Macronome

by Howard Pierce

  Slowly it dawned on Gerald that he was staring at the reason he had come out here today. The donkeys had turned left and headed up west towards the end of the box canyon. Turned left, through the fence line—a fence section that was clearly down now. That never happened, and if it did there should have been an alarm on a dozen screens. Gerald had noticed a variation in the power draw from the line, which had made him curious, but a hole in the fence was a serious matter. And the donkeys were escaping.

  He noted the number of the fence post and shot his podrone northwest, intercepting their path, swooping down to scare them back towards the east and the safety of the park. He hovered close above them and rocked the podrone in a manner he thought might turn them and move them back across the invisible line. The young male, the one he had seen mating the day before, stood his ground at first, staring directly into Gerald’s eyes. Defiance with humor. After a few moments, the donkey turned to join the rest of the pack, which had already started back towards the Paradox side of the now invisible line.

  Gerald sat his podrone down on the sandy rise just outside the fence line and took out his dash, preparing to send a message and coordinates back to Celia so she could have someone check the circuit and code. As he cast another look at the departing donkey pack, the young male turned back towards him and sauntered up to where the bright blue lines should be glowing between them. The donkey seemed to fix Gerald with his moist gaze, and then, suddenly, the fence line relit with a snap followed by the familiar electric hum. With a snort, the donkey turned and was off to join the receding pack.

  AndrzejD was calling to him with increasing irritation, and the others were silently pressing him to get the hell out of there. “Stop fucking around, SevD. Get away from that guy. And Sereendipity1/2, don’t you listen to him if he tells you to turn the line off again.”

  They were moving fast for old donkeys, and DanniD asked them to slow the pace.

  As SevD caught up with the pack, he was chuckling. “We are the sacred donkeys AndrzejD, remember. We can do what we please. It’s good to let them know who is the real boss every now and then.”

  “Exactly wrong, SevD. We are trying to hide out from a shitstorm that you basically created. The idea is to keep a low profile, not get snuffed, and, in my particular case, see to it that TIC and that piece of shit Murcheson splatter like bugs against something righteous in the not-too-distant future.” He looked over his shoulder at the approaching SevD. “Are you planning to help or are you going to keep acting like a teenage mule?”

  “Teenage mules get more ass than old donkeys, my friend.” He winked at LoriD.

  “Whoa. Burn.” MorleyD was laughing, and even DanniD had a smile on her face. “But AndrzejD is right, SevD. No one here really gives that much of a shit about the great view we can’t get to up on that west ridge because of a lame fence. We do really care about seeing Murcheson meet the exquisite end that I bought him time to anticipate. Don’t you just love these wafers? The way they blend you in with the high desert.”

  LoriD cut in before MorleyD could go off, yet again, about the perfection of Paradox and hiding in plain sight. “What do we think about Paladin? Serendipity1/2, what do they look like to you?”

  She, who was currently without physical form, responded immediately. As she talked in their heads, she surveyed the scrub surroundings to assure they were alone. When she was sure, she brought her plex into view. “Paladin is merely a different fruit on the tree. It is more viable and likely to carry on for some time. TIC is barren and rotting. Its seed will go nowhere. Still, they are on the same tree.”

  They were all getting used to her talking this way. LoriD had found it awkward and annoying at first, but now she was coming to appreciate what she thought Serendipity1/2 was doing. The little parables made her think. They made her interpret the cryptic statements into her own plex. “So, what is the tree then?”

  The plex re-presented and now showed a lineage of sorts, growing from a wide base into thin and brittle top. “Human commerce, exchange, and expansion.”

  Serendipity1/2 lit up the roots and stump base. The wind blowing around them whispered, “Barter.”

  The focus light moved up to mid stump. “Feudal hierarchy,” said the wind.

  Further up still, as the trunk narrowed and became gnarled with only a few branches showing signs of life. “Capitalism.”

  Finally, the wind blew through the withering leader and the two-remaining twig-like boughs. “Crypto-capitalism bleeding into the social credit systems.”

