2. FOJIP

Dr. Esteberger of Area J presents point clouds and FOJIP polyhedrons, then explains that FBI station chief John Spillers was one of the 39 men left behind at La Navidad in 1492 by Christopher Columbus

Previously—1. The Crate: we got a glimpse of 1950 Puerto Rico, as seen from the eyes of special agent Anton Ramler of the FBI. We learned that his boss, station chief John Spillers is not at all what he appears to be. In fact, after killing Ramler's partner with his bare hands, Spillers makes the shocking admission that he's been alive for hundreds of years. Then he grabs Ramler by the head and squeezes, until his brains shoot out of his ears.

In this post—We meet the operators of Area J—mysterious observers whose business is to exhaustively explore, analyze, and document the human layer of something they call “the event stream”. Dr. Jamal Esteberger of Area J walks us through a presentation of point clouds and FOJIP polyhedrons, describing the workings of human brains, using the language of symbolic logic, machine learning, and neuroscience. He then draws our draws our attention to the fact that FBI station chief John Spillers was one of the 39 men left behind at La Navidad in 1492 by Christopher Columbus.

Area J

On the third floor meeting room of Area J, Dr. Jamal Esteberger stands at the main lectern, squinting to the left and right, as the last stragglers amble up the ramps and into their seats. From the dais, he taps a silver drafting pencil against the cover page of a report he’s here to summarize. Anyone who knows Esteberger recognizes that pencil. He carries it as a sort of hand prop any time he’s called on to explain things. And now, he twirls it, clicking on the end cap with his thumb—two clicks, he pushes the lead back in… three clicks, the lead goes back. So on and so forth, ascending a ladder of prime numbers until his hand is finally relaxed. It’s a carryover from his days as an operator.

Behind him, within two arms reach, is an extra large wall mounted aperture—a seven by five meter rectangular patch of darkness bordered by white quartz. It sits there stupidly doing nothing on the wall, its contents shockingly black—contents that could easily be mistaken for tinted glass or, if you stepped closer maybe liquified obsidian. This aperture, like every other one in the building, allows specialists to peer into the mystery of mysteries—what the Area J people call the event stream. And those who specialize in this work are called operators.

As the last straggler makes her way up the ramp now, the lights dim further and Dr. Esteberger speaks. “Hello everyone. I’m Dr. Jamal Esteberger, Director of Event Stream Operations here on the third floor’s history department. The information I’m sharing with you today is not really for a general audience—not just yet.”

Looking down at his papers, he double-clicks his pencil and draws a small circle and triangle along the margins of a randomly selected sheet. Inside the circle, he pencils in a smiley face with a pair of large cajoling round eyes that seem to beg… don’t talk too fast! He pauses to clear his throat, pushes in the pencil lead, and continues. “If you look around, you may notice that everyone here is a GS-10 or higher. We uh… we’ve recently found some odd patterns in the event stream, and felt it was time to share this information out with a slightly bigger group—starting with the department managers and directors. So what follows is an executive summary and briefing—of sorts—of what we think those patterns might be.”

“This presentation is divided into two parts. First, a rundown of FOJIP—what it is, how we use it, why we use it, etcetera. I’ll try to keep this as high level as possible. The second part is a live demo where we’ll roll up our sleeves and step through what’s called a FOJIP polyhedron. And hopefully, knock on wood, nothing goes wrong. You never know with these live demos right? Haha, OK.”

The work of an Operator

“So… right off the bat, I want to explain what operators do. Per updated field manual 5137—and I’m paraphrasing here—given three or more arbitrary points sampled from the human subset of the event stream, an operator should be able to gather sufficient data to construct a bridge connecting those events—forming what we used to call a point cloud, but what’s now called a FOJIP polyhedron—with a mean fidelity of no less than seven, and a variable or fixed step interval of the operator’s choosing.”

Esteberger looks out at the audience, rotates his head left, then right—and flashes the beginnings of a grin.

“Alright then… everyone got it?” he asks rhetorically with a chuckle. “Actually, if you’re able to follow the technical stuff, that’s awesome. If you’d like to dig further into the details, I suggest taking a close look at the appendix. For non-operators, here’s what we do. We look into the event stream—zeroing in on the one layer that’s perceivable to humans. And we identify and extract the sum total of what’s knowable inside that layer. We document it. We explain it. And we provide our interpretations in the form of reports to the folks upstairs. That’s it.”

