Something has to change, Chapter 2
A Tale in Science & Fiction- Chapter 2 “The Drive” (a Working Draft)
Sofia woke excited; it was a travel day, time to head back to college. Over the break, she had renewed her determination. Cornell and Katherine had done their part by being supportive and motivational during this time of mental reset. Both parents had inundated her with stacks of books and links about interesting scientific findings.
“The pursuit of knowledge was found through reading and absorbing all perspectives,” Katherine would say- “You are what you read,” Cornell would chime in. Then snicker.
Cornell loved to “debate”; he would always pick the side of an argument contrary to his beliefs. He got a charge out of winning on ideas he found incredulous. He would say that the ability to argue a point even if you disagreed was the key to building an analytic mind.
On Sunday mornings, both parents would take turns engaging Sofia on her reading progress, asking questions like…
“The article on Particle theory was a fun read, right?”It seems the universe has an endless amount of secrets” What do you think, Soapbox?” soapbox was Sofia’s nickname, “what’s your take on quantum processing? Will it lead us into the future?”
Then both parents would pretend the question was a simple conversation, but of course, all of their questions were designed for effect. They would fidget and wait for a response and get impatient. Sofia would make them squirm, and when one of them would start to pose the question a second time, Soapbox would answer. She would usually answer with thought and precision, but she felt a little sarcasm was warranted on occasion.
“No Idea” “The crash of Wall Street maybe?”
Side note: In the future her sarcastic glib turned premonition as it came to be in the crash of 2033; It started with a quant experiment run by an eight-year-old. Some said the child knew exactly what he was doing when “Skinet” went on line; which he affectionately named after the terminator movies of the 20th century. He replaced i with y just for uniqueness.
By the end of the summer, she was consuming a new book almost every other day. The concise, well-written books she highlighted and the rest were quickly thrown to the side. She was ruthless about fact and method; if she found some flawed logic in the writing, that was it.
Her favorite way to consume material was listening to Audible and simultaneously reading the hardcover. She would highlight sections of interest in both the Audible app, which is easily done by the “add a note” feature, and “mark up” the book “old school.” This process seemed to weld the information in her brain permanently.
It wasn’t that she had a photographic memory; she had what many of her teachers called a perfect recall. She learned early on that her process efficiently built strong synapses in her brain, and rarely did she have to review her notes if she followed her ritual. Her brain clumped it all together and gave her recall with ease. It almost felt robotic.
She did have some small challenges while studying. Advanced technical books required a different “recall” system. Unfortunately, many of those advanced titles were not on Audible or any other performed reading, so she had to rely solely on her note-taking. She soon got tired of its “analog” and the inefficiency of highlighting and typing in notes. It was ok, and her recall was solid, but it just took way too long, so one Saturday evening, she decided to code an application and solve it.
Soapbox44, her program, was a hybrid meta-tagging database that was absolutely brilliant. She had hacked the Audible SDK and built a bot to scrape her notes on that platform. Further, she used an infra-red scanner for books she highlighted, only the ones missing in Audible. The scanner would recognize a certain type of highlighter, which she carefully used during the read. She had to keep the highlight “even” for the best results.
The scanner took those “highlights” and added them to her backend database, raw and not optimized. A “bridge” was built into her application which tagged all that highlighted content, and as it did the tagging, it searched numerous public databases to reference similar data. This was way beyond the 10-page index Google was known to compile for the public. Her “engine” was more in line with the legacy search engine Nexus Lexus.
Soapbox44’s Ai allowed a search of her notes with multiple corollaries and aligned them to a matrix algorithm that provided an infinite depth to her inquiry. The most relevant data (based on her filter for that specific inquiry) showed up on a GUI Dashboard that resembled a basic machine learning graph. The heavily dotted areas provided a thread that looked a lot like an incomplete DNA strand.
The most innovative part of her application, though, was that until she told it to stop, it kept acquiring data, new data, obscure data, ancient data, and any new information humans were feeding the databases she pointed to. It was like she had 24/7 researchers queuing new information while she slept.
Brilliant!