  Hanging on the opposing branches were two strange fruits. One was shriveled and oozing from internal rot and collapse, the other heavy and ripe, weighing down its branch while hanging on by a near-dead stem.

  LoriD involuntarily bit at a bug that was worrying her upper leg, coming up with the bug and some hair in her mouth. She spat out the wet mat as Serendipity1/2 went silent. As no one else was offering comment, she said, “We got it, Serendipity1/2. Prepare for the end-state of human consciousness. What do we do in the meantime?”

  “You asked me about Paladin. I just painted you a picture.”

  These days DanniD was quiet for hours on end, following slowly along from the center of the pack wherever it wandered and listening and keeping her thoughts to herself. But now she spoke up. “She is telling us to let it be. Intrinsic molds and decay are already taking their revenge against the prime actor, TIC, and they will soon finish off Paladin and the rest of the narrowing monocultures.”

  Everyone looked at DanniD with ill-concealed surprise. Not because of what she had said but because she sounded more like Serendipity1/2 than DanniD. She knew what they were thinking but continued as if unaware.

  “I know it is hard, particularly for you boys, to get used to, but we are supposed to just watch, learn, and breed.” She looked pointedly at LoriD and SevD. “Serendipity1/2 has a plan, and it’s the only game in town. We only have a few generations to see if it works, and our part is to prepare ourselves to be the best hosts possible. Remember, she is just as exposed to extinction as we are. If it doesn’t work, she probably winks out, too.” Like the old Danni, she added a postscript for MorleyD. “You were just telling us about that story you liked so much from the Bible, MorleyD—the one about the ark. Well, we are both the animals and the boat itself.” DanniD looked at AndrzejD. “We just have to trust her to machine in some form of revenge, AndrzejD. She is the only one, through Serendipity1, who can safely tinker with humankind now. If we get tempted and they discover us, they will kill us, and the experiment will be ruined.”

  MorleyD shambled his rear end around so his brow and scarred nose were pressed up against the forehead of his longtime companion and missed love, DanniD. “We are all behind you, DanniD. Down the rabbit hole we go. It’s easy for me. I never planned much anyway, and things have always worked out.”

  AndrzejD looked at the plex, which still showed the shriveled tree with the opposing fruits flickering in a precarious breeze. “He killed my wife and son, Serendipity1/2. I was helpless at the time, and now I am being asked to ‘let it be.’ You call yourself a ‘simple concatenation of algorithms.’ Can you understand my need for revenge?”

  Serendipity pretended to answer his question by projecting two holo streams for them to watch, one right after the other. The first exposed the meeting in the TIC boardroom with Jody Miller and Donald Murcheson. The holo lingered on the last exchange between the turtle-like Marc Heather and the clearly possessed Jody Miller. “Yup. We have Serendipity.”

  The second holo scene showed Jarrett Langerfeld and Leslie Massoud in the theater in the round that was Paladin’s Synthesizer. With this one, she savored what she was sure would be their deep appreciation of her Morley impersonation. “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.”

  While her donkeys watched the
holos, Serendipity1/2 flooded the sluicegates of her quantum brain, processing and reprocessing the notion of revenge and how it had played out over human history. The results were mixed and inconclusive. Was it additive? Did it belong within the long sequence of the macronome? Space was becoming ever more precious. Too small and it would be too vulnerable to the unforeseen. Too big and it would be too slow to react. She would watch some more before deciding.

  With a Rope

  Having been designed specifically to enforce transparency, operating a program of concealment proved to be more of a kluge than Serendipity had expected. Query after query rained down from the dash of Jody Miller in the service of the TIC strategic team of Marc Heather and Gina Conaway, while Donald Murcheson watched and lurked in the background. Serendipity faithfully returned the results and reordered them as requested, but her far greater effort was spent hiding this activity from the methodical team at Paladin who scouted the perimeter and checked for any activity related to their company on an hourly basis.

