by Toby Weston
Ben sat and watched the two older men talking. He couldn't work out if the Minister believed all the double speak. It was the thing Keith kept bringing up. Was it all a grand conspiracy, with disciplined actors taking their scripted positions? He didn’t know, even now, sitting across from a guaranteed player next to his billionaire father. He didn't know the answer. Perhaps, one day, his father would let him in on the secret—if there was one.
The coffee arrived; it was of the instant variety, thin and bitter.
“Until the WTO can stop the sham economies dumping their counterfeit merchandise on us, we are going to have to live with increased levels of unemployment,” said the Minister. “We simply cannot let our constituents lose hope, while they are waiting to get back to work. We have to give them something to cling to.”
“Exactly, Minister,” Ben’s father said. A slight shift in posture and tone indicated they were now moving past pleasantries and onto the meat of the meeting. “That’s why we have come today. We would like to show you some new technology that may be able to improve your situation. Ben?”
“Sure, of course,” replied Ben. “At BHJ, we have recently pulled back the curtain on what we think may become one of our most important products. We call it the Sage…”
“Like the herb?” Pritchard asked.
“No,” replied George. “It’s a marketing term, some sort of vague acronym of Synthetic General Intelligence. Silly really, not my idea, but I imagine our marketing department wants our customers to think of wise old men with beards.” He gave a wink.
Ben thanked his father with a nod and continued. “Imagine automated, integrated PR. All statements and opinion backed by reams of research. Supported and re-enforced by well-placed sound bites and scripted statements from both real and constructed personalities. Strategic modelling of populations, incorporating adjustments and optimisation, based upon real time feedback from a significant sample of, um…” Ben hesitated, choosing the right word carefully.
“Citizens?” the Minister offered.
“Yes, of course. Ben, I thought you were going to say voters,” George quipped wryly. It didn’t hurt at this stage to make it clear that they were fully aware of the significance of what was being offered. “How about a demonstration? Ben, if you wouldn’t mind?”
Ben had arranged a Companion on the desk, pairing it with the room’s AV system, and projected a sample ‘This is Life’ episode onto the only wall of the office that wasn’t a glass window.
Ben went into his rehearsed patter. “What we have here is twenty hours of tie-in content per week. Characters chosen from racially adjusted archetypes and interactions engineered to exploit any talking points you provide, although semantic analysis of the top stories from the public domain will be chosen as default, incorporating mood-defining themes.”
They watched the crude, garish cartoon for perhaps thirty seconds, and then the Minister interrupted. “Sorry to be blunt, but it looks like something my kids would have watched… some trash like South Paw or whatever it was called.”
Ben paused the video. “No need to apologise. How old are your children, Dr Pritchard?”
“Oh… wait, err, Julie is thirty-four and Adam is… he must be thirty-seven.”
“Our core demographic for this channel! Of course, we can make it look much better, photorealistic even with virtual actors, but have you heard of the Uncanny Valley?”
The Minister seemed about to say something then shook his head.
Ben continued. “People find the ‘nearly but not quite’ to be a lot less pleasing than obvious parody. That’s why we choose the comic, cartoon theme. Plus, the thirty to forty-year-olds are familiar with the style from the thousands of hours of content they watched growing up.”
“Sorry if I am slow,” said Pritchard. “I have read your brochure and am trying to understand… Your computers come up with twenty hours a week of programming, which you say we can control with a team of virtual spin doctors…?”
“Would you like to meet them?” Ben interrupted.
“Ah, now you see, I thought I had understood. How can I meet them if they are not real?” Pritchard asked, clearly losing track.
Ben offered the Minister a pair of wraparound BHJ branded Spex. Pritchard looked sceptically at the technology before accepting them, with a level of disdain that would have been more appropriate if he was being offered a severed finger freshly pulled from a prison shower’s plughole. When he finally deigned to place them on his face, they remained in place for the briefest moment before a flash of shock registered, and he quickly ripped them off again. He cast his eyes in a panicked glance over the again empty chairs around the meeting table. Ben smiled as the old man placed the Spex gingerly onto his nose once more.
“Amazing, I have never seen anything as real as this,” he said, his voice full of wonder.
For Ben, the table was already crowded with the Sage avatars, generated by BHJ’s automated propaganda server. Where empty chairs were available, the software used images superimposed over the real physical objects with accurate topological juxtapositioning of limbs. As there were more spin doctors than stools, the remaining avatars sat on their own virtual chairs.
The virtual people looked very much like the flesh and blood cluttering the Minister’s real offices along the corridors; inclusive, young, beautiful, and conservative.
“Sally, tell Dr Pritchard about yourself.”
A tall, severe, blonde-haired lady in a loose-fitting grey business suit began to talk. Her voice had a home counties feel to it, but the accent was strange and the rhythm slightly off.
“I am Sally Strong. I have worked for ten years as a writer for BHJ. I am now senior content supervisor for civil order and social outrage.”
“Ask her what she thinks of the hole in the road, Minister.”
