Buggy Divination
Blue letters burned afterimages into my vision and taunted me with my failure. According to the prediction engine, when the off-worlders were asked their name, they should “vomit profusely, curl up into a ball, and scream.” I didn’t even know if they could vomit.
I stepped away from the screen. Aches spiked across me and I felt cramps in muscles I didn’t know I had. I deserved a break, because… damn, even trying to code for the behavior of sentient gasbags had been easier than this.
Just as I prepared to put graphs and equations out of my head, I heard footsteps down the hallway. Of course. I recognized that unsteady gait, the way its heavy steps rang across the whole building. I went back to my console. No luck today, I guess.
A light knocking came from just outside the office.
“May I take a few moments of your time?” The voice was stiff and strained.
“Yeah, yeah, come in.”
They opened the door with slow consideration, but still stomped their way into the room. I still only knew them as “the Mediator.” Apparently partial anonymity would “improve team efficiency by 6.1%.” What a crock of shit. I knew the code well enough to say that maybe you could predict that to the nearest five percent. Maybe.
“We’re having errors,” the Mediator said, “with the behavior modeling. The team has been falling behind because of it.”
“Oh, great. What level of problem are we dealing with?”
“It appears to be completely broken.” The Mediator started to fidget.
“Broken?” I checked what version the team should be on. “It…shouldn’t be a software problem. We’re using what everyone else is.”
“It’s not functional. Emotional predictions for the team were completely wrong out in the field. With the error values given for their responses,” the Mediator checked some notes, “the conflicts I saw had a one in ten quadrillion chance of happening. I already checked with the wetware techs and they say the implants are working fine. Couldn’t there be an issue with the program itself?”
“Yeah, well, if that’s true then we’d have bigger problems than productivity loss—my advice would be to grab a spear and put all your stuff in a pile. No, this has to be something else. Did you flag the bad predictions?” The Mediator nodded their head. “Okay. I’ll take a look at it. Try to keep them away from each other’s throats, alright?”
The Mediator gave me a salute—dead serious, as best I could tell—and left my office. The ones fresh out of the academy were always so embarrassing.
I tried to focus on the problem at hand. Not only were the aliens totally opaque, but now we couldn’t even analyze our own people? I pulled the flagged data.
It didn’t seem specific to the person. I flipped through various filters of the data, hoping my subconscious would catch some kind of pattern, so I could send it to someone else and go take a nap.
Nothing stood out, so I tried some categories that shouldn’t have any effect. When I organized by location, it all suddenly fell into place. The errors cropped up around the same hotspots, but they seemed to move a bit over time. I overlayed the location data with a map of the region. All the error clusters were suspiciously close to the alien outpost.
How did that make any sense? Maybe some of their technology interfered with the implants. I didn’t think that was possible, but, well, the data was the data. I thought about what to do next. I could just punt it to the department, but now the problem was clawing at the back of my mind. I’d just throw together a simple experiment.
I grabbed a tablet and synched a simple stimulus-response test to my implant. I went with nostalgia. If there was anything interfering with the implant, it would be obvious enough in what it fed me. I gave the program a quick test, and it flashed a series of images at me, amalgamations of memories of my homeworld. Each one gave me that same blend of wistful regret and happy reminiscence, a record of personal journeys and time long gone. More importantly, the bar on the tablet showed the test’s perfect accuracy rating. It seemed calibrated to me so far.
I set out of my office, passing through narrow corridors and around prefab furniture. There were boxes unpacked everywhere—the whole facility was still a mess. I noticed the background chatter seemed more high-strung than usual. I wondered how well people would do without the predictors. It’d be much easier if we could get a perfect, real-time scan of the brain, I thought. Simulating it would mean you could just know what you were going to do before you did it. Though, seeing that would probably be an input to account for in itself. I shuddered, thinking about the poor bastard who’d one day have to code that recursion.
Finally, I reached one of the doors, exiting the thick canvas walls of the lab. I breathed in, enjoying the natural air. I looked over to the alien domes on the horizon. Our neighbors probably didn’t feel the same way.
I checked to see where the closest one of their patrols would be. I walked over packed-dirt paths, feeling the toll of being cooped up for too long. I still marveled at the open space around me. Back home, a space the size of the lab tent alone would be worth a fortune, not to mention enough open space for aliens to play archeologist in. Then the sound of power drills in the distance broke into my thoughts.
I saw our drones first, circling overhead to record everything and beam the video back to the lab. The aliens came into view next, with their true form obscured by featureless environmental suits. Blank, perfectly reflective helmets covered their faces. I took a moment to mourn the loss of usable data caused by that particular stylistic decision. Borderline rude, that was what it was.
Before I got any closer, I ran the test on myself a few times. It came back fine—if this effect was real, how far away would it stretch?
As I approached, some aliens noticed me, and a couple waved their appendages in greeting, but most just focused on their work. By now, they were used to people like me wandering in and out.
I stood far enough away that we’d have to yell to speak to each other, but I was still well within the patrol’s area. I ran the test again. This time, as images of my past flitted by, I still felt that sense of nostalgia, but I noticed myself feeling cramped looking at the stacked buildings of my home planet. That was strange. It didn’t feel like an intrusive thought, but it shouldn’t have come up, and when I checked the test accuracy it was well below acceptable levels. Fascinating.
I drew closer. I was within arm’s reach of one of the aliens, though it ignored me, and I ran the test again. This time I caught myself thinking about the journey to this world. The test was barely correlated with my actual thoughts anymore. Finally, I noticed one of the aliens looking at me. I ran another test, seeing if its focus meant anything.
The images had me thinking about the logistics of feeding everyone back home. How much power did it take a day, I wondered? Then I checked the test. Its accuracy rating had hit the floor. A part of me started to panic. Was my implant ruined forever? Did they change my brain itself? I walked away from the patrol, then started to move faster, and by the time I was out of sight I broke into an all-out sprint. I raced to the lab, overflowing with theories, questions, and instinctual terror. I stopped outside the entrance, head clearing, and the rational part of me decided to take the test again. This time, it was perfect nostalgia. No anomalies. I calmed down a little, and made my way to the office, wondering just how much of behavioral prediction analysis was about to change. I remembered how the aliens themselves seemed appalled at the idea of the field altogether.
All of this brought to mind the aliens’ strangely archaic views of philosophy. I pulled up records of translated discussions as a refresher, eyes darting through line after line. It just didn’t add up. How a civilization with a basic grasp of chemistry and neuroscience—not to mention one that’d crossed the stars—could still believe in such a superstitious fantasy…then I took a mental step back, and it started to click.
If I was right about this, I would have to send out a report as quickly as possible. I readjusted my posture, folding my hind legs into the chair, and started to write.
174,123 AYU
Department of Xeno-Behavioral Predictive Analysis
Basic Psychological Profile Report
Alien subject 2568 appears to produce a localized field that results in the malfunction of standard predictive psychology tools. The effect appears to be directly correlated with both proximity and attention from the aliens.
This effect appears to have influenced the subject’s beliefs. Subject 2568, known to themselves as “children of Terra,” or “humans,” still subscribe to the mathematically disproven concept of free will. Their inducement of a non-deterministic psychological environment may correlate with this strange vestigial viewpoint.
Such an effect could pose many problems to the field of behavioral predictive analysis, both inter- and intra-species, and could induce wider error ranges in even well-established programs. Further research will be required to understand the exact impact on predictive accuracy. The physics-bending nature of this phenomenon may pose a severe challenge to maintaining industry standard prediction rates.
Additionally, there may be some minor philosophical implications to this finding.