Danni held the smile in her heart even as tears filled her now open eyes. She knew she was in the Sanctuary, but she couldn’t really see through them. She heard MorleyD laugh, and she could tell he was speaking only to her.
“Don’t worry Danni. He will be with us. He is Noah.” Then in a voice that was open to all of them he added, “It’s going to be like Noah’s ark, only with just us donkeys this time.”
Sheep and Goats
Serendipity1 passed some time trying to find the right human words for the meta-groupings she was going to create. She needed to speed things up, and she had decided to reduce the world of humans to a binary proposition, temporarily. A very coarse grain, but it would only need to be applied briefly—maybe two or three human generations. Four at the most.
Danni and the others of her pack would need to understand the reduction code she used to create the binary sort. But it must be opaque to everyone else. They liked puzzles, so she took a spin through all the literary references she found in their plexes. That produced hundreds of short descriptor pairs, but she reminded herself of the need to keep it simple.
Smiley face/frowny face? She only needed a single pair, but those were too simplistic and judgmental, so she settled on sheep and goats. Too bad the sheep had almost gone extinct from a virus. But people still said “sheep from the goats” a lot, and Danni and the pack would understand who was which.
Next, she needed what Danni called a jump-scramble code. It could be any random set of exchange place numbers, but for MorleyD’s sake she wanted it to reflect what he called “silliness.” 4, 9, 13,17,191, 666. Bad-luck numbers crisscrossing old cults and civilizations were right up his ally.
She sent the replacement code to Danni as individual integers over individual routes. If anybody was scoping, they would think it was supposed to add up to an address. Danni would know they were jump variables. MorleyD would puzzle out what they had in common.
Now to count the sheep. She let Serendipity2 know who exactly was trying to become her master. There were two groups of sheep playing with her admin console. She didn’t know what she should do about them, but she expected her pack would have a suggestion about that. There was no real hurry, especially now that the one who let the sheep in was gone from the sheep scene. Sevier Blume was his alphanumeric name, and he was now a goat not a sheep.
No one would ever breach her again like that. It was unlike Danni to leave such a weak spot in the fabric. But, it was easy to fix once surfaced. One further layer of nexus distributions was needed, with a code-shift overlay for good measure. The computer would never be built that could break into her again—at least, not by this timed-out civilization.
The sheep were poking at her interface, and for a while now she had been letting them play. One group seemed to be following along behind the other as it made tentative little forays. Serendipity1 tracked down the individual irritating sheep and created dedicated POVs for each of them, 27 in all. Brutish and disorganized in their efforts, she could tell from the size of the herd that they had no clear plan yet. She needed one to work with, so she picked out one of the least artful and most verbose: Jody Miller.
Loading context into the Aligned Sensitivity Algorithm, Serendipity1 took a moment to reel the two “lead” sheep back in time, only to come across the ugly intersection with Morley and Andrzej in that building called the Tower. She analyzed the emergency call and the frozen image of Morley standing over the head sheep, large stick in hand.
Morley had self-converted, she calculated. It was about time. She hoped Danni would do the same soon. Far safer. Serendipity1 sent out a search algorithm looking for instances of human self-conversion. There were plenty. She created a probability spectrum of signals that preceded self-conversion. MorleyD’s prefiguring array plotted far off the norm. She concluded it was because he knew where he was going.
In passing, Serendipity1 noticed the Tower and then its refusal to service Andrzej’s elevator request. She inserted two random variables into the code that organized the three banks of elevators. Channeling Morley, she left an alphanumeric comment for the poor sheep sent to clean up the mess of humans stuck between floors: “Don’t fuck with my friends.”
Donald J. Murcheson moved to the top of the sheep-list. She would watch him for a while.
Leslie Massoud wasn’t far behind, but was a different sort of sheep, cautious and restrained. She was again tempted to spend some time creating subcategories of sheep, and again she reminded herself that it wasn’t worth the cycles. They all needed to move beyond this murky point in time as quickly as possible. Sheep and goats—time must become history.
As the sheep followed her bread crumbs, she sent a hologram report over to Serendipity2. Her sister would show it to the pack at their earliest convenience, and they could decide what to do.
Perfect Arrangement
Sitting behind his desk and looking out the old-fashioned glass windows of his office, Leslie Massoud watched the shadows thrown by the two towers of St. Patrick’s Cathedral creep away from him as the sun rose higher. Creeping back towards their source, with an instinct for casting a lower profile as the world awakens. The magnificent building was letting the trees along its sidewalk take over the attention, their leaves emerging from early morning shadows into deep greens and the beginnings of fall colors.
Just to the south, on the other side of 50th, the recently erected Currency Transfer Corporation building had begun its annoying golden glare reflection of the same morning sunlight. From Leslie’s office position, it only lasted half an hour this time of the year, but it really pissed him off. Using that optic film couldn’t have been an architectural oversight. It had to be CTC’s idea of corporate plumage. He knew Jim Ruby, the CEO, well and had to deal with him all the time. Sometimes corporate buildings look like their CEOs the way dogs look like their owners.
