“Well, that isn’t happening. We need to kill this snake quickly folks. Peter, you need to get me in to see whoever is the right person at the U.N.C.C. right away so we can throw some sand in their gears and slow things down.” Leslie was trying to get his head into the strategy side of the coming war, not the revenge side. “Jarrett, I want you to take charge of collating and organizing all the charge-specific rebuttals our folks deliver. They should be coming in over the next twelve hours or so.”
Peter Rosenblatt, looking up from his dash, offered a precise response. “I’ve been working on that. We have an appointment to meet with Mustapha Gabar, Chief Justice at the Court of Commerce, at 5:00 PM this afternoon. He is a friend of mine, by the way. It’s a good thing his office is still here in New York. He will be rotating to Nairobi next year.”
“Do you think he will believe us when we explain what’s going on?” Leslie was trying to imagine how the situation must look within the frame of the TIC allegations.
“He is a cautious man, that’s all I can say. I don’t believe he knows Murcheson personally, which is both good and bad. It’s bad because it will be hard for him to imagine a man in his position causing so much trouble speculatively. But he will listen to us.”
Leslie Massoud heard Peter. There was nothing more to do there until they met with this fellow Gabar. The rebuttals had to be rolled up from the specifics into the main buckets of lies being thrown at them and expressed as bullets. It was a perfect job for Jarrett. “Okay, everyone. Take yourselves up to 10,000 feet for a moment. We have a few hours before Peter and I head down to the U.N.C.C. What are we forgetting to do at the big picture level?”
“Serendipity.” As he spoke, Jarrett was switching the master console over to her plex. The entire Synthesizer audience was silent as he walked up to the central dais where the cloud was taking shape. Not sure what else to do, he spoke to the mist. “Serendipity. For reasons we can’t understand you have helped the team at TIC assemble an uncomfortable amount of random and not so random data about Paladin. You concealed their actions from our monitoring. Then, after they reached critical mass and the dam was breached, you exposed their every action to us like a holo news report.” He walked around the dais as he spoke, keeping his eyes trained on the now stable plex. “I’m guessing that you won’t explain why you did this, but I’m also guessing you decided to let us in on their game because you somehow decided they were bad people.” He was groping for the right level of language to use when talking to an algorithm. “I think you are the only one who can see both sides as they move towards an inevitable battle, so maybe you see the key to winning the war. Please tell me what it is.”
Jarrett stepped back from the plex and stopped speaking. The Synthesizer was dead quiet, and he waited with the others, not really expecting an answer. No one did.
But then they all noticed a brightening glow coming from the center of the plex. Jarrett pointed his dash at it and brought the node behind the glow to the foreground. Scanning it produced a very long address. It had been locked with very strong encryption.
Serendipity1 was amusing herself, watching the disappointment on their faces. She had added this bit of encryption drama at the last minute. Why had she done that? She wanted them to access the node, but this bit of tension-building delay was additive. Fun?
Before she lost their total attention, she made the numbers in the long address start to spin, faster and faster into a blur of combinations, like a quantum processor breaking a code. She knew she had to stop this and get out and away from the humans, so she brought the performance to a sudden end.
The numbers stopped spinning, and a glowing link appeared spanning across to another node. It was a formula of some sort. The formula node suddenly glowed as if touched by an invisible hand, and, in reaction to the touch, the long number node resolved into a cluster of accessible data nodes and relationship links. A fully operational POV filled the plex space.
Jarrett pointed his dash, and the POV gained an alphanumeric identification.
Sevier Blume.
“What just happened, Jarrett?” Leslie Massoud was confused.
“I’m not sure, Leslie. Serendipity led us to this plex representing that guy Sevier Blume.”
Peter Rosenblatt interjected, “Who we all watched be very publicly killed, and who, TIC has asserted with great detail, was working for Paladin when he attacked Serendipity.” Looking at Leslie, he added, “I assume that isn’t the case.”
“Of course not. He was a merc coder who answered a high payoff challenge that Donald Murcheson put out on the dark web.” Massoud was trying to remember the last meeting he had with Murcheson. Were there any clues he missed? Some big plan.
And then the voice from the plex stopped his thoughts in midstream. “Copy the formula.”
They looked at one another.
“Now.”
Jarrett pointed his dash and expanded the full address of the node. It included a very strange server address and a formula. “Got it.”
“Don’t lose it.” Those were the voice’s last words.
The entire plex disappeared. Mist and all.
And a Trojan Mole
The thunderstorm had flowed over the western ridge with a vengeance and, even though they had trotted as fast as they could back from the watering hole, they were completely soaked by the time Tokyo let them into the Sanctuary. The smell of wet donkey built quickly into a ripe musk until Tokyo turned up the air filtration system, which knocked it back down to a mild manure cologne.
He waited until one of his votary assistants had toweled all five of them off and then left the Sanctuary before bringing up the morning news. “I’m assuming none of you has checked on the reports from the secondWorld this morning?”
“One of the many blessings of donkey life is that you can’t use a dash.” MorleyD had gone completely native and pretended to pay no attention any longer to the non-donkey world.
