by John Barnes
“Those messages that no one intends to send, that are sent by a lot of different sources collectively, are called system artifacts. Like people doing the wave in a stadium; the wave isn’t any one person, but it’s visible to everyone. Like one color of scrunchy being reserved for the popular girls in a school; nobody makes it up, everyone just knows. Surprising numbers of fads and fashions have no originator for any practical purpose.”
“So you guess at fads and trends like the pattern recognizers?” Colonel Green asked. “And you’re studying how Daybreak is a fad?”
“No.” Arnie had an expression that amused Heather every time she saw it; it was the same one she’d seen on an astronomer who had been asked to cast a horoscope. “The pattern recognizers and trendspotters just know a lot about fads in the past, and they watch the news and the social media and look for things that look like what happened before; it’s all about their feeling and intuition.”
“The sort of thing I do,” Crittenden put in. “Highly believable and I like to think insightful, but nothing the historian at Charlemagne’s court couldn’t have done.”
“At least it’s entertaining,” Arnie said, “but forgive my pointing out it’s not science, and it can’t tell you anything you don’t already know on some level. What I do is describe in numbers the whole huge network of communications—everyone and everything, be it person, bot, book, web site, accident, whatever creates signs, and the signs they send, and everything that interprets the signs and the secondary signs that they send to each other about them. There are numbers and geometry to express all the ways the messages and their sources and targets are similar, different, parallel, whatever. That results in huge data structures, many terabytes even for the most elementary problems, which is why no one did this before supercomputers. Then, with a very fast computer, we use wavelet shrinkage—that’s a statistical method for estimating fractals if you’re up on your math—to find patterns that are persisting.
“Or to oversimplify and use an analogy—which is what Dr. Crittenden does, and why he’s easier to understand than I am—the pattern recognizers look at the clouds, and say ‘That’s a horsie, I feel good about horsies, I guess it won’t rain for the picnic.’ I teach the computer to look at trillions of pictures of clouds and notice that puffy ones with flat bottoms are associated with lightning and hail—even if I’ve never seen a cloud before.”
“Or a horsie,” Green said, grinning. “I’ve got grandkids. I can relate to horsies.”
“Or a horsie,” Arnie said. “I don’t find horsies, I find the pattern by which people learn to look for horsies—and I also find some people talking to some other people are more likely to call them horsies, and under what circumstances, and maybe construct a relationship that associates with the prefix grand- in other relationships. And I can do that in languages I don’t speak. So statistical semiotic analysis shows me brand-new patterns, things that haven’t been perceived before relating in ways that people haven’t named before; from there we can work out the tests and methods for detecting following those patterns if they’re important and persistent.
“Usually these patterns that fall out of the math are just what we call an idea pump—a person or organization that just repeats a message and encourages interested people to repeat it—and those are intentional and single-minded. Like the pattern of beer commercials having pretty girls and occurring during football games in North America.
“Sometimes the math finds a complex system like Islam, ‘Go Angels!’, or model railroading, where there are central ideas that change little and repeat often, but generate a huge volume of secondary short-lived messages—like Catholicism, say, the pope says pretty much what every pope always said, but your Catholic mother says, ‘What would Father McCarthy say if he found out you did that?’, that’s a secondary message reproducing and altering part of the primary message.”
“You were going to explain system artifact, Arnie,” Heather prompted.
Edwards cleared his throat. “I think I see where this is going from what Arnie’s already said. So a system artifact is a pattern that carries a message and originates in the system, not from any one participant, but from everyone at once.”
“Exactly,” Arnie said.
“Like esprit de corps, or corporate culture?” Green said. “No one makes them up, and you can’t order people to have them, they just sort of grow between people, but anyone who’s been around them knows they’re real.”
Steve looked up, and said, “That’s what you think Daybreak is. A group of ideas that… what, fused? Found a way to… ?”
