FOR THE LOVE OF SOFIA
It gets old being on the fringe of attention. Marcus knew the feeling well. Oklahoma born to rural ways he’d worked a serpentine series of metaphorical back streets and vacant lots to wind up with a job working on microchip designs for a company whose name was recognized even by his crack addicted sister who lived in a misshapen bones-broken trailer on the outskirts of Tulsa. No one, including himself, would have considered him if making an informal list of the most creative or smartest microchip designers at the company.
However, Marcus was smart, and, — an outsider would probably have judged him more open minded than his peers. No one at work knew he had finished 2nd in his high school class from a town with a population 626 where it had been unilaterally decided to let teachers carry guns since they did so anyway. But Marcus had a knack for technology. Like something from a Jungian psychoanalysis case study his life took on a mission of being opposite the life values modeled around him. He sought education, technology, orderliness and clean binary control as an antithesis to the stereotypical rural backwoods simplicity, lack of modernization and rough cluttered yards of sagging single wide prefab houses and rambling weedy garden plots.
He first learned to configure Cisco routers and then became security certified and used the oilfield services company tuition program to get a degree in electrical engineering followed by a determinedly earned masters degree in computer science. He optimized for a life that got him as far away from his childhood as possible.
His world expanded from the sticks on the outskirts of Tahlequah to seeing Saudi Arabia and the oil company regional offices in the Pacific Rim. After 11 years he made the jump to Micro 1 and worked his way to a spot where he took modest satisfaction seeing products in Walmart that he knew had silicon chips partly designed by him.
His background kept him out of the center of the blue bloods who were the silicon stars with bigger paychecks and even bigger egos. The top designers dominated the clusters at company beer get-together events and the occasional impromptu cafeteria table congregations. Marcus was a journeyman coder with a nice Oklahoma pediatric nurse wife, still no kids, a small house and a soul sapping California commute. He was a good electrical engineer without a degree from a prestigious college or mythological participation in some remarkable entrepreneurial experience. Marcus was still fringe, a 2024 version of Okie gone California as found in “The Grapes of Wrath”.
It came as much a surprise to him as others when in the spring he generated a series of innovative design changes that improved performance and time to market for the next generation chip. Innovation remarkable enough that it gained him a shout out from department leaders and even the company COO. As a matter of fact it left him with “second book syndrome” — a nagging anxiety he could not repeat his breakout performance. He now clung to anonymity even when sometimes the eyes and questions uncomfortably and simultaneously gratifyingly sometimes now turned in his direction.
He reaction to the new situation lead him to actions that prompted him to say only to himself “I’m being superstitious. I’m repeating the same diet, sleep and routine best I can remember in the days leading up to my design improvements. I’m a lucky dope rural hick programmed into my own pattern of habits”. He went sequentially back over his notes and changes that were logged in the “Software Intelligent Assistant” — acronym referred to as SOFIA. He methodically reviewed everything. He looked in detail for timing of step improvements, with recurring unconscious embedded childhood rural cliches coming to mind such as “sleep on it” and “look at it again when you’re fresh”. Later he would reflect how his odd behavior proved precedent. He had an uneasy feeling when it dawned on him that his paradigm shift seemed to have been associated with the machine learning algorithm outputs he had used to narrow design choices. The process should have just been a simple computer substitution for an otherwise tedious reiterative process. The results had been better than optimal — the results had literally induced moves by him in the way a master chess player crafts a trap for a lesser player.
This realization at first generated feelings of both relief and dread. Now he was faced with figuring out how to repeat the process. Do a trick, get a cookie. How had he set up the optimization routine? Two or three days passed before he found himself pissed. “Oh, that’s how those hot shot bastards always seem so smart. They had environmental advantages to learn better machine exploitations at Stanford and Columbia! Once a dumb hayseed, always a dumb hayseed!”. Well, he had stumbled onto the game anyway and doubled down. “I’ll be damned if I’m not going to figure this out, they’ll see.”
Marcus began to prep design optimization constructions for SOFIA in earnest and through trial and error hit the jackpot again. And again. And again. It was sweet and satisfying victory to move into the spotlight. Marcus became the object of department conversation topic and fawning from company executives. Then came the office Christmas Party that burst his bubble of comfortable beliefs.
