The Future They Made Us Forget, chapter 20

Chapter Twenty: The Ring of Gyges?

“What’s ‘threat modeling’?”

“It’s a computer security thing. [Explanation, with examples: maybe a random hacker is trying to steal your money; maybe the NSA is trying to spy on everyone; maybe an abusive partner wants to snoop on you. In this context… One adversary is the evil scientists, so we need to think about what their abilities are. They have uncertain amounts of mind control over the uninitiated, they have the time machine but only if they can get into the room with it – I can keep the doors locked, but there’s a “master keycard” that can get to any of the doors; Fuller will probably have that. The other threat is the possibility of paradoxes [go over any general mitigations that weren’t discussed in previous chapter] Meanwhile, our resources are: I have all the scripts the other Marvin wrote, and I can write more,]

[... which inevitably leads into the discussion of what their actual plan needs to be:] [Maybe the other Marvin had seen things in a different way than I did, to be willing to kill the scientists; he had been plenty angry at the scientists and they were certainly evil enough, and he had made the decision himself. But for me, my first exposure to it was when I saw our future selves, with Marvin looking so devastated, and Kayla looking so [uhh... brutally pragmatic?]. Having it put right in my face, that we had already killed them, maybe it made part of me think about how we would have to live with that, instead of / When you’re in the middle of a fight, you don’t think ahead as much, but when you see the aftermath to begin with,] [Can we at least try going to the police?] [“police were tried already, the first time someone died from one of the experiments. A couple of them came and asked a lot of questions, they were talking to me and all the other test subjects and I told them everything that happened, they acted like they were taking me seriously. Then Dr. Fuller walked in, smiling and acting all respectful, and said he would explain everything. The cops went in his office, I don’t know what he said, but when they came out, they didn’t even look at me, they just walked away. And we never heard from the police again”]

“He mind-controlled them?”

[“I don’t even know if he did! That was years ago, –” [If not explained yet: they’ve been holding you here for years?! No, they’ve been experimenting on me for years. At first, they were still just working from the offices at the University, they only had me come in once a week for testing. They didn’t lock me up here until 81 days ago]

“– Years ago, before they figured out the [cyanosol] treatment. Damn it, maybe he did mind-control them, because if he did, I wouldn’t be able to remember it. But I thought it was just, you know…”

“Just what?”

“He’s a rich white man! You think the cops are going to listen to us?”

“I mean… I’m a white man,” I said, [without any conviction]. But I knew what she meant. In the grand scheme of things, I was nobody. Dr. Fuller owned this entire building. [He was a polished professional, it was like he could roll out of bed already dressed in “business casual”]

“What are we doing to do, tell them about the mind control? The time travel? They’ll never believe us!”

“What if we just… don’t tell them about that? They’re still guilty of kidnapping, that’s a regular crime –”[maybe: my parents gave consent for me to be here/for the “treatment”. What about all the other kids though? Also they were abusing you, there’s definitely a crime in here somewhere]

“So the cops will march in here, and what? Our rooms have the Pattern all over them, they won’t even be able to see them. They’ll just ‘not find anything’ and walk away like every other –”

“I could show them the photos,” I said quickly, before Kayla could get angrier. “I could crop out the parts that actually have the Pattern in them. I know for a fact that what’s left would still be incriminating. I think I can even get video of the experiments, so we could actually show the police what the Pattern does to people, so they can know to be careful.” I quickly put together the pieces of a plan. “They don’t even have to go in the building, they could wait for everyone to go home and arrest them at home. Then you and me can go through the building, open the locks and let out all the kids. All we have to do today is break the time machines so they can’t go back in time and stop us”

[Maybe: even then, Fuller could talk his way out of it (maybe the “white man” dialogue wants to be here instead of the above?). But maybe:]

?????

[Section break] It wasn’t a perfect plan; if we had thought about it more, we would have seen all the many ways it could go wrong. [Maybe: Even if Fuller went to prison, what would keep him there? He could just ask for a purple marker, draw the Pattern on a piece of paper and walk out. [Or maybe that goes further up? In the current plan scenario, the police could be told not to let him have anything purple] [actually they can’t say this until after they see the coyotes]]

?????

[But Kayla was not at all satisfied by that plan./But that just revealed the real reasons Kayla didn’t want to go with that plan./That plan was one end of the spectrum; it existed in contrast to Kayla’s true motivations./But despite not being perfect, that plan was good enough to dismiss Kayla’s practical objections, which meant that now she revealed her fundamental objections/[grand generalizations, like:] when you have a plan, sometimes there are practical reasons not to do it, and sometimes there are fundamental reasons not to do it, and if there are both, sometimes you only hear about the former, but after they are resolved, the fundamental reasons inevitably come to light,] “You just want to break the time machines, arrest the bad guys and leave?”] [“What else is there to do?”] [maybe cut this] [“We need to take the time machines and use them! I don’t care about going back to the world out there, it sucks anyway! But with time travel, we can do something about it!”] [Ah yes, she was a young person with grand ideas, jumping way ahead of what she could actually achieve – or so I thought at first. Maybe even: it’s a good thing she didn’t take my advice, because then we’d have all been screwed “It’s okay to just leave the world better than you found it”]

