“Usually both.” Andrzej’s uttered his first words for some time. He also spoke directly to Lori. “All you need to know to be a good dictator is how to make the sheep look at you and not up at the light.”
Translucent Morley gestured with his arm outstretched towards the Simon who sat immobilized before them. “He had this knack for picking the path no one else could see in the forest. We all just trusted him, but he knew he would be gone, and he wanted to leave us with the puzzle. It was way too deep for my simple mind, so I’ve been enjoying life as a happy beast of burden, waiting patiently for my final act.” He reached out to put his hand on Danni’s arm, which lay on the table next to him. “Danni thinks she has the puzzle business spinning towards a conclusion, and she feels the pressure of time more than I. She doesn’t want to wait around for a final solution. It’s her choice. She chose to live in a more bloodless world, and now she is preparing to evaporate like a cloud.”
Morley gestured once again towards the frozen last breakfast tableau. “That’s one other thing we all seemed to have in common: wanting to die on our own terms. As for me, Lori, once you have joined Andrzej at the wheel of this ship, I’ll find the perfect way to join back up with Norris and Simon and the others.”
Time flickered between the flat calm waters of the Indian Ocean and the rippled bay on the Sea of Cortez. “When I do, I will be dragging the sorry ass of Donald J. Murcheson across the Rubicon with me. The little fuck was only 26 years old when he blew up Delani Beach, not much older than Andrzej at the time. He doesn’t know that people like me even exist. But I’ll be sure he understands who I am as I kill him.”
The menacing certainty of the words blended with Lori’s recent memory of being Norris in the dim pool and the look of sudden comprehension on Rudolph Murcheson’s face.
“And on that jolly note we might want to get back to Lori’s lesson.” Andrzej was beginning to worry about the effect of Morley’s dark rant on Lori.
Translucent Morley brought his sneer back to a friendly grin with unnerving ease. “Pay no attention to me love. We all have our little hobbies you know.” With that Morley punched his dash and …..
Last Breakfast
….. Breakfast resumed at the Delani Beach Hotel, just as Danni of the histogram walked up the steps from the beach.
A trim 59, dressed for travel in a jumpsuit much like Theresa’s, she glided into the kitchen and soon emerged with a mango and mug of coffee, dropping into the chair next to Morley with her back to the ocean, the bright glare behind her gauzing the finer details of her face.
They were scheduled to lift out in two hours, and Simon had a few last things on his check list. “Are you done with the command tent, Danni? Can we break it down? Most of that stuff is pretty old and not worth dragging along.”
“It’s all ready. The only thing I’m taking are Norris’s old binoculars. They are packed in my bags.”
Everyone was eating and sipping their coffees with an uneasy silence hanging over the table. The last breakfast in Shangri La, hidden and mostly protected from the world. It had been their collective home, command post, and workplace for over 25 years.
They all knew it had to end. Simon’s people from the front offices of Skramble and Hyde were warning them about a dangerous coalition of the taxed and the tithed, formed just over the past year but growing in its nerve and impudence. The enormous Comm companies, religious organizations of every shape and size, the young start-up crypto-states, invisible high net worth individuals: They all resented the cash-flow transparency Serendipity inflicted on them. They hated her omnipresence in their data stores. They hated the taxes she calculated for the nation states and the United Nations. And they hated the firm of Skramble and Hyde that held the contract to operate her.
The word to Simon was that they were no longer safe at the Delani and that their processing bunker in Salt Lake was soon to be attacked in some way, maybe even physically.
Simon grasped the evolutionary logic of this federation and sensed the growing menace. He had told Danni that it felt inevitable as they studied and played with the situation in Serendipity’s plex. In the models the tropistic reaction—the reach towards power—unfolded so clearly within her interface that Simon couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it coming earlier.
Danni, scurrying across the silky threads that caught and held the data debris in the plex, reminded him that Serendipity was a spider’s web. She was an extension of the collective phenotype. She needed to be monitored constantly for foreign vibrations.
They watched the taxed, writhing in the sticky mesh, simmer in their resentment. A growing mood of entitlement, seeded from somewhere, emerged in different spots, blossomed, and ripened into a sickening goo. Danni could sense how it dampened the web harmonics.
Simon had acted to protect their core.
A new Serendipity processing facility was built and hidden, buried within an obscure world heritage site: a salt mine in southern Poland.
A mysterious new U.N. history preservation entity was created, the World History Institute, and Skramble and Hyde was charged with operating the newer smaller quantum environment.
A new command post was terraformed into a hillside overlooking a forgotten bay on the east side of the Baja peninsula, not far from the no-man’s-land around a nuclear waste storage site. Donkeys grazed on a sparse slope of brown rubble and cactus that led down to an abandoned beach.
Now it was time for them to move. Simon had asked Danni to arrange for a distraction—some small crisis to divert the attention of their newly emboldened enemies. Two hours from this moment on the deck at the Delani Hotel, a simple piece of math, buried in the error-checking systems of both the major exchanges, would begin to rapidly depress the offered value of 63 selected stocks. Chaos would ensue. It would take all day or maybe two for the damage to be undone and the auto-triggered trades to be rescinded.