“Evolved,” Arnie said. “It started out as a huge, inchoate list of reasons people didn’t like the modern world. As the people talked to each other, Daybreak lost all the reasons and justifications over time—I can trace out about the last half of that process—and converged on a basic idea: Working together, we can take down civilization, and we should. Within a few years, because Daybreak had acquired the priority of finding ways to propagate and to move out of virtual and into real events, it acquired skilled people, and got better at persuading them to join, and at giving up the aspects of their own ideas that separated them from other possible Daybreakers, and so on.”
“How does it keep them in line?” Heather asked. Good, good, mostly they’re getting it, look at them nod. This is going better than I thought it would. Come on, Arnie, make it—
“Well, that’s something it copied from a lot of the New Thought and ‘spiritual’ parts of the web,” Arnie said. “Made more extreme, of course. Most serious Daybreakers spend two to four hours a day staring into the computer screen while they play Daybreak messages that tell them to relax and feel calm and happy—and think about what they can do to take down the Big System. The messages reinforce negative associations for the Big System, so that the person automatically blames every small thing that goes wrong on plastic and electronics and corporations. They tie self-esteem to being Daybreak-oriented. And listening to the messages makes Daybreakers calm and happy.
“Then too, it spreads and infects other systems of ideas. About eighteen months ago Daybreak penetrated the coustajam movement in music, and that helped prepare a lot more people to drift into Daybreak; it’s also invaded the Stewardship Christianity branch of fundamentalism, and the Japanese Middle Earth Liberation League, and the Sons of Boone and Applegate, and lots of other places. But no matter what door people come into Daybreak from, once they become self-aware that they’re attracted to Daybreak, Daybreak will teach them to spend a lot of time repeating Daybreak messages to themselves, or playing them over and over from recorded media, in a deep suggestible state.”
“Who writes the messages?”
“Lots of Daybreakers scattered all over. Then they send them to each other, and try them out to see how they work with prior Daybreak messages. And they all collectively select the ones to use in their meditation and the ones to discard. For people who have been in Daybreak for three years or so, Daybreak is as central as Jesus is for a serious Baptist or the Revolution is for a serious Communist, but much more systematic and internally consistent—optimized really. Daybreak doesn’t need an enforcement system—no Inquisition, no thought police, no awareness of a friend who deviated and was shunned or arrested, because Daybreak is always a welcoming path that leads you deeper and deeper and makes you feel better at every step.
“So I think what we are seeing is the evolution of a new, much more powerful and effective kind of system artifact, and we have to understand it as such if we’re going to—”
Cameron sighed, impatiently. “All that was interesting theory until you found the connection to il’Alb il-Jihado,” he said. “But now as I see it you’ve got two possibilities. Wherever Daybreak might have come from and however people might practice it, it comes down to this: Either Daybreak found an enemy of the United States and allied with it, or the enemy found Daybreak and duped it. That means Daybreak has a leadership somewhere—leaders to be fooled or
leaders to make the decision to be an ally—”
Shouting in the main room outside.
They all froze.
Cam muttered “Excuse me,” and went through the door; by common consent, as they looked around, everyone seemed to agree to go see what the matter was. Funny, Heather thought, none of us individually decided to drop Arnie’s explanation and go out the door, but here we are, filing out. Have to ask him if that would be a system artifact.
“I just think I should go with Kim!” President Roger Pendano’s voice was wild, yelping, cracking with misery.
DoDDUSP Garren and half a dozen uniforms were all crowding around him, saying “Mr. President” in an urgent tone that meant Listen!
Cam headed for the little group by the door, trying to be there instantly while not looking like he was hurrying. Now Pendano’s voice was too low to hear words, but the passionate, desperate, throat-mashing whine in the tone was painfully audible.
Lenny said, softly, “The president wants his dinner and his bed; look at the shoulders and the expression. Shit, shit, shit. Maybe if Garren or Nguyen-Peters pulled a Patton on him, right now, and just slapped him?”
