The young man grinned, reclining in his chair even farther than Sandy, hands folded on his middle. “Why? You know some good stuff?”
“I don’t think you could run my sims.”
“Never underestimate the capabilities of an ambitious man.”
“Ambitious,” said Reggie. “Is that what they call it?”
Abraham said nothing, gazing at the blank holoprojector. From her own feeds, Sandy could tell he wasn’t even uplinked. He was just a quiet, thoughtful man who often had nothing to say. Instead, he wrote—ten books at last count, seven more than Reggie. His topic was sociology, theoretical systems and their applications in modern societies. He was not just a premier Callayan expert, he was a premier Federation expert. Sandy guessed that made him quite wealthy.
“Hey,” said Vanessa, arriving from up the back and making her way down between chairs. “Sandy, you talking about sex again?”
“’Course, babe,” said Sandy, arching her head back to look at her. “Where’s the tyke?”
“I’m not bringing a three-month-old to a top-clearance briefing.”
“Oh, come on,” Sandy laughed. “Who’s she going to tell?”
“You’re bringing your kids to work?” Reggie asked. “The FSA let you do that?”
“It’s just datawork,” said Vanessa, settling into the chair across the aisle from Sandy. She looked a little tired, Sandy thought, but otherwise good. “I could do it at home, but I need to get out. I have entire offices of ready child minders outside.”
“Who’s got her now?” Sandy asked.
“Sarita.”
“Of course.” And to Reggie, “Personnel manager, grandma with twenty-three grandkids.”
“Good lord, women breed in Tanusha,” Reggie exclaimed mildly. “I had two, and even with all the tech, I’ve no idea how they find the time for more.”
“Colonial society has a breeding imperative,” said Abraham. “All these worlds to populate. It’s why feminine social roles are more traditional away from Earth, completely contrary to what League thought would happen.”
“Yeah,” said Sandy, “and League overcompensated by building synthetic people instead.” Abraham smiled a little. “She’s been good?”
“Oh, she was screaming for about an hour this morning,” said Vanessa, repressing a yawn. “And two hours last night. And Sylvan was screaming another hour. You’d think twin babies could synchronise screaming so we only lose two hours sleep, and not three?”
“You think they’d make a systems mod for it,” Steven added unhelpfully. “Twenty-sixth century and there’s still no fix for screaming babies.”
“If they do,” said Sandy, “that’ll be the point I know to resign from the human race.”
Steven peered at her past his dark glasses. “You know, Sandy, for such a high-tech specimen, you’re quite a luddite sometimes.”
“You’re not the first Tanushan techie boy to accuse me of that.” The doors atop the main aisle opened, and three men entered. “Speak of the devil . . .”
Ari was there, of course, walking with Ibrahim, the dark leather jacket and the cool plain suit. The other man was dark, slim, with a round face and unremarkable, almost androgynous features.
“Hello, Ragi,” said Steven, quickly taking his glasses off and sitting up straight. Sandy repressed a smile—obviously some GIs required more full attention than others. “Haven’t seen you for a while.”
“Hello, Steven,” said Ragi in that mild, pleasant tone of his. He walked the aisle steps down but took a seat one row back from the bottom. “Good to see you once more. Reggie. Abraham. Cassandra and Vanessa, of course.”
Ari gave Vanessa a dark-browed look as he took a seat beside Steven, who looked pleased at the gesture. “What are you doing here?” he asked her.
“Oh, that’s lovely,” said Vanessa. “Maybe this little baby factory still has some other uses left in her?”
“It’s not the propensity to make babies,” said Ari. “It’s the propensity to spread chaos and disorder wherever you go.”
“Cassandra brought her,” said Ibrahim, taking a random available seat. “Insisting she’d be useful.”
“No pressure, babe,” said Sandy. Vanessa snorted.
“Is this everyone?” Ibrahim asked, peering around.
“No,” said Captain Reichardt from up the top of the stairs. He sealed the doors behind him with a code. “Now it’s everyone.”
“A man in uniform,” Ibrahim observed, as Reichardt came down the stairs. And beneath his breath, “Wouldn’t that be nice.” There were grins. Ibrahim was no tyrant, but he did occasionally let slip mild concern at uniform standards in the building of late.
Vanessa shuffled along a seat so he could sit beside her and across the aisle from Sandy. “Hello, gorgeous,” she offered. “It is a lovely uniform.”
“Goddamn, girl,” said the yellow-haired Texan. “Darn shame, you bein’ married an’ all.”
“Abraham,” said the FSA Director quite mildly, “I seem to recall some literature of yours on the detrimental effects on procedural outcomes of too much familiarity between coworkers? I think we could all become acquainted with that work again.”
“And while you’re at it,” said Vanessa, “catch up with the Daily Gossip’s latest article on asshole bosses who won’t allow their overstressed workers any fun at all. It’s a doozy.” Even Ibrahim struggled against a smile.
“Thank you, darling,” said Sandy. “And now he knows why I brought you.”
“It was a minor work,” Abraham told Ibrahim with an impish smile.
“Good,” said Ibrahim drily, organising a comp slate on his lap. “Work. Reggie.”
“Yes,” said Reggie, and Sandy sensed the uplink connect to the room’s holodisplay. “Preliminaries on the maglev terrorists. Again, the usual disclaimer, we are aware that not everyone in the room is a neuroscientist. . . .”
“Including you,” Steve added with a wry smile.
“Well, sure,” said Reggie, a touch self-consciously. “Let me rephrase that. None of us in the room are neuroscientists, but some of us have to borrow from that field frequently.”
“While others of us are far too busy to dabble in a new discipline,” Ibrahim summarised. “Understood.”
“We don’t yet have the complete files on them,” Reggie continued. “A lot of Pyeongwha security personnel are blank IDs, very hard to trace. But the very fact that they’ve accumulated these advanced skill sets without leaving any official record trace is indication enough.
“We’ve been retracing their movements, which has in turn given us leads to their uplink records . . . they’ve been scrubbing, but there’s enough left for analysis. The conversations are all in code, so the words themselves remain meaningless, but there’s a significant amount of code integration . . . Steven will get to that later.
“The end result is a PT graph like this.” She linked up the holographic display in the middle of the circular floor. “PT is ‘psychological topography,’ for those of you who don’t regularly attend these briefings.”
With a glance at Reichardt and Vanessa. “I was gonna say ‘physical training,’” Reichardt offered.
“Perfect tits,” said Vanessa. Strangled smiles. “Do go on.”
“You can’t actually graph that,” said Steven. “Though god knows some of us have tried.”
A 3D graph appeared in midair between them, shimmering. The nonexperts in the room frowned, squinting slightly as it slowly rotated. “You can see the star pattern here,” said Reggie, as figures on the graph aligned to make a five-pointed star, “this is the intersection of . . . well, I’ll stay away from the technical terms—the intersection of short-term memory recall, interactive emotion, spatial perception . . . and a few other things. But when this star shows up on a Kitamura Graph, you know it’s probably Neural Cluster Technology. NCT creates this intersection in maybe fifty percent of long-term users. It’s statistically, just . . . wildly improbable that it should appea
r in anyone else, under natural conditions. Or under non-NCT conditions anyhow. With nearly everyone uplinked these days we’re lately struggling, in this field, to recall what a ‘natural’ template looks like.”
“We call that a Ruben Star,” Steven added, with a glance at Ari alongside. “It only arose from your initial work on Pyeongwha four years ago.”
“Well, now you’re just engaging in Jewish stereotypes,” said Ari.
“It’s a pentagram, you dill,” said Vanessa. “Not a Star of David. Unless you’ve become a Wiccan lately.”
“My rabbi would not be surprised,” said Ari. “Could just as easily be a Kresnov Star though, half of those ideas I got from her.”
With a glance at Sandy. Sandy just watched, a leg stretched out, thumbs in pockets. Observing carefully.
“And that indicates a Compulsive Narrative Lock?” Ibrahim asked.
Reggie nodded. “It’s not a precise match, everyone’s different . . . but generally yes. Most of the Pyeongwha regime radicals, and maybe thirty percent of the general population, were showing this to varying degrees. Of course, the more extreme they were, the more likely they were to be in the Pyeongwha regime themselves. And if you have a critical mass of the population locked in to the dominant narrative, it pushes enough of the remainder into a non-compulsive orbit, what we call a submissive mass pattern. Abraham’s term.”
“On Pyeongwha it seemed to work on the rule of thirds,” Abraham explained. He was the sociologist, Reggie the psych. Reggie studied individuals, Abraham studied groups. “One third compulsively locked into the regime ideology. Another third, not showing the Ruben Star, but following anyway—that’s the submissive mass pattern, the people who follow not because their brains have left them no choice, but due to natural, unaugmented social pressure and Compulsive Narrative Syndrome. Which leaves a remaining third, largely too afraid to oppose, even if they feel opposed.”
“And of course a lot of that last third have the Ruben Star as well,” Reggie added. “They just haven’t locked into the regime ideology, they’ve locked onto something else. A lot of anti-regime activity on Pyeongwha was organised by ideology and institution, there was a lot of religious opposition, so of course the regime shut down the religious activity.”
“So in some ways,” said Steven, “the regime was right to be paranoid. The opposition groups really were out to get them, and the regime knew just how fanatical they were, because the regime had the same fanaticism.”
“That’s an international relations problem,” Reichardt said grimly. “Rational Escalation, the polarisation of opposing sides in a zero-sum environment. Fleet Captains deal with that every day.”
“So okay,” said Vanessa. “We have this natural mental condition, Compulsive Narrative Syndrome. Pyeongwha’s uplink tech was making it far worse. People who have it become fanatics. So how does the regime make sure they become fanatical in favour of it? I mean, I get that that last third, where the opposition groups came from—they weren’t. The religious groups and so forth. So why aren’t there more of them? I mean, if the condition is as . . . as malignant as it seems, why aren’t people just becoming fanatical about all sorts of things? I know you have a random spread of that on Pyeongwha, but you still have this mass support for the regime. Why not more opposition, more diffusion?”
“The most relevant question,” Abraham acknowledged. Vanessa looked pleased. “It is the one aspect that my field cannot account for. And it’s her fault.” Pointing at Reggie.
Reggie sighed. “There are so many variables. I mean . . . well, we know the reasons, we just can’t narrow it down to a main one. The first possibility is input dominance, meaning simply that people accept that information which they receive the most of. If ninety percent of the information you receive tells you one thing, and ten percent tells you another, the ninety percent is what you believe. You see this in any politics and religion, people who grow up and live in environments where they are only surrounded by the same kinds of people who believe the same things rarely question their beliefs. On Pyeongwha, the regime had input dominance, it was everywhere. Compulsive Narrative Syndrome is just looking for a juicy narrative to swallow, and the regime gave it one, all day every day.”
“Which in some conditions will just set up counter-narrative dissonance,” said Abraham.
“Yes, well . . .” Reggie swept some braids, “let’s not complicate things unnecessarily. The second possibility is good old-fashioned emotional conformity. The oldest human psychology, it’s hardwired into the least-evolved parts of the human brain, the parts that fish use to school, or birds use to flock. Protection and cooperation in numbers, it’s the foundation of all society, animal or human. It’s the reason very nice children will not oppose bullies and will sometimes even join in with bullies, even if they’re not bullies themselves in other circumstances. Joining the dominant group is the most natural of human instincts, as deeply embedded as sexual desire. It takes an act of extraordinary willpower to oppose it and take another path when doing so leaves you all alone.”
She looked at Sandy. They all did. Sandy inclined her head, silent appreciation of the gesture. She did not add that sometimes she thought that her own rebellion against the League was only that in a military society that valued force and power, she was the dominant group, no matter how outnumbered.
“And the third, of course,” Reggie continued, “is narrative resonance—the opposite of the narrative dissonance that Abraham just mentioned. Which is just to compliment the Pyeongwha regime on a good marketing job. That’s the same thing political parties everywhere run on, or ideologies, or religions—the appeal to things that trigger a positive emotional and psychological response. With extreme CNS, the resonance is so strong it instantly produces emotional conviction, an extreme emotional response. It’s not new, you see it in pre-infotech societies too, look at footage from the Nuremberg Rallies in Germany in the 1930s, you’ll see people sobbing, hysterically happy and committed over a man and a regime that started a war that killed a hundred million people . . . including a good percentage of those in the audience.”
“And from where did we Jews learn irony?” Ari said drily. “I wonder.”
“And ‘the collective’ remains an emotionally powerful concept,” said Abraham. “However you define it. A state, a nation, a religion, a football team, an ideological concept of philosophy or politics. The triggers of personal identity and belonging are powerful, and too often they drive the so-called intellectual reasoning. Usually these are contributing factors to human conflicts. Certainly they were in the League-Federation War. What we fear we are beginning to see now, in the League, the destruction of Cresta and elsewhere, and in the Federation with Pyeongwha, is that the secondary sociological phenomenon becomes the driver. The cart pulling the horse, if you will.
“Usually these phenomena have a cause. Most historians draw a clear line between the rise of Hitler and the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles after the previous World War. Cause and effect. Similarly, the League-Federation War was fought over one primary issue, the question of synthetic humanity and the future direction of the human species. Now whether an individual accepts that the war was necessary or achieved anything worthwhile, from a technical, sociological point of view, we can confidently say that it had a real world cause.
“Pyeongwha did not. There was no reason for this regime to start murdering hundreds of thousands of its own citizens. They just chose to. The reasons why are largely inside the regime’s heads and those of its supporters. There were no shortages. There were no notable social or religious divisions. There is nothing remarkable about Pyeongwha on any measureable scale that one might expect to cause a violent sociological response. Other than the fact that they had Neural Cluster Technology and used it with irresponsible abandon.
“So this is what we are now faced with in the League. What might otherwise be solved as petty disagreements between worlds and social groups, now erupting into violence because of t
he extreme and uncompromising collective narratives and mindsets of its people. Modern societies require compromise to function. Some historically did not, in pretechnological days they could shut out all who thought, looked, or acted differently, or burn them at the stake, or whatever their solution. These days, societies that do that can no longer function, because the natural diversity of human experience is impossible to avoid. If the automatic response of all narrative groups toward disagreement with their narrative is violence, in modern society, then human civilisation will destroy itself en masse.”
A silence in the room.
“And am I correct,” Ibrahim added carefully, “that you believe that something similar may be happening not just in the League but in the Federation too?”
“It’s not that we believe it,” Abraham replied. Pensively, leaning forward on his chair, elbows on knees. “The evidence assures us of it. If you refer to our latest report . . .”
“We all read it,” Ibrahim interrupted. “I do not wish this meeting to waste time reviewing very well compiled figures and analysis. I want to review this basic point. If this is not a League-specific condition, and is also spreading in the Federation despite our relative lack of Neural Cluster Technology in uplinks, what do we do about it?”
“I don’t think it’s arguable,” said Ragi, from several rows back. Calm and quiet, as usual. “I think I understand the technical ramifications of the technology better than anyone else here—with apologies, Steven and Ari.” Steven shrugged. Ari just waited. “As an experimental GI, my brain is structured to comprehend these things better than most. And when one applies the methods of this team—mass-psychological analysis by network interaction—to recent events . . . look no further than Operation Shield, the analysis data from those events were sobering.
“I think that monitoring for the condition should be expanded. You must know what you’re dealing with, ignorance is deadly in these conditions. You have results showing particular individuals and institutions displaying symptoms, and we’ve just seen what those conditions lead to, left unregulated. A coup and a shootout in the Federation’s capital city. If we can prevent that, we should.”
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