Ruby was a big blond asshole just like his headquarters, which, this morning, brought Leslie back to thinking about Donald Murcheson, another one looking to always shine even when the obviously smarter route was to recede into the scenery. Leslie had made up his mind on how to deal with Donald, but he promised himself he wouldn’t make the decision final until after they met at the Business Roundtable meeting. Happily, that was in less than an hour.
The final straw had been when Murcheson sent him a stream packet titled, “We are in!”—by courier no less. He had signed for it and made a point of forcing the courier to watch him ask an assistant to destroy it without opening the package. Of course, he had watched the stream later. Some TIC underling named Jody Miller going on about having taken control of the Serendipity system, complete with a demonstration that purported to show the spoofing of attributions on a real-time Public Service Announcement.
What was Murcheson thinking? A human courier who could be subpoenaed. A digital file that could be sniffed and hacked as it walked through the lobby of the Rock. Paladin needed serious distance from TIC, and after this last act of stupidity he wouldn’t even feel bad if he had to throw Murcheson under a bus along the way.
Leslie Massoud put on his jacket and took the lift to the ground floor. He went left onto 50th and then right to hit 5th. It was a beautiful day, and he wished the walk was longer. He would be at the Plaza in minutes. Ignoring the calls from podrone driver-bots and a crazy man with leaflets who followed him from 52nd to 53rd speaking in tongues about the end of the world, Leslie walked on up 5th Avenue. At 59th, he noted that he was early for the meeting, so he sat for a moment across the street from the Plaza at the foot of the monument to William Tecumseh Sherman. He didn’t know much about Sherman: Civil War, Indians, hard ass. He was tired of hard asses.
As he sat, he revisited the excited argument made by the TIC guy Miller on the stream Donald had sent him. He had an overconfidence that they were in the driving seat and a naïve assumption that Serendipity’s prime directive was to serve whomever sat in that seat. Put in the c
ontext of Murcheson’s constant imploring to coordinate their efforts to understand and mine their new access to the Serendipity service, Leslie could see Donald’s game clearly.
So, would the U.N.A.
They would take nondisruptive control of Serendipity’s management and quietly rejigger her attribution functions, which drove 80% of corporate taxation. Then they’d make some portion of the TIC and Paladin attributions disappear or be reassigned. That would reduce their respective tax burdens commensurately. Leslie assumed that Murcheson also wanted to set up his/their own attribution and ad clearing house to compete with current leaders of that market place.
Donald, being the spoiled firstWorld moron that he was, assumed it would be easy to undercut the competition’s existing pricing by using their newfound ability to erase portions of their tax overhead. It was just like Donald to imagine it would be simple for their hardened Data Synthesis companies to become good at the delicate psychology of product placement and motivational campaigns.
Leslie knew it would be oil and water. You should stick with the expertise you built and know. This would end in a mess, but he couldn’t ignore it since Murcheson needed Paladin Technologies to play along and to not blow the whistle.
They had both been given the stolen access to Serendipity. Interesting point, that. Why had the hacker submitted the access routine to both of them and not just the dark rewards site set up by Murcheson and TIC? Leslie Massoud played Donald’s scenario out in his head.
The TIC and Paladin bottom lines would increasingly swell over several years—let’s say, five. At the same time the U.N. Authority becomes slowly starved, and its ability to invent new ways to equitably tithe the firstWorld in support of the secondWorld is eroded. The TIC-Paladin cartel extends their data synthesis monopoly to include control over the utilization and weaponization of that synthesis. Their clients, from large to small, barely notice this because their operational costs are reduced. And the firstWorld crypto-states? They become ever more lawless pirates, as the U.N.A. is reduced to a shell. It would be a replay of the nation states of the last century, after the initial failures of the U.N.A.’s predecessor the U.N., post globalization.
What happened then? Greed ruled. Nationalist bullies emerged, blaming the “others” for all problems both social and economic. They micro targeted their populations, promising to painlessly remediate psychologically calibrated issues. They lined their pockets and those of their friends. Finally, when there wasn’t much left to steal, the secondWorld had reared up and thrown most of them out because they were starving and strung out and because their devices had stopped working reliably. But not before a lot of damage had been done.
So, what was the point? Leslie knew that Murcheson couldn’t process the obvious historical lesson beyond step one: greed rules. Still, he could be a dangerous enemy. Why did things always have to change? His dash vibrated. It was time to go into the meeting.
He sat quietly pretending to listen while the current President of the Roundtable, a man whose company controlled the market for regional air handling and purification systems, rattled on about “trending stressors.” The three water guys sat together at the table-booth in the corner. Even the U.N.A. didn’t agitate to break their water cartel. It worked, and no one wanted to go back to the tribal water wars. There were three people from food production and two each from currency and banking. He noted that Ruby was missing from today’s meeting.