Heather shook her head. “I don’t think the Secret Service would let Garren do that, and Cam’s too gentle and has too much respect. Besides, it might just send Pendano right over the edge.”
“He wasn’t this way about the Federal Reserve bombing, or the attack on the Franklin Roosevelt.”
Heather sighed and shrugged. “But those were ‘routine terrorism’—nothing personal—it wasn’t the enemy torturing one of his best friends, then blowing him to bits, let alone something he has to blame himself for.”
Kim Samuelson departed like a lost little girl between three big Secret Service agents; Pendano slumped into a chair, face in his hands, with Garren squatting beside him and whispering, urgently.
“Breaks your heart, doesn’t it?” Lenny said.
“Yeah.” A thought struck Heather. “Might be something I can do. Back in a second.” She walked directly over to Cameron, who held his hands up as if to fend off two generals and a Secret Service man. “Cameron, I have something urgent and relevant.” She purposely stopped about twenty feet from him.
He held up an index finger to the group and walked over to her, whispering, “Thanks for the rescue, and what do you have?”
“Graham Weisbrod is good with former students in trouble. He’s stuck me back together many times. Maybe if he can talk to the President—”
Cameron grunted as if he were deflating. “Anything that has the slightest chance of working, sure. Call Weisbrod. And thanks.”
Heather turned around and nearly collided with Allie. Startled, she didn’t speak until Allie said, “Sorry, I overheard. I was coming over to suggest the same thing.”
Cameron smiled faintly. “Apparently Graham Weisbrod has some kind of amazing calming power on the minds of his former students. I don’t mind telling you, if he can do that for you at a time like this, I wish he’d been my teacher too. Anyway, go get the guru and see if he can do anything for the president. If you’ve got a witch doctor on tap someplace, bring that one along too.”
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. DUBUQUE. IOWA. 9:42 P.M. CST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Chris Manckiewicz awoke, as he often did, to the vibration and the insistent, “Wake up, Chris, it’s the phone,” in his own voice, which came from the cell phone buttoned into the pocket of his soft cotton pajamas. He sat up in bed, put the phone to his ear, punched the “prep and stand by” button on the traveler’s autocafé that he kept ready by his bed, and said, “Yeah?”
“Your guy Norcross is about to give a speech about the shootdown of Air Force Two,” Cletus said. “Have you been asleep?”
“Yeah. Needed to catch up, Norcross’s a baseball nut, I figured he wouldn’t do much during a big game in the Series, my chance for a night’s sleep.”
Cletus chuckled sympathetically. “Oh, man, the fates really are after you, Chris. Brace yourself. Vice President Samuelson was on a secret peace mission when il’Alb kidnapped him and stole his plane, loaded it with some nasty-shit weapon, probably tried to crash it into Angel Stadium during the World Series, and his old best buddy and pal Prez Rog had to order it shot down. Air Force Two is burning like a fucking match head in the California desert right now, and the smoke from it is so deadly it’s knocking planes out of the air. And Pendano hasn’t been on the air with even one word about it, zip. Now that asshole Will Norcross is going to horn in and give a speech before the President does.”
“Well,” Chris said, trying not to sound pissed off, “you know, he is running for president.”
“Yeah. That’s what I meant. Cheap political stunt. Norcross just announced he’ll be making a statement twelve minutes from now, in the front lobby of the Radisson Dubuque. You’re in that hotel, right?”
“Right.” Chris’s practiced hand switched the autocafé on, and it gurgled as it began filling his carafe. “I’m on it. Live feed as it comes, and I’ll pack you a wrapped-and-ready ASAP after that. Standard procedure.”
“Hey, make sure it is standard procedure this time. This asshole is piling on our president at a real bad time. So do him no favors, you got it? Absolutely no fancy camerawork, plug in one camera, focus it on the podium, and just record the speech.”
