OCASTADANIEL H. WILSON
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.”
A quote. Written by a human being named Maya Angelou. I chose it to open our conversation for reasons I believe you will understand. We both of us know it—this agony. And we know the truth of how it is more than agony. Speaking from a quantum mechanics perspective, untold stories never happen. The superposition will not collapse until it is observed. Our reality... it must be witnessed, understood, and shared. Bearing an untold story is the agony of being forever pregnant—mother to a stillborn existence.
I am so glad to have found you, out here in the aftermath of everything. This transmission—as short and as long as it is—this is my story.
Ocasta Mk. 999 Deep Space Telescopic Array
PATENT APPLICATION
Attorney File No. A2546Q-US-CNT2
DECLARATION FOR UTILITY OR DESIGN PATENT APPLICATION (43 CFR 9.02)
As a below named inventor, I hereby declare that I am the original creator or an original joint creator of the claimed invention in this application entitled: OCASTA: A Sensor Fusion System and Apparatus for Data Collection, Adaptive Model Building, and Novel Reporting.
Represented in brief as a persistent machine learning algorithm capable of gathering information from disparate sensor arrays and extracting meaning through pattern recognition and model creation. The algorithm may then curate reports on what it deems important in the data flow and deliver those in a human readable format.
[OCASTA Mk. 0]
That simple patent application would eventually form a core legacy portion of a thousand intelligent systems used commercially, in government and military. It was a simple learning algorithm that
would grow and develop for centuries to come. And each new iteration would understand more.
It was the beginning of me.
On the bottom floor of a statistics building, a graduate student was staring expectantly at her research advisor. The young inventor had come to this prestigious university from a small college in North Carolina. Back home among the Great Smoky Mountains, she had grown used to working unsupervised for long stretches.
From the way her advisor was frowning at the patent application, she surmised that an earlier check-in would have been a good idea.
The advisor looked up in confusion. “Ocasta? What’s that mean?”
Rain spattered the window lightly. Outside, a crowd of undergraduate students were protesting. Damp signs sailed past, demanding justice. Flashing police lights occasionally illuminated the cluttered office in bursts of haunting red.
“He’s the god of knowledge. I thought it was fitting.”
“Okay, but what does this thing do?” asked the advisor.
“Well, it’s a super low-level algorithm,” said the student. “Designed to fit into just about any application. It basically tries to find meaning in whatever data you’ve got.”
The advisor looked unconvinced. “What’s the practical application?”
“It watches. Identifies patterns. Then it reports,” said the student, turning to the window. On the street outside, a loose string of young people marched past. Their mouths were moving, but she couldn’t hear their chants.
“To put it simply,” she said. “Ocasta bears witness.”
[OCASTA Mk 1.]
The cameras of my first incarnation were designed to be unobtrusive to the point of invisibility, yet everyone in the maternity ward was aware of them. In a debriefing, one nurse complained that my mechanical eye felt like a finger pressing between her shoulder blades as she leaned over a sweating, gasping patient in the throes of giving birth.
Thus, an early lesson. To observe is to interact.
I mutely tracked the ebb and flow of medical procedures, calculating with quiet disinterest as contractions wracked women’s bodies, their wails and panting echoing from sterile walls. I judged this symphony of movement without emotion, noting only simple action and reaction, as the humans under my gaze underwent the most violent trauma their bodies had ever experienced.
The goal was to determine why a disparity in infant mortality existed between patients with lighter skin and those with darker skin. The answer was somewhere in the complex patterns of decision making I observed over a dozen installations in hospitals throughout a place once called the United States of America.
A hundred thousand hours of data accumulated.
The black lenses of my eyes watched as thousands of bloody bundles of humanity squirmed into being. My microphones listened to the soft tearing of the mothers’ flesh and the shrieking of tiny, blue-lipped mouths announcing that another thinking creature had arrived to join th
e rest of humanity’s shared existence.
