by Paul Dueweke
Jenner discovered a file containing the documentation for the purchase of some small computers to act as buffers and managers of the networks. Once again, the decision matrix attached to this justification did not match the reports that she pulled up. With these computers to manage the increased satellite-linked networks, the complexity of data-storage options would be unprecedented. Why does the System Manager need such a complicated network? she thought.
Jenner sat back in her chair and stared at the display before her. The words and symbols dissolved as her vision focused beyond the display. “Unless …” she said in a whisper.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Ultimate Identity
In spite of the technical success of Project Dagger, the Asp was still concerned about a deficiency in the overall strategy. He’d wanted to disguise the hardware so that it could be manufactured and integrated into the robots by the vendor from whom the robots were procured. After several trials, however, it was determined that such a charade would fail and that the risk of the robot’s true mission being discovered outside of COPE was unacceptably high. He retreated to the less-desirable fallback position of modifying each robot in-house to perform the “enforcement” function.
The modifications were refined to the point where a single technician could install the required injection device, rewire the harness, replace a few ICs, reprogram a few EPROMs, update the software, and test the totally integrated device in a realistic test range in the second basement. This young, hard-working technician could complete two such systems each week. The Asp wanted to keep the involvement at this critical stage to a minimum so it would be easier to decommission the activity at the desired time.
In a nearby lab, several engineers diligently worked at building a totally different kind of robot that could perform precisely the modifications to the spiders that this technician was doing. The engineers knew only the mechanical, electrical, and control system characteristics of the device to be installed, not its function. These engineers would then instruct the technician how to teach the new robot its specific assembly and test tasks.
The new robot would be able to complete six to eight modified spiders per week since it did not also perform such human overhead functions as eating, sleeping, and watching TV. In addition, the rework rate was near zero since the robot-building robot nearly always did the job exactly right the first time. When the time arrived for the transition from manual to automated spider modifications, the young technician was promised a promotion to a senior technical slot in the Advanced Systems Development Lab immediately following the month-long training, orientation, and debugging period for the new robot.
On the last day of this shakedown sequence, the young technician was in the test range with the last spider to be tested. The transition testing had gone quite well. There were several bugs that were discovered and corrected early in the period, but since then the new robot had performed flawlessly. Each one of its modified spiders had passed all tests and had been assigned to a special computer, which dispatched it with its instructions.
The final spider was nearing completion of its testing. The young technician noticed that the spider somehow looked different when it walked across the lab, but he was unable to decide exactly what the difference was. He’d never seen it before, but it was so subtle that he could not decide exactly what the difference was. He watched it walk. He watched it start. He watched it stop. He started and stopped the spider several times. There was something about the way it started to walk that didn’t seem right. Then it came to him. Every other spider had led off with its right front leg. This one began with its left. It seemed very odd to him, so he made a note of it in his data-log comments. But it was getting late, so he dismissed it as unimportant. If it passed all the tests, it must be okay.
The final examination of a spider was a rigorous test of its capabilities. Since its function was to carry out silent assassinations, it was important for it to be agile enough to climb things and let itself into locked buildings and silently search strange and darkened interiors in preparation for its lethal injection. At another extreme of its duties, it must be able to run down a fleeing victim with stealth and accuracy.
In the last planned activity of the test series, the spider was to run the length of the test range at maximum speed, avoiding or overcoming several moving and fixed barriers, and attack and inject a humanoid that was attempting to avoid the attack. After successfully completing that exercise, the spider returned to its station while the young technician sat at a computer console summing up the test series. The spider paused as it passed the hard-working technician whose back was to the graduate. It unsheathed the injection needle, leaped onto the technician’s back, and it sank its venom-dripping fang into young technician’s neck.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Triumph of Arrogance
“Yes, Sherwood, what is it now?”
“It still does not make sense to me. People will not suddenly begin mass participation in elections just because it is fun and certainly not because the politicians are better quality. There must be more to it than that.”
“We’ve discussed this, and it’s not even properly a part of this class. Last quarter you covered all that with Professor Newton.”
Sherwood arrogantly endured the glare of his teacher and the uncomfortable tension in the classroom. He wondered if the staff here at the Institute was merely promulgating the party line or if they really believed that the dramatic revolution in American politics was really that simple.
Maybe I should try Newton one more time, he thought. She seems different than the others. Maybe she just could not depart from the party line during class. He knocked on the door that read “Dr. I. Newton.” Her attitude was very scholarly, which juxtaposed her surfer-girl exterior.
