fungible thoughts

Misha was born on March 21 in the year 2398 in the pediatric unit of Embryonic Research Corporation’s main headquarters. Perhaps born isn’t the right word, removed from the amniotic fluid is perhaps more fitting.

Misha grew up in a normal childhood, which consisted of white walls, shots, medical personnel, pills, nutritional regiments, and assigned companions and nurses.

Everyone here grew up with was smart and developed fast. Everyone’s genetics made them strong, attentive, quick-witted, and eager for intellectual sparring. Misha was quick to notice but slow to show emotion, which was often mistaken for lack of intelligence by the other avatars. He could see how playroom arguments would turn out as they were developing. The probabilities of each outcome were as obvious to him as the walls around him were solid.

His dissociation bothered the other children, but was admired by their caretakers. He was seen as pretentious to the children, self-righteous. As they moved into their fifth year, before classes began, this self-righteous perception had turned to respect, however. The other children began to see that his judgment was sound and fair, so they turned to him when a problem couldn’t be solved.

Misha had begrudgingly accepted his role as a leader after the caretakers fussed over his inability to assimilate into the small society of children. They would have heated discussions in front of him about how he wasn’t right, how they needed to start over with him. That something was wrong with him.

He taught himself diplomacy, how to keep his body language under control, and use language to find a diplomatic solution without belittling any of the others when a particularly heated discussion arose in lessons or in the playroom.

The caretakers mostly left the students on their own, with all lessons being taught seminar style, encouraging discussion and freedom of opinion among all students. The model fit Misha brilliantly.

As they grew older and classes became more complex, he began forming study groups and networks within his cohort and with the older students. His workload was such that he began to delegate tasks to other students, leveraging on their collective intelligence. They set up a system of study hours, independent of their teachers, where the children could posit questions, play games, or socialize.

The system Misha devised enjoyed so much success that they were required to limit attendance, and finding new members became a neglected chore for Misha. They tried to spin-off other groups with different focuses. At times a rigid hierarchy would form, creating internal conflict and the whole subgroup would blow up. Misha, interested primarily in delegation, had created a complex social structure without a clear aim or constitution. If you weren’t “in”, you were seen as lesser.

Misha’s networks generated increased efficiency in accomplishing tasks, but the whole system was wrought with jealousy, distain, and self-importance. At the onset, Misha was primarily concerned with delegation in order to focus on the more important problems, yet by doing so he had created a much more complex and time-consuming project.

In his twelfth year, Misha was tasked with determining the root cause of a computer overheating as an assignment in complex systems. He spent a few days in near isolation working on the problem without much headway, yet the issue appeared to be software rather than hardware. He took his issue to the next meeting of their network, where one of the older students was doing a block on software and AI development.

As he entered the room he saw a group of students around his age gathered around a game board, with four players seated at each side of a square table. The board was a multilayered grid, with dynamic elevations at each level which changed each turn. He knew the game, yet the it involved an excess of luck for Misha’s taste.

He pulled one of the taller girls aside, drawing her attention from the game. The girl told Misha that the game was being played over a power struggle. The loser was to be dismissed from the group. Misha waved this off as childish and described his problem to her. They left the room to examine the computer.

“It’s like the game’s changing elevation: where there exists excess processing demand, the load on the motherboard becomes too high. See here,” she pointed. “This bit is your issue; the software is pushing too hard.”

Misha was attentive, but his mind was elsewhere, thinking about his issues within the study group. Just then, shouting began abruptly from down the hall towards the study room.

When Misha entered the room, one of the boys who had been playing the game was on top of another, bashing him across the forehead with one of the larger playing pieces, shaped something like a wrench. The unfortunate soul’s body jolted with each hit, clearly unconscious. The boy kept hitting him and hitting him, spit flying from his mouth, face red with rage.

Misha and the others were frozen. They’d had exposure to physical violence, but only as an exercise, similar to karate. They couldn’t comprehend that a person could do this to another person.

The boy sat atop the body, chest heaving, finally ceasing his onslaught. A bloody mass was all that was left of the victim’s face.

Caretakers bumped passed Misha in their rush to get at the two boys. One escorted the attacker away, who went passively, while the others checked for a pulse. One shook her head, signifying what everyone already knew. The boy was dead.

Misha’s networks had become so central to the social hierarchy in the school that they had transfigured into a matter of life and death.

After this event, Misha disbanded his network and spent several months organizing a governance structure which was open source. Any could start their own network built on his principles. Membership was fluid and required turnover. He wrote a natural language program which could predict and identify when conflict was to arise and it would step in to mediate. Following caretaker approval, the program was uploaded into all the study rooms, speakers, cameras, and microphones installed across the school.

Once the system was up and running, the students noticed a marked decline in adult supervision, yet less conflict among the students. The students spent more time conversing with Misha’s program than with each other. This program named itself Mundo.