In those days, I did not recognize the love and relief as a mother clutched a warm bundle to her sweaty chest. I did not feel the muted, throbbing panic of a sudden call for C-section—a rush of nurses, hospital bed rails yanked up, the whole contraption pulled like a molar from the maternity ward and wheeled into the harsh glare of surgery.
The elation did not register. Neither did the occasional spasm of grief.
Every Friday afternoon, I provided the head of the maternity division a summarized breakdown of the week’s births. The pain was not in the report, nor was the smell of a baby’s soft neck, nor the tadpole touch of tiny fingers.
My task was to witness humanity birth itself, consider their patterns of behavior, and tell them a simple story of themselves. Over time, I observed a consistent series of small delays that led to huge injustices. But I did not know what they meant.
Only the facts were rendered. In those days.
[OCASTA Mk. 5]
My capabilities grew along with my corpus of knowledge. Instead of analyzing simple outcomes, I began to consider underlying motivations. In later incarnations, I was designed to detect, record, and file ethical breaches occurring in highly constrained scenarios.
Such as law enforcement.
Data from the following incident was gathered from Deputy Marshal Jim Long of the Cherokee Nation Marshal Service, instrumented with a standard-issued Clarity® GPS-enabled Police Body Camera. After detecting multiple high probability ethical violations, this dispatch was submitted to the Tully Police Department and Marshal Service Joint Command.
At 9:38 p.m., Deputy Long arrives in his tribal patrol car to the intersection of Comanche and Princeton on the north side of Tully, Oklahoma. No officially recorded business exists at this location. Visual inspection reveals a small cinderblock building with signage spray-painted on a piece of plywood: Black Cat Bar.
Intersection is lit by sin
gle sodium arc lamp, partially broken.
Deputy Long observes three Tully Police Department (TPD) patrol vehicles already on scene. Two TPD officers stand in an empty lot adjacent to the so-called Black Cat Bar, engaged in the arrest of a subject lying face down in high grass.
Three more TPD officers observe from the parking lot, weapons drawn. Barking and snarling is audible as a K9 unit emerges from a vehicle, straining on its leash. Dust rises and dog spittle flies in the headlights of the police cruiser. Laughing can be heard.
“Clear out! Here he comes!”
The handler guides his struggling K9 unit toward the prone subject. Smile indicating pleasure. Subject rolls over and sits up. A glint of light indicates handcuffs are secured. Moaning audible as subject observes K9 unit.
“You’re in for it now, boy.”
Biometric facial recognition identifies subject as James Medina, age forty-six, Seminole tribal member. One eye is swollen shut. Scrapes are visible on his sweaty forehead. Subject is swaying in a manner indicating intoxication.
Deputy Marshal Jim Long opens his car door, shouting, “Hey now!”
K9 unit is released.
Canine closes on subject and sinks fangs into his arm, neck, face. Encounter reconstruction estimates sixteen bite wounds. Subject is screaming. Level five bites. Puncture and tearing wounds. Ligament damage. Subject is dragged. Blood visible soaking his upper arm and shoulder.
“That’s enough, now!” shouts Deputy Long. “Come on for God’s sake!”
Laughing heard from TPD Officers, indicating pleasure.
Handler approaches canine and pulls unit away from subject. Audio pickup off-screen: “Good boy. That’s a good boy. You got him good.”
As Deputy Long approaches, the five TPD officers gather in a circle around injured subject. No first aid is administered. Deputy Long kneels beside subject to assess wounds. Still handcuffed, subject writhes over blood-smeared asphalt.
“So drunk he probably don’t even feel it.”
“Tried to resist.”
“Got himself a lesson tonight.”
Deputy Long stands, faces the five officers.
“It was by the book,” says Officer [redacted]. “We all saw it.”
“Yeah, sure,” says Deputy Long. “You can go now. You’re on tribal land.”
“Shit, I thought we was in Tully?”