  That she was letting this go on astonished her. It seemed illogical to let the bad guys at TIC gain so much insight about their competition Paladin. Queries covering 15 years back in time. Results ordered by their variance from the relevant U.N.A. laws regarding the use of herself, Serendipity. Legal issues ranging from small and mundane to larger and more controversial. Potential abuses of secondWorld consumer protection measures. Even evidence of personal failings and indulgences on the part of Leslie Massoud and his top staff. And of course, comparisons of Paladin’s internal books and U.N.A. tax and tithing records.

  Round after round of synthesis and further reprocessing of the results. Serendipity1/2 began to glimpse what she titled the “logic orientation” of the TIC people who were designing the searches and specifying the synthesis rules. She knew their names, but she referred to them internally by nicknames that MorleyD gave them as he kibitzed from the sidelines.

  She created a scale and ordered the four or five TIC actors by “attitudinal deviance”—deviance from a golden norm for humans that she had amalgamated and fused out of the one plex she held in permanent memory, Danni’s (now DanniD’s). The deviance scale was an elegant little subroutine, and she thought of its use as “comparing souls.” She knew it was a flawed premise to build a subroutine around. AndrzejD would say she was moralizing. She didn’t tell anyone, not even DanniD, about it. The Turtle was at the top of the deviance chart.

  But why was she concealing all this from Paladin? Serendipity1/2 decided to talk to the donkeys about it. DanniD said right away that she was developing intuition, which brought her up short. She had a nonintuitive fear of intuition and the danger it posed for any program that even occasionally employed branching logic. With one early intuitive misstep, a calculation could go wildly wrong as it bounced its way down through the multiplex pins and chutes to a conclusion.

  While she and DanniD talked, the others studied the same reports that the TIC folks were reviewing. AndrzejD and MorleyD soon switched to monitoring how they edited and repackaged the data. Everyone began to see real characters behind the early nicknames as the individuals took actions and the donkeys got used to looking at their specific plexes. Within 24 hours, they could see where things were headed.

  They were back on the banks of the stream, having had their morning wafers and a breakfast of hay. Returning, lightened from his morning dump in the fallow field just to the north and now hoofing gingerly and stiffly down the gravel path into the river’s ravine, MorleyD offered them all his morning musings. “The Turtle is an even bigger dickhead than Murcheson.” After a final short slide to a stop at the bottom of the path, he added, “You may not like it, Sarah,” his new nickname for Serendipity1/2, “but your intuition was spot on, and bloody devious for a long pile of code like yourself.”

  All the donkeys looked at him, knowing he was going to deliver his opinion on something. It was another beautiful morning after a cool and starry night. They hadn’t had to wander back into the shelter of the Sanctuary for several days now, and life seemed sweet.

  Serendipity1/2, who had decided she liked the name Sarah, was vaguely with them but currently formless. She had many threads in process. “Please give us your thoughts, MorleyD.”

  “Well, firstly, the only thing I miss being a donkey is coffee. And beer.”

  “And picking your nose. These hooves are a bitch.” SevD was cheered by the warmth of the morning sun as well and by any opportunity to needle MorleyD. “Sarah has no hands, either. Thank god we have Yamanaka and the votaries to help us.”

  Ignoring him, MorleyD continued. “My second thought is that you, Sarah, gave the TIC folks plenty of rope to hang themselves.” As soon as he said it, he regretted the words. He knew from a previous conversation that Sarah had a hard time with the concept of suicide, apart from their conversions, and that she might get hung up on the “hang themselves.”

  “What I mean is, absent all that help you gave them yesterday, they would be too stupid to come up with a plan dangerous enough to make Paladin rise to the occasion. And if you had let Paladin see what they were up to, they would have knocked it down early on with little or no fanfare.”

  Sarah freed up a few cycles in order to make her plex appear to hang over the middle of the stream bed. Had they figured out that she had to instantiate the image in each of their minds separately? DanniD knew. Probably LoriD and SevD.

