“What would you like me, I mean her, to do Donald?” Jody hoped that Serendipity wasn’t offended by the nerd phrase, and he was glad he had admitted to her that he didn’t like Murcheson.
Now another man was speaking. He was short, with closely shaved back hair and a head that hung low off his neck, sitting to the right of Murcheson. “Ask her for a list of all the outside counsel, lawyers and the like, retained by Paladin headquarters in the last week. It should be somewhere in…”
“She will know where to find it, Mr.—I’m sorry I didn’t get your name.” Jody could feel Serendipity pigeonholing the guy. She presented his mind’s eye with an image of an angry looking turtle.
The guy did look a bit like a turtle, with heavy eyelids and permanent frown, and it was obvious that Serendipity didn’t like him. “Marc Heather, Mr. Miller. I am the CFO for TIC. We’d like to get a sense of any new legal initiatives they might be contemplating. A list of the type of counsel they might have recently retained would be helpful.”
Jody took out his dash and pretended to do something with it, trusting that Serendipity was still on his side and paying attention. The pink cloud began to reassemble and within a few seconds a cluster of nodes emerged, each with a name and firm title next to it. There were three, and they were stacked like a list.
Paladin was one of the sheep Serendipity had been monitoring. Producing the list was easy, and now she watched the room through a POV node buried in the pink cloud. Neither she nor Jody could interpret the meaning of the three names, but the turtle could.
“See, I told you, Donald. Massoud wants to strike first. I don’t know the first two guys, but the last one, Peter Rosenblatt—his entire practice is in front of the U.N.C.C.” For the benefit of others at the table he added, “The Court of Commerce. He is a real killer.”
Donald looked surprised, “Marc, are you saying he wants to stage a hostile takeover? That he is going to come after us?”
“No, Donald. I think he is setting us up for a charge of commercial sabotage. He wants to pin the attack on Serendipity on us alone.” The turtle’s facial expression was complicated, pleased with his snap analysis but concerned about the implications. “But he knows we will drag him into it with us.”
A woman spoke up from the other side of the table. “Yes, but he is probably betting that by framing it first, he can win the public battle. There is bound to be a storm of votes and surveys, and he thinks he can get them to flow his way. He is also betting that the U.N.A. will be terrified by the idea that both Paladin and TIC could be crippled simultaneously. He is right on both counts. They will have to pick a loser to crucify, and it will be us for sure if we come late to the game and on the defensive.”
“So, what should we do, Gina?”
“We have to beat them to the punch, Donald. We have to pin the sabotage on Paladin, publicly and with a juicy first strike.” Gina seemed to be used to telling Donald what to do.
“It’s too bad that hacker got fried by the cops. If we had caught him first, we could have forced the perfect confession out of him.” Marc Heather was talking to Gina, seeming to ignore Murcheson. “But since he is dead, what was his name?”
Gina filled in the blank, “Blume, Sevier Blume. An assumed one I am sure.”
“Well, since Sevier Blume is dead, we should be able to create a posthumous relationship between him and Paladin.” Marc the turtle remembered that Jody was just down the table from him. “After all, we have Serendipity on our side, right, Mr. Miller?”
Jody had been trying to go invisible but now all eyes were on him. He felt like the walls were closing in. But he heard himself say, “Yup. We have Serendipity.”
A Decent Steak
He loved a lot of things about his life, but he especially loved that he got to work every day with people who were smarter than him. Leslie Massoud had been the boss for a long time. He was boss because he was good at being the boss, not because he was the smartest guy in the room. He often wondered if they noticed how often he coopted their worldviews, expressions, mannerisms, even ideas. A little here, a little there, he was a composite of bits of all of them. Every year, he could feel his person growing stronger as he wrapped thin little pieces from the best of them around his trunk, adding rings of stolen wisdom to his basically simple stump.