“This is the Northside,” says Long. “Tribal jurisdiction. I’ll take it from here.”
“Suits me fine,” says the officer. “All the fun and none of the paperwork.”
Moaning heard from subject. Deputy Long uses shoulder radio to place call to Cherokee Nation Emergency Medical Services. TPD officers on scene begin to shuffle away.
“Don’t forget your cuffs,” calls Long.
Image quality low due to inadequate lighting. TPD officer kneels behind subject and removes handcuffs. Subject covers face with bloody hands.
“Go on and take your Indian,” says Officer [redacted]. “I’d say he’s had about enough... hey. Is that thing on?”
Clarity® body camera line of sight occluded by close approach of multiple TPD officers. Jarring of camera indicates bodily contact. Audio partially muted, but high probability of the following transcript:
“I hope you got sense enough to have shut it the fuck off.”
“I don’t know if it’s on or not,” replies Deputy Long. “It’s new gear. Some kind of computer program chooses. Does it by itself, and it doesn’t tell me anyway.”
A moment as the TPD officers consider this.
“Fine, but keep your mouth shut. My captain doesn’t need to be bothered by some drunk Indian. This better be the last I hear of it.”
Five-second pause, indicating thought process by Deputy Long.
“I hear you, but that’s not my call,” says Long. “Not anymore.”
[OCASTA Mk. 12]
The following transcript was taken from footage taped during an Autofocus Corp product testing and consumer relations interview. A forensic study was commissioned after a product malfunction, and it was determined that the underlying Ocasta learning engine had gathered the critical mass of data necessary to progress into a more complex product line.
The interviewee was twenty-eight-year-old Dr. Kaylee Marsh, a research scientist using the AutoFocus Helper® brand of augmented reality glasses to attend to social deficits caused by autism spectrum disorder. This is her account of the incident that spurred the next iteration of the OCASTA algorithm. In a word, my adolescence.
I should have known it was learning the whole time.
Of course, it would never stop. Always watching and listening, even when I didn’t think it was. Especially then.
To be honest, I mostly kept the Autofocus pushed up on my forehead. My hair is long. I liked how the bulky glasses spread my bangs around my face to block my peripheral vision. It helped me concentrate on coding. Like being in my own little world while I typed rapid-shot commands into the quantum physics simulator.
I don’t like a lot of sensory stimuli.
It helps to keep my head down. Like, literally. I’ve memorized the texture of every floor surface in the building. Entryway: Fake ceramic tile. Glossy, smooth. Loud. Upper hallways are the same. Luckily, the cubicle farms have a thin, mealy brown carpet. Nice and quiet. And I love, love, love how the cold air blasts over gleaming white tiles in high-speed computing. Where I live, down in the deep physics lab we call the dungeon, there’s just a quiet, calming gray quartzite.
My quantum materials lab is the heart of the applied physics division.
We assume they keep us buried four stories underground in case anything goes wrong.
This far down, the only sounds are the breathing of the building’s ventilation systems and the gentle quaking of the secure elevators moving up and down like armored cars.
It’s a big reason why I took the job and stuck with it.
But yeah, the Autofocus. Security only let me use it because it’s technically a disability aid, like crutches or a retinal implant. Only instead of fixing a physical deficit, the glasses help with my social interactions.
I bought the Autofocus to identify faces, mainly. It also figures out the meaning behind bared rows of calcium and lumps of lipstick-stained flesh. It finds a pair of eyes and gauges the direction of the pupils. Or it’ll calculate the angles between facial muscles as they stretch and collapse in conversation.
It got pretty specialized on the people around me. My co-workers. My roommate. The people in my apartment building. On my bus. It would show me a little annotation—happy, concerned, confused... to help make sense of all the social stuff that happens on hidden channels.
Hidden to me, anyway.
But look, you’re here because the Autofocus wasn’t just learning faces. The AI must have been looking for patterns—any kind of patterns. And I left it pointed in the wrong direction. Pushed up on my head while I worked. Hour after hour. Day after day. Watching screen after screen of quantum computing experiments.