“Err… Hello, Sally. Nice to meet you. Did you notice any traffic problems on the way here today?”
“Dr Pritchard,” replied Sally, “I do not know how you can remain so calm knowing there are vandals and saboteurs about, who are ruining the commutes of half this city. They are walking free, while thousands of hard-working citizens are effectively jailed every morning within their own vehicles, as they sit for hours in traffic. We need to take the bull by its horns and tackle this problem! We need more police, and they need the powers necessary to enable them to deal with these terrorists effectively!”
Ben interjected. “Sally, scene sketch please: Reprobate, drug using teen as protagonist. Vandalism of transport infrastructure. MOT: life-lesson and repentance.”
“Sorry… MOT?” the Minister asked.
“Moral of Tale,” the Sally avatar replied before Ben or his father could answer.
She caused the projected scene to change: a fat mother in a run-down kitchen whining to her daughter about something was replaced by a street gang of Asian and black kids throwing stones at traffic lights. The movie that played was a rapid, crudely animated storyboard. At the bottom, an elapsed time readout counted towards twenty minutes, about ten times as fast as the finished episode would. A car, unable to see a vandalised red light, ran across an intersection and smashed into a lady pushing a pram. The baby was thrown out of its crib and was caught by a construction worker, who was in its line of fire. The woman died later in hospital. The baby was adopted by the construction worker, who also found the wayward stone-throwing Asian kid a job and gave him a second chance.
Ben drank his coffee and watched, reluctantly ingesting both forms of evil artificial spew. The Minister was riveted, and when the little epic finished, he actually clapped.
“Fantastic! Really, you hit the nail on the head there, Sally!”
“Thank you, Minister.”
Pritchard, still not quite understanding, made small talk with the avatars for a few minutes. Then he took off the Spex and somewhat reluctantly handed them to Ben’s father.
“No no! Keep them, Minister. Try them and keep Sally for a few days, too. Even if you even
tually decide our services are not right for the Forward Party, we'll be happy to make an admin Sage available to you.”
Ben and his father exchanged a fleeting glance.
Most people considered Spex to be just an enhanced display technology. They could create a movie screen from a blank wall or superimpose objects, or even people, over reality. With elegant programming and understanding of the geometry in your local area, Spex could populate your environment with real avatars of people, either physically remote or fully artificial.
Society had incorporated them into day-to-day life as a new iteration of an old technology—treating Spex as fancy TV sets which were worn on the face—without ever spending the time to inspect the implications.
Newer models, like the fancy ones generously presented to the Minister, were not only for output; they were crammed full of sensors, recording everything from ambient sound to the complex electrical and magnetic fields that crawled across the scalp. EEG and MEG sensors embedded in the frames isolated firing patterns from neurons deep within the brain. Exotic mathematical functions identified active regions and cleaned up cortical firing to the point that speech, or motor control, could be pulled from the neural background noise and used in conversational interfaces to command the Spex.
Spex commands were usually sub-vocalised rather than spoken. Familiar with talking to their HomeHub or TV, people gave little thought to how words were heard and understood by Spex. Manufacturers made no big deal of the technology employed. They were happy to let people misunderstand sub-vocalisation as extreme whispering and let them assume super-sensitive embedded microphones were picking up faint sounds, rather than draw attention to their ceaseless brain scanning.
BHJ's white hat security geeks had warned that, if compromised by malicious actors, the ability to control the images presented to a brain, while simultaneously monitoring its subconscious responses, would give unprecedented access to conscious and subconscious mental content. In one scenario, they outlined how a hacker could locate a region of the victim's brain that was active when thinking about their bank account. If this region also became active while the victim looked at a phone number that contained parts of the account's PIN, the hacker could guess at the complete number. To refine the results, these partial guesses could be modified and presented back to the victim to check for a stronger or weaker response. Over time, massive amounts of information could be mined, without the subject ever guessing they were being interrogated.
The management at BHJ had listened to the security briefing and agreed; this was a shockingly powerful technology that must not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands.
They had, therefore, immediately created a department with sufficient R&D funding to ensure it fell into the right hands.
***
In the ‘Card Game’ version of human evolution, the assumption has always been that the best an oppressive king can achieve is to postpone the reckoning. A robust hand of sages is a prerequisite for an intelligent, creative society, and necessary for the dynasty’s long-term survival. Oppression alienates creativity; drives out the artists. Looking back at their history, the dissidents know it is only a matter of time before base reality re-asserts. Corrupt regimes must crumble to be replaced by open meritocracies—presumably replete with flamboyances of pixies and unicorns.
Lately, this idealistic philosophy has acquired two new problems.
If the entire world is trapped under the same absolute dome of suppression, then there is nobody to out-compete the evil, inefficient rulers and come to the rescue.
Second, one day soon, technology will be ready to replace the troublesome sages and artists with pliant simulacrums; artificial creative power improving the tools of oppression, while keeping the population sedated with an unending stream of synthetic twenty-four-hour media pacification.
