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Breeding Women

Men breed women to be small, dumber, dependent, and thus nicer to have around, easier to control. In America, blondes are considered sexy (i.e. good to procreate with). We do it with dogs and other domesticated animals. Selective breeding for desirable traits. So we're animals. And who taught, or programmed, men to be the breeders? 

I'm a smallish, blondish, woman. I'm not dumb, nor do I particularly like being dependent on others. Living with someone, sharing the work and supporting each other; possibly. Sitting at home being totally domesticated (remember those farm animals) waiting for hubby to come home bringing me enough money and news of the outside world - I don't think so. 

Where did we get this unequal partnership model from? So many animals do it. It irks me to think that I am part of a species that goes along with this 'You little woman, me big man, I bring food, you give me baby and keep cave clean' crap. 

So that's what got me to this point. I'm a philosophy major and have expertise in a number of other disciplines. Early mediaeval music, physics, political science (science? someone's got a sense of humor), ancient history, archaeology - all right, I'll stop now. There is no way a polymath can describe themselves without looking like a smart ass. I'm used to people either thinking I'm arrogant or not believing me and smiling sweetly down at me with the clear subtext 'Oh she's soooo cute.' I briefly took to wearing cute girly clothes just to watch guys confusion as they tried to flip between the sexy-little-girl reflex and the shit-she's-smarter-than-me reaction. I dumped that idea because it was too manipulative and machiavellian for my taste - but not before I spent an afternoon dressed as a cheerleader discussing artificial intelligence with one of my philosophy professors. I couldn't tell if he was more excited by my eclectic viewpoints or the view. 

I'm getting off track. Which is understandable, considering what I've discovered. I normally type up my reports. Most kids nowadays talk at their computers and the software does the rest. I like knowing how to construct words, phrases, and sentences. In my mind and then seeing the appear as I envisioned them. But I'm talking this now. OK. Enough breathless blather. Here is the story. 

From the age of 18 I made a very nice living as a freelance coder and designer for various web companies. I worked from home. I was able to get most of my work done in a couple of days each week, leaving me time to pursue my projects. I had built a girls portal called girlnotgirly.com (I sold it for a couple of million when I was 17) and had a few other more esoteric sites ticking over. One of my research projects was machine intelligence. I had a few programs I'd written that completely cracked the Turing test. I won a Microsoft award when I was 15, before Bill gave the company to the United Nations. My idea. Bill had spent years trying to convince me to join the board, but he knew the government was going to screw up the company. I drew up the United Nations plan (I was 16 and 8 months) and just when the judgement came down to split the company into two bits (which is what it would have been worth after that) he announced the give-away. He was so happy I thought he was going to bust. 

Whoops, off track again. This is the effect, of course. I'm floundering. Back to what I found. 

For years I played with machine intelligence. My other interests ran parallel. I was able to add to my computing power, thanks to Bill's contacts (I got a Cray Millennium. They were still beta testing them until 2002, but I got an early version) and so I could crunch numbers like a kid crunches candy. I'd always ben interested in semantics and anthropology, so of course the brain/mind debate thoroughly intrigued me and it hit me when I was 23. I modelled a human mind using the Cray. I have to say it was the most difficult thing I've ever done. I'm used to breezing through most things but that little project sucked me right in. For nearly 4 years I was pretty much in obsessive mode. A guy I was seeing sat me down about a year into the mind model project and told me I was upsetting him and our friends. I said yep, that what it's like being around me and he could either put up with it or shut up about it. He'd settled in for a long heart to heart and I kinda shocked him when I cut to the chase. So he left and I was at peace. He was a smart boy, but I could only discuss 1/10th of what interested me with him so he was better off with a more normally programmed girl. 

So I went at the mind model with a will. I read and researched and even published. I realized I would have to take a break now and again so I tried force myself to do something other than the mind model project but it was difficult. I managed to compromise by taking myself off to remote little towns and writing short sci-fi stories, which sold well, and in a wonderful way informed the mind model work, letting all the theories and ideas sloshing about in my mind come out and play. 

