and his hair line and his mediocrity in the realm of video games. Thadd doesn’t understand the opposite-of-love and his entourage tries to explain it away, the withdrawal of the public’s love and the trickle that precedes the flood of internet hate. Thaddeus does not understand that he has become a villain because he’s been cloistered in a lab making machines that suppress the wages of poorly paid and fed people with missing teeth they’d really like to tend to and worn joints and nutrition so bad it makes it hard for them to think.
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END UNANIMITY 2
MORE TO COME