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SAGE Anomaly Chapter One

The HODL Frame of North Bay Canada

Fictional NFT Story

The HODL Frame of North Bay Canada
The HODL Frame of North Bay Canada NFT SuperRare Bård Ionson

He was frantic trying to find his grandfather. Holding a box of computer junk he was crying and begging for my help. What could I do, I am an AI scientist?

Layout of North Bay Canada SAGE Computer
Layout of North Bay Canada SAGE Computer

What is your name? James he said. Well I am Lynn and based on your box of junk here maybe I can help you. I have been searching for artifacts that you have there. Eyeing the big spool of 35 mm film in the box I was certainly curious.

Based on my study and research into the history of SAGE he thought I might have an idea of what happened the night of January 15th 1964. The box contained large box of manuals, rolls of film, computer tape reels and punch tape rolls.

North Bay Canada South Portal
North Bay Canada South Portal

The south portal

SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) is a computer network that consisted of 56 IBM AN/FSQ-7/8 computers scattered across the United States and Canada. There were about 24 Direction Centers with two computers each. If one failed they would switch to the secondary computer. One of these centers was 600 feet underground in North Bay Ontario.

Locations of the SAGE Computers
Locations of the SAGE Computers

Locations of SAGE computers 

His story was pieced from multiple conversations with his grandpa as he drifted into alzheimer’s. 

“Damn it, Why is tape T in the system again? Get those girly pictures off the screens”, he would yell in the middle of the night, James said. He always started out that way. “Put the P tape back in. Why is the A side and B side both active? The system is overloaded.”

“James”, I said, “Tape T was the test tape. It was used to run simulations of Russian bomber attacks, although there were test patterns on it also.”

James finally told me of what he had pieced together. On January 15 1964 he thought his grandfather had said there was a was a major anomaly. He said there was random drawings on the command center screen. They kept changing becoming more advanced. And he said that he remembered because the night was cold at -35 c and he was able to park in the tunnel that night.

“Shut it down now, remember in `59 when static on the modem line almost launched a CIM-10. Route the modems to New York until this interference stops.”, he said once.

Nike Missile Launch
Nike Missile Launch

“Sometimes he would say the anomaly was caused by a programmer who liked to draw pictures on the screens. He thought someone had loaded the computer with images drawn using the light guns. But there are reports in this box that say it was looked into and all they ever found was a single image of a pin-up girl.”, James said.

Woman On Oscilloscope created for test purposes
Woman On Oscilloscope created for test purposes

 Picture from The Atlantic 

“What did he say happened on the screens?”, I asked. 

“All he ever said was that it began with random static and progressed to something like a language.”, James said. “Could it be the computer learning on its own? Like artificial intelligence? But now that I think about it, he mentioned the possibility of Russians jamming the signals.”

Character Matrix Illustration SAGE
Character Matrix Illustration SAGE

A Page from the SAGE Theory of Programming manual

Alien Intelligence
Alien Intelligence NFT SuperRare Bård Ionson

“Let me look through this material James, I am not sure the Russians would jam radar signals in order to cause symbols on the screens.”, I said. As he left James said, “O yes this is weird but once he said something about another purpose for the SAGE system. My grandfather said something about using the radar systems to watch outer space.”

Hieroglyphics Of The Future
Hieroglyphics Of The Future NFT
Projection Recorder Reproducer System showing film running through an instant processing system for display on a large screen
Projection Recorder Reproducer System

The Projection System

Projection System Photo
Projection System Photo

The film reel of images that were displayed on the large command center screen were deteriorated along with the magnetic and paper tape. But there were fragments that could be pieced together. Most of the film was the standard images of the coastline with aircraft markers moving in each advancing frame. 

SAGE Console with gun to select aircraft on screen
SAGE Console with gun to select aircraft on screen

The projection system could take a picture of a CRT and process the image every 30 seconds and then display it on the command center screen.

SAGE Console with movie camera attached
SAGE Console with movie camera attached

Another source of film came from the Situation Display Camera Console. Which is a normal SAGE display console with a self advancing film camera strapped to it.

But there were a few interesting fragments in the film strips. Pictures of symbols that looked almost modern.

Video of Simulated Bombers coming in
Video of Simulated bombers coming in

Using the machine learning processes DCGAN and pix2pix I was able to recreate the missing parts of the frames and some of the missing frames. As you can see from the NFTs published by Bård above called “The HODL Frame of North Bay Canada” and “Alien Intelligence” and “Hieroglyphics Of The Future” which have been enlarged.

The image below shows the original resolution of the AI processing and seems to be some sort of communication signal from and entity of some sort.

Cosmic Neural Network
Cosmic Neural Network Bård Ionson SuperRare

The images make me really question what they saw that night. The images allay an advanced intelligence that in 1964 would not be understood. There is a message here that could only be understood today. The symbols predict the future. The future that is now.

Read the next chapter The Hypothesis

See the next art piece at Async.art which is 303 editions of the story told with layered art.

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