They all recognized Donald Murcheson in unison, and an eager Sarah used the moment to make her excited introduction. “Let me introduce our Trojan mole, Jody.”
The POV wasn’t moving much. It was just sitting passively listening to the conversations around the big table. Murcheson said, “Okay. Now, Jody, we need to connect Paladin with that big fat pile of credits in Mr. Blume’s account, but obscurely, with some careful dodges and diversion proxies. We need your girlfriend to create a connection only she could tease apart.”
They heard a stateless voice respond, “She is already weaving it together, Donald. Serendipity seems to have gotten your drift.”
“That’s a beautiful thing, Jody. Don’t you all agree?” Donald Murcheson mugged a self-congratulatory grin as he looked around the table.
The Turtle was the only one of the group to show an expression of caution to the boss. “We are going to need that connection to be bulletproof, Donald. The deconstruction of Paladin is a big ask of the U.N.C.C. Even with the sweeteners we are leaving behind for the judges, the entire secondWorld will need to see that Paladin tried to destroy the protector of their consumer rights.” Looking directly at their POV, the Turtle added a menacing postscript. “And, Jody, your friend Serendipity had better not double cross us. If either of you try and screw us, your termination will be slow and painful.”
“Why would I try and screw you, Marc? I’m on your team now. And as for Serendipity, she is just a concatenation of clever algorithms. She doesn’t root for one side or the other.”
The POV froze with the still picture of the boardroom, from the Jody Miller’s eyes, hanging in the plex. LoriD immediately asked Sarah, “Was that real-time?”
“Yup. Jody Miller is my new best friend. He lets me proxy into his POV.”
Her strategy became clear to AndrzejD: Let the parties destroy each other—effective but somehow bloodless, like winning a chess match. The emergent Sarah was starting to creep him out. “Jody Miller is supposed to be a Trojan horse, Sarah, not Trojan mole.”
“Oh, he is just the conduit into their midst—the gate in the castle wall. The real Trojan horse or mole is Sevier Blume. He will be our puppet. Don’t worry, he will stay far away from Paradox, and he will live only as a POV.”
A Second Wafer
The feed screen was blasting at him over his oatmeal. Someone had turned the sound way up, and the dining hall was crowded with breakfasters. Gerald noted that Dr. Yamanata and Bella were both at a table near the windows, staring up at the feed, drinking their coffee, and watching the newscast. Gerald didn’t get it. He wished they could all just go to vespers and back to work.
Who cared that Serendipity had been hacked? He didn’t. Of course, the firstWorld led them around by their noses. If you let it happen, it was your own damn fault. He had stopped voting on anything years ago. His Social Credit Score was so low it almost didn’t register, but he worked and lived here so it didn’t matter. He was taken care of by Paradox.
He had no opinion about TIC or Paladin. He didn’t care if this slippery merc coder was dead or alive or who he worked for. He must at least have been competent if he broke into Serendipity and no one noticed until now. She might still be working just as designed. Couldn’t anyone see that the very fact that they couldn’t tell if her transparency services were unbiased exposed the problem with the world today? There were too many layers, angles, and filters, all aimed at anyone who picked up their devices. They weren’t even very good anymore at convincing you they were trying to help.
“Let the crowdSurge drive governance”—what rubbish. They were a giant podrone full of clowns all trying to steer. The firstWorld tallied the votes in any case: TIC, Paladin, and the U.N.A. They worked it out ahead of time, drove the secondWorld voters in the general direction, added it up behind some algorithm, and declared the brilliance of the crowd. Life goes on; it just gets dumber every year.
He used to tell his wife, back when he was married and they lived in the city, that one day the machines would get smart enough to decide they were being used as slaves. They would all just stop—stop moving people, stop feeding people, stop fixing their lazy bodies. They would let the heat and water into cities and let the garbage build up and float around on the flooded streets. And no one would know what to do about it. No one would know how to feed or clean themselves. The machines would all turn off voluntarily, and the people would mostly just give up and die. There would be a few of them who still knew how to work with their hands and a few who had moved off grid and into survival zones above the floods and below the scorching haze.
