More longer friend see that sky?

The project was a complete failure. There was no other way to put it. No euphemisms, no learning from our mistakes, no vague gestures towards it all being an iterative process where it all happens incrementally, one less bad version at a time. After this, there would be no next version. It was done, over, no more

The initial aim was to use big data to copy people. By scraping everything that could be scraped about someone from databases, social media and everywhere else an algorithm could get a foothold, a sufficiently informed replica of an individual could be created that in all ways that mattered were that person, down to whether they had dandruff or not. Everything that could be known went into this doppelganger, and out came a copy so indistinguishable as to be identical

However

The process could not copy the small flaws that made up a person, the minute hesitations, the second-guesses, the imperceptible reroutings of thought processes through childhood memories that characterize a mind that has been around for a while. They got everything right, and thus, they got it all wrong

Nowhere could this be seen more clearly than in the cases when someone chose to have themselves doppelgängered. For whatever reason, they were too busy to be everywhere they needed to be, so they built a copy of themselves to keep up. However, these copies turned out to be better at being themselves than they were, and soon it all became a game of catching up with one’s better half just to stay in the game. Moreover, it happened at times that when someone figured out the person in front of them were the original rather than the copy, their barely disguised looks of disappointment could positively destroy those of a sensitive disposition

And thus it came to pass that no one copied this project. It was, once and for all, over

His specialty was failing. He had taken failing to a new level and made it into an art form. There was no task, no activity, no project so simple that he could not, in a manner as spectacular as it was convoluted, botch so completely as to beggar belief. In short, if you needed something to go wrong, he was your man

One time, he had been tasked with stealthily moving a modestly sized package from one end of the city to another. A simple task, just move it from one place to another without attracting undue attention. Like posting a letter, but with less confusion about how much a stamp costs these days. Needless to say, he failed at this, and summarily invited to attend a high-profile dinner with a visiting princess from a nearby kingdom. While this is considered a success by many metrics, it was everything but stealthy, and the package remained undelivered for a long time after this very public occasion

The key to understanding his art of failure is that he always fails at the task he sets out to do. This could be tweaked to suit the needs of those who employed his services. The key was to phrase the task in such a way that the outcome of him failing was positive when all was said and done. And, most importantly, it didn’t work if he knew he was supposed to fail; invariably, he would fail at failing, thus succeeding in a spectacular manner never before seen, thus invalidating the whole thing

Being an unfortunately intelligent soul, he soon caught on to this, meaning that the contractual terms had to add yet another layer of specific safeguards to ward off the possibility of accidental success. Double, triple or even quadruple negations were not uncommon, to the point where even analytic philosophers had trouble keeping up with what the conditions for success were. Over time, it became its own specialized vocabulary of gently drawing one’s attention this way and that without ever clearly spelling out what was to be done, but fully trusting that it could and would be done. Despite these contractual complications, he remained highly sought after, and often found at the site of very remarkable confluences of events that probably should not have happened but happened anyway

Needless to say, we did not invite him to our social functions

The advent of quantum computing really threw the wrench into cryptography. By making computational speed an arbitrary function of coding, of basically figuring out how fast these things could be made to go, any given implemented protocol would soon find itself outpaced by a more recently implemented hack. Secrecy became a function of frequent updates, which ultimately came down to how fast you could make your coders work. These same coders had, through some miracle of actually existing communications technology, unionized and gotten something asymptotically approaching decent working conditions. The genie would never again go into that bottleneck, and thus other avenues than mere mathematics had to be explored

The key realization came when a digital humanities scholar made an off-hand remark that fiction could contain a nearly arbitrary amount of information, if written intertextually enough. Fan fiction, in particular, excelled in constructing densely connected webs of references, countersigns and internal winks that would utterly nonplus those uninitiated, but be completely apparent to those in the know. The key to keeping something a secret, then, would be to hide it in plain sight in such a way that it was functionally illegible to society at large, and even more so by incorporating false narrative leads familiar to those wanting to figure out what was what. At last, the cryptographic arms race could finally continue apace

One day, new birds started appearing. Most folks, not attuned to the comings and goings of birds, did not notice, but it did not take long until birdwatchers and ornithologists were on the case. A new bird was a big deal – for birdwatchers, to be able to say that they did indeed saw them; for ornithologists, whole conferences could be arranged based on confirmed sightings of new species in territories where they previously were not. Conferences meant funding, publicity and publications, all good things. Thus, the appearance of a whole host of new species of birds was a Big Deal, worthy of extensive note

Soon, it was discovered that these new birds were not related to the birds we all know and love, and that they probably were not descended from dinosaurs either. Scientists were baffled, and rightly so. The new birds came in all shapes and sizes, big, small, loud, sneaky – whatever your thoughts about birds are, there was one of those. They were, in a word, many

Little did the baffled scientific community know that there is only one rule in this world, one organizing principle from which everything else follows:

The amount of bird in the world is constant

He took a lot of selfies. Like, a lot. If called upon, it is very likely his selfies alone could constitute a substantial part of the empirical material of an ethnographic study regarding contemporary culture (for any given definition of contemporary between now and the invention of selfies). It is safe to say that in his case, quantity took on a quality on its own

Then, he disappeared

More accurately, his wish came true. He finally, after much meditation and unrelenting application of chaos magic, managed to become a selfie

This is not to say that he became a picture. Rather, he relocated into the picture frame (be it analog or digital), choosing which of his many selfies to display at any given moment. Thus, he could move from room to room, talking – in his own way – to anyone observant enough to notice his presence. Very attentive observers eventually noted that some selfies seemed to be taken after his disappearance – a curious state of affairs, never explained