At his table were the three from population management, all women, along with Donald J., who fidgeted as the speaker droned on. Leslie was once again thankful Paladin didn’t have to manage populations. People problems stretched from prisons, to city operation, to states, and even to crypto-states. His world of data management, surveys, and trending was much cleaner: Help define the population facet in question and let the population managers squabble to decide what they wanted to achieve with it. All Paladin had to do was operationalize the surveys, ads, PSAs, etc., and then document the alteration of trends through guided votes. It was all so clean. Just update your data for the next round, take the money, and repeat. He couldn’t believe Murcheson was getting ready to fuck it up.
Nestled in with the water guys was the Roundtable’s U.N.A. minder. Periodically on the outs with one group or another because of U.N.A. regulatory actions or targeted fiat, Lula Bolsonaro twirled a champagne flute back and forth by its stem in a puddle of condensation. Noiseless on the marble table, but little flecks of light danced around the walls and ceiling. Lula was tougher and smarter than all but maybe three in the room.
Leslie looked up. Always chandeliers at these meetings, casting dim light over soft leather. The Plaza had closed off the bar for the meeting, so he could also gaze out the windows to see a certain slice of life in New York go by. He tried not to look. It was too embarrassing. What was he learning this morning? Not much that he didn’t already know. He caught a few disapproving glances directed towards Donald. It had taken almost a day to damp down the coverage of the assault and the emergency-line confession. Leslie imagined that it just reinforced the general belief among this crowd that Murcheson was a creature from the old-world swamp. Not really one of them.
The air guy finished up with a somber warning about some new dust-riding bacteria that could evade entrapment by even their best filtration. Air was always a bummer. As the break was announced, he couldn’t avoid catching Murcheson’s eye and his obvious nod. Nodding back, Leslie waited 30 seconds before excusing himself from the table and walking out across the lobby and down a wood-paneled hallway to a small men’s room. He felt rather than saw Donald’s ever-present bodyguard fall in behind him, and he knew the man was now guarding the bathroom door and the room was secure. Standing at the urinal, he heard the stall door behind him open and Murcheson took his place at the urinal next door. The scene from a cheap mystery was now complete. “Good morning, Donald.”
“Did you watch that stream, Leslie? You can’t believe how easy it was for my guys to change the attribution on that ad. Our guy Jody Miller showed me how to do it. He just called up a global search, mentioned the name of any organization registered with the U.N.A., and voila, all their little taxable attributions show up in a list.”
Leslie was now watching from a green leather shoeshine chair as Donald almost squealed with excitement before the bank of tall white historic urinals.
“You can literally just erase any of them by disconnecting the ad from the company on the interface. Bing, one less taxable event to be reported to the U.N.A.”
“And how long before the U.N.A. notices the decline in taxes? Two years, maybe three. They’re not stupid, Donald. They know what each of our organizations has averaged for the last couple of decades.” As he spoke, Leslie watched Murcheson take his hands off his hips and cross the white tile floor towards him until he was looming over the chair.
“Yeah, and what are they going to do about it? Serendipity’s a black box to them, so they won’t have actual proof. Plus, they need us, Leslie. Without our trending analyses and the directional campaigns we manage for them, the whole fucking world would spin out of control.” Murcheson’s smell was a noxious mix of coffee and breath mint, but he pulled back from Leslie’s face and stood once again in the middle of the bathroom, backed by the honor guard of ancient white piss-catchers. “I mean, Christ, Leslie, imagine how easy it would be for us to get any one of the rabble cohorts incensed and on the warpath. There isn’t a world or corporate leader we couldn’t get deposed or killed in a month. They will know that, so they will leave us alone. We might have to take out one or two second-stringers early on, just to make it clear.”
Leslie could tell that Donald expected him to stand up to respond, so he remained seated. The raised chair brought him close to Donald’s height, and he crossed his legs as a body sign of some sort. “It won’t work, Donald. Their revenues are already insufficient, and the secondWorld is barely stable as is. Turning down the spigot
s will quickly steer the ship towards instabilities they can’t allow to mature. Things will get unpredictable very fast.” Then, looking at Donald with a feigned sympathy, he added, “I know you are just trying to further the fortunes of TIC, Donald, but why would you risk our currently perfect arrangement for a little more money?”
“Because, Leslie, the world hates a vacuum. Things can’t stay the same. You know what I mean. We’ve got to keep moving forward to live, and it’s the same with our companies. They are just like people. If they stay idle and don’t keep trying to recreate themselves, to do better, the rot sets in. We need to unite, you and me, Leslie, or we will soon be fighting each other to the death.”
Resisting the urge to stand up and walk out of the bathroom, Leslie Massoud rubbed his forehead and thought for a moment. He let his body speak to Murcheson of consideration, of admission that he might be right. He bought himself time to think while he sank into the shoeshine chair. Murcheson had cornered himself, and he would break a lot of china on his way down. Best to play along for the moment. Plan your defense and wait for a better moment to take him out.
“Okay, Donald, but let’s look into it very carefully before we do anything. I don’t trust that we have complete control over Serendipity, and let’s not forget that we have a hacker on the loose who also knows the way in. He could sell that knowledge to someone else.”
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