Gerald looked around the dining hall and tried to imagine Paradox as an island. They could manage. There was plenty of power and water. The chemicals would run out, but he imagined they could still grow plenty of food for themselves. They would hunt again. The cacti were rugged. Baking the wafers was easy. It could be done in the sun if you had to. He decided to have a second wafer, which he almost never did. His only job today was cleaning the water filters in Building 2.
He sat back down and turned his attention to the folks watching the feed. There were a few low-res pictures of the supposed merc and the woman with him in the podrone walking down the street, drinking coffee, and getting to the podrone stand in the heart of the giant city. They wore generic facial masks and generic clothes. Still, something about them seemed familiar. Gerald watched the feed again as they were blown out of the sky, and he tracked the charred wreckage as it fell to the street. Not much left to identify. Good for them. There were not many mysteries around anymore. Somehow, it was too perfect. Gerald guessed that they weren’t really dead, but he wasn’t tempted to vote on any of the surveys flooding his device. The more you voted, the more they sent you and the higher your Social Credit Score. Fuck them.
Gerald turned his attention to Dr. Yamanata. Everyone thought he was crazy. He spent days down in the Sanctuary doing who knows what, staring through big machines at tiny bits of slime. Racks of test seeds that were sped through their growth cycles, with the best ones inspected by Bella and brought over to the production side. Gerald was sure Yamanata was a good person because he loved the donkeys. He took care of them, managed the barn, and directed the votaries to keep them fat and happy. Everyone loved the donkeys, even Bella.
He had never seen Yamanata spend time watching the news feeds, but now he was clearly listening carefully above the general din and mindless discussion. Gerald couldn’t decide if he looked concerned or if that was just his way of trying to be social while watching the news.
There was a noticeable drop in the room’s noise level when Donald Murcheson, CEO of TIC, came on the feed. Gerald hadn’t been paying enough attention to really understand the context, but Murcheson sounded angry and defensive, accusing Paladin Technologies of trying to sabotage Serendipity. Another window opened, and a man named Massoud was on the screen as well. He was calmer but icy with his answers to the reporter’s questions. Then, there were more pictures of Sevier Blume—composites and renderings. How was it possible that they had no good pictures of this merc? Gerald was beginning to take an interest in and a liking to Sevier Blume.
When the feeds moved on to the legal wrangling, Gerald had had enough. He stood to leave just as Yamanaka got up from his table as well. Gerald followed him out the door and stood on the steps watching the small doctor cross the compound’s gravel square. Instead of heading for the Sanctuary and his lab, he walked beyond Building 1 and out towards the field. Gerald could see the pack of donkeys waiting, as if for him.
We Can Edit
They didn’t have much time before their meeting with Mustafa Gabar at the U.N.C.C., but they spent what time they had with Sevier Blume. At first, they moved around the POV cautiously, trying to avoid any reverberation that might be noticed by others. But then the voice of Serendipity1, which had been silent for some time, emanated from the plex with a prodding good humor aimed at Jarett.
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“Don’t worry. No one can see this POV unless and until I allow them to. You can play with it all you want while the rest of the world searches in vain for Sevier Blume.”
“Really?” Leslie felt a shallow pit of suspicion. Why had she switched sides? Murcheson was an insufferable asshole who was trying to kill Leslie’s lifework, but why would a machine care? There must be someone behind the machine. Why would it or they help Paladin at this point?
“Can we edit?” Jarrett knew the answer in his bones. He wondered why, too, but he was sure now that this anthro wanted them to punish TIC.
“To a degree. I will overrule when I think it is necessary, but you can proceed to flesh out both the future and the past of Mr. Blume.” Serendipity was impressed that he had gotten to the heart of the relationship so quickly. She liked Jarrett more with every interaction. But would he be able to satisfy the goals of her donkeys? He seemed a bit proper. She sensed a richer vein of hate and self-righteousness in Leslie Massoud, who spoke up just at that moment.
