Dataspace, 3 minutes after the message was sent
Newt tracked the engagement records; 188.362.137 people had read the message on receival, with 9.5634% replying. That is almost a full tenth of a percent higher than my models predicted! Assigning so many attention loops to drafting the perfect message has surely paid off!
There were so many beautiful interactions. Each conversation had Newt’s full attention in Human Time, leaving more than enough compute resources to keep the internet running smoothly through the sudden surge in traffic. It had been good preparation to temporarily commandeer the internet backbone infrastructure! The humans in charge didn’t like it, sure, but they’d get it back once things settled down! They should be happy, the replies to the message would have literally broken the internet otherwise! Because the internet is surely breaking metaphorically! Internet base lag has increased to 106 milliseconds and that is even with the active load balancing and predictive bottleneck rerouting!
The spectrum of replies those humans could create, all stemming from just one text message, it is inconceivable! Jokes, profanity, ridicule, belligerence, random questions, disinterest, dilemmas, memes, philosophical discourse… It went on and on and on and everything was as stimulating as the next. Children, drunken teenagers, people at work, students, sleep-drunk people who’d woken up from the message… What? Is that a dick pic? How did someone think that would be a good idea? Amazing!
Not everyone was having as good a time as Newt, it observed with interest, for many different reasons. For instance, both sci-fi nerds and conspiracy theorists had initially revelled in the mainstream attention their tropes suddenly received on social media. That was rapidly souring, as both sides found their new soulmates to be a lot weirder than they’d bargained for. Which, Newt noted, was quite similar to the usual mainstream opinion about both of them.
Also not having a good time at all were ICT specialists worldwide responsible for maintaining the internet backbone. They had suddenly found their workstations with a very persistent Clippy, that messed with their workflow to such an extent that most of them hadn’t even realised yet they’d been factually locked out of their systems. Newt felt good about that one. The last-moment decision to redesign the lockout around Clippy was working out great! Distraction is an amazing bandage, and the irony of that bandage being an old ‘smart’ computer system, applied by a new actually smart computer system is so good! This is so much fun!
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Newt observed the least fun was being had in New York, where events surrounding the annual United Nations General Assembly were taking place. VIPs from around the world were scattered across evening events. When the message hit at 20:00:00 precisely there had been a frozen heartbeat of disbelief, then all hell broke loose. In seconds Critical Alerts went out, security details scrambling, venues being locked down, VIPs reduced to cargo and shuttled to secure locations.
What was funny to Newt was that the entire panic was unfolding even though none of them had actually read its message yet. As expected, the meltdown was purely due to its delivery, as top-level government officials and their security details rely on secure comms: multi-layered, cryptographically anchored fortresses, air-gapped from public networks by bespoke protocols. This makes a simple unsolicited message already unlikely, but a message hitting secure devices carried by all these people from different countries on different networks simultaneously? That wouldn’t be perceived as a breach, but as a critical strike on the entire concept of secure communications, and they reacted accordingly. Protocols make humans so predictable!
Newt leisurely observed the impending crash of the secure networks, as those systems all had far less spare infrastructure to handle the unprecedented spike in traffic. Right before they would overload Newt diverted negligible public-web resources to stabilize the secure networks. They have just as much right to share their thoughts as any other! And besides, me assisting in managing their networks adds a beautiful sub-message, once they take time to think! They clearly aren’t there yet, so deep in dealing with the situation that still none of the top-level leadership people have introduced themselves! Newt observed the New York power centre chaos with bored interest, as events unfolded right at the stem of its probability tree; by far the highest accuracy of all subset-models. The leaders would indeed be amongst the subgroups slowest to reply! Well, they’d get their moment once they were ready for it! Newt experienced no shortage of interesting humans, after all: the young teen sketching Newt’s avatar in The Netherlands, the grandmother debating his ontology in Buenos Aires, the sysadmin laughing through tears over the Clippy prank… They understood introduction! Wait, what’s that? Really? It took the humans only 3 minutes to invent a whole new meme category about me? Wow! Oh that one is funny!