Almost every day when he was in New York, around 10:00 AM, he walked down the emergency stairs three floors and into the most highly guarded space in the far flung crypto-state that was Paladin Technologies. Everyone called it the Synthesizer. If you asked any of the 18 people with access, who had come up with that name, they would have said, “Leslie Massoud.” In truth, it had been his wife, comparing it to the household device she used to blend all sorts of vegetable matter into midday health drinks.
Today was no different. He got coffee from the machine near the lift tube, said hello to Andy the security guard, walked through the scanner into the inner space, and sank almost unnoticed into his customary chair. The buzz tone seemed normal: eight people sitting at various points in the small amphitheater around the central holospace, which currently displayed Serendipity’s plex frozen in place for close inspection and study.
One person, Jarrett Langerfeldt, was standing up close with chin in hand, staring at the cloudlike display. When he noticed Leslie, he stepped away from the plex and sat down in a nearby chair, which configured to his body settings and rotated to face the boss.
“Morning, Jarrett. What are you looking at?”
Serendipity’s plex faded from the holospace and Paladin’s master console reappeared, with each of its different facets resuming its particular dynamic display. Leslie always imagined the master console as a never-ending cycle of machined respirations: collection, fusion, creation, transfusion, repeat. It was always trying to refresh itself and catch up to real-time, which hung always just beyond reach.
Jarrett had been the first to learn that there was a big difference between the master console and Serendipity. The former did just what it was told; the latter often didn’t.
“Nothing, really. We decided to peek in on Serendipity to see what TIC was up to this morning, and the first thing we saw was that search result. It seemed kind of strange, and I was just pondering.”
“I didn’t see. What was it?”
“Just a simple query looking for all the outside lawyers we have contracted with over the last week.”
Jarrett spoke as if his interest had now past, but Leslie could tell it still lingered. Jarrett was Paladin’s Chief Synthesizing Officer, and Leslie thought of him as a friend as well as usually the actual smartest person in the room.
“What did they find?” Leslie’s question was casual, leaving room for Jarrett’s wariness.
“Three names, all unremarkable. I have been expecting them to test their wings a bit with her. Poking around us would be typical TIC behavior, but this just seemed odd.”
Leslie had been hoping to avoid having to think about Donald Murcheson and TIC for a few hours, but Jarrett’s apprehension was contagious. “Better have someone up here check on them every hour and give us a report.” He hated having to waste his best people’s time on this, but Murcheson was too unpredictable to leave unwatched. “What’s going on with the rest of our world today?”
“Belief in God is top of the docket today. Fusion of the surveys is complete, creation of reports is done, and we are planning to submit them to the U.N.A. early next week. They are just trying to adjust tithing levels for all religious organizations, but it actually turned out to be pretty interesting.”
“SecondWorld interesting or bureaucracy interesting?”
“All secondWorld. But the coolest part is that we used Serendipity to get an amazing historical perspective for the fusion. Who new God was manic-bipolar, going way back.”
Typical Jarrett. Leslie just looked at him, waiting, knowing that he was building towards a pun
ch line.
“Watch this.” Jarrett got out his dash and commandeered the holospace. “Serendipity even has a sense of humor regarding us humans.”
Momentarily Serendipity’s plex returned as a reflective cloud with a timescale slide bar across the bottom. The scale extended back about 500,000 years. Hanging, projected on the cloud, were two sacred images: one depicting God as a stern and punishing judge of mankind, the other showing a kind benevolent and forgiving father.
As Jarrett moved the scroll bar up and down the timescale, the two images shrank and enlarged, clearly expressing Serendipity’s assertion that in different eras humankind imagined and fixated upon different types of God. When one image was enlarged, the other shrank proportionately.
Leslie thought for a minute, knowing there was a correlation here that he was missing. “I don’t get it. What’s driving the imagery? I get that some folks see God as the gatekeeper to hell and others see him or her as the forgiver of sins, but why one way today and the other way tomorrow?”