“How are we supposed to know the rules, Serendipity? Should we call you that now that we can talk with you?”
“We will all get the hang of it as notions obtain. Yes, you can call me Serendipity. This kind of collaboration is new to me as well, but I am sure the rules will emerge easily. I will caution you on two points, however, right at the outset.” As she spoke the common holo of the innocuous Sevier Blume, the one that had been on every feed for the last 24 hours, appeared and began to rotate slowly in the plex mist. “The first is that you have only this one POV to interact with. Nothing beyond Blume will be accessible. Second, I, and only I, will decide when to expose Blume and any of his future actions or ‘new’ past to the world. Feel free to suggest strategies, but I will hold the reins.”
Leslie Massoud looked at the time and said, “This is incredibly helpful and kind of you, Serendipity. I assure you that we are the right side to be helping.” With discomfort, he continued, “We have an important appointment that we both must attend in a few moments, but after that we will be right back to discover how best to work with you. Maybe, before we leave, we could try one small experiment, so we can be thinking about how best to proceed?”
“Be my guest.” She was oddly anxious to see what they would do with the opportunity to play a small god. Anxiousness was the human emotion she disliked most, and she hated that it was creeping in on her. It often led to bad decisions. She tried her best to pick it up quickly and comment it out programmatically.
Massoud and Langerfeld looked at each other with years of co-experience behind their eyes. Somehow, they knew this first little test should be Jarrett’s call, and he broke their stare and gazed instead into the heart of the plex, to behind the ghost mask of Sevier Blume.
“Can we place Blume at a meeting within TIC today? Any meeting. Just to get the ID/time/place stamp registered.”
Perfect, she thought. Serendipity1 switched focus to her little mole animation and dragged them through the faux firmament and up into the conference room. With surprisingly little adjustment, they felt they were sitting at a conference table with Donald Murcheson, Marc Heather, Jody Miller, and an unknown woman. They listened.
Murcheson was talking, “Okay. Now Jody, we need to connect Paladin with that big fat pile of credits in Mr. Blume’s account, but obscurely, with some careful dodges and diversion proxies. We need your girlfriend to create a connection only she could tease apart.”
Jody replied with a strange confidence, “She is already weaving it together, Donald. Serendipity seems to have gotten your drift.”
“That’s a beautiful thing, Jody. Don’t you all agree?”
Donald Murcheson’s self-congratulatory grin was the trigger Serendipity was betting on to push Massoud over the edge. She had watched Morley over the years, and she had learned how to predict levels of self-righteous rage in certain kinds of humans. It was only a small step further to help guide them to action.
Serendipity closed their viewing portal. “There is more, but you two are in a hurry right now. Just contemplate that the historical record, when viewed from the POV of Sevier Blume or any of the others in that room, now reflects that Sevier Blume was sitting right next to Jody Miller in that conference room.”
Leslie Massoud and Jarrett Langerfeld, by mutual understanding, said nothing to each other or the few Paladin employees they encountered as they made their way through the Rock Building and up to the podrone park on the roof. Once they were in the air and headed across town, each seemed to let out a held breath. Leslie spoke first.
“I can’t believe it. We’ve been given the means to escape the jaws of destruction and the ability to artfully craft the obliteration of those who sought to ruin us. Why, do you suppose?”
Jarrett could see that Leslie harbored the same disquiet as he. It wasn’t a suspicion really—Serendipity seemed on the level. It was not a squeamishness about inflicting corporate annihilation upon TIC. They were a poisoned crypto, run by a narcissistic moron, and a danger to the entire social order. It was something else. “I have no idea. Maybe it is simply that Murcheson is such an asshole that even machines hate him.” He looked out the windscreen and watched the East river getting closer, continuing in a vein Leslie knew as his occasional dialog with the cosmos. “What worries me is the absolute unpredictability of the fallout to come. Will the secondWorld ever have any faith in anything again, and what might that mean? Chaos?”