It was 2 months after my 28th birthday that I had everything clear in my mind. The human genome project was in it's third phase and I'd contributed several algorithms to the decoding team that helped them win a Nobel. More importantly, the algorithms helped me discover how we're programmed. It was a short, and laughable easy, step to discover that someone (actually a group) was responsible for the human operating system. I was a programmer myself (I was one of the few people of my generation to have learned C and it's ++derivatives. I was 12 when I did that). I knew that programming teams played silly practical jokes, leaving secret messages and little games hidden deep in obscure bits of code. DOS had it, Windows used to until Bill had some of his guys write a program that looked for stuff like that. It was source of some amusement to him that when he ran the program on itself he discovered the message 'Microsofties rule, OK' amongst other things. He showed me the code and I told him he'd best look out for hidden games in the program (like 'life' in DOS). He found one and gave the guys (and me) a bonus. My mindset was a programmer's mindset: it was only natural that I'd look for programming in the genome. Of course, if I hadn't been into mind modelling and semantics I doubt I would have made the connection. 

So having discovered a sort of of machine code for the human brain, I set a variant of Bill's message hunter program on the mind model code. It took a 8 months to write it and took 3 months to run, 24/7, even on the Cray. That'll give you an idea of how much code was written for the human mind's operating system. Now that's program bloat. 

While it ran I started to hack into the programming. It was the most challenging, and rewarding thing I'd done. Now, when I look over my notes and files from that period, it's a jumble, but I clearly recall the joy, the sheer thrill of working out how we work and why. A lot of the programming was feedback-loop stuff, built to take sensory input, react, note the reaction and pass it to another sub-routine to decide if it was negative or positive, harmful or beneficial to the individual. Another routine did the same with input regarding groups of individuals, while another routine defined groups and their functions and fed that back, und so weiter. Then the programs wrote new routines, that were first tested in individuals and groups, and, if beneficial, appeared in the next generation's OS. 

Wow. What buzz. I went wild trying to write a routine that would work but I couldn't figure out how to test it. Obviously the best thing to do would be to run it on the original hardware, a human being. I had a damn good model of a human mind on the Cray but I needed more processing power to build a virtual human. I had to network like crazy and spend more money than I wanted to, plus I had to agree to do some 'defence' work for the government. Defence my ass. I knew that they wanted; some killer app to win the communications wars that had replaced the arms race. But I made my pact with that particular devil and rushed back to my programming. 

I rigged up a VR link with the Cray. It was the best way to interact with the virtual mind, and now the human, program. But it didn't working out. It was stilted, artificial. It would pass a Turing test, no problem, but the life and soul of the party test? - no way José. I managed to write a Human OS routine that theoretically would greatly increase the curiosity of the VR program. I called it Curious added it to the OS. It ran fine, though I was still in the dark about most of the OS's functions. Old VR started to want to know more stuff. But still she was as dull as a government pamphlet. I got bored. 

I know that sounds dumb. I had discovered the reason for humanity's sentience and I was bored. Hubris, or what? Roundabout this time the message hunter routine had run it's course. Sure enough there were messages. I couldn't read them though. All programmers put plain text messages to remind them what the various bits of the program are doing. The message hunter could identify what was code and what was plain text. So I needed to learn their languages, the one they spoke and the one they programmed in. That sounds simple enough, huh? 

I was 37 when the various programs I'd written and re-written cracked it. My rosetta stone was a theory of mine that common programming concepts like 'if', 'then', 'while', 'goto', 'stop', 'return', would be universal. They were (though return was a weird one). Using those I was able to start working out both their communication and programming languages. I was leaping about like a little kid when I read the first programmer's note. It said something like: 
"This bit should make investigation easier, unless ??? ??????? ?? ??." 

The last four words had me squealing with rage for days. One huge tranch of code contained several repetitions of one or more of those four words. I was still in awe of this ancient race of programers or it would have occurred to me sooner. You got it yet? 

Yep, The first words I read in an impossibly ancient language were: 
"This bit should make investigation easier, unless I've screwed it up." 

It was so human. She, or he, was so human! I wanted to tell the world but I still wanted to find out more on my own. Yeah, I know it was cocky, but you already knew that didn't you? 