Danni named the little algorithm Travel, a “timed reduction-of-value loop.” Simon thought of it as an art prank. Morley called it the asshole tax.
One way or the other it would keep the world occupied while they decamped to their new spaces. There was one last thing on Simon’s list.
“Since we have a quorum here for our last meal on this gorgeous ocean, I want to call a meeting of the Board of Skramble and Hyde. I want to propose a change to our mission statement.” Everyone except Danni looked at him with varying degrees of surprise and curiosity.
“I think you all get that our change of venues won’t go unnoticed for long. We have had a great run here, and we’ve had a chance to help the world evolve towards a more sustainable socio-economic model, but the pendulum is starting to swing back the other way now.”
Mostly they had all tried to ignore politics and the world in general for over two decades, but they knew Simon had never lost his fascination for socio-dynamics.
“The first world is chafing again at the embedded carrying costs of the second world, and they are bound to blame some messenger. In this case, the messenger is the tax collector. In many eyes, we are the embodiment of the tax system. We are the unwanted middlemen who have been granted the power to force the unreasonable transfer of their wealth to a U.N., which redistributes it based on naive social formulas rather than individual merit. The ‘we’ they blame is the infamous Serendipity and by extension Skramble and Hyde.”
Watching, Lori began to appreciate how Simon must have seen the world communities back then, social tectonic plates pushing semi-blindly against one another. She looked to the translucent Danni on her left and saw tears halfway to the hollows of her cheeks, poised on cheek bones, ready to break beyond the moment of pause. Andrzej sat still, focused on Simon, and Lori understood that he had never actually witnessed this moment in time before. He must have been waiting for them either at the Office in the salt mine or the Cabin he had just finished building over the Sea of Cortez.
Simo
n continued. “So, the truth is that our change of locations isn’t enough. To survive we need to adjust our mission, our prime directive. To be blunt, we need to remove ourselves entirely from the political fray to avoid being crushed. We need to become rapidly irrelevant so that no one wants to bother trying to kill us.”
Setting his mug down loudly on the table, the grizzled Morley offered his support. “Thank you, Jesus. I was hoping you might have a plan for how we don’t get killed.”
“Well, it may be an exaggeration to call it a plan, but it seems to me that the one division of Skramble and Hyde that remains both under-developed and relatively non-threatening to anyone is the World History Institute.” A grin was hiding just beneath Simon’s serious veneer. “And I asked myself, who among us could come up with an interesting mission for the WHI? Some quest that would keep us amused for a good long time but also keep us far away from the limelight. A puzzle if you will, one that no one else would think of, much less try to solve.”
Every face at the breakfast table immediately turned towards Danni, making her blush invisibly beneath her chocolate skin.
“So of course, I asked Danni, the love of my life and tireless mapper of patterns that seem to obtain out of thin air for her alone.” Simon was standing now, and he beamed down at Danni who smiled back at him. “As you might expect it turned out to be a case of, ‘be careful what you ask for’, and I am going to let Danni explain the puzzle she came up with.” Looking particularly down at Morley, he said, “Fair warning, Morley; it’s going to make your head hurt.” Then back to the table in general, “But I am dead serious about adopting it as the mission statement for our innocuous little shell company, the World History Institute, our new home.”
With that Simon pulled out his chair and sat back down, joining the group stare at Danni. As an afterthought, and mostly to himself, he added, “If we are going to retreat from the first world, we might as well go hide in the future rather than the past.”
After a few moments of dead air, Theresa broke the pregnant pause. “Excellent. Draw it right out for us, Danni. Anything is better than what we have been reduced to lately. Trying to stay ahead of the relentless attacks on Serendipity has become beyond boring.”
Julia added, “I agree. Our work is done here. Let’s see if the secondWorld has learned how to take care of itself for a while. We’ve earned a nice retirement.”
Danni had been prepared for Simon’s preamble, and she made them wait as she finished her mango and drank her coffee. When she finally put her cup down, she launched straight into her long-considered proposition. As she talked, Lori sensed that this younger version of her dying mentor already organized her thoughts with the familiar balance of descriptive precision and conceptual leaps. Morley called it “Danni’s jazz.”
Shipwrecked Genes
“Well, the first thing I needed to deal with was the vagueness of the term ‘world history,’ as in the name ‘World History Institute.’ Where does world history start really?” Danni looked at them like a teacher prodding a group of consistently disappointing students.
Nothing. Pause.
With a stage sigh, “OK, let’s review the problem.”
“Recorded history might go a few thousand years back. Starting with proto apes would mean a couple million years. From the first existence of mammals, let’s say 100 million? The first emergence of multi-cell organisms might mean beginning from 3 billion years ago. Or the formation of the solar system, 5 billion. If we go all the way back to the big bang, there’s probably 13 billion years of world history. You have to start somewhere.”
Danni had her impish smile on now and Lori could tell she was toying with them, especially Morley who was trying to decide if it was too soon to inject a sarcastic comment.
Danni beat him to the punch. “But after a few hours of considering Serendipity’s entire plex from a variety of perspectives and after letting her weigh the relative value of millions of scientific speculations about the cosmological past, I decided we should be using the timeframe of human consciousness. Does that seem logical to you, Morley?”
