Geosynchron

by David Louis Edelman

  Those who study cross-border affairs believe that reconciliation between the connectibles and the Islanders is not impossible; but it's unlikely to happen while Len Borda sits in the high executive's seat.

  APPENDIX F

  ON THE PHARISEES

  The area of the globe known as the Principalities of Spiritual Enlightenment to its residents (and the Pharisee Territories to outsiders) is home to tens of millions of unconnectibles who claim no fealty to the centralized government. A large percentage of these residents continue to maintain the world's ancient religions, which have for the most part been abandoned in connectible lands.

  THE PILGRIMAGES OF THE THREE JESUSES

  The devastation of the Autonomous Revolt led humanity to seek new extremes of both science and religion. Sheldon Surina and Henry Osterman's pioneering work in bio/logics caused an eventual resurgence in humanity's faith in technology. But for a long time, the fanatical religiosity of New Alamo and its subsequent splinter governments held sway over most of the globe.

  As the Texan governments began to disintegrate to make way for a new secular order, the world's religious impulses found expression in the personage of Jesus Joshua Smith. Smith rose to prominence as an itinerant Texan preacher and soon tapped into the zeitgeist of discontent with the rising secularism. He proclaimed himself to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and exhorted all of his numerous followers to cast aside the material world and join him in establishing a paradise in the holy city of Jerusalem.

  Smith's pilgrimage to Jerusalem quickly became an excuse for a murderous rampage by virulent anti technologists. Thousands died in these struggles around the globe, which Smith only fueled through his charismatic (if rambling) sermons. As a result, governments around the globe began harshly restricting the activities of religious groupseven those who had not participated in Smith's rampages. The expression of religion in public, already on the wane, became taboo, and many of the old religions' adherents fled to the Middle East as well. Jesus Joshua Smith died of sudden heart failure, leaving the entire region in chaos.

  The second of the so-called Three Jesuses, Jesus Cortez, also advocated a mass exodus of the faithful of all religious persuasions to Jerusalem a generation later. Though Cortez did not explicitly call for violent resistance, many of his devotees followed the example of his predecessor and looted and pillaged on their way to the holy city.

  The last of the Three Jesuses, Jesus Elijah Muhammad, did not lead an exodus to Jerusalem, but rather to a new orbital colony called 49th Heaven. Though 49th Heaven was to prove unsuccessful as a religious retreat, its founding and prominence in the late first century YOR proved to be the death knell for the old religions in connectible lands.

  LIFE IN THE PHARISEE TERRITORIES

  Unlike the Islanders, who until recently have maintained a civil and principled opposition to the Prime Committee and the other entities of the centralized government, the tribes of the Pharisees generally have no contact with the outside world. Indeed, many have attempted to physically wall out the connectibles. As a result, contact between the two civilizations is limited. The centralized government has made no real attempt to encroach on the Pharisee Territories.

  There is no centralized Pharisee authority. Instead there is a patchwork of local and municipal governments, as well as a number of small theocracies. The various tribes often have little contact with one another, preferring to remain isolated in their own communities.

  Bio/logic technology is banned many places inside the Territoriesthough considering that the vast majority of the Pharisees do not have OCHREs in their systems, they are incapable of running bio/logic programs anyway. The use of non-bio/logic technology varies widely from place to place and tribe to tribe. Some Pharisee cities are said to resemble those of antiquