It was one of the quiet summer days after a busy year. The woman, who had already used her annual leave, was now sitting in the office, sipping her fourth coffee of the day, while everyone was sharing sea and beach photos on social media. Since the customers were generally on holiday, no one was calling. She received an email from her manager, who was on vacation. Their most important customer Goofle have raised a complaint. Accordingly, the smart cameras they installed in the customer's data center had been giving false alarms for a week. Her manager wanted him to handle the error since she was the most senior engineer in the office at the time. According to the SLA, such errors had to be corrected in two days and the time had started to run. She had plans with her boyfriend in the evening and she was afraid that if this took longer, it would be cancelled.
She was working as a senior engineer at a start-up that produced smart cameras that detect people in real time, based on the major developments in image processing technology and computer vision / artificial intelligence algorithms in recent years. They were one of the few companies in the world that were able to develop this technology which detects intruders that could go unnoticed by security officers with zero error and was proven to not give false alarms. Goofle was using it in order to ensure the physical security of data centers, one of the largest information repositories in the world, for thousands of its customers. “When we installed, everything was working perfectly. Their employees definitely tried to interfere with the system and broke it.” she thought while waiting for the error logs to open.
While she was thinking about the source of the incident, she recalled the time when she went to the data center last month to do the installation. When she first walked in, she felt like she was in the future of a science fiction movie; with doors that can be accessed by retina scanning, 3D holographic receptionists, automatic cleaning robots, cameras that see every area inside and outside the building and follow every movement, and server fields covering hundreds of square meters.. There were over four thousand cameras already installed inside and outside the building. Thanks to the software they developed, they made all of them smart by integrating their own systems without changing the cameras. First, she would try to find out which cameras were causing false alarms.
As she reviewed the logs, she saw that when the alarms started, they were coming from cameras both outside and inside in a scattered manner. In the last two days, she found that it was concentrated outside in the northeast corner and inside around a certain server block.
While she continued to investigation, it was getting late and if she didn't leave immediately, he would be late to meet with his boyfriend. Moreover, they were going to the last performance of Wagner's opera Dawn of the Gods, which had never been staged in their city before. She thought that if they were late, she would never have the opportunity to watch this opera again. In terms of information security, the data flow between the customer and its servers was encrypted. He asked the customer to send the recordings of the camera and a few days of his choice to make sure that there was no problem caused by encryption during transmission. She was going to look at the images in the morning and solve the situation immediately.
When she came to the office the next morning, she was happy to see that the customer had sent the images. When she started watching, she thought, "They must have sent the wrong camera footages!". She was relieved, because there were no people in the areas framed in the images. There were no human limbs or photographs, not even shadows! It was very strange. She checked whether the messages were sent on the correct day and camera, and they were. The system codes were also identical to the original codes, which had been tested hundreds of times before and were used by other companies. She called the customer's technical team and asked them to confirm the accuracy of the camera recordings they sent and whether there was any work or unauthorized intervention that could cause changes in the alarm areas. Because, as far as she saw, the error was not caused by the smart camera system. The customer insisted that there was no change or breach in their system and that they had been checking this for a week. Finally, she said, “Since we can't detect the problem like this, I need to come there and do an onsite check. "I'll be there in a few hours." She sent an email to his manager informing him of the situation and headed to Goofle's data center.
When she got there, she toured the area where alarm cameras were concentrated; she learned that Sfotify servers were located here. There has been no change since the installation. She measured the light and heat levels, and everything was within normal limits. She made checks on the equipment; she looked at the camera lenses, the dust, the steam, everything; It was okay! When evening came and the shift ended, she still couldn't solve the problem. “I have to stay here and work tonight.” she said to the employee in charge of the night shift. “According to our SLA, I have to solve this problem by tomorrow. In addition, false alarms were always received after working hours, perhaps a change in the evenings caused this. “If so, I can only stay here and determine.” she added. Speaking to his manager, the employee said that she was given permission to work at night; He said if he needed anything he would be in the office on the other block. The engineer set to work, hopeful that he could solve the problem this time.
The hours when smart cameras reported seeing people were mostly from midnight to four in the morning. Between these hours, employees working in the operations center were also in the other office. When they received notifications in their e-mail boxes, they were connected to the live cameras and could not see anyone. The engineer was working in the office directly overlooking the relevant server block. She was quite tired this evening after yesterday's opera, and she fell asleep in front of the computer while waiting for midnight to arrive while checking to see if there was an error in the algorithm that she missed.
She woke up from his sleep in this uncomfortable position to the C sharp minor fugue of Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier. While she was thinking "What is this? Is Bach playing in my dream?" and looking around to understand what was going on, she realized that the music was coming from the servers, not his head. When she looked at the area where the Sfotify servers were located, at first glance she thought her vision was blurry because she was myopic, but when she put on his glasses, she surprised more because the blurriness did not disappear. She immediately took her phone and zoomed in on the image with her camera. There was no blur on the phone camera and everything was very clear. For security reasons, she couldn't enter the server area without an officer, but she forgot about it out of excitement and started to go towards where the sound came from.
The entrance to the area was open, which she realized how strange it was when he thought about it later. As he moved towards the area where the blur and music came from, the biggest question on her mind was whether this was really Bach. It sounded very similar, but was she sure? As she got closer to the blur, she made out some silhouettes and stopped in her tracks in fear. This time the music changed and Mozart's symphony number 41, known as "Jupiter", started playing. “Am I seeing things wrong because of lack of sleep, am I still dreaming?” Thoughts like these were running through her mind. On the other hand, "Did they see me?" She started to worry. In fact, if "they" were a "thing", they must have seen her because she had walked openly from the beginning of the corridor to there. But right now it seemed better to assume that they didn't see it because they didn't interact with it.
While she was thinking about these, her phone rang, it was her boyfriend. He must have been worried. The phone ring was the opening melody of Beethoven's "Pastoral Symphony" No. 6. Because she was afraid of being caught, she immediately muted the phone, but it was too late; The music suddenly stopped. She realized that the silhouettes had noticed her. While she was stiff with tension, thinking about what would happen next, Beethoven's famous brotherhood-themed "9. The chorus part of his "symphony" started to play. The whole movement played, while the silhouettes remained where they were, nothing to be afraid of had happened. In fact, it seemed to the woman that an atmosphere of brotherhood filled the room.
When the music ended, a tense wait began again. Although she didn't know what to do, she felt like she had to give an answer. She opened the Sfotify application on her phone and pressed the play button. The song she is listening to these days because she is trying to play it on the piano; Rachmaninoff's prelude to Opus 3, "Elégie" began to play. While this piece, which is musically very tense and means "lamentation", was playing, it seemed to the woman that the atmosphere in the room had become a little tense and heavy. When “Elégie” was over, it was the silhouettes' turn. They also played Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2, known as the "Funeral March". The woman was shocked, or did they understand the music and choose it consciously?
She decided to test her theory some more. She played songs from every style and era, from medieval songs to musicals, from Miles Davis to Madonna, from Iron Maiden to Eminem, and she saw that they always responded with music that conveyed the same feeling. It was as if they were talking to each other. After going on like this for a while, they started responding with music she didn't know. "I'll see what pieces they are later." she thought, and started recording them on her phone. Some of them were similar to Bach's works, as she heard when she woke up. Some of them were atonal, some rock, some Latin, some electronic, some acoustic music, but she couldn't put them into a certain genre. It was impossible to describe the emotions that arose in her while listening to them.
At that time, she had no idea what they meant, she was just listening. Happiness, peace, melancholy, love, friendship, joy of life, longing, inspiration, a greatness and satisfaction as if she could understand the whole world and the universe, a rest as if he was in the deepest sleep. A state in which all contradictory and yet consistent feelings can be found. It was as if there was everything that man had discovered and had not discovered in this music.
So what were the "silhouettes", who were they, what did they want, why were they here, why were they listening to music and why were they communicating with him through music? Even though these questions were swirling in her mind, she couldn't stop and think at that moment.
Perhaps, she would never know for sure, but the "silhouettes" were a Jupiterian research team from space. They had advanced a lot in the field of science and technology on their planet, and it had become very difficult to develop new technologies. For this reason, they were one of the research teams provided with resources to research other technologies in space and bring them to their planet. The reason why humans have not been able to detect these creatures on Jupiter in exploration studies so far is that they do not have an opaque physical form and are not visible in the wavelengths of camera technologies used by humans. When looked at with the naked eye, as the engineer did, their presence could be noticed and their silhouettes could be seen, albeit slightly. Their invisibility ensured that they would not be caught by motion detection devices when entering the building. They were able to pass through locked doors without leaving a trace, thanks to encryption technologies that were far superior to those of humans. Among the thousands of servers and unlimited information in Goofle's data center, music attracted their attention the most. Even though they had advanced in technology on their own planet, art was not as developed as on Earth. In fact, they never even had such a thing as “music”. Sfotify servers, where most of the world's known music is stored, became an invaluable mine for them. She didn't think the aliens he saw had ears as we know them, but they seemed to be affected by the vibration of sound waves in their abstract forms: they had found the innovation to be taken back to their planet.
There was one more question to answer: why did the “silhouettes” cause false alarms in smart human detection cameras, even though they were not visible on the cameras? Although this was a mystery that human technology could not yet solve, the most plausible solution was that it was a result of the Generative Adversarial Network technology they added to the artificial neural network. Accordingly, the artificial neural network could produce similar results that were not given to it by learning from a data set given to it. In this case, he guessed that the GAN added the possibilities of human-like creatures, which it created by learning from the human data set, to the data set and triggered an alarm by placing "silhouettes" in this human-like class.
After spending some time in the server area, she saw the Goofle guy coming. He suddenly realized that the music had stopped and the "silhouettes" were no longer there. The officer asked him how she got in and what he was doing there. The engineer mumbled some reasons, partly out of surprise and partly out of tiredness. Since the officer did not want to bother too much at night, he said, "Let's see you off, anyway." "We will have a shift change soon." he said and sent the woman off.
She fell asleep as soon as he got home. When she woke up, she saw the missed calls on her phone. Since its voice was muted, she did not hear his boyfriend calling at night and her manager calling in the morning. She called and told him that he was fine, that she had to work last night, and that she couldn't believe what happened. She also told his manager that she worked all night last night and that they would not receive false alarms again.
Then, she got excited, remembering the music she saved on his phone last night. She started listening to them, searched the internet for what sounded familiar, but couldn't find it. As she tried to play it on his piano and analyzed its harmonies, she began to understand what they were. The more she understood, the more amazed she became, and the more amazed, the more she understood. “Silhouettes” had learned all the known music of human history and created a brand new music by optimizing all of them. She was very curious about how other people would react when they heard this.
Thanks to the algorithm of the silhouettes, if she guessed correctly, she had discovered the universal music that had been the subject of discussion for centuries and could appeal to all people in all geographies until now. When she showed the samples she had to a few of her close friends and lovers, she received reactions that confirmed her predictions. In fact, everyone listening felt the same incredible emotions as she did. It was as if this music brought out the best in people. She couldn't convince anyone that she got it from aliens; At best they would think she was crazy. For this reason, she would explore the algorithm by better examining the harmony and form of this music, so that she could produce new pieces.
Months later, when she completed her work and presented the new music to the whole world, this discovery was not only a great success and source of pride for her, but the emotions it created on the listeners were so effective that everyone had the hope that humanity could get better. Even though she could never be sure, she found peace thinking that with this contribution of "silhouettes" to humanity, the first step of a universal interaction was taken and that the Earth shared the same music with distant stars ...
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