Sherwood went right to the point. “I cannot understand why participation has climbed to over ninety percent since TV voting was introduced. And TV was only part of the change, and not even the most important part. The candidates were lawyers in the old days, and they at least paid lip service to the more popular issues. Now the candidates are media celebrities, elected on game shows. How can you rationalize such a dramatic change in such a short time?”
“Sherwood. Yeah, I remember. Sat in the back, didn’t say much. Just scared the hell out of everyone with your weird stares.” She stood up and walked to a ROM-card file and opened it, continuing to speak. “Remember Ms. Snell? Sat a little up from you. I know you noticed her … noticed probably isn’t the right word. Wonder if you took the same notice of me when my back was turned.” She rummaged through the file as she spoke.
Sherwood stared at her back—through her toward his goal. “People elect politicians based on their knowledge of trivia, and hype, and sex appeal,” he said, fondling his pipe in his jacket pocket and his lighter in his other hand. “You seem to be the only professor at the Institute not totally constrained by the COPE ethic. I wondered if you might put this into some perspective for me.”
Dr. Newton pulled out a ROM-card, the size of a credit card, and handed it to Sherwood. “This is very illuminating, although a bit iconoclastic, but probably no more than you.”
Sherwood released his pipe and accepted the ROM-card.
“Come back after you read it, and we can talk about it.” She finally released the ROM-card from her grasp. “Maybe get together over a beer.”
Sherwood placed the ROM-card in his pocket and mated again with his pipe. “Thank you, Professor Newton.” They shook hands, and Professor Newton’s eyes captured Sherwood’s until he aborted the spell.
Sherwood began reading as soon as he got home. The book was entitled The Evolution of Media Politics by Lisa J. Rutherford. In Chapter Seven, the following paragraphs caught his attention:
The political process began to be a burden on the electorate during the last half of the century. People became disenchanted because they always had to choose between two unacceptable candidates. No matter what the prom
ises or who was chosen, the economic and social climate slowly deteriorated.
Vietnam was a turning point. Before Vietnam, the standard of living of the middle class rose noticeably each year. People felt that the political process was, at least, not working against them. After Vietnam, the standard of living slipped into neutral. Advancing productivity was matched by advancing taxes and inflation.
The electorate felt their choices were less meaningful than they used to be. The party platforms converged on the politically safe territory of government growth, and the social and government debt situations never seemed to improve no matter whom they voted for.
The revolution in politics over the last thirty years has relieved much of the stress of voting. Modern voters are assured that future events are totally decoupled from their votes. Thus, they can vote for trivia, hype, or sex with no effect on the future. The modern political process has taken the risk, and thus the responsibility, out of voting. Voters can now choose the most whimsical candidates with no social impact and thus no guilt. We have developed a stress-free paradise for irresponsibility, and voters are participating as never before in history.
Finally, Sherwood thought he’d found an attempt at truth that, at least, veered refreshingly from the standard answers. For this, he and his cynicism were grateful.
He applied every ounce of his intelligence, his rigor, his skepticism, and even his paranoia to the course work at the COPE Institute. He unexpectedly found this latest phase of his education to be even more exciting than the wonders of servo control theory had been in engineering school. It even compared with the lessons he’d learned in his endless excursions through Detective’s Life and Double Agent, although that early exposure to the world of espionage could never be supplanted by engineering or politics, or even money or sex. His attachment to the world of spooks and counter spooks nurtured his paranoia.
“What would COPE do,” he asked one day in class, “if a candidate for Congress were to file a suit against COPE seeking relief from the requirement to submit to a full personal and financial investigation before he could campaign?”
“That’s quite easy,” came the quick reply. “The Supreme Court has already ruled that candidates for political office are in violation of the public trust by refusing to cooperate with COPE. We would discontinue funding his campaign.”
“But suppose he funded his own campaign or just continued to speak out against COPE?”
“We couldn’t allow that,” the professor continued.
“But what would COPE do?” Sherwood pressed.
“COPE has a history of tolerance for opposing viewpoints, however we’re also dedicated to the elimination of anarchy for the good of our citizens. We have a legal office that handles these matters on a case-by-case basis. I’m not concerned with such operational details. I’m a strategist. Now let’s continue our discussion of the organization of modern political parties.”
It seemed to him that the professors had spent so many years in the cloister of the COPE Institute that they didn’t care about many of the real world issues that Sherwood aired.
The research resources available through The Institute were, however, outstanding. One class that each student took was Individual Research, which culminated in a research paper. All the students were COPE employees so most papers related to the position of the student in the organization. Most of them dealt with financial practices and accounting standards, candidate disclosures, voter preferences, multi-media technology, and legal issues.