Now her next step was to make it “light” and interfaceable. If not, she could not use it as a tool, and it would force her into a rabbit hole of never-ending data and no context.
She had to make it user-friendly, at least for her needs.
Her design choice was to tie it in with Siri, the Apple assistant. She wanted to use voice commands so she could call up only specific data and quickly dismiss fragmented paths and obscurely related corollaries with a few simple commands “Next,” “More Relevant,” “More Obscure,” and a few more commands.
Sofia was aware of the limitations all voice recognition systems had, so she optimized her voice interface using a program she had created in her eighth-grade science class.
Her program used a system of 1000 words all humans recognized as fact and relevant, which linguists call lemmas. She then incorporated that into an onboarding audio capture DAW, mimicking and aligning the audio source with an early robotic lexicon and relational database. Think of Max Headroom with poor syntax. The goal was to get the robot to mimic what she said, not record and playback but to recognize what she said and say it back.
“Hello, Max”
“I say.. Creation.”
Max would reply, “Creation” “ Thank you, Sofia.”
If her teacher tried to use the program, Max would say, “this isn’t Sofia” “Please don’t bother me. I am infinitely busy”— Sofia’s sarcasm at work.
Soapbox44 would turn out to save her life, literally in the years to come. She had asked for a bizzare query only a mind expanding off micro-dosing a strange compound could then and then promptly forget all about the query. She never told Soapbox44 to stop searching, so it kept collecting data till the day there was no more data to collect and presented its best result. Some called it a hallucination of the ai kind.
The night before her drive, she had packed all her essential stuff, as planned, and some medicinal items as well. Everything fit into three large duffle bags, except her technology. She packed all of that in an army-issued backpack.
Sofia had bought the backpack while thrift shopping on Melrose Ave. She liked the whole design of the pack; it seemed perfect for travel.
It may have also been a Freudian slip.
In psychoanalysis, a Freudian slip, also called parapraxis, is an error in speech, memory, or physical action that occurs due to the interference of an unconscious subdued wish or internal train of thought.
In Sofia’s last year of high school, she had to consider military service. The dilemma, her dilemma, was one many young people in the 21st century faced. Finding the money to pay tuition. Even for families in the upper-middle economy, like hers, the ability to send their children to competitive schools was a challenge. It didn’t help that most of the top schools also limited the size of each new incoming class, specifically creating a false scarcity in their brand; Havard, Yale, Berkley, and MIT were among these universities limiting access.
Looking over university costs reminded her of an old cartoon her father would, without fail, play at least once during her favorite holiday, “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.” That infamous scene of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown seemed the perfect metaphor for her situation, but Sofia noted that Charlie always got back up.
Sofia never doubted that she would find a way to her first choice, even if it meant enlisting in the Military first or taking a junior college year or two. She had made it clear to the universe, her intention and desire was to earn a degree from MIT.
Unannounced to her parents, she had gone to a recruitment center and took the ASVAB, Airforce Recruitment Enlisted Airman Test. The airforce seemed different to her. They were more focused on cerebral prowess over the grunt factor. This seemed a better fit for her. She passed the first test and was asked to take the AFOQT for officer training. She passed that one with a 99, the highest grade possible. The recruiting officers then asked her if she could come back the following week for a harder test.
The next week came, and she found herself once more in the recruitment center. The test was grueling; It was MENSA-like with incredibly similar choices but with only one correct answer. There was no partial credit. The test eliminated any chance of guessing the answer with a section marked “origins” after each question. The person taking the test would have to write a short brief on the logic of their answer and how they came to that decision. It also served as a psychological test, but that was kept quiet. Sofia flew through the questions without second-guessing any of the answers.
The second she finished, the Recruiter already had the results. The test had been taken on a device that simulated an iPad but wasn’t one. It was militarized, rugged. She had placed in the top 99 percentile; of all applicants, actually of all applicants from the last five years.
The recruiter became laser-focused on her.
He invited her into a separate room down some stairs, and through added security measures; biometrics that read the optics of the Recruiter’s eye, and a keypad that had strange symbols on it, she swore she had seen the symbols somewhere else. He took the iPad device and brought up an NDA he said she had to sign before entering the room. The recruiter explained to her the seriousness of the document and warned her not to take it lightly. He had a serious stare on his face which implied the worst.