He was ready, not wanting to be called out as the dullard who hadn’t done his homework. “Depends on what you mean by consciousness, my dear, and how would we know when it started?”
The sun had risen high enough to be fully blocked by the deck’s awning roof, and Morley’s smile of delight was glare free. Lori caught herself watching the translucent Morley sitting next to her as he carefully inspected his younger histogram-self at the breakfast table.
Before them Danni stood, lifting up on her toes to lean her butt against the top of the deck rail. The sleeves of her jumpsuit were rolled up tightly to her deltoids, and the close curls of her hair, set against the backlit canvass of the awning, created a corona around her face. “Good question. Somehow, at some point, during the grindingly slow evolution of human-based neural activity, consciousness emerged.”
“Serendipity can’t see the exact point in time but, having digested almost all of the extant cosmological, geological, and anthropological knowledge of pre-history, she can see the before and after states, so we can come close enough. The clearest expression of the emergence or transmutation to consciousness, really the only one we can get our hands on, is the sudden non-linear movement of Serendipity’s super-number.”
Danni’s face flickered a look of hard-won satisfaction. Simon was the only one who caught it. “It turns out that, when the formula is properly expressed, it does change after all.”
“Are you saying you buggered up your super math formula, my dear?” Morley was delighted that Danni had made a mistake.
“Yup. One small variable, but a big effect.”
“How did you discover the mistake, Danni?” Theresa leaned forward in her chair.
“I didn’t. Serendipity found it and asked me if she should correct it.”
That left the breakfast group silent, all thinking their own thoughts.
“So, when did human consciousness start, Danni?” Simon’s casual acceptance of Serendipity’s self-correction, and that Danni must have answered this eternal question, seemed like the perfect gesture of love to Lori.
“700,000 years ago, give or take a bit, so that at least gives us a starting point for our World History Institute.” Danni looked to her class to make sure they were all comfortable with this piece of the puzzle.
Theresa was not quite there yet. “What happens with Serendipity’s super-number to make you light on 700,000 years back?”
Resuming teacher mode, Danni rewarded her best student with bonded enthusiasm. “It is an amazing thing to see, Theresa. She grinds along on the grist of mankind’s cumulative geo-cosmological speculation for literally billions of years, with the number doubling about every 500,000,000. Then, suddenly, at about 750,000 years ago, the rate of change begins to bend up.” Danni was hunched forward from the railing, speaking in the hushed tone of a story teller around a camp fire. But now she straightened up and her manner changed back to the polymath seer of visions. She had the proof she required to move forward. “And starting about 400,000 years ago the number begins growing dynamically.” Danni traced a ski jump curve with her right hand on the blue chalkboard of sky. “I won’t bore you with how many point plots she built and analyzed, but it is safe to say we humans hit full exponential increase in consciousness somewhere around 3,000 years back.”
Taking her device out she walked towards the bar area and lit the streaming screen over the bar. She had moved to within ten feet of where the four of them sat watching, and Lori worried that the holo-Danni would somehow sense their presence. But she was oblivious and pointed to the plot that now glowed on the screen.
“This one has only three points, but it’s perfectly emblematic of where we now find ourselves in the course of ‘World History’: 44 BC, the year Julius Caesar died, 1789, the start of the French Revolution, and 2025, a year t
hat marked the beginning of the end of originalist capitalism.”
Turning back to face the breakfasters and the ocean, Danni concluded, “Sociologically, the rate of change over the last 3,000 or 4,000 years has been akin to the speed of light. Maybe that breakneck pace was the problem. Maybe it exposed us to mutating forces that can corrupt neural activity. It’s possible that there is some natural timer that limits the dominance of any species. Who knows? At least we should have plenty to think about at our new cabin by the sea.”
As the five at breakfast stared blankly at Danni and the tensioned curve on the screen behind her, Simon added, “That last year on the curve, 2025, marks one other important point for us grubby, greedy humans. That was around the year we started mucking with our own DNA.”
Danni let that tangential nugget sink in just the right amount before delivering the morning’s punchline. “I was just getting my head around the meaning of this acceleration of consciousness when Serendipity signaled that she wasn’t done.” She made her eyes wide to cast a dramatic pause over the table. “Without my asking, Serendipity displayed the variable section of the super-number formula. She waited a moment for me to focus and then she tweaked one other key variable by a tiny amount. Right before my eyes. Again, all on her own.”
Looking back up at the screen Danni’s face was turned away from the breakfasters, but Lori could watch it clearly—a mix of maternal pride and amazement.
“Without prompting from me, she drew back to a new focus point and projected this plot on her plex. It starts 700,000 human-years back and terminates right now.”
Lori craned her neck to study the screen. The plotted climb of the number began with the same slowly growing trajectory. It still seemed to hit an inflection point, now around 5,000 years back. But then, at around 1900 A.D., the curve clearly began to rapidly flatten.
“Then Serendipity did one last thing.” The whites of Danni’s eyes seemed to glow. “She applied a compression to the time scale to better illustrate the dynamics of the recent acceleration of the super number. Look.”
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