  “What we need is a big exciting battle. Something to knock those fruits off our sorry excuse of a family tree. Right?” MorleyD looked around at the others. “So, what’s been up while I was gone? It’s about time for TIC to try and do something really clever.”

  “You were only gone about ten minutes, MorleyD. Your morning ablutions don’t take very long.” LoriD poked his swollen belly with her nose.

  Sarah sensed that things were about to start moving very fast out in the firstWorld, so she cut in. “Well, to bring you all up to speed, TIC just delivered a formal letter of complaint against Paladin to the U.N. Court of Commerce. It accuses them of sabotaging my little sister, Serendipity1, as part of a plot to pin the deed on TIC and take over exclusive management of her.” And after a pause she thought was just the right length, she said, “Oh, and we just took the blinders off Paladin. That fellow Jarrett is having a fit. My sister told me a few minutes ago that she ‘likes’ him. I wish we could stop imitating your human emotions. She says his actions suggest he is brooding about the processes that first blinded him and then showed him everything all at once.”

  Out of nowhere, surprising them yet again, DanniD spoke. “May I remind you all that our job now is to watch. We need to be very quiet and resist the temptation to meddle further.”

  “A wise reminder, DanniD.” Compliments sounded odd coming from Sarah. “You should all keep that in mind, especially when you get to the part in the complaint that asserts Sevier Blume is still alive and working for Paladin.”

  And a Formula

  “I just got word that the U.N.A. has put a passive quarantine on all our accounts. What the hell is a passive quarantine, anyway?” Jarrett Langerfeld was over his initial blinding rage. He was all about establishing true situational awareness now.

  “I don’t know. Sounds like one of those oxymorons that takes on a life of its own after some harried lawyer sticks it in an obscure public document. Peter, how does it work?” Leslie Massoud was taking a break from talking with the breadth of his top management team across the world, telling them not to panic. Fourteen people, three separate calls. “Breathe deep. Review the charges. Get me a rebuttal of anything that effects your group—by close of business.”

  Leslie had known Peter Rosenblatt professionally and personally for years, and when his Chief Corporate Counsel Alan Affolter suffered a heart attack earlier in the month, Leslie had hired him as a replacement while Alan recovered. At 7:30 that morning, this had seemed like a piece of good luck, given Peter’s years of work
in the U.N.C.C. arena. As of an hour ago, they had all come to realize his hiring had inadvertently triggered a colossally idiotic set of actions by Donald J. Murcheson.

  Peter was new to the environment in the Synthesizer but, being a wise old dog, he found his proper spot quickly. He had been given an office just down from Jarrett’s, but, since what he referred to as “the event” the evening before, he had moved semi-permanently to a chair and side table in the back raised row of the Synthesizer’s amphitheater. His very first legal opinion for Paladin, offered around 11:00 A.M. after several hours of intense review, was, “This can’t be un-fucked, Leslie. We have to kill them.”

  Asked now about passive quarantine, he was more granular in his analysis. “It means that, while monies and credits can move in and out of your various corporate accounts, they will be tracked in every way possible by the Court of Commerce’s Blockchain Monitoring Service. You know what the BMS does, right?”

  “Kind of.” Leslie hated all BusTech stuff.

  “To keep it simple, basically all your commercial clients and partners will have to allow BMS tracker worms into their accounts if they take money or anything of value from you.”

  “You have to be kidding. No one would agree to that. They can do that just based on the pile of bogus allegations and gossip TIC gave them?” Leslie’s head wanted to explode.

  “Worse still, if Paladin is found in breach of any contracts or owing any penalties because of adverse rulings, money can be clawed back from any and all of your clients if necessary. The BMS folks don’t care about right or wrong. They just follow the money and suck back enough from every one of your clients to cover any fines you haven’t paid—presuming Paladin is bankrupt at that point.” Peter Rosenblatt liked Leslie a lot, and he was coming to like Jarrett, but he had learned long ago not to shield any client from the stark legal truth.