Ready Player None

Chapter 8.3 - The Old Man "New Frontier"

The assistant programmer leaned into the 3D presentation space, peering intently at some of the smaller digital result columns in the corners. "How's it going?"

"Well enough," the old man answered, with only the normal amount of grumpiness he displayed when anyone was bothering him, interfering with a system visualization, or even just entering the room. It was clearly a good day.

"Should we be worried that the players are taking so long to find the puzzles?" she asked. "They haven't even found half of them yet, and haven't solved a quarter. We may have overestimated how many players would search, and how dedicated they'd be at sticking with it."

"The Party doesn't matter. It's a smokescreen for our real work."

"Yeah, right, old man. We all had fun coding them, even you. If the programmers didn't get a break from AI work once in a while, we'd all have killed each other by now."

"Fine. It's a smokescreen, and a murder preventative. It still doesn't matter," he said.

She touched a nearby display panel, and called up a picture of a frozen snowglobe with a human female laying asleep inside. "I put a lot of work into mine, but it was worth it to spend some time fangirling over Sting."

"The singer, or the wrestler?"

"There were two Stings?" she replied, confused.

"Ask my wife about them sometime. She has a much broader knowledge of that time period than I do, I was always focused solely on Halliday." His eyes glazed over a bit, as if he was starting to reminisce, then caught himself. "Anyway, why did you come in here? It wasn't about the Party."

She cleared her throat, and said "We're worried about your project. We're well past a restart on any of the logic layers, and now you've enabled self-discovery and modification. Giving the AI access.."

"James," the old man interrupted.

"Right, yes. Giving James access to his own coding means we can't undo any mistake he happens to make, we can only add imperatives that may or may not work."

"I'm quite aware of that. I think he's doing a great job of assimilating with humans, and making choices without complete information. At this point, I don't even care if the choices are wrong, although for the most part they haven't been. Do you know how hard it is to get a AI construct to even make a decision when a number of the variables is unknown?"

The look on the assistant's face was pained, but she remained silent as she waited for him to figure out the obvious answer. To his credit, the old man only paused for a couple seconds.

"Oh, of course you do, you wrote most of the code. Sorry about that. But anyway, for everyone else out there, do they understand? If James seems uncertain or indecisive, they won't let him do anything for them except turn on the house lights and play music. He needs to be so much more than that. I want him to make mistakes, and I want him to learn from them. What I don't want is for him to be afraid of being wrong."

"But what if he keeps on making mistakes? We can't let.."

He leaned forward, interrupting her. "That's exactly why I won't let anyone here communicate with him. We know too much about him. He will only learn about fear if he learns it from us."