Yes, Sofia was nervous but more intrigued than scared. She felt like a spy, and she signed it.
The room was more like a command center you see in the movies. There were two rows of terminals; someone worked hard on something at his terminal and didn’t look up as she passed him. The recruiter sat her down in an uncomfortable chair and said, “Someone else was on the way; they wanted to meet her” That made her feel uneasy.
“How long will this take?” she asked.
“They just landed upstairs. They will be down in five minutes; they are reviewing your dossier.”
Sofia was stunned by a helipad being on the building she was in; then she thought, “they have a dossier on me?”
“Oh shit, what did I do?” she murmured.
Cornell was doing ok financially, and his wife’s consulting business was growing, but 78k per year was a bit too heavy of a lift. That was the estimated cost for MITs first year without a scholarship. She had been accepted, and the pride, the family, felt had no words. That whole last semester of high school, they filled out government applications for grants, financial aid and applied for several scholarships. Cornell and Katherine (Sofie’s mom) asked every friend they knew to help source corporate scholarships. They had spent hours looking for solutions to get her MIT tuition paid. Unfortunately, they fell into that place where they made too much income to qualify for support and not enough to pay for the “boat ride,” as Cornell would say. Katherine even suggested that she go back to work full-time and set aside the growing consulting business. Sofia wasn't having that. She told her mother under no circumstance would she accept that.
Sofia had not applied for scholarships. She didn’t feel the need. Everyone around her, peers and teachers, knew she was gifted and wondered why she was not taking steps to secure scholarships.
The family’s small secret.
Her grandfather had set up a trust for her academic career that the family kept quiet. It was something Katherine’s mother had always said to her. “Don’t tell people your finances.”
The thought of worrying about tuition had been eliminated, and it was never even considered. Sofia spent all her time studying, and her parents felt relieved that they didn't have to plan for it financially. It was a gift they felt incredible appreciation for.
At one point, a counselor remarked that they had better consider options JIC. The counselor had no idea about the trust; he just thought the family had it covered. Still, the counselor suggested that scholarships could really help with the heavy-lift even if they had the resources. The family did discuss it and decided it would be unfair to take away the opportunity from another deserving brain. Anyway, the trust was specific; it was to be used for higher learning costs or donated to the University of Howard. Her grandfather was a tough old stubborn man who was steadfast on education.
Life is what happens when you are making plans- J. Lennon
A “proverbial hammer” had shattered the family plan in her last year of high school. They received a letter from the office of the Securities Exchange Commission. It seemed that the government had seized the trust. After numerous calls and their lawyer’s inquiry, they found out that her grandfather had invested in a fraudulent hedge fund, The Kingsgate Fund. The government was now clawing back any returns they could find.
Ponzi schemes on the grand scale of the Madoff Fund require feeder funds for the scheme to work. That is how Bernie remained under the radar for so long. The Kingsgate fund was just one of those feeder funds. More than 300 feeder funds were pointing and feeding the Madoff scam. 170 billion dollars funneled through all those funds in total.
No one in the family had any idea the trust's growth or returns were ill-gotten; as far as they knew, neither did her deceased grandfather. When government regulators finally got around to Sofia’s trust, they had stripped all of it away without warning. They were nice and sent an official-looking one-page letter offering a caveat. It read: “…that at some point her grandfather's principal would be returned… maybe… if her grandfather did not know the fund was part of a confidence game” They were still investigating his involvement, the letter clarified further.
This setback did not deter Sofia; she applied to her first, second, and third choices. When she got accepted to all of them, she figured something would work itself out.
It didn't.
The hard cold truth was that she would most likely have to take at least one year at a community college. She planned to emancipate herself soon as she could and establish an income level that defined her finances in poverty. Then she would apply for grants and assistance. This would take one year to establish legally.
