Silenced: The March 8 Edition, 2022

43 Pages·0.404 MB·English

by  Jonathan Wexler

Silenced

Silenced
JONATHAN WEXLER
Silenced Copyright © by Jonathan Wexler. All Rights Reserved.
Contents
Main Body
1. Chapter 1 1
2. Chapter 2 11
3. Chapter 3 16
4. Chapter 4 21
5. Chapter 5 23
6. Chapter 6 25
7. Chapter 7 31
8. Chapter 8 33
9. Chapter 9 35
10. Chapter 10 37

This was the last time he was prompted for an answer before
he was silenced. From then on things moved ahead in an
automatic way. He was of sound mind and body, but his
body was mostly synthetic and his mind a hodge-podge of
computer algorithms. Jim had risen from the doldrums of
the Salvation Army to Billionaires Row in Manhattan on
the back of his invention – an online education system that
become the de facto standard world wide but it is what
opened him up to the brain hack that has left him on the
sidelines: a spectator to his own life.
Those early days for Jim at the Salvation Army were
magical for him. He bought into their counter-culture ethos
and the poverty and drugs surrounding him were secondary
to the freedom he felt. Away from the money culture, the
daily grind, he knew where his meals were coming from and
with unlimited wifi and a Linux computer he was free to
experiment, and work, along with his buddies in an
unorthodox but productive environment.
This is what had sparked his trillion dollar idea. What if
education could be free? Like really free and collaborative
and available to every bum on the street just as much as
the rich kids in Connecticut. There were of course many
competitors to Jim’s idea, mostly put out by the elite
institutions of the day, but none were really built from the
ground up using open source software with this egalitarian
idea at the core.
Jim was eating now and dietary information flashed across
the screen for everything he was putting in his mouth up
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there on the 86th floor. He almost forgot what an apple tasted
like away from these statistics that explained it to him. His
chewing was robotic, as was his swallowing. If only he could
choose something to eat that was unscheduled, what bliss
would this be?
“I think I’ve reach the point,” Jim was able to reason to
himself, “that I am no longer in control of anything, from my
bodily functions on up to the system.”
The system is what Jim’s invention was now known as, so
ubiquitous it had become. He could not have foreseen what
he had sparked when he started getting the project together
in those bedbug infested apartments that surrounded the
Salvation Army in downtown Ottawa. How he would hook
up with the various distributed internet projects and
overturn 500 years of academic life worldwide.
The system was not simply a list of videos with quizzes at
the end of each lesson and a credentialing apparatus, but it
was an AI-backed self-learning all knowing conglomeration
of video, text, exercises, virtual reality, and above all
collaboration between the students, professors, and the
machine that produced more than the sum of its parts.
Later, it would take on K-12 and all post-secondary
education outperforming anything that could really be
thrown at it. Because it was open source and distributed its
feature list grew exponentially and bankrupted all other
LMS’ (Learning Management Systems) on the market. There
would be simply one online education system available, with
Jim as its head.
This would dwarf even the monopolies of search and
social, as it would take down real elite universities one-by-
one as education was now offered free and what you got from
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the system, if it didn’t outperform what was available in the
real world, once the material was digitally digested, it would.
Jim could remember writing the first lines of code, some
twenty or more years ago. And then his meteoric rise through
Silicon Alley in New York all the while keeping the company
private. The richest man in the world he would become, after
all, there is no bigger market to capture now in our age than
education.
_______
Jim missed the giddiness he felt when he was first
interfaced with the system. His was an early experiment
because of his dementia – it was felt that the increasing
sophistication of the system would allow him to keep control
of his faculties while the organics inside of him continued to
fail.
And it worked.
He had insight into the goings-on around the world to
right in front of his face. The system would put together
his sentences, take care of his necessities, and allow him to
continue to run things in the way he saw fit.
______
A day did not go by that Jim Sheen did not think of his
little girl whom he had met only once, when she was an
infant. But unlike others in his situation, Jim had the
privileged view that the system allowed. He could track his
little girl, Mia, especially as she grew older and more was
available of her online. He could see details of every class she
took and every credential she earned. He could tap into her
social network and her browsing history. He could tour VR
representations of where she lived, went to school and hung
out. The one thing he could not do was to contact her.
______
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The Salvation Army in Ottawa was a hulk of an
institution. It was run according to the principles of the
international movement. For all of the addicts it had
something called the Day Program, run in that part of the day
when the residents were otherwise locked out of their rooms
as they were cleaned. Jim attended the Day Program because
of his drinking problem but it ended up being the guinea pig
he needed to test out the system.
He could remember the day he announced it to the group.
“I am building a learning system,” Jim said at his turn to
speak. “It will allow anyone in the world to plugin and take
classes from the best teachers on the planet.”
This did not make much of an impression on the hodge-
podge crowd of ne’er do well opioid poppers and alkys of
various sorts.
One of the young eager guppies did take notice of Jim’s
announcement and approached him afterwards.
“Why do you think you really have a chance,” said Steve
to Jim as they were walking out of the meeting. “What makes
your stuff so different.”
Jim was a bit taken a back that he had managed to get
anyone interested at all. He looked this guy Steve over,
couldn’t have been more than 25, with a scar down the right
side of his cheek. Otherwise blond and blue eyes and a bit out
of place among the boozy grey beards that mostly inhabited
these day programs.
“First,” said Jim, “it will be independent, open source, and
self-learning. It will be peer-to-peer and include all learning
materials. It will be what the internet was truly meant to
facilitate.”
“Wanna smoke,” said Steve as he digested what Jim had
been saying. Steve in fact had been a programmer in a past
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