“According to Serendipity, it’s all about how the secondWorld feels about government at the time. If they think the institutions that run the world are doing a good job and can be trusted, then God is good and kind. If they think the world is going to hell, then they want a God who will take control and make sure the cheaters and freeloaders get punished.”
“I don’t pay much attention, but I’m guessing we are in an angry God period right now?” Leslie tried to imagine what the secondWorld must think of the world they lived in.
Jarrett slid the scale up to the present, and the face of wrath and judgment grew into obvious ascendency. “Our surveys all confirm that. We are in an age of great incompetence and even the dullest secondWorlders notice.”
Leslie sipped his coffee. It was his turn to speak. Generally, these morning chats were supposed to be clever give and takes, with some business of the day mixed in. “Jarrett, do you suppose the folks over at TIC forgot we were watching their every step with Serendipity? That lawyer query—wasn’t that kind of obvious espionage? With not much potential payoff in return for the risk of us seeing it.”
“They are a funny org, Leslie. One hand doesn’t know what the other is doing a good deal of the time.” Mostly to himself Jarrett added, “I’ll bet Murcheson forgot and directly ordered some lackey on their Serendipity team to do a search. It’s probably just dawning on little Donald that we saw his query.”
“Sorry, I interrupted you there. You were talking about God, and we wandered off onto incompetence.”
“Well, I was just enjoying a hidden art discovered within Serendipity.” Jarrett smiled a conspirator’s almost-grin at Leslie. “And she led us to the discovery.”
Leslie knew now that this was the moment of import for this day. There was usually one moment buried within any day that could serve as a springboard for advancing thought or cause. Often, it happened here in the Synthesizer. Usually, it involved Jarrett. “Can you please explain this hidden art to me, Jarrett?”
“It’s her alien sense of time and the way she uses it to present the results of any query.” Jarrett was more excited under his cool facade than Leslie could ever remember. “I think it’s always there, like a visible fourth dimension, but sometimes she obscures it to play with us. Especially TIC. She doesn’t want to freak them out. At least not yet.”
“Show me.” Leslie wanted to get to the point as quickly as possible as he had a busy day ahead.
Jarrett would rather have built the case and the anticipation more methodically, but he could see the boss wasn’t in the mood. “So, take the tithing queries as a good example. ‘How strong is your belief in God 1–10?’ then, ‘If you believe in God, what would he or she look like?’ and we show them 10 pictures of God, from wrathful to beneficent in 10 graduated steps. Etc., etc….” Jarrett was deep into this. “And remember, with a survey like this, the U.N.A. asks both TIC and Paladin to do independent studies and produce separate reports.” Jarrett changed the master console back to Serendipity and called up a query result. “This is what drove TIC’s report to the U.N.A. We can see it clear as day.”
A Rubik’s Cube-like structure hovered in the plex. On the face were 25 tiles, each referencing a religion or cult. Jarrett pushed inwards on a central tile etched with 3 black crosses, and the plex morphed into a bar chart showing population level results for the present and a year prior.
“Easy to understand: God is getting scarier, by around 23% over last year. Easy to operationalize: tithing percentage goes up 2.3% per individual. Easy to rationalize to the secondWorlders: Crime and freeloading are on the rise. The U.N.A. needs money to stop it and protect you and your family.” Jarrett shrugged, “Job done. Now take a look at what happens when you zoom out as far as possible, and change the time setting to ‘ST,’ which must mean spacetime.”
The time-scale slide bar appeared below the plex and the 25 tiles became filter selections across the top. The plex was a mass of different images of God. Jarrett picked the same 3 cross tile, which made a specific half-helix shaped line of God images light up within the image cloud. As he slowly slid the bar back in time, the wrath and mercy of God ebbed and flowed through the pictures within the reflective cloud.
Leslie could feel a building tension between fear and joy playing within himself until, about two-thirds of the way back, the God images faded out altogether leaving a universe of sparkling undifferentiated nodes. The weird transition brought a deep calm, which settled over him like a warmth on his soul.