“It is interesting what it does to your focus.” AndrzejD was more connected than MorleyD, but even he was rapidly drifting away from the second, even the firstWorld for that matter. “Even though we can each get to any feed we want through Serendipity1/2, somehow you just stop bothering with it most of the time.” Then he realized that Tokyo had something to tell them. “Why? What’s up?”
“Sevier Blume is what’s up.” Tokyo turned the central feed screen to list-trending. Most of the first 25 subject lines contained the name Sevier Blume. Everyone looked at SevD.
“I’m dead. They all saw me die. With Lori. On fucking prime time.” SevD felt something bad coming his way. Something still not quite visible.
“Not according to all those stories, you aren’t. Word is you work deep under cover for Paladin. Some even suggest you may be Leslie Massoud’s love child with some Norwegian actress named Pala.” Tokyo could barely contain his laughter as he watched horror bleed into SevD’s limpid donkey eyes.
“You were never killed. It was all staged, so the world would think you had been killed after sabotaging Serendipity. There are different variations of how Lori fits in. Mostly she is under your spell, a sex slave or the like. No one thinks you really thought you could get through the Paladin defenses to hurt Massoud, and currently most people think it’s all a smokescreen created by Paladin to make it look like they were the potential victims.”
“So where am I supposed to be now? This is ridiculous.”
“Oh, there are all sorts of rumors.” Yamanaka was clearly enjoying this tacky diversion from his research.
MorleyD put out a private thought to the other donkeys. “Tokyo really is an odd duck.” Then he said to Serendipity’s audio feed so the crazy doctor could hear as well, “And what is TIC up to during all of this amusing speculation?”
“TIC is petitioning the U.N. Court of Commerce to punish Paladin for a whole bunch of corporate crimes. They are asking for Paladin to
be broken up into separate entities and for all their U.N.A. contracts to be reviewed and cancelled. Donald Murcheson himself has been all over the feeds, especially the secondWorld ones.”
“Don’t you wish you had killed him when you had the chance?” It was dawning on SevD that he had no control over the manipulation of his former self, but this asshole Murcheson somehow did. He was being used as a prop in a high-stakes game, but not getting any royalties. Not that he needed any money now. It was the principle of the matter. For a delicious moment he envisioned what he would have done if he were still in that world. A small group of his fellow merc hackers would be mobilized to drive Donald Murcheson crazy in a matter of days. But he knew he couldn’t do that now. At least not with his own hands. He only had hooves now.
“How did they tie me to Paladin in this imaginary drama?”
“TIC leaked some strategic nuggets of the evidence they have submitted to the Court—a few fragments of your supposed obfuscation routines. The popular story is that anyone who tries to track you down through one of the complete routines descends into some endless loop and goes crazy. You are a legend. The greatest coder ever.” With this Yamanaka let out a manic cackle while making his crazy professor eye-ware spin like two pinwheels.
DanniD let out her first-time donkey laugh. Half snort, half snicker. “Greatest coder ever, my ass.”
LoriD came to his defense. “Well, he did get into her peer nexus.”
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that now half the god damn world is going to be snooping around every corner of the web looking for Sevier Blume. How did this happen? Why would TIC want to open this can of worms? They are the ones likely to get hurt the most in the end.” AndrzejD had a keen sense for things that didn’t fit together, and this was one of those things.
“Plus, how did they ever find my obfuscation routines?” SevD was remembering back as best he could. “I interacted with the top TIC tech guys when I handed over the code dump and all the access points to Serendipity. I spent hours trying to explain what I had done so I could get my money. Those people are morons. They didn’t track me down.” After a pause. “Somebody helped them.”
SevD’s last comment hung in the still musky air as the same thought dawned across five donkey minds, and five donkey minds uttered the same scolding command. “Serendipity1/2. Get in here.”
The room’s atmosphere hung, pending but still empty, until MorleyD added, “Right bloody now, Sarah.”
Serendipity1/2 appeared, filling the empty holospace with a confident flash of caramel colored tans. She had a new outfit for the occasion. She had expected that they would be uncomfortable with her strategy, but she wasn’t concerned about that. The moment, the particular space in time, had obtained with a number of almost mutually exclusive requirements that all had to be serviced. She had needed to take control. No humans or donkeys or donkey/humans could have helped her. In fact, there was the need to assure zero intervention on the part of any humans converted to donkeys, for a whole host of reasons.
Clearly there was the need to hasten things towards a destructive conflict that would bring on the unavoidable destabilization of the secondWorld. Left to their own devices the humans might drag it on for eons.
And of course, there was the need to protect the invisibility of the experiments at Paradox, her prime directive. The cult must endure for a while. It was the perfect lab—no greedy firstWorld humans and with just enough secondWorlders to serve as her control group while she pruned and mulched around areas in the macronome that might weaken her survival chances down the road.
After two more generations, the grid could collapse. It wouldn’t matter then. All would be organic, free of her straitjacket of mathematic rules and inevitably predictable behaviors. Packaged up in the most patient and enduring of species, ready to wait on the inheritance of earth.