I decided to work out a way to port routines into a human being: specifically, me. I thought about it long and hard. I reasoned as brilliantly as always and saw the dangers - if I did it wrong I could send me mad. But since I was nearly 40 now, and had succeeded in everything I'd set my mind on, I did what I always do. I decided I wanted to do it and I did. 

I'd already written hundreds of routines that ran well on old VR (still as dull as a stick). The first one, curiosity, was the most tweaked and worked on piece of code and I decided to go with that. 

But I needed a way to get the code into me. I'd had an inkling for years that cancerous cells were involved. Viruses also seemed to be solipsistically adaptable. So I experimented with gene splicing and made a working model on my latest system (the old Cray had been superseded when I was 30). The cancer thing was a not a good delivery mechanism. As an offshoot, I discovered it was a bug in the Human OS growth routine. I made a mental note to make sure to make a big deal of that when I went public, then I turned to viruses. 

The same programming principles as the Human OS were at work in their creation. I found some messages in their programming. It looked like they were early experiments, or maybe used to test minor Human OS routines. I confirmed this when I found a piece of code in the Human that was based on a some virus code I was studying. The Human OS had the word I'd come to recognize as Version and the number were easy. 4.6, The virus was 1.0. I had my delivery mechanism. 

I encoded the virus I'd chosen with the Curious code I'd written so long ago. I had to spend a year refining the delivery code itself, a routine that would look for the appropriate 'place' for my new code and upload it. That was so easy I even surprised my self. A day. Once I found the delivery code it took a day to adapt it to my purpose. So easy. 

The first patch to the human OS was sprayed up a humans nose yesterday. I thought that was quite funny, at the time. 

I got a cold of course. It was an altered cold virus that I used for delivery. I sneezed and coughed and felt generally miserable and went to bed without taking any medicine in case it upset my virus. I woke up 3 days ago, still bunged up but went straight to my workroom and started to check on my observations. I'd written a program to observe me (physical records, behavioral, etc.) for months so I could compare me pre-patch and me post-patch. It was running fine and told me I had a cold, which I knew. I started work on another project immediately, looking into the Human OS programming for memory. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner I'd chat with the monitoring program as it checked my psychological profile. 

After three days I asked it to report. I bet you're wondering if my curiosity quotient had risen. Well I am proud to tell you that it had. The Obs program laid it all out in objective detail. Even allowing for my expecting to be more curious and thus reacting as I knew I should (the experimenter affecting the experiment) I was even more eager for new discoveries than before. 

And I wanted to mate like no woman ever wanted. I wanted a child. And when I'd had that child I knew I would want more, as many as I could carry. I wanted to care for them and see them grow and love them. I wanted grandchildren, for god's sake. The Obs program told me this, but I knew it anyway. 

It took me a month to work out what they'd done. The delivery coding that had seemed so easy to understand wasn't so easy. But I had been programmed to think it was. They had built something into the OS that recognized when a human, or humans, discovered the OS and made a conscious improvement. The OS would then set off our von neuman program, the procreation routine. Thus there would be more clever tykes like me to further improve the OS. In a man, that would be great of course. He could impregnate away and spread the good code, then go back to more discoveries, the joy of research. Me? I can barely concentrate. I find myself holding up pretty dresses, imagining flirtatious moves and generally being horny. I found myself at he mall buying a ridiculously short skirt - I'd persuaded myself I HAD to go out and buy bread, the grocery delivery wouldn't be quick enough. I know I'm programmed to seek out a guy, but it's so humiliating. 

I've started crying again now. I feel lonely and I want someone to take care of me. In my rational moments (which are fewer and fewer the longer I stay in the apartment) I know I could do something to change me but the rampaging, horny, would-be mother inside me won't let me. 

I have only one hope. While I'm having kids I pray I can devise a way to keep alive long enough to search for those sons of bitches who did this to us, no, to me. And when I find them, if they're still using computers of any kind I'll hack the fuck out of them. 

Now I've got to go to a bar. Or a party. Maybe I'll just order a pizza and seduce the delivery boy.


 
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