“Don’t you know about climate change? About the rise of global fascism? The constant threat of nuclear war, ?????? Hell, even the pandemic? The world is already worse than when we found it. Doesn’t matter if you do nothing but good deeds all day. Doesn’t matter if I get out of here and live a [cute but in a mocking way] suburban little life. In twenty years we’ll probably all be dead. You, me, everyone. And if we have a chance to do something about it –”

[I realized how dramatically] my Kayla had already diverged from the one in the video. Video-Kayla [had spent her first N days of time travel experience assuming that you weren’t allowed to change your own past, which made it not-so-useful (you could play the stock market, maybe), and had kept thinking in that framing after she learned Aster’s notes. But for my Kayla, that revelation had been upfront, and she was already thinking from a framing where you could change your own past. And if you could change your own past... then you could undo every decision that ever went wrong for you. You could make plans that couldn’t possibly fail. A single person with a time machine could make themselves more foresighted than any political strategist, and luckier than any tyrant.] [Except that if you wanted to change your own past, you would end up like them. The one who made the decision would be erased from existence. And only the next version of you would keep going.] [I could tell I wasn’t going to be able to stop her. “Can we just focus on the first problem?”]

“Fine.”

[Going to the store: if people see them and that causes divergence in what they text the scientists, then the later parts of the recorded timeline won’t be accurate anymore. I guess we should try not to be memorable? If we take the car, we could affect traffic… Should we walk? They try to walk, but Kayla struggles to walk even as far as the car, so they take the car] [Kayla sees a coyote on the way to the store [waiting next to the car when Marvin is about to get out] and has to point out to Marvin, they start to think about how there could be things that they still can’t see:] [“Hey! Watch out!”] [Kayla was pointing. At first I didn’t see anything where she was pointing at, it was just part of the road. But I kept looking, trying to grasp what it was. There was a coyote there/the face of a coyote, not like it appeared out of nowhere, more like it had been there all along and somehow my eyes had just skipped over it. With purple and white stripes, like the Pattern. Jesus Christ! I yelled and shooed it away (waving an object?) and it ran off] [“Were those there all along?”] [Yeah, I’ve been able to see them ever since they put me on [cyanosol]. They’re all over the city, they are not scared of humans at all because humans can’t see them. [The idea: the Pattern is some sort of weird effect that messes with your nervous system, so the urban coyotes evolved it to protect themselves from humans; later the scientists discovered it and started using it for mind control]] [I shuddered. There was one time when I had lost a sandwich while I was [standing around], I had thought I must have put it down somewhere by mistake, but probably a coyote had eaten it out of my hand and my brain just erased it from my memory. “How much other stuff is there that we can’t see?”] [“The coyotes are the only thing I’ve seen. But you know… They’re the only one I’ve seen.” The implication was clear – there could be more things, and we wouldn’t have any idea how many things we weren’t aware of. “Reggie has this set of photos he shows me. He always shows me them in sequence and asks me what’s in each of them, and he looks disappointed. That’s got to mean that there’s stuff I’m supposed to be seeing in the later photos that I’m not seeing!”]

“Wait, what if we put the Pattern on ourselves, like printed it on a shirt? Would people not see us, the same way they can’t see the coyotes?”

“Eugh! Like a real life Ring of Gyges,” she mutterred.

“Ring of what?”

“It’s a story from Plato’s The Republic. A man named Gyges finds a magic ring –”

I’m ashamed to admit, I wasn’t expecting a teen girl to reference Plato. “That’s, uh, impressive,” I mumbled.

Kayla saw the implication immediately. “You’re just like everyone else!” she snapped. “Are you going to listen to what I say, or are you just going to stand around gaping?”

“Jeez, I only meant –” I began. But I stopped myself, remembering something I’d read, in the documents Zeroes had sent us. After the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, the researchers had made a guidebook for aid workers, and one of the things it said was this: “Refrain from arguments; the starving are ready to argue on little provocation, but they usually regret it immediately.” I swallowed my defensiveness, long enough to realize that she had made a fair point. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have made assumptions. Please, [tell me what you were going to tell me].”

[Kayla began the story: (and/or bigbreak?)]

As I would later learn, [Kayla had spent lots of time reading philosophy when she was around 12, to cope with her anger and distress about everything around her. When you’re having thoughts that bring you distress, about something you can’t do anything about, you have two choices: you can [distract yourself and avoid thinking about the thing,] or you can [keep thinking about the thing. Mentally engaged with it. Face it.] And Kayla had always chosen the latter. She had chosen to keep trying to find ways to make sense of it/ways to interpret it that were acceptable to her.]

[“A man named Gyges [Jy-jeez, [IPA]] finds a magic ring that can make him invisible,” she began. “And once he realizes people can’t see him, he knows that there won’t be any consequences for his actions, and he starts doing evil stuff. Pretty soon he’s killed the king and made himself the new king –”

“Wait, why would he get to be king just because the old king was dead?”

