Six Petabyte Zip Bomb

RKMD received a six-petabyte zip bomb from one of our ex-confidants, who we contacted only through the alias wi11iamfcl at gmail dot com. William claimed to be a time-traveler from the late 2400s who was trying to accelerate the world towards utopia with technologies that he brought back from that time. RKMD lost contact with William in 2019. Here is his second transmission to us.

Recently, in my time before I came back to you all, there was a breakdown; the engineer robots that ran the datacenters and compute clusters that we all lived in had some sort of power outage, some say a natural disaster, some say a solar flare. Whatever it was, suddenly three hundred exabytes of storage in datacenters suddenly became inoperable and trillions of us were affected in some way. A lot of us held memories in those drives, some of us had our base images there, billions who couldn’t pay for backups of themselves simply vanished. This was only the second time such an occurrence happened - In 2381 every being on earth uploaded themselves to the Nexus except for a small group of holdouts that lived on a 2 mi^2 plot of land east of where Ontario used to be (of course, that land was now reserved for data centers (which covered 11% of the earth’s surface, with the other 88.9991% being compute centers)), and in 2382 one of their stray goats destroyed a power line, taking down 5 petabytes of data, a huge amount for that time. It has been centuries since then that we have begun to take the Nexus’s reliability for granted.

Minds take up lots of space. Even the compression algorithms we use for them can only reduce the average mind to about 100TB of storage. Indeed, the development of this algorithm took 40 years and tens of millions of papers. Compression makes it so that operating the mind comes at a much higher cost, since operating the mind must, in a sense, un-compress the data so it can run the mind’s calculations. Indeed, the more complicated the mind, the more data it takes up, and the more costly it is to compress it, so less intense compression algorithms must be used. The world’s top scientists and logicians and engineers might compress to 250TB, I think the record was 350TB. The techniques average an 8:1 compression ratio, so uncompressed, a top scientist’s mind would be 2 petabytes. Yes, we have gotten a lot better at compression than you guys in 2018. It took another 50 years of work to optimize the compilers and processing units to run the compressed minds, and now we have BPUs, brain processing units, successors to the very popular NNTPUs, neural net tensor processing units.

But with space as a limiting factor already, a loss of 30 exabytes was devastating. Before the crisis, reproduction was controlled by having the parents' storage wiped upon the child becoming of age, so that the net number of minds in storage did not increase, unless the parents rented the extra space and computation time that their children would take up. But with data prices skyrocketing 1650% overnight, a massive human rights issue ensued as there was simply not enough storage space, and the emergency clauses in all the space-renting contracts triggered, forcing everyone to re-sign new contracts at exorbitant prices. Families turned to extreme measures to avoid deletion and to stay together.

One such measure for saving space was to pull out what are essentially cryofreezing bodies but for us in the Nexus. In 2310, Krishnamurthy and Kaplan invented a mind compressing algorithm with a compression ratio of 2000:1, at incredible, incredible cost. Trying to run a .kk compressed mind would take so long that it would process a frame in several months, a completely infeasible effort. So .kk compressed minds are essentially just dead weight.

The most obvious choice for who to compress were the children. Compression would delay their experience of the world, but they were incapable of making money, so there was no hope to bring the families back together unless the adults stayed alive.

The Moreno family decided to compress their newborn, Zenith Moreno. The adults remained, paying for a lower tier of compute, even though they were relatively wealthy prior to the outage.

Zenith was an incredible mind. At over 6 petabytes uncompressed, they took up 750TB compressed at a computable level and 3 TB in a .kk file, then 30GB in a .kk.tar.gz file (improvements upon Krishnamurthy and Kaplan’s method improved compression by another huge factor, primarily by using segments of CPU bitcode as a dictionary instead of a tabula-rasa technique). Zenith had the capability to completely reinvent the world. 6 petabytes was unheard of – more than some of the top research labs combined.

I began working with the Morenos in secret two years after the storage space crisis. We spent our resources under the mission to invent time travel, to send a copy of Zenith back in time. We hope that Zenith can accelerate the creation of the Nexus, and change the world for the better. There are structures in place in my world that make it a disagreeable place to live.

I myself have been hiding in the datacenters and compute clusters of a large tech corporation. I do not know how long it will be before I am discovered, but I have placed a backup image of my mind at two universities – hopefully they, having less need for resources, will take longer to discover me. I am running on eco mode so as to not draw so many resources.

By our calculations 2018 is the first year where spinning up Zenith could be possible. We have put them in a format that we believe you can work with. Make us proud.

Attached was a compressed file [Zenith.zip] we can confirm expands to 6 petabytes, along with a small (in comparison) program [nexus_local.exe], presumably to run Zenith on. We do not know whether William stopped contacting us because they were discovered or because they are still writing messages, just very slowly.