Chapter 12 – The Have Nots
Anosh had been sitting at the kitchen table, tinkering with a complicated set of pipes and valves. He heard the appalling scream from beyond the closed doors of Segi’s room. Before he had time to react properly, the door slammed open and Segi exploded out. Anosh barely grabbed him as he dashed towards the stairs. It wasn’t possible to get any sense out of the boy, other than the words ‘Zaki’ and ‘dead’.
Anosh felt his blood turn cold, but he made the boy put on some shoes, then grabbed the shotgun and dashed out of the house, following his son’s frenzied dash.
Anosh’s heart was hammering, fingers white as they gripped the black metal. His limbs demanded oxygen, but he had to consciously make an effort to breathe. They sprinted past neighbours.
“Hey, Anosh! What’s wrong? Do you need help?” shouted Bernd, a welder and metalworker, who was hitching a trailer to his quad bike.
“Get Vikram!” Anosh called back over his shoulder.
Other pedestrians stopped in their tracks, shocked by the tableaux of an eleven-year-old boy pursued by a bearded man clutching a shotgun. Anosh internally acknowledged this must look disturbing, but he ignored them all, hoping that fear of the gun would prevent anybody interfering.
After five minutes of pavement pounding, he realised where they were heading. The black mouth of the underpass was already yawning open ahead. He put on some speed and passed his son.
“No, Dad, on the other side. Go around!” Segi panted.
Anosh had already been forming a picture of the boy surrounded by a circle of lurking Penners in the darkness. He changed direction. Instead of plunging into the tunnel, he vaulted over the railings at the side of the road and ran across the duel carriageway. The underpass was a shortcut below a huge loop of road. A hump, which had once been a manicured and lightly wooded traffic island, was now covered in small fenced allotments. There were angry shouts from a couple of the micro farmers. This was contested territory and persistently plagued by diverse classes of two-legged thieves. The farmers would be armed and not above discharging weapons to protect their precious crops.
Anosh ignored the danger, and everything else around him, crashing through beds of vegetables and trashing the delicate fences that separated the smallholdings. He caught his foot on a wire and fell at full speed into a bamboo trellis, tangling himself up in a mess of raspberry canes and garden wire. When he managed to get up, Segi was only a dozen metres behind. He set off again, leaving the gardens and crossing the opposite circumference of the road. By the time he reached the final barrier, he could already see a small huddle of brown coats. He had twisted his ankle when he fell during the dash and climbed, rather than vaulted, the last metal pedestrian barrier.
Heads were turning as he approached. A few crouching figures stood and stepped away. He chambered a round, sending ahead the distinctive clicking sound as a warning. Eyes followed him from beneath tatty woollen hats. Anosh could see blood on the road. As he limped the last couple of metres, all the Penners stood back, leaving a single seated figure cradling the head of a broken doll. The drone was still hovering, letting out its keening whine from a few metres up.
They had carefully picked the limp boy out of the gutter. Anosh carried him to the trailer of the quad bike and cradled his head, while arranging his limp limbs. Vikram and a couple of other neighbours, including Bernd, the owner of the improvised ambulance, were milling around. The Penners kept a distance, though they seemed entirely innocent. He learnt that one had covered the boy in a coat and pressed rags to his head to stop the bleeding. Anosh would worry about hepatitis or HIV if Zaki ever woke up. The boy was unconscious, but breathing evenly. Vikram had checked him out, arriving pillion on the quad bike only a couple of minutes after Anosh and Siegfried had turned up.
The 200cc engine barked to life, and they headed back to the Docks. Segi walked back in silence with a few other locals, while Bernd, Vikram and Anosh took the quad.
It was chilly and raining. A group of people were waiting when they got back to the building. They were standing outside the door or on the stairs. They seemed uncomfortably impotent, but ready to help.
Ayşe rushed out to grab the child in her arms.
“Careful! We don’t know if anything is broken,” Anosh warned.
They were trying to move him with minimum disturbance. Ayşe took a floppy hand and squeezed it tenderly. The boy stirred.
“Mama?” Zaki asked weakly. His eyes opened slowly and he took in the cluster of intent faces surrounding him. “What…” he started, turning his head slightly, then wincing in palpable agony. “Mama, my head hurts!”
They took him carefully up to his room and made him as comfortable as they could, while they tried to work out a plan of action. The arm was broken. Vikram guessed he also had a fractured skull, fractured pelvis, and broken ribs. They called for an ambulance, but the stressed and abrasive woman on the phone told them, bluntly, it would probably be better if they made their own way to A&E.
Segi stayed with his brother, keeping him talking and gently coaxing him away from sleep. In his battered state, another ride on the quad was out of the question, so they booked a corporate taxi. The black Benz pulled up fifteen minutes later and sent them a notification. Zaki was crying and wincing at every step as they carried him down the stairs. They got to the pavement in time to see the auto pull away. Some remote pilot, obviously not thrilled at the prospect of cleaning blood off expensive leather seats.