“That’s not the point of the story! The point is about the nature of justice. [It starts from the idea that you might like to be able to hurt or steal from other people, but not as much as you’d dislike having other people hurt or steal from you, so we’d all be better off if we just agree not to do it./If you have to choose between no stealing and everyone stealing, you would choose no stealing. But what if you could hurt people and not be hurt in return, if you could steal from everyone and no one could steal from you? Plato’s Glaucon says that anyone who found the Ring of Gyges would do that, no matter how good of a person they are when they might face consequences.]

“Oof. That’s a tough one.”

“What? No it isn’t! Plato only wrote that for the sake of argument, so he could show why it’s wrong! Obviously there are people who wouldn’t rob everybody just because they could! You can just look at what’s good and evil, and decide not to do evil! I wouldn’t [do that]! Would you do that?”

[I was uncomfortable because I knew that the temptation did exist for me] “I mean, uh… if you, like, steal someone’s PlayStation, there’s someone who’s actually using that. They’re going to be upset, they’re going to have to replace it… maybe I’d steal from, you know,” I nodded at the store in front of us.

“That doesn’t count. Stealing from megacorps is a social good.”

[But another thought was sneaking into the back of my mind. Sure, maybe I didn’t like to upset people. But what about just spying on them whenever I was curious about their private lives? What about bank scams where you steal half a cent from every account? If I could have whatever I wanted, and no one would even know that there was something to be upset about… I wasn’t so sure I wouldn’t do that. But I didn’t mention that to Kayla. [She was still on a hair trigger/she was a true believer/she clearly wanted me to say that I wouldn’t do that, and I didn’t want to disappoint her]] [By habit from taking care of my nieces, I kept her talking, to give her something to focus on instead of the pain] “so, what does Plato say about it?”

“Oh, Plato’s wrong too,” she said, like it was the most straightforward thing in the world. “He says that anyone who behaves justly will eventually be recognized for it, and the unjust will eventually be found out and punished. And then they’ll be rewarded or punished by the gods in the afterlife, too. But obviously none of that is happening.”

????? “Do you believe in God?”

“Of course not,” she said. “And if there was a God, they’d be evil. If there was anyone who has power, and they weren’t evil, they would do something about all this.” She [made a gesture all around]. She didn’t just mean [the evil scientists], she meant our whole capitalist dystopia. “Look at who is in charge in the world, they are all just like Gyges. They do evil and there are no consequences for them.”

[Maybe: K: Do you believe God exists? / M: I’m not sure what I believe / K: “That’s just avoiding the question! Don’t you think it’s important to have the right answer about –”

But for better or for worse, I didn’t have to face that question that day, because we had just reached the store, and [practicalities ensued. / We had to be unremarkable. Kayla: “if anyone talks to us, you do the talking! If I talk, people will remember me!”]]

[Somewhere in there: “...in all respects a god among men”, from the Gyges story] [Not sure if this actually fits here: Maybe a child who grew up with the ring for their whole life, since before they developed their moral beliefs] [Shopping: avoiding people’s gaze, talking quietly with Kayla about what we need. Marvin pushing a shopping cart (how are we going to carry this stuff after we leave? We should get backpacks. You expect me to be able to put on a backpack?? Okay, uhh… We got a backpack for me and a fanny pack for Kayla) Getting food was tricky because Kayla was very carefully restraining herself but I couldn’t stop noticing the hungry way she was staring at everything.] [Duct tape, a screwdriver (“you always need one of these in escape room games”)] [They buy separate burner phones for every time loop. Marvin insists on buying 16 of them (“you always end up wanting more than you expect. Our last selves did 5 loops, we should get more just in case.”) and 2TB flash drives for bringing video data back in time. With everything we’re buying, this is thousands of dollars! How can he afford it? “I’m not super rich, but software engineers are well paid. I don’t have to worry about spending a few thousand dollars if it’s a real emergency.”] [Back in the NeuroSci Innovations building, they carefully collect the video of themselves going to the time machine the first time (from the video: "you/we should really be keeping careful records of exactly what time everything happens, but we didn’t want to give you too much stuff to remember at once. Anyway this time you can just take it from the camera records] [We didn’t know what was the deal with Reggie and Aster, but I’ll let them explain it in their own words when we get to that part of the story.] [Marvin thinks they should talk to Reggie, Kayla is resistant (“he stood around taking notes while they experimented on me!”; At the very least can we just read his notes first) They read the notes in more detail. Kayla reads more of Aster’s notes while Marvin reads the time machine code?] [Asters notes are extremely disorganized, lots of half formed sentences, using scientific terms that don’t exist anywhere on the Internet. The scribblings of a genius, incomprehensible to us normal people. A note says “TODO: make a diagram of this”. Notes about the other scientists, “(safe to come out to?)”, Plans to stop Fuller,] [“I mean they can’t be the same person if Aster is writing that they wish they could talk to Reggie. Maybe Reggie was bad, but this Aster is against Fuller”? “No, whoever wrote these notes is definitely the one I’ve met, so the person we’ve met is Aster, and Reggie is someone else”]