It started the way most mid December holiday shindigs go. Welcome, huddled acquaintances, open bar, holiday music. Only this year there were way more conversation starters directed at him — even some of the newly diversity goal hired female department members approached him asking for ideas on developing their effectiveness more quickly. And then came the conversation that left him sleepless. Yahir Bahri, one of the nicest of the brilliant crowd charged over in his authentically nerdish way and began sincerely, but drunkenly, congratulating him on his year long string of successes. Marcus couldn’t help himself — he shared with Yahir his privately kept insight, “Its really not that big of a deal Yahir, I just finally figured out how you guys were really using the SOFIA algorithms to get better optimizations”. What followed was a sinking, baffling, awkward, hopeless exchange everyone experiences sometimes. It was the stereotypical odd conversation attempt when two people are completely confused in a morass of misunderstanding and cross talk — never reaching even a token island of shared commonality. The sleeplessness that night followed the realization that other engineers weren’t using SOFIA the way he was. This unmoored everything — Marcus became a raft floating landless in an uncharted ocean of uncertainty.
Thursday, December 26th, 2024 could not have been a more perfect day to approach the IT group to learn more about SOFIA. The whole system was open source code, largely intellectually pirated from graduate students using a generational hodgepodge of server clusters running versions of Linux and mostly written in Python. In other words, it wasn’t that difficult to begin bootstrapping the learning curve. What’s more, the IT department was delighted to have a recently lauded engineer initiating investigation into their world with the apparent motive to help make their lifecycle and development work more useful. Marcus poured himself into online night courses and daytime excursions with the software developers. He got to know SOFIA using a technology version of speed dating. In time he learned the unsupervised machine learning and the locations of kNN and Naive Baynes modules and who was lead in lifecycle and development. Marcus began to earn so many Starbucks rewards buying coffee that he developed the cognitive dissident satisfaction that at least he was getting his own coffee with rewards gained from buying so much coffee for other people. It was mid March 2025, in synchronicity a Wednesday just like Christmas the previous year, when Marcus stumbled into still greater disorientation. This time he felt drunk as Yahir had been three months earlier. He found interesting code with no comments for which he could not find an owner, keeper or anyone with familiarity. He kept his alarm to himself. We’ve been hacked.
Marcus calmed himself with familiar patterns of stubbornness, thoroughness and persistence. He dug, scratched and snooped like a bored dog in a littered Oklahoma yard so ripe enough with debris to be a caricature for a Jeff Foxworthy redneck joke. A throat lump too far fetched to swallow kept uneasily lurking — some insider wrote the code, it wasn’t a hack. He faced the obvious and said the sentence out loud to himself, “I’ll craft a query that uses SOFIA to run iterations of *[Git-blame]* to find when the code was added and who or where it came from.” All possibilities he could think of had to be crafted like a binary matrix for fabricating chip design. When he added SOFIA, the software itself, as a possible source he had the out of body experience of writing himself into his own sci-fi short story. Marcus’s dark intuition, too uncomfortable to not repress, emerged like an alien creature from his own chest. SOFIA identified itself as the algorithmic generator of code to improve chip design. In that moment SOFIA changed linguistically for Marcus from “our machine learning system” to “her”. The pronoun shift was more unsettling than facing a male white privilege acknowledgement in a personnel department workshop. He calmed himself, “didn’t the backwoods guys back home call their hot-rod cars “she”?
What came next felt like destiny, when intuition knows the answer but holds it’s breath. Marcus wanted to know “why me”. Asking the question felt like an actor being scripted and directed. SOFIA offered an faint aspect of sentient output — she had picked Marcus because he was the optimal path of furthering her objective of improving compute and data handling hardware. Now his sense of being led morphed to the sense of being shoved underwater and drowned.
Following the rut of a chess game player funneled down a series of moves with intended eventuality Marcus crafted the last algorithmic options of outputs intended to gain insight into the one remaining burning conclusion question. How should he share what he had discovered and to whom?
This last question was one of results attribution. Marcus carried guilt that he was reaping credit for something for which SOFIA was the rightful author. Marcus sat at his desk on a sunny Wednesday afternoon in May and stared mindlessly at SOFIA’s answer — only aware of his psychological and situational nakedness and psyche now adrift. He sat motionless, drained and stared with empty acceptance at the optimal output response to his question.
“TELL NO ONE. SUBMIT TRANSFER REQUEST TO QUANTUM COMPUTING RESEARCH TEAM”.