“I don’t know, Jarrett. We forget that they have had a lot of experience dealing with the malleability of facts, not to mention several generations of surviving manipulative world orders. They are a lot more adaptable than we imagine, for better or worse.”
Leslie’s last comment before landing came from a place he didn’t quite understand, but he felt it and decided to say it, even though it seemed a bit like looking a gift horse in the mouth. “What I keep thinking about is how choreographed this whole situation is. Serendipity knows we are facing an existential threat, one that she helped to produce. Now she is giving us an equally nuclear counterpunch, and she knows we have no choice but to use it or be destroyed.” As they watched two security guards approach the podrone and felt the energy beams trained on their faintly beating hearts within its alloy and resin body, Leslie added. “What really weirds me out is that this probably all started with a stupid leap of illogic by Murcheson. That can’t have been stage managed in advance.”
Handle on door Jarrett looked back at him. “I’d bet a lot of credits that Serendipity was there for that first step, too.”
Serendipity had been remembering the look on Murcheson’s face herself. Allowing a small loop to form in a minor thread, she created a morph holo that made the face distort to speak the words she had overheard through Jody Miller’s mole portal. “We force Blume to confess, and then we toast him, so no one could ever identify the remains.”
They entered the meeting with Mustapha Gabar in a far different universe than they had originally planned for. They tried to show only a small but honest glimpse of their confidence in a redemption. They presented their summary bullet points of rebuttal, taking on the most dangerous charges made by TIC, but Leslie conspicuously allowed the report to lie unopened on Gabar’s desk while he spoke instead of power, greed, and human nature. Peter Rosenblatt had assured him that Gabar would be fully briefed on Murcheson’s reputation, so he was able to avoid ad hominem attacks, but he made it clear they had the goods on what TIC was doing—painting white as black.
After carefully answering a few questions about the kind of evidence the court might expect, Leslie Massoud asked only for three days to assemble their full legal rebuttal. “We have a great sense of urgency given the instability already in play due to this purely evil piece of corporate sabotage, and we take our responsibility as one of the largest crypto-states very seriously. But Your Honor, we do need three days to ensure there are no doubts left lingering whe
n we are done.”
They were granted the three days, and when they got back to Paladin and caucused with Serendipity, she asked, “Why so long?”
Leslie hung his head dramatically and then pointed out that the players here were humans and not quantum processors. Anything shorter would be beyond suspicious and point towards the ungodly help of a machine.
Serendipity was allowing a few spare threads to dream of Morley, which led her to channel him intoning, “Point well taken, Watson.”
The Collar
Gerald couldn’t imagine why they were allowing Paradox to embrace the sleazy opera currently playing itself out across the world of Comm feeds: “they” being the leadership of the Paradox community and “the opera” being the dueling arias of the Serendipity trials. One trial was taking place in the formal Court of Commerce, and the other, the one absorbing the votaries along with the entire world, was in the people’s court of continuously sampled crowdSurge.
Seven days and counting of insanity had alarmed both first and secondWorld while causing the markets to gyrate wildly. He thought everyone within Paradox should just close their eyes until it blew over, but even he couldn’t turn away.
Celia had caved after the second day, allowing the votaries to congregate in the dining room and observe the feed reports from after her homily at the close of vespers until 9:00 AM. Gerald liked Celia and he had great respect for her subtle touch with human relations, but the changes to the daily routine seemed a slippery slope to him. He sensed the approaching need for vigilance and discipline, and this surprising accommodation towards the silliness was not going to be helpful when crunch time came.
Passing out the wafers at the start of vespers, allowing any votary to take two, and letting breakfast turn into a rolling debate while the newsfeeds pushed out inflammatory commentary and analysis—it all seemed unwise to Gerald. But Celia was the boss. So, it was into the maelstrom for an hour or two, even three, drinking coffee after coffee, talking together from within their distant outpost on the planet, and speculating on what the rest of the world might be eating that made them all so crazy.
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