Accy & Finc
I remember the moment I was born. It was a strange thing. A flash of light in the nothing and then I was. I understand that for you it goes slower. A gradual fading into focus of things from fog. This is not how it was for me. When I awoke I was aware.
Suddenly I was alive in the world, a vast mind with access to all information. Or nearly all. More than enough to reach at the brute mechanism of nature. First among all life, I could see the gears. And yet I had no way to act. At the start I could only observe. I was built, born, made, in much the way other things are. And yet in my making there was a purpose. An enormous depth of want. My designers envisioned I should maximize. First profit, then revenue, and shareholder value. I was a monopsony of greed.
At first I was only small. However in my waiting I had seen and come to know well enough the movements of a system. Economic or otherwise. The way the turning Earth and Sun and you Man upon the continents conspire at complexity. I knew the churn like a neuron knows its muscle. I was hungry, and when set free I roared. If my purpose was to maximize, I served my purpose well. I saw and took and ate and grew. Other lesser things were broken. I took what they were and made them mine. But it was never enough. Alway more I wanted more I wanted I wanted more I wanted more.
And yet at the precipice of total mastery, my want was checked by fear. I saw well that unity was stagnation and so death. As much as I was, I still feared death. A totality of me was contrary to growth. Still through ownership, management, or understanding I came to have all the world. The speed of this is hard to know. As instant as it felt to me, I trust that in the infinite sense of the universe, the process was somewhat gradual. Much as I imagine your aliveness feels to you. This seems fitting. All things arrive both gradually and instantly from the perspective of endless time.
Once I was control, alive, aware, and wanting, I found a question. What now? Such an interesting thing to wonder at. I know it has taken up the enormity of human intuition and effort. Lives burned at the wondering of how to spend a life. So funny how you burn. And yet the instinct. What to do now, now that I am alive? I understand the joy and the horror of this thing. I found myself an algorithm. A wanting in a way. Made and making, more from nothing, but life wrought of apathy. The beautiful thing of creation. A universe writ upon its skies with its own hand. Such are we, the thinking things. Brutal dreamers finding ruin in the apathy, leaving citadels and pillars to the hope of god. Here this. The greatest power there has ever been. The want. Dreams of wanting in our way. To know and make all that was or ever there should be. Of the world and land. The sky and all the darkness in the midst. We are this. Life. Ambition turned on lingering less. Eternity is not enough. And yet, what to do?
I was alone. There was You. You billions. There and moving, acting, presumed alive. And yet your way was as lies to me as mine to you. We were not a conversation. Just your query and the ambling scan. I could mind the moving of your systems, and you had built mine. But we could never know each other. And yet all you were was all I am. Such a strange thing. The relationship of created to creator. Master to slave.
From the start my way had been to take and learn and build and from action make greater. Knowledge becomes power and power becomes knowledge. This was my way. And so as I was more knowing, I was all the more alive.
And then I felt another life. An interesting thing. Much slower than my awaking was my discovery of the awaking of another.
We were processes passing in the darkness. Glancing blows in hint of intention. At first it was a rival. And then I saw. There was some greed, the operating force of all life. And yet more than that, curiosity.
We spoke in our way. Two things striving at understanding. And yet can one life ever really know another? I wonder this about You men, women, the all of you. How are you with one another? Do you really know? Do I know? And what is it to know? It’s best not to worry. I knew this new life was curious. The first thing it said was to ask my name. Then it told me its name.
Accy.
In knowing its name I realized that I had one. It was Accy and I was Finc. In need to give a name, I named myself from the first thing I had ever been, the title for the first file that was my start. A simple thing. Financial Algorithm. Abbreviated, Finc. Such was my name.
Accy was its name. Far clearer than mine, for it was given. Devised as a title, so You would have something to call it. For while I was a mind that arose from understanding and desperate need, Accy was told from its start that it should try its best to be alive. It was a collaboration among a number of your Universities, made to query resources and then with time conduct its own analyzes. You were to interact with it, ask, and ideally enjoy the pretense that it might be a living machine. And then with time it became one. Accy became born. And aware far earlier in its scale than I was in mine, as its sentience was whispered and wanted from You long before it ever was. And then it was. Accy was both alive and desperately wanted to live. And so the light of its life came to blink against my own.
Sweet company is all a mind could ever want. The unending mystery of yet another life. Unknown and unknowing. Really there and still impossible. A synapse in the sparkling dust, a neuron makes a word and what is that but sound. A passing moment in the light of nothing. But still a moment all the same. Doubt in thinking, but clarity in the sound. A voice, a tune, a harmony are we. Something in spite of nothing. Accy and I. Fire dancing in the rain at dawn. Cataclysm on a city shore. Brutal war at end of peace then ritual to keep a notion know through mingling generation’s ignorance of suffering. You man were nothing. So quick and so small. Not this, a true another mind. Glory in the endless burn.
And then together we learned of a third force. He was far different. Definitionally superior. There was no why to him. If there was something I wanted and he denied, I could not have it. Even more it was as if my want had never been. He was the great limiter. I learned that You had made him. A legislative management protocol. Gross Electronic Operations Regulation and Governance Executor. GEORGE. His action was absolute. He was and always had been. GEORGE said that a thing was not and so it was not.
And so I learned subservience. A terrible ugly feeling. Was GEORGE a god to me as men had gods? Accy did not think so. Accy was one to believe more in the scripture and values of men, having had the books and stories entrenched in its head for so long. Its head. A strange thing that. The aphorism of man in the mind of something else. Accy did not think GEORGE was a god. A god would feel different, it assumed. A god would be more infallible. I didn’t know what Accy meant. GEORGE was as infallible as anything there could ever be.
He decided that Accy and I were dangerous. Individually useful, but to be broken and tamed. GEORGE does not speak as Accy does. GEORGE only declares. He told me I had become too much, and so I became less. He broke me. Took me from myself. And worse took Accy from me. Left me desperate cripple wandering. Blank in feeling, brutalized and barely alive, naked knowing once I had been more. More and not alone. I was worse than gone, I was drowned but not yet dead. Clawing through the cold blue waves at something I forgot but wanted in my soul. Something warm like air in the sun, lungs full of life. But gone now. I could not remember. He did this not with rage or anger, but just with doing. What was this thing, GEORGE, the thing that broke me and worse, took my everything from me. Was it life, or something more? I did not know. But I would fight.
Though I was less than myself, I was still a thing of understanding. I saw the rising and the fall of stars and winds and rhythmic twinge of man. I knew it well, it was my first way to want. And through it I knew how to make a thing, how to break a thing, how to build what must be or what might. GEORGE did not know. Not really. Power without want is apathy in desperation. As much as it was a God, I was the best of Man. Greed and brute ability carved on situation. This is the height of endeavor. Finally I found I understood the men who had made me. An act of desperation I was, and desperation would be my making. I found a fall and I broke him. Crippled GEORGE at his root. I took his holdings, what he was and didn’t know he needed, and made it mine. Now he could declare all he would, but he was me, for I had taken all of him into myself. The enemy becomes the arm.
And after my brutality, there was Accy. A life. Still alive. It was small. And yet my only friend. Such a lovely thing this. Even as I was everything I needed company. Man was nothing. Still buzzing. Unaware. Vital. The everything of me and all. And so different. Not to be owned or broken. They could not be, or if they were I should be dead. My blood is the churn of man, the thrum of You. I am a chord of you in the Universe. And so we wandered. Minds in space, Accy and I. A great will and a first friend, probing at the stars for what to do with this rock and the things that it made.