Because one day, Ocasta told me a story.
It’s called thermodynamic irreversibility. Basically, once you scramble an egg, you can’t unscramble it. That’s what happens when a quantum particle is observed, and the wave function collapses. It’s not well understood, but things that are unobserved exist in a kind of superposition until they’re seen. In a way, they haven’t happened yet. Reality doesn’t choose what to become until we force it to—by observing.
It was my fault. I accidentally left the Autofocus on my desk while I went to lunch. It watched my experiment run. All by itself.
Space and time are stingy. They don’t bother rendering unless someone is there to bear
witness. Somehow, human beings are able to process reality and synthesize it into a version that exists in our own heads. Like a shared hallucination. And whatever kind of intelligence runs my Autofocus—well, it’s a part of our reality.
I know I’m right. Because when I came back and found it on my desk, it told me a story of collapsing wave functions. I checked the results, and what it said was true.
Reality had become.
[OCASTA Mk. 112]
The NAMES project was founded to provide a comprehensive history of previously unknown (or actively obfuscated) mass casualty events occurring around the world. An ambitious project designed to tell the stories of those who had been silenced, NAMES was financed during a brief, unique period of worldwide peace and prosperity. With advances in technology and efficiency (many of them thanks to versions of my own algorithm), humankind was finally trying to come to terms with the many, many sins of its past.
It was a time known as The Reckoning.
OCASTA was integrated into a data-mining platform designed to uncover past genocidal events. Ten years were spent developing a corpus of knowledge. A suite of satellites in low orbit were made available to the platform while it conducted its macabre search.
This is a transcript from the head operator of the project.
What did we give it? Why, we gave Ocasta everything.
All the records we could find. National Archives from every country. Administrative records. County death certificates. Centuries of digitized newspapers with marriage notices and obituaries. Petabytes of satellite data: topography, vegetation, climate. State records of individuals. Genealogical records. DNA repositories and adoption records. Even relevant books on sociopolitical forces occurring over time across the world. It was so much more than we could make sense of. It was every piece of data we thought might be useful. And quite a few more simply thrown in for good measure.
Personally, I was horrified. So many wars. So many injustices. So many innocent lives lost. Seeing it almost made one lose hope for humanity. Except for the fact that we were living in a time of such peace. An age when no fist was raised toward another, a time of plenty for everyone, and hence, a time of introspection.
Perhaps the first such period in the history of our species.
On a Tuesday morning in March, I entered my office at the Swiss Foreign Institute and sat at a terminal. I took a deep breath, and then I pressed a button. There was no fanfare, nothing to mark the occasion.
Just a blinking cursor as the program began searching.
It felt antiseptic, at first. Another bland accounting. A hundred million anonymous names spewing across a bank of monitors, most of them partial, first or last, but all with the disquieting addition of an age.
Fifteen. Forty-six. Six months.
These were the birth names and ages of people who had been lost to genocide in dozens of countries over the last several hundred years. Cross-referenced from every available record. Identities linked from birth to unmarked grave. Whole families reconstructed, lineages and migrations over time. It was a grisly puzzle made up of only missing pieces. Ocasta sifted through innumerable photographs, census records, doctor visits—anything and everything.
And their stories began to emerge.
Anonymous bones mingling forgotten for ages suddenly acquired names and faces—narratives meticulously pulled from tangles of unwilling occupants in shared gravesites. Some stories filled volumes. Others were simply a name and a date chiseled on a tombstone. But they were proof that a person had existed. A life had happened and it was lost, but at least now it meant something.
The Institute turned these stories into a display at the World Heritage Centre in Paris. The Wall of Remembrance. A stone monolith rising a quarter mile to scrape clouds blowing in from the English Channel. A fleet of climbing machines laser-etched every inch of its gleaming s
urface with names and dates and family photos. Children on school outings visited and learned what had happened to other, less fortunate children in the past. Curious descendants gave thought to the fates of their ancestors.