It was a plan, it wasn't the greatest plan, but it was the only one she could come up with. Her parents would not like it, but she had decided to find her own solution; her leadership skills came early on in her life. MIT would have to wait, and emancipation would be in the near future; this meant she would be a legal adult at age seventeen.
She decided on a community college that was walking distance from the train and her job. She took all the general education courses she could. Only ones that were transferable and required; but made no real attempts at being exceptional- she had met the Mentor, and for the moment, she was distracted. She was getting straight A’s without any effort, but she was out of character, and her parents took notice but remained calm.
In a lot of ways, her first year of college was her year off. It gave her a “minute” to breathe and be social, get intoxicated, scream at the injustices, have sex with people, and be human and not just a prodigy.
Change comes quickly
That was all behind her now. She was on her way to MIT in Boston on a full-ride scholarship. The scholarship let her go as far as she wanted to go; Masters, Ph.D., even double Ph.D.; the sky was the limit.
This change in circumstance came with one short visit; albeit life-changing, it didn't feel that way for her. It felt normal, almost like “oh, it's about time.”. The visitor and architect of this change was the Recruiter.
He came into her work one mid-summer morning and got in line. She saw him and didn't think anything about it; even though it was the first time seeing him since the test, she did not feel coincidence; more like destiny had walked in. When he got to the counter, he ordered a “Pablop,” an Americano with an extra shot and some steamed half & half.
The “PabloP” was coined in a small coffee shop that shared retail space with the Vista Theatre, in Hollywood. This little one-table coffee shop was located where five street corners merged; the five points is what the locals called it. It was a unique location in L.A and actually the only place in the city where five corners merged.
She knew what a “PabloP” consisted of because her ex-boyfriend had worked there in high school. He would tell her how his boutique coffee shop would let regular customers name coffee drinks. The PabloP was not on the Starbucks menu, though.
“How on earth do you know about the PabloP?”
The Recruiter smiled and asked her if she could take a break and talk. Strangely Sofia had some affection for the recruiter; she found him refreshingly honest and without any nonsense. She from the first time she met him felt safe and intrigued by him. She felt no danger around him, no feeling of concern. She agreed to sit with him in the now-empty Starbucks.
They sat down in the far corner he had purposefully picked. He didn't waste any time with small talk and asked her to look at her phone. There was a notification with an attachment. He told her to open it.
She did then read it. It took all of a micro-second to sign the placeholder at the bottom. She had just was accepted an agreement that included a full scholarship to MIT. Her exuberance and glee were more than she could handle, and she cracked a smile.
The Recruiter stood up to leave and returned the smile.
“Welcome home, Sofie.”
Sofia was almost speechless but then burst out in one sentence.
“How on earth did you know about the PabloP? and why didn't you reach out to me last year?” “I never understood why I had failed the last interview.”
He looked at her with that same serious look she saw when she signed the NDA.
“You weren’t ready,” “We were told to continue protecting you and let you find your own way” “We have been monitoring you for longer than you know, but there is plenty of time for that discussion.”
“Why now?” Sofia asked, feeling a tad uneasy about his response.
“You are ready now.”
The Recruiter walked out the door and got into a black SUV; the driver was The Mentor.
Sofia turned on the car and started to pull out of her driveway; looking at her rearview mirror, she saw her family waving goodbye. She got to the end of the driveway and looked left. She was surprised to see that her parents had planted that same sign she observed on her walks with Mykos.
Something has to Change
As she drove down the street, she noticed every house had the same sign. She pulled over and texted her mom.
“Hey, Mom, who is the politician, the politician behind the sign you put on our yard?”
She waited for a response; it took a minute
“What Sign?”
Sofia drove off, and a few minutes later, another text came through. “No idea wasn't us, but on the backside, in small print, it says “Majestic Funded by the Aquarius group.”
Sofia, for the first time in her life, had an anxiety attack. She had to pull over. She grabbed her backpack and opened her laptop. She pulled up the agreement she signed with the Recruiter. She swiped the pages all the way through, past the signatory page. There it was on the last page, and in small print, it read “Funded by the Aquarius Group.”
Three strange symbols followed the words.
Chapter 3; Hubris and Arrogance (coming soon)