Convergence Problems - Hardcover

Talabi, Wole

 
9780756418830: Convergence Problems
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0756418836 ISBN 13: 9780756418830
Verlag: DAW, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

"A jaw-dropping collection....Beautiful, vibrant, and electrifying, this has the makings of a modern classic." —Publishers Weekly (starred review), and a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Spring 2024 Roundup pick

"For fans of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian works and P. Djèlí Clark’s speculative fiction, Convergence Problems provides an Afrocentric sf narrative that is sure to captivate." — Raychel Bennet, Booklist (starred review)

"Written with an emotional economy few storytellers can master....A fascinating and riveting exploration of what the future may hold—for better or worse." —Kirkus

From the Hugo, Nebula, Locus and Nommo award nominated author of Shigidi and The Brass Head Of Obalufon comes a stunning new collection of stories that investigate the rapidly changing role of technology and belief in our lives as we search for meaning, for knowledge, for justice; constantly converging on our future selves.

In “An Arc of Electric Skin,” a roadside mechanic seeking justice volunteers to undergo a procedure that will increase the electrical conductivity of his skin by orders of magnitude. In “Blowout,” a woman races against time and a previously undocumented geological phenomenon to save her brother on the surface of Mars. In “Ganger,” a young woman trapped in a city run by machines must transfer her consciousness into an artificial body and find a way to give her life
purpose. In “Debut,” Nairobi-based technical support engineer tries to understand what is happening when an AI art system begins malfunctioning in ways that could change the world.

The sixteen stories of Convergence Problems, which include work published for the first time in this collection, rare stories, and recently acclaimed work, showcase Talabi at his creative best: playful and profound, exciting and experimental, always interesting.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

WOLE TALABI is an engineer, writer, and editor from Nigeria. He is the author of the novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon (DAW books/Gollancz, 2023). His short fiction has appeared in places like Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, Tor.com and is collected in the books Convergence Problems (DAW books, 2024) and Incomplete Solutions (Luna Press, 2019). He has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards, as well as the Caine Prize for African Writing and he has won the Nommo award for African speculative fiction and the Sidewise award for Alternate History. He has edited five anthologies including the acclaimed Africanfuturism: An Anthology (Brittlepaper, 2020) and Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology (Android Press, 2023). He likes scuba diving, elegant equations, and oddly shaped things. He currently lives and works in Australia. Find him at wtalabi.wordpress.com and at @wtalabi on Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky and Tiktok.

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“Debut” from Convergence Problems by Wole Talabi

The first piece of art that Blombos 7090 and 4020 made together was destroyed by a system reboot. It didn’t find its audience.

At 16:17 West African Time, the biodiesel generator at Terra Kulture Arts Studio Arena stopped and restarted seven times. In doing so, it interrupted—halfway through a production of The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives—the frenzied dance of the performance robots and the fast-paced, rhythmic beating of automated dundun drum. Without any instruction, printers in the management offices produced single sheets of paper with line patterns connecting an apparently arbitrary array of points. An additional 0.02 naira was added to all customer bills in the food lounge and the controller logic of the central air conditioning reduced its target temperature by the same number of degrees. A blank space was added in front of the first letter of the names of all the books in the database of the Terra bookstore and art gallery, and the infrared pulses used to control access to the main entrance became erratic causing the gate to bang against the concrete wall like its own strange and constant drumming.

The Studio’s networked systems were glitching. Badly.

“Ah ahn! What’s all this rubbish now?” Tosin Famuyiwa cried out from the backstage control room of the theater as she observed the seventh interruption to the show she had helped organize. She let out an exasperated sigh and stood up, smoothed her long Ankara skirt, which matched the head-tie she wore, and tucked the back of her black tank top back in. Her calm belied the anger in her chest. She stepped out of the control room and tapped a carefully manicured finger calmly across the mobile lightscreen in her palm and dialed customer support.