Sherwood devoured the few COPE reports dealing with clandestine activities. These reports were old and discussed such things as the early requirements for covert data to assure COPE’s published information. One report outlined covert data requirements and the creation of an in-house staff to collect the data. He concluded that COPE no longer wrote about its clandestine activities in unclassified reports.
He knew there must be a sea of highly classified documents. He’d been involved in such a program and knew there were others, but his lack of a “need-to-know” precluded classified investigation.
He turned to a more accessible research area—the twentieth century political climate that encouraged the transformation that had occurred. Contemporary politics was neither a natural nor a predictable consequence of the twentieth century, but he began to see the elements mandating change and the influences directing that change. The specific direction the change took might not have been predictable, but it was understandable in retrospect. The evolution gave Sherwood a frightening insight into the mind of the American citizen and the motivations behind political coalitions, past and present.
He drew some innovative conclusions about the roles of political empires, government spending and debt, and Washington arrogance in the development of a hype-class electorate. He appreciated the modern explicit role of entertainment in politics compared to its similar, but veiled, role a century earlier. The political heroes of the twenty-first century were a direct consequence of the flourishing infotainment industry of that era. He began to understand why voters embraced the glitter of the new politics, why it satisfied basic needs, and that it provided relief to no longer have to pretend to make political decisions based on substance. Voters could now indulge in political fantasies as they had always desired to do. The difference was that now it was totally guilt free with no troublesome consequences for fanciful choices.
He entitled his research paper “The Triumph of Arrogance over Apathy—an analysis of the evolution of political parties from the Great Society to the Great Collapse.” He received a C for the effort, which was better than he’d expected.
Whether a C or an A, he was now one step closer to his field assignment.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Deal
Sex was mechanical for Sherwood and Jenner. They enjoyed it, but they didn’t enjoy each other. Sex was a thing they did to sometimes help them through life, or around life. Life was centered about their things, their concepts, and their activities. They tolerated relationships with people as an athlete tolerates gravity. They both knew they soared above people by shear force of their intellects. But Sherwood went one step further than Jenner. He was superior by his very nature. His knowledge simply provided him the tools to manifest that superiority.
The times after their encounters were normally filled with marijuana, Mozart, and then silence, punctuated by vignettes of their recent technical efforts. The smoke would fill Sherwood’s apartment, drifting from room to room in rippling layers, being recycled by them innumerable times before finding freedom through some small crack or being imprisoned on a curtain or a bookcase. It blended with the darkness and the shadows as a wave merges with the sea. It made their company tolerable.
“Maxwell, was all over the Asp today,” Jenner said. “They had another ‘incorrect target’ yesterday. Some poor woman got wiped out by accident, and she happened to have connections. Too bad it couldn’t have been Maxwell. Anyway, the cover story they leaked didn’t make much sense, and I guess there’s a big flap over it. I sure don’t understand how all that cover-up stuff works.”
“COPE leaks the story to the media,” Sherwood said. “The media will buy any credible story because of its alliance with COPE and its dependence on the current administration for favors and access to the so-called news. Organized crime accepts the fall for many of the murders in silence rather than risk that the FBI might turn up the heat on their operations. The FBI is in lock step with COPE because COPE has the ears of Congress and controls the FBI budget. It is a nicely packaged arrangement with COPE and the media at the focus. The FBI, organized crime, Congress, and the Executive Branch all crowded around this focus, careful not to make shadows, but understanding their roles and their rewards.”
Jenner looked in amazement at Sherwood. “Is that what they teach you at the Institute?”
“They teach swill. Garden-variety swill for garden-variety apostles. But they do have some very good research facilities.”
“How’s your class work coming along?” she said.
“I am nearly finished there, about two weeks to go. How is Monocle progressing?”
“Well, I’ve found a way to statistically analyze the error function from the centroid track file in real time. That’ll help discriminate the object parameters,” Jenner replied.
“Have you figured out how to integrate that analysis with the edge data, or have you given up real-time merging of the data sets?”
“I haven’t given up, but the convolved function creates such an enormous data file that I can’t process it before the next data string wipes it out.”
“How about doing the convolutions at only 50 Hertz?” he said.
“That may be a way out, but I still haven’t analyzed how that effects the probability of breaking lock.”
“Sounds like a tough problem. Can you finish on schedule?”
“Not a chance. Already told the Asp I need more time or more help.” She paused. “What would you think of joining Monocle for a while when you’re finished at the Institute? You already have the tickets and your spin up time would be zero.” She hesitated. “You’d be perfect for the job.”
Sherwood lay there for some time thinking about the attractive offer. He was sure Jenner didn’t know what actually made it so attractive to him. “I am anticipating my field assignment after graduation.”