The Truth Machine
Page 39
Although still lower than the numbers reported five years earlier, both statistics represented substantial increases over 1997 crime rates.
Few people had heard of McCutcheon in 2003. The article Pete referred to was first published in Scientific American in August 1999, and largely ridiculed by the scientific community at the time. Today, of course, McCutcheon is recognized as the founder of complex expectation theory. Considering the primitive state of the field in 1999, the predictions in the article correspond amazingly well to findings of modern probability analysis machines. Thankfully, McCutcheon’s calculations did not take the Truth Machine’s effect into account.
These crimes were not discovered until November 2049, when the Armstrong defense team performed meticulous reconstruction and computer analysis of all bank records from that period throughout the Boston metropolitan area. Their conclusions were eventually confirmed, accepted, and stipulated into the court record of the Armstrong trial.
Simple human trust, indeed! We can only imagine Charles Scoggins’s thoughts when he uttered those words, for today we know relatively little about him. A Truth Machine would have been a threat to him, but how seriously he took the concept that day is a matter for conjecture. It is self-evident that, at an early age, he became obsessed with the accumulation of wealth, fame, and power. Orphaned at age six when both parents were killed in an automobile accident, Scoggins was raised by his maternal grandmother. Apparently she loved him and treated him well, but wouldn’t (or couldn’t) give him the discipline a younger guardian might have supplied.
I confirmed this thought from the reconstructed transcript of Scoggins’s only scip interview, which took place on August 11, 2024.
Pete used a primitive compression technique that allowed simultaneous two-way calls directly from his personal computer. The digital bits were sent on the Internet to a friend’s computer in Dallas, which automatically forwarded the call to the West household. Prior to that, David wrote letters to his mother and brother every day, but would save them up for as long as a week, or until he had six pages, just enough to squeeze under the one ounce limit for a 70-cent first-class stamp. He would also telephone them, but only once or twice per month, always at off-peak times, using a phone card to get the lowest possible rate.
Later that year, after beginning a regimen of Amgen’s newly approved protein enzyme, Dexanase (generic name, leptin), Williams permanently lost 57 pounds. In the words of her new best friend, Carl Whatley, “Leslie simply metamorphosed into drop-dead gorgeous.”
Rosenfield was shocked at the amount she received. Three Seattle hospitals, anxious to fill empty beds with clinic referrals, bid the price to over 20 times earnings.
Sun Microsystems “ate ATI’s lunch” in that important niche. Their Sun Translator Units (STUs) dominate the field even today. Sun still uses Intel chips, very similar to mine, in all STUs.
In 2011, scip was still an acronym (scan cerebral image patterns) and therefore entirely capitalized. The term was still obscure jargon, used almost exclusively by people associated with ATI.
Gyrocopters, first manufactured by the Raytheon Corporation in 2006, were remarkably advanced for the time, a significant improvement over the dangerous, slow, and inefficient “helicopters” that had preceded them. Dual jet engines and circumvolution stabilizers made them nearly as safe as mini-jets. The 2011 models weren’t very different from those still in use today. Still, few companies had them; they were expensive to maintain, and had a range of less than 300 miles. ATI had purchased the machine solely for Pete’s convenience, although other executives were permitted to use it on occasion. Valuing Pete’s time at only $10,000 per hour, a fraction of its true worth, the ATI Board of Directors had calculated that the cost of keeping one gyrocopter was justified.
It wasn’t. Kramer-White pled guilty to second-degree murder. She served four years in a rehabilitation facility, during which she wrote the first two of her best-selling books on incest and sexual abuse.
Mosely refused to comment, reasoning that during the election it would have been inappropriate. Afterward, he apologized to David. After all, Mosely’s silence on the matter did point suspiciously to David as his source, which really wasn’t fair. After the election, Mosely’s source finally gave him permission to report that he’d obtained the letter from someone in Treat’s office.
At the time, well over half the circulation of new books (as well as magazines and newspapers) were still printed on paper, a very expensive medium. Now of course paper products are seldom used. Few humans today realize that paper is actually an organic material, manufactured from dead trees.
Scoggins may also have avoided relationships because he was a careful and habitual criminal, a fact of which the Wests were not yet aware. Scoggins couldn’t afford to let his guard down. Before the Truth Machine, a high percentage of crimes were solved when perpetrators were turned in by former spouses and lovers.
This measurement is based on reported crimes, so 97 percent may be a significant understatement. However, a large part of that reduction was due to the ACIP’s contribution to timely discovery and treatment of mental illness, not just deterrence of criminal activity.
Except if the subject was under seven years old. Until wristband ACIPs became affordable several years later, very few small children could be trained to be uniformly truthful.
“Issue testing” provides that, as a precondition to voting in any referendum, voters must take a test to prove that they understand both sides of the issue being voted on.
The old joke went: “What do you get when you cross a Unitarian Universalist with a Jehovah’s Witness? Someone who knocks on your door for no apparent reason.” And on August 11, 2011, Rev. Jonas herself said, “Referring to Unitarianism as a ‘religion’ would be like calling the United States Congress a ‘team.’”
Unless she turned him in immediately, learning of his crimes would have implicated her as an accessory after the fact and disqualified her from passing certain government scips. Even worse, in the case of the murder—failing to disclose a capital crime about which one has knowledge is itself a serious crime.
Constructed in 2020, when Maya was still a teenager, the church had taken nearly three months to build; the science of mechanized construction was still in its early stages, and the architecture was elaborate.
Until 2017, automobiles were considered so dangerous that, for safety reasons, they were required to have “seat belts,” which were actually harnesses.
For the sake of international uniformity, the spelling of her last name was legally changed from Schuyler to the phonetic spelling, “Skylar,” during her second presidential term.
This optimistic prediction was based on preliminary results of H.R. 1717, the Homelessness Act, an ambitious program that among other things offered subsidized housing, subsidized drug, alcohol, and mental illness treatment and job training, and guaranteed jobs to homeless persons or those in danger of becoming homeless. It would actually take 12 years before the homelessness problem was effectively eliminated.
LottoPick was announced three years after the admission of Puerto Rico, but East New York and West New York still comprised a single state.
About this Title
To prevent abuse of the law, a machine must be built that detects lies with 100 percent accuracy. Once perfected, the Truth Machine will change the face of the world. Yet the race to finish the Truth Machine forces one man to commit a shocking act of treachery, burdening him with a dark secret that collides with everything he believes in. But the creator of the machine is himself guilty of a shocking crime. Now, he must conceal the truth from his own invention or face execution.
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p; James L. Halperin, The Truth Machine