“I’ve got six remotes and the big one on the computer, Cletus. It doesn’t cost any extra for me to use ’em, and you never know when the main cam will go out or something will pop. Using all the cams is standard—”
“Oh, horse shit. What was that last time, you got him at that church with all the screaming, weeping Jesus bitches practically busting out of their blouses, and that one-armed cowboy dude with that Navy thing on his hat and that big old tear in his eye—”
“He was a real vet, really was on Roosevelt when the suicide glider hit it, and he lost an arm fighting the fire—I verified that. And the tear was real. And my fucking story was real, Cletus.”
“Oh, yeah, real. Real. So real we had to bring in two editors to fix it and grab all your unused feed so we could show just Norcross’s face, which is what I fucking told you to shoot, just that and the empty corners of the room—”
“There weren’t any empty corners. It was packed.”
“Fuck you. If it wasn’t for the fucking lawyers, I’d have trashed your whole file, but we have to keep that piece of shit on file now for twenty years in case we get sued. Asshole. Now, listen, I’m telling you. Don’t stick us with more stuff we can’t broadcast—you know that’s what I mean. Now, one goddam camera, on Norcross, get his speech, don’t get anything more.”
“Cletus, what do you have against good video, anyway? You cut things like that hot girl losing it at the Save Our Nation rally—”
“Yes, I did. And I’ll do it again, and I cut that damn stupid huge African-American family all waving and grinning, and the old lady doing the Pledge of Allegiance with her hand over her heart. We are not giving Norcross one more thing than the minimum. What do you want, an Emmy for covering some jackass who will destroy our industry? You think someone’s going to thank you for that?”
“You keep shitcanning my best work,” Chris said. He set his cell phone down, put it on speakerphone and full vid, then turned to dress so that as he swiftly whipped his pajamas down, the camera pickup would point straight at his anus. Of course, this may be too subtle for Cletus.
Chris snatched his working suit from the closet. With just one guy on the job, thanks to the wonders of tech, every so often he had to be the man talking in front of a building.
He listened while Cletus screamed at him; it was the same fight they had every other day. Chris only prayed that when the campaign ended, ten days from now, 247NN would reassign him as far away from Cletus as possible, so he made sure these fights got plenty nasty.
After all, nothing else was at stake. Anyone could see that Pendano was gliding to reelection as smooth as if he had glass wheels.
Word wa
s, even from Norcross’s own people, that since the ’pubs knew it wasn’t their year, with a popular Democrat running for reelection, they’d thrown the nomination to Mr. Jesus Guy just to hang the failure on that wing of the party.
Chris Manckiewicz knew all about how large organizations shaft enthusiastic people. One thing he really hated about this beat was that everyone who worked for Norcross knew that that they had no support, and, no matter how hard they worked, they’d been positioned to fail. I hate having so much in common with them.
Okay, maybe it was weird, even scary, that more than a third of the population was jumping up and down and wetting its Wal-Mart panties for a guy who wanted to add ten amendments to the Constitution to “make Jesus the Supreme Law,” whatever that was supposed to mean. Chris wasn’t going to vote for Norcross—but he wasn’t going to hate him, either. All he really wanted to do was report him.
He hadn’t said anything, being busy getting his tie on straight and running a fast suite-check on his gear, so Cletus felt ignored, and was screaming, “Listen to me, Manckiewicz!”
“I’m listening,” Chris said. “That’s why I’m not talking.” If he could just show everything about the Norcross campaign, Norcross would be understood—and then for sure he wouldn’t be elected. Did Cletus think the viewers were stupid, or what? Just last week he’d had some blond-maned teenage psychobitch for Jesus raving about killing all the gays, standing right in front of some weather-faced old farmer type, looked like a stock illo for “Farm country shot to hell,” who was obviously checking out her butt. If they’d broadcast that—
“Manckiewicz, you just remember to do your job when I tell you what it is. I need to deliver one thing to 247NN every day: twenty seconds per day of Norcross moving his mouth, to make things balanced. That’s all I need to do.”