Esteberger’s grin widens a notch as his eyebrows go up playfully. “As I said earlier, all our reports come with a fidelity score, something that’s brand new, and only made possible by the FOJIP polyhedron method.” He scans the room with a quick upward glance toward the third row where he imagines a pair of eyeballs might be—somewhere in seat 17, then goes right back to his papers. “It’s intuitively simple to implement for the operators, and dead simple to understand for non-operators. Case in point—” he says, looking up and across the room from left to right. “—you get a report. It’s scored. Automatically, you expect it to have a 7 next to it. If it’s got an 8, you’re thinking wow, even better—more accuracy. It’s really that simple.” He waits a bit, signaling through his grin and eyebrow combo that he hopes this point about fidelity scores will resonate. “BPA point clouds, on the other hand, don’t have anything analogous to fidelity scoring. A deeper explanation of this topic is included in the appendix.”

FOJIP as an Acronym

“Arright, quick show of hands. Does anyone here—anyone NEW—know what FOJIP stands for?” Esteberger looks out at the crowd, smiling. “FOJIP stands for—Face Of Jesus In Pancakes.”

There are a few laughs in the first and second rows.

“Kind of whimsical, I know, but it’s a memorable and easy-to-pronounce replacement for a word that’s… so long,” he says rolling his eyes, “I won’t even bother to try and say it. The original monstrosity of a mouthful is derived from the Greek word pareidolia, which is the…”

Here, his head snaps down toward the report, eyes scanning for quotation marks, thumb dispatching slow clicks until he finds the words… “‘perception of apparently significant patterns or recognizable images, especially faces, in random or accidental arrangements of shapes and lines’”.

His head comes back up, and he continues, “Besides having a much shorter word to describe what we do, FOJIP beats the pants off of BPA any day of the week in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. For those who want to know where the acronym comes from, well… there was an incident on April 14, 1922 in the town of Wheeling West Virginia. A ten year old boy named Elmer Kalo—his details can be found in the appendix—was having breakfast with his older sister when he blurted out… and I quote… ‘Jesus is in my pancakes!’ The sister, Sally, was so frightened, she ran out of the kitchen to immediately fetch her father, who was digging a post hole for a new mailbox. News of the pancake incident spread quickly—first to the grandparents Cyril and Ann Kalo, then across the street to the neighbors, then down the road to pastor Dale of the First Baptist Church. Within twenty four hours, the story appeared on the front page of the Wheeling Intelligencer under the title ‘Face of Jesus in Local Boy’s Pancakes!’—and Elmer Kalo was being treated like a local hero. When we got wind of it here, we all laughed and thought… people see stuff in clouds all the time. Sure, it’s weird a kid saw Jesus’ face in pancakes, but that’s an outlier. No way it’ll happen again. Boy, were we WRONG. Within a month, we were getting reports of Jesus’ face in wood grain patterns, drying paint, curtains, bowls of soup, spider webs, in the folds of skin—humans were seeing it all over the place. Many of these early instances are highlighted in the appendix.”

“So… one day, a junior operator got curious, and decided to take a closer look at the Elmer Kalo incident. She discovered something strange… which led to a series of investigations which… changed our understanding of the event stream. Not to mention, the human brain. That junior operator was Dr. Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck, who now serves—”

In unison, all the seated members offer enthusiastic applause lasting five full seconds. When things quiet down, Esteberger caps off that last sentence, “—yes, Dr. Vandyck, is now director of ontology up on the sixth floor.”

Humans and FOJIP

Turning to the page in the report titled ‘Humans and FOJIP’, he continues. “In general, as human brains move through their world, creating and consuming data, they ask a single question: is there a pattern that explains the stuff I’m seeing, smelling, hearing, feeling? Let me illustrate with an example. Let’s say… a pair of burglars are wrapping up a jewel heist. They’ve gone to great pains in the planning of their robbery—studying blueprints, bribing security guards, learning the use of specialized tools for safe cracking, etcetera. They’re just about done, when they both hear sirens off in the distance. One of the thieves looks to the other, and says doze ‘aint fiyah trucks. Without saying another word, both thieves pack up their things and silently exit the building. Think about how amazing that is for a moment. The second thief instantly knows what the first one means, despite having heard just four words. He hears the four words, but understands this: hey, I know you just heard dat noise chroo da window. Doze ah fuggin’ police sirens. Let’s get the fugg’oudda here before the cops show up. An’ don’t make any fuggin’ noise you idiot. They understand all of that in just four words. How’s it happening?”

“As many of you I’m sure know, humans base all their decisions on the outputs of judgements derived from linear classifiers running in their brains. Sorry to point out the obvious, but I don’t like to make assumptions about the audience. By the way, I have it on good authority from a GS-14 that humans don’t see it that way at all. Strange, I know.” he says, shaking his head. “The jewel thieves in my example are able to efficiently communicate because they’re running nearly identical linear classifiers in their brains, parsing words into meaning, and ultimately biochemical signals that travel through their brains. When humans walk around, doing what they do, what’s really happening under the hood is this: they’re running queries against their experiences, both lived and interpreted—attempting to find something with the same semantic shape as the thing that triggered the query. And if they’re lucky—if they have access to a rich dataset, those queries tend to produce results with great explanatory and predictive power. For those with smaller datasets, the predictions and explanations fall short, and lead to suboptimal outcomes that run a… fascinating spectrum from the trivial to the absurd… to the tragic. Things like—overestimating your dancing abilities at a wedding; launching rockets into low orbit to prove that the earth is flat; and genocide. The people up on the fourth floor study these kinds of zigged-where-I-should’ve-zagged fiascoes in detail. If you’re interested, they run a lunch and learn every Friday at 12pm—which I highly recommend.”

Esteberger, who feels like he’s on a roll, looks down at the lectern and notices his right hand twirling and clicking the silver pencil—occasionally even using it as a drumstick. He releases it and says, “So… as I was saying, by always being primed to judge the world as they move within it, humans are able to predict the next stuff that’s about to come their way. That’s the basic design. Perceive, judge, move. Pretty cool right? What the humans don’t realize AT ALL—thank God—is that this general feature of how their brains work also functions as a kind of safety constraint—keeping them clamped to the event stream, squarely in the human layer. We’ll discuss this more as we go deeper into the live demo. Now, if you all turn to page 14 of the report—”

The Simulator

There’s a short pause, followed by the sound of pages ruffling. “OK, we’re there? Alright, great, thank you. Human brains are outfitted with a field-expedient simulator—not too dissimilar from the ones we use here on the third floor, but obviously, with a lot less processing power. The simulator in a human brain is kind of a marvelous device in the scheme of their evolutionary biology. A simple, but powerful tool that lets them game out multiple hypothetical scenarios before committing to a course of action. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s got some flaws—it’s fragile… it’s kind of a hog when it comes to calories, but overall… a solid design.”

Esteberger picks up the pencil again, pauses and gives the aluminum cap two taps with his thumb. “Most humans have the ability to run their simulators for basic problems like driving a car, selecting a partner, or designing an algorithm. We call that Type 1 Simulation. Some humans though, use their simulator for tasks that have less to do with immediate gratification, and more to do with long term scenario planning—what we call Type 2 Simulation. And here’s where it gets mysterious, and absolutely fascinating. We don’t understand the mechanism. Not yet—but it turns out that humans at the extreme end of type 2 simulator competency, and are sensitive to things that lie at the periphery of the human layer of the event stream—these people are capable of locating point clouds suggesting a skill level on par with that of an expert GS-10 operator—basically doing a crude brain-based version of what we do during aperture sessions.”

Esteberger pauses to allow this to fully seep into the audience, rolling his pencil back and forth along his thumb and forefinger. From the barely audible noise level, he doesn’t believe he’s made his point. “As far as we know, humans do this by feel—without being aware of the structure of the event stream. Operators don’t do it this way at all. We locate point clouds with math, running enormous numbers of calculations on points to find related points. Turns out that humans have access to a much simpler direct path at understanding than we do. They do it, but they’re not in full control of it. And they certainly couldn’t explain how they do it.”

“When Dr. Vandyck originally looked into the Elmer Kalo incident, she dialed up the magnification of the event stream to a resolution allowing her to peer into the brains of skilled humans as they ran type 2 sims. And what she realized was… humans contain their own event streams, encoded right in their memories.”

Several people seated toward the rear begin to rearrange themselves in their chairs, crossing and uncrossing their legs. Some clear their throats and glance around the room. The quiet ruckus causes Esteberger to look up from his papers for a moment. He continues by explaining, “We’ve always known that humans store memories—we just didn’t fully appreciate what they were. Or even why they do it. It appears though… that human memories share characteristics with the event stream… that inside human brains, there are, for lack of a better word… deposits of geometries with near… perfect symmetry with entire regions of the event stream.”

This brings on a full eruption of frenzied whispering and a few gasps—which is the reaction Esteberger wanted. “Yes, yes. I know.” he says, talking over the din. “We had no idea this was even possible. The geometries are nothing short of spectacular—the implications are just… I don’t even know how to describe… it uh... well, that’s really a question for the folks up on the fifth floor.”

Having reveled long enough in the quiet calamity of speculative gossip bouncing around the rows of chairs, he taps his pencil a few times on the report he’s been reading from, and says, “OK, let’s just get back to simulation. When skilled humans run type 2 sims, they think of it as ‘being deep in thought’—which is not entirely wrong… but what’s really happening is… they’re accessing internal geometries, harvested from their memories, attempting to line them up with portions of the event stream—doing so with a crude, almost blind groping—many times unconsciously. Some of them even do this while they sleep.”

There are several ooooh’s that emanate from the middle of the audience upon hearing this, which he had planned on.

“When there’s isomorphic alignment with one of those geometries and the event stream, the human experiences this as… comprehension—a recognition of something… familiar. When Dr. Vandyck observed moments of comprehension like this—she noticed the illumination of extremely irregular polyhedrons in the aperture—right inside the humans’ brains. The existence of these polyhedrons was Dr. Vandyck’s key insight. That, plus the discovery that these shapes can be scanned, and that humans have access to a relatively low number of them—a manageable vocabulary of geometries so to speak. This makes it computationally feasible for us to replicate what they do, at scale. With a large enough library of these polyhedrons, we can simply go through a brute force process of overlaying them on to the event stream, then trying different orientations with different vertices lying on different entry points—just sort of seeing what we get. Kind of a like doing jigsaw puzzles. This is the FOJIP methodology in a nutshell.”

“Granted, we don’t experience the alignment as comprehension in the same way humans do, but at the end of the day, we’re still doing math here. Applying the polyhedron method is a field-expedient generative shortcut, allowing us to identify point clouds in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take with BPA. Dr. Vandyck scanned hundreds of human geometries, a few of which are diagrammed in the appendix. She’s now leading the effort to catalog and document them.”

“I anticipate that in another year, we’ll do a complete overhaul of FM-5137 and deprecate BPA (and point clouds)—standardizing on FOJIP (and polyhedrons). In the meantime though, it’s a little messy. BPA has been the gold standard since—well, I’m not even sure. Please just bear with us during this time.”

Esteberger grabs the report and leafs forward to the page with two words on it, printed in large bold letters—Live Demo.

“So… for anyone who hasn’t sat through one of these, please bear with me. Basically, we have to traverse all of the FOJIP points of our polyhedron along a set route of transformations. You may not understand the order of things, but it will make sense when we’re done. I kindly ask that you just… suspend judgement for now, and allow it. Per SOP, everything mentioned in transit is part of a single self-contained polyhedron, comprising what Dr. Vandyck likes to call a story manifest. Alright, everyone ready? Great. Let’s take a look at the aperture.”

Dr. Esteberger turns to face the mouth of the aperture, standing in what’s called neutral position—left foot forward, right foot back, torso and hip alignment at a ten to twelve degree tilt with respect to the aperture’s viewing plane. He draws in a quick succession of tiny breaths while simultaneously pressing his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The distribution is uneven, like clumps of various densities and lengths, moving in a sort of spiral fashion—undulating like endless beads of photons marching along in a manner that resembles the movement of blood more than that of particles. There is no beginning or end to the field of dots, no order or pattern. Not at first. Esteberger’s pencil is quite active in his right hand, moving between fingers, sometimes rolling back and forth, other times twirling. His eyes remain open the entire time, and his expression is relaxed. The true gift of operators lies in their ability to use their entire body—what they would call their first brain—to navigate through the aperture, moving, rotating, magnifying, and occasionally warping the vantage point—doing so with minute changes in their breathing, posture, and muscle contraction—all to assist in the construction of a view that a layman’s eyes can gain purchase on, so the swirling nonsense can be tamed into something comprehensible.

“I’ll begin by drawing your attention to a single point… here.” The points move and twirl, redistributing into different clumpiness. Esteberger tilts his head a hair to the left, and begins to roll his pencil like a cigarette between his forefinger and thumb.

“When I zoom the magnification, this big particle cloud with clumps we’re seeing here in the upper quadrant—that’s everything that happened on Earth in the year 1950. Now, I’ll adjust things to sharpen a bit.”

His posture becomes taller, and his head tilts again—this time upward—his chin nudging forward in tiny increments.

“Just hold on a sec. OK, now we’re at the proper scale, I’ll be moving a little faster. What we’re looking at now is the beginnings of a military invasion into South Korea. It’s the morning of June 25, and two groups, trained and armed by the Soviet Union, have crossed the 38th parallel. One is headed west, toward Seoul. The second is headed east toward Gangneung. The South Korean and American military are pitifully outnumbered. We’ll come back to this region later.”

“The next FOJIP point is… here—8,500 miles to the east and 1 day forward—in San Juan Puerto Rico. We’re going to focus on a single man—this one here. His name is John Spillers. He’s the FBI station chief, and the reason he’s on the phone is that he’s requesting permission for the construction of an interrogation facility to be built… over… here. Does everyone see this big grassy patch of land? This is Ramey Air Force Base on the western side of Puerto Rico, about 60 miles west of Mr. Spillers’ office. Inside the base, there’s a 50,000 square foot patch of land, sandwiched between the airfield and the ammunition depot—literally called the GRASS CUTTING AREA on all the maps. Strange name I know. It’s only called that because the engineer who drafted the original survey back in 1939 chose to pencil it in as such, and when copies were made, it was presumed to be an official designation, so it stuck. True story. Any way, that’s where the interrogation site is built, starting in early July. This site is important, but what I really want you to focus on is this man here—John Spillers. Everyone see him?”

Esteberger waits until he sees many heads nodding.

“Normally, humans have disc-shaped luminosity, when viewed in the event stream. Spillers here is very different. Do you see the unusually long debris trail? It’s like a… tiny comet. This is what caught Dr. Vandyck’s attention. I’ll zoom in so you can see the details I’m talking about. There. Does everyone here see the unusual markings? Yes? Good. And the coloring?”

As soon as Esteberger sees enough heads nodding, he moves on. “Yes, it’s definitely off. And Dr. Vandyck has a theory about this.”

Esteberger pauses, elongates his neck and rotates his head a bit to stretch. “Before I move on, I’d like to ask everyone to use their eyes to look at the event stream… visually. Just for a minute.”

One thing the Area J people have never understood is the humans’ reliance on eyes as the dominant regulator of vision. Esteberger, like many senior operators is able to simultaneously see the event stream in multiple modes, and can perform visual and point perception without needing to reset.

“Everyone ready? Alright, so focus your eyes on John Spillers again—do you see him? Take a little time to catalog the details.”

He pauses, allowing everyone to make the adjustment. “Alright, great. We can all stop using our eyes now. Next… we’re going to move 400 miles to the west of San Juan, over to this place.”

Esteberger’s diaphragm puffs up slightly, then contracts. The dots of light inside the aperture twirl and dance again, zooming out, then rotating, then zooming in.

“In this area of the event stream, it’s now December 6, 1492. Do you see the three wooden sailboats and the men? These men have come from Spain, and are about to meet… these people here. These people are the Taino, and they call this place Hayti—land of mountains. We’ll take a close look at these people later. For now, we’re going to scrub forward about three weeks, to December 24. This is the day Europeans call Christmas Eve. On that day, one of the boats, the Santa Maria for no good reason, runs aground right… here. Just drifted into a sandbar. And within hours, the crew realizes there’s no way of getting it unstuck. Many of them by this point, have had it with the man in charge, and privately think of him as an imbecile who knows nothing about sailing or navigation, despite his pending title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea.”

“By the next day, the Admiral, who’s well aware of his crew’s feelings toward him, commands thirty nine of them to stay behind on the island. He names the place la Navidad, the Spanish word for Christmas, and tells his men to start building a fort—has them unload a year’s worth of supplies from the Santa Maria, then orders them to fire a couple cannonballs into the trees. He does this to frighten the Taino people. And before leaving, the Admiral reassures the crew he’ll be back as soon as he gets the Queen of Spain to give him more boats and more men. Meanwhile, look for gold! he says, and remember, you’ve got cannons and swords.”

“The men who stay behind are not what you’d call… the cream of the crop. For example, this man here… right… here. In the spring of 1492, he was in prison for killing a baker in the port town of Palos, twenty five miles to the west of Seville. The only reason he’s not in prison is that his sentence was commuted by royal decree on May 23, in exchange for serving aboard the Santa Maria. When we focus in on this man, we can see a luminous shape typical of a human—a whitish yellowish disc that’s basically elliptical. Nothing unusual right? OK, so again—I’d like to ask everyone to use their eyes to take a second look at the same man. We’ll stick with eyes for a while now.”

Esteberger pauses. Within seconds, there are murmurs of stifled surprise, throat clearings, and muffled questions.

“Alright… so, it looks like everyone’s seeing it. Same slouch, same eyes, same blond hair. He’s a lot dirtier in 1492, but you can see the resemblance.”

Silence.

“The man unloading barrels from the Santa Maria on Christmas day in 1492 is John Spillers—the same man who, in 1950, serves as the FBI station chief of San Juan Puerto Rico. I realize this is an extraordinary claim that goes against the normal constraints of human biology. But I wouldn’t make it if I didn’t have the data to back it up.”

“We’re going to take a close look at Mr. Spillers as we make our way through the next few points of this polyhedron. A forewarning though. Most of the things you’re about to see are difficult to watch.”