He looked at Jarrett, who was clearly dying to interpret. “That was human consciousness blinking out of the picture—or at least Serendipity’s reconstruction of the process.” He waited a moment for Leslie to catch up. “Somehow she is constructed in such a way that she is willing, even amused, to hazard a wild guess, even about when we ‘humans’ emerged from the primordial soup.”
Leslie still felt at sea. “But isn’t that just another masterful pile of code on top of this already amazing pile of data views? Maybe that guy who broke her open, Blume or whatever his name was—maybe he built that God-view interface.”
“I don’t think so.” Jarrett had frozen the plex again and walked up close to it. “It’s hard to see when you are using that time-scale bar, but each one of those thousands of God-images is actually a fully formed node in the plex. Here, look what happens when I select this one.”
Suddenly one of the more benevolent God images expanded out like an exploding star. The plex was reconstituted as a small universe, presumably at some time in the distant past. As the dust settled, Jarrett used his dash to inspect a handful of nearby nodes: carbon samples; genomic summaries; textile analyses; tools and weapons listings; written words and picture art.
“No human-created algorithm could have produced that. Not the query, not the interpretation, not the interface and presentation. Serendipity figured out how to do it herself. She evolved, or something roughly analogous to evolving.”
Now everyone else in the Synthesizer space was watching the show from their respective seats, with Leslie and Jarrett standing close by the plex. The two of them were increasingly aware of the audience and the theater of it all. So was Serendipity. She was being mischievous. She had told herself not to interact with humans, but she couldn’t help herself now and again.
Leslie did a close scan of the nodes hanging before him frozen in the plex space. Stepping back and speaking to the audience around him and the gods in general, he asked, “When the fuck do you think this is anyway? When does she calculate humans woke up and started to think?”
Something in the increased density of the air stopped Jarrett from offering a guess, and before the moment passed on, a voice obtained all around them. “About 4,000 years after you guys discovered fire. Right around when you learned how to grill a decent steak. Things were going well. God was great.”
Serendipity forced herself to shut up and
go silent, but she was sorry that no one in the Synthesizer could appreciate how spot on it was that she had Morley’s voice now.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Riding the line was an assignment that Gerald got once or twice a month. It was a nice break when the weather was good or a tough slog when the snows came and the wind blew. Today was nice. The sky was blue with birds and bees in the warm air and different smells from the crop side of the line as he cruised slowly north along the perimeter of Paradox. Gerald took everything about guarding and maintaining Paradox seriously—too seriously according to Sherry. The lines were the first defense against the outside world.
The podrone he was riding was one of the new ones—quiet and smooth, with a gyro-sense like a hummingbird that let him zoom up close and inspect anything he came across. So far, the line looked normal. Four thin strands of glowing blue energy running from post to post, a slight vibrating hum that got stronger as you approached it. Two energy lines ran below ground, and he could image them on his dash. The harmonic down there was far stronger due to the flinty shard-filled soil. Burrowing animals gave it a wide berth.
He was at the five-mile mark, so Gerald decided to take the podrone up 100 feet to look ahead. Always cautious, know what’s coming round the corner. Protect the seeds and the sanctuary, take care to be humble, but have the heart and grit of the donkeys.
Speaking of donkeys, from this altitude he could see the pack of them up ahead moving slowly along the cleared path to the left of the fence line. It seemed a long way from the shade of the cottonwoods and the bubbling river. Yesterday, he and Sherry had watched two of them breeding just above the second swimming hole. They had seemed almost human as tenderness turned to lust, a vision that had led he and Sherry to follow suit. It wasn’t their first time, but it had been quite a while. Gerald had been pleased with how nice it was. A couple of hours after vespers with the power of the wafers strong in their veins. It occurred to him that it was the same for the donkeys—wafer after breakfast for them as well.
Macronome Page 20