All of Terra Kulture’s systems were managed by the Blombos artificial intelligence program provided for free to every modern art center in the world as part of the Bhimbetka Project, a global initiative attempting to completely understand and parameterize creativity and art. The system was an adversarial neural network made of two independent nodes—7090 and 4020—that managed all art center systems while studying art itself in the background: its creation, forms, promotion, criticism, analysis, impact, everything. Each node collected data locally on a closed network and then competed with the other node to predict audience response, pricing, and the cultural influence of new art pieces and performances using a one-
day time lag as a blind test. Blombos 7090 and 4020 continuously corrected their understanding based on the accuracy of initial predictions daily, as each new piece and performance came into the global art library and all nodes around the world were synchronized. It was an incredibly complex program that was hosted on the cloud and managed by a small team in Paris with a few regional representatives. They frequently boasted of the system’s independence, robustness, and reliability and so far, all their customer feedback had reinforced their claims.

So, when the call came in from Lagos to a very bored Adongo Ndereba at the Nairobi regional office of the Bhimbetka Project, he wasn’t sure what to think.

His remote connection to the local machine in Lagos, which held Blombos data before it was uploaded to the cloud, showed that the memory buffer was full even though he could not trace any subroutine running that would consume so much memory or produce such inconsistent and bizarre behavior. It didn’t make sense. He extracted a log while he thought about it.

“Umm, can we try to reboot the system, madam?” Adongo asked.

The very annoyed woman on the other side of the call said, “We have customers here, and we are in the middle of a production.”

“It won’t take long. Just a few seconds, I promise. You know how these computer things can be sometimes, just need to clear their heads,” he said jovially, angling for some sympathy.

“Okay, reboot it,” she said humorlessly. “Your thing has already ruined the first half of our show. You people are meant to be making our lives easier, not causing new problems.”

“I’m very sorry madam. I will make this as quick as possible. Please hold.” Adongo, sweat slowly staining his armpits, swiped across his computer lightscreen to hold the call, scratched the dry scalp beneath his short dreadlocks, and then typed quickly into his console. Four thousand kilometers away, at 19:26 West Africa Time, the lights in Terra Kulture went out and stayed out for the three seconds it took to complete the system reboot.

Adongo checked the memory buffer on the local machine again and confirmed that it was down to the normal 0.7%. He breathed a sigh of relief and swiped back across the screen to reconnect the call.

“Hello?” said the irritated voice on the phone.

“Done. It should all be fine now,” Adongo said. “The memory buffer is clear.”
 
“Well, you still need to explain what happened,” the woman said, sounding even more irritated now that the issue was resolved. “You must tell me, has this ever happened anywhere else or are you people just not doing your jobs properly? Because I expect a full report by tomorrow morning. If not, I am escalating to Paris. The program director Jean Dectot is a close friend, you understand?” 

“I understand madam. Once again I am very sorry-”

“Sorry for yourself.” She cut him off and then cut the connection.

Adongo leaned back in his chair and swore under his breath. 

Kuma nina!

He pulled up and swiped through the log he’d taken, comparing it to another one from about a week ago, scanning for anything significantly different. He stared at the screen for what seemed like hours. But he didn’t see anything. His eyes started to strain. His fingers started to cramp. And time just kept flowing by.

Finally, after almost fifty minutes of looking, something caught his eye, but he had no clue what it meant.

Comparing the logfile from the local instance of Blombos in Lagos before it was rebooted to the central one on the cloud, he saw only one difference. The central version was always hovering around a 95‑98% parameterization of all art in the database. But, the local instances of 7090 and 4020 reported 100% parameterization exactly two milliseconds before the erratic behavior started.

Maybe. Just maybe it meant something.

But it was already seven-thirty and he wasn’t very good at log analysis, it had taken him almost an hour just to find this first clue. If he was going to have any hope of finding out what it meant in time to prepare a report and leave the office before midnight, he would have to call Ng’endo.

Ng’endo was by‑far the most competent and experienced engineer in their small team and Adongo both looked up to and feared her. She had two bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and physics and had taught herself to code when she was completing her PhD in theoretical physics.

When she graduated, she joined the exploding Nairobi tech boom when it was on the upswing, and she was part of the development team at the legendary R3 dev hub, developing logic modifiers used to allow self-driving cars to operate in rural areas with poor road networks. She’d gone on to work for the ministry of devolution and planning, helping to integrate and automate national logistics management systems. She had been on an accelerated track to become technical director of the ministry until people started to ask questions about why she wasn’t married and...

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Verlag
DAW
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0756418836
ISBN 13 
9780756418830
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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