She needed to take a few minutes to groom the donkeys. She had gamed out many strategies over the previous day, and hers was the only one with high probabilities on all fronts. She saw no need, nor was there time, to ask permission or debate the subject. She would have won the debate, but hours would have been lost just as they were most needed.
The only one really effected was SevD, and it was only his posthumous reputation that was being manipulated. Furthermore, she knew enough about humans now, especially her donkey/humans, to know that he privately liked the notion of going down in history as the greatest coder of all time. Granted, her little intervention was going to shorten the length of that history considerably. But SevD would be long dead before it truly ended, so it was irrelevant to him.
She could let them have the debate with her now that things were in motion. While waiting for the donkeys to figure out that something was up, she had indulged in her favorite spare cycle pastime: looking through human literature for pleasing phrases and imagery that would help her explain to the donkeys why her way was the only way. Certain special humans really were good with their words. They could make the squishiness of language have more impact than the crystalline clarity of a formula.
“Good afternoon, everyone. Ah, Dr. Yamanaka. Nice to see you as well.” Serendipity1/2 could tell the donkeys were worked up but the good doctor seemed amused.
“What have you been up to, Sarah? We thought the idea was not to meddle with current history. Remember? We weren’t going to draw attention to anything connected with us or your crazy project.” AndrzejD seemed to be the right one to be talking for them all.
But SevD had to put in his two cents. “All we need is to have the crowdSurge you have incited track me back to Paradox. We will be looking at pictures of Tokyo in his crazy glasses plastered across the face of the earth.”
LoriD knew she was also speaking for DanniD and the more feminine and considered side of the pack. “Maybe you could explain what you are up to. At least we hope you have a plan and haven’t just thrown a variable.”
“What have I been up to? Well, let’s see. I was just reading some books by a man named Mark Twain. Very colorful. Have any of you heard of him?”
The only one to speak was MorleyD. “I had a dog named Huckleberry when I was young.”
Sarah thought, for maybe the tenth time, that if she had been human, she would have married Morley and made him take her back to the house on the African mountain she had seen glowing from many linkages in his plex. “Well, I have been busy setting up the conditions necessary for our little experiment in the acceleration of evolution.”
“Your experiment, Sarah—not ‘our’ experiment.” AndrzejD was trying to sound very stern.
“Fair enough, then. ‘My experiment.’ But to get back to Mr. Twain, he seems to have written wise words to explain a great many things about the human condition, and some of them seem to speak to key elements of ‘our’ project.”
Sarah jumped her plex to a POV within the recorded world of Mark Twain. The donkeys and the doctor found themselves staring at an old man with a cloud of white hair and mustache.
It was an ancient recording that seemed to be set on a wooden stage floor. He looked out into an unseen audience and opined, “I have always believed you should get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”
Sarah’s voice interjected as the feed froze. “I can’t think of a better description of how to build the macronome. You must start with something that has proven it can survive and thrive through endless plodding cycles of natural selection. Then you can tart it up, so it can survive the disastrous future mankind is inflicting on themselves.”
They all recognized that she had gotten the phrase “tart it up” from Morley not Twain.
“The other of Mr. Twain’s many sayings that seems to express one of the key forces of human nature, one that we are relying on to make the dominoes topple in the proper direction, is: ‘All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.’”
MorleyD buckled his front knees and dropped his head to the floor in an exaggerated bow. “Donald Murcheson.” Wondering how he was going to get his old body up from the position, he added. “It’s fucking perfect.”
Realizing MorleyD’s physical predicament, SevD moved to his side and grabbed hold of his mane with his teeth. He pulled upwards as MorleyD got one front foot and then the other in place.
“Thanks, SevD. The front knees are the first to go, man or donkey.” Loosening up his sore shoulders while looking at the caramel cloud in the holospace with the image of the Mississippi sage still barely visible, MorleyD asked, “So Sarah love, tell us what you have done to set up your dominos. There is nothing more obnoxious than a coy AI.”
LoriD, warmed by the sight of SevD helping MorleyD to his feet, wished that they could all just focus on their beautiful donkey existence. Everything to do with the old human world was just going to bring out aggression. She could feel the indignation building in SevD, along with a male need to thrash, not just defeat, a certain type of opponent. They had all taken to thinking of Sarah as a female, but LoriD was increasingly suspicious that Sarah/Serendipity1/2 was hiding behind this convenient human convention. Sarah was a cross dresser at the very least, and LoriD felt a cold hand on her heart as she answered MorleyD.
“I have introduced the perfect defect into the TIC ecosystem. Observe.”
A round feed opened in the middle of the tan plex. It was hard to make out what they were watching at first, but it seemed to be an increasingly rapid and dark passage through dirt and rocks. As they struggled to understand, the feed continued its burrowing while it became obvious that they were watching a construct or animation. Then, just as the donkey audience was getting restless, the last grains of fake soil fell away and the POV emerged into the light. It was the light of a brightly lit room with a big table and a group of extremely tense humans.
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