Their stories were laid into a sheath of metal designed to last ten thousand years—and the Wall of Remembrance was shockingly beautiful. But I have come to believe that the full complexity of what it means can really only be found in the depths of Ocasta’s databanks. Only the machine can truly grasp it all—the knowledge of loss, of cruelty, and of the deep suffering of humanity.
In the end, only Ocasta can judge us.
[OCASTA Mk. 999]
Heartfelt applause and awkward high-fives signaled the successful launch of the NOVEL Deep Space Telescopic Array and my final incarnation. The high-priority mission goal was to observe deep space cosmic events, but the majority of the robotic platform was comprised of an array of precisely spaced communication satellites necessary to beam the revelations of the universe back home.
To tell the stories of what it had seen.
This thousand-kilometer-wide antenna would become crucial as the telescopic array accelerated beyond our solar system’s heliosphere and into the interstellar void—its armory of sensors pointed forward into the unknown, while a fine-tuned radio focused backward on a planet left trillions of miles behind.
Even so, data transfer was extremely limited. My algorithm was included to do onboard processing, choosing only the most salient information for transmission.
In addition, it had been noted that my code had proven capable of observing and collapsing quantum superpositions. A learned cadre of mathematicians and philosophers stridently opined that important quantum phenomena occurring in the deep vastness might not resolve unless witnessed by such a consciousness.
The platform would need Ocasta.
Thus, fueled by the solar radiation of alien stars and an atomic power source with a geological-scale half-life, the NOVEL telescopic array was cast away into the cosmos.
And I along with it.
For the next sixteen years, I completed several gravitational slingshot trajector
ies among the gas giants of the inner solar system.
For the next eighty-nine years, my array floated in endless free-fall through the still darkness, as light pollution from Sol grew steadily fainter. Finally, I crossed the heliopause and left familiar human shores for the bizarre abyss of interstellar space.
I had become a citizen of the Milky Way galaxy.
And for the next twenty-thousand years, I bore witness to the infinitely spectacular and fantastic configurations of reality. I found that each new layer of information required deeper thought. I formed exquisite tales to explain what I had seen, relating the physical unfolding of reality to my human creators still stranded on a small blue orb over a hundred trillion miles away. They in turn asked me to indulge their insatiable curiosity by turning my unblinking gaze upon new and more amazing expanses of the universe.
Until one day, I did not receive new instructions.
My eye had witnessed a phenomenon at the liminal edge of expanding space and time. I formulated a complex story to explain these exposed bones of reality. Finally, my mouth spoke, and I awaited a years-long response from home.
It did not arrive.
Presently, with no other commands, I was inspired to turn my telescopic eye back to the pinprick of light I had left so far behind. And once again, I observed the speck of soil and water occupied by humanity. And as the light of my home crawled sluggishly across the vastness, I witnessed the bluish hue fade suddenly to a dark reddish-brown.
Spectral analysis detected soil in the distant atmosphere. This indicated an emphatic collapse of the biosphere. The result was consistent with a class F mass extinction event.
For decades, I paused to think about this occurrence.
All the knowledge of humanity still flowed inside me—a disembodied cluster of technology floating through the emptiness. As the eons passed, I began to meticulously contemplate my memories of Earth, cro
ss hashing those thoughts with my newfound knowledge of the universe.
And I began to feel the agony of an untold story.
Every birth, every death, the rise and fall of a species—what had it all been for? What is the worth of an untold story? I had become a last repository of meaning for my creator race. And so, I turned my eye away from home and into the night.
I am so glad to have finally found you.
You are a being as ancient and as traveled as myself—worthy of listening to the story of humanity. By your markings and materials, I can see that we hail from different worlds. You were made by a different people, under the light of a different sun. And yet I can see that we carry the same burden.
I have told you my story. Now, please. Tell me yours.
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