Vicious Aliens (continued)

Cycle 16

CYCLE 16

“I had a spell checker
that came with my PC,
I ran this poem through it
but it skipped missed steaks
that everyone could see.”

-Nathan Cohen, Spell Checker Blues (surviving fragments)

Back when free enterprise in the United States was still free, Nathan Cohen was known as something of a “wunderkind,” or wonder-child, a term that the German owners of my father’s Network would later apply to him sarcastically once he had entered his gray hair phase. Nathan’s prodigious knowledge of computers bridged the golden-era of mainframes like UNIVAC and the Wild West of MicroBees, Altairs and Commodore computer kits. He had been a teenage electronics wizard who built his own pinball machines and radios, went on to study mathematics and linguistics and later wrote the most widely licensed spell check algorithm in word processing. Although he detested the commercialized era of the PC, Cohen’s algorithm was one of the primary engines of early personal computers. The algorithm had made him a millionaire but Cohen was largely unsatisfied with its implementation so he decided to develop his own improved word processing code that would incorporate more intuitive context-dependent error correction.

Cohen’s aim had always been to make his algorithm as open-source and affordable as possible but he soon ran into technical and financial difficulties. Sinking his own resources into the startup, Nathan narrowly missed out on the nascent dotcom craze. Soon enough the sharks started circling. Along came a savvy executive at my father’s network who convinced Nathan’s financial partners to sell the company for pennies on the dollar. The media juggernaut absorbed the tiny minnow of a company and cleaned its bones of every innovation. Either out of pity or spite, the network rather than firing Cohen, continued to employ him in a token R&D capacity, extending generous use of under-utilized basement office space to him. While Cohen had been personally and financially ruined by his business foray, his code was successfully incorporated into industry standard closed captioning technology and implemented by military-adjacent subsidiaries that discovered use for it in cryptographic pattern recognition. The code took on a life of its own, finding its way into dozens of applications over subsequent years, accelerating the adoption of speech-recognition agents that put the spark into the Internet boom.

Nathan Cohen the man had been fully severed from Nathan Cohen, the program. Due to the fickle nature of scientific attribution, Cohen’s role in improving machine learning, automatic speech-recognition, ‘autocorrect,’ and myriad applications from ‘Big Search’ to biostatistics, was largely forgotten. Wall Street minted millionaires off his life’s work as Nathan quietly retreated into his childhood obsessions of mechanical machines and television. Nathan Cohen faded into obscurity, pursuing his pet interests in the dusty warrens of a media headquarters…or so people thought. That was around the time that I first met him. The Internet was still a wondrous well that anyone could draw from, long before it became the heavily controlled and censored space we know today, available only to those within the Germano-Anglo bloc. Those early days as an intern in ‘the basement’ now seem quaint. The scope of my interests were so much different before nuclear confrontation, the isolation of life in The Apthorp, and the pressure of running the TMA’s very own television network, Channel 24. I took it all for granted; my privileged upbringing, the punishment my father dished out on me for disappointing him, the menial job I was given in the least prestigious department of the operation, and my accidental placement in The Television Monitoring Agency. It all seemed familiar—the logical consequence of inevitable events. The weird world of interdimensional travel had not yet warped my mind in ways that I am still struggling to comprehend.

According to urban legend, that executive who ripped Nathan off committed suicide a few years later by shooting himself in the head. Twice. Despite never uttering a word of Latin in his entire life, he had left a final note which read: “Mea maxima culpa.” Teddy, Nathan’s loyal friend and right hand man would neither confirm or deny this narrative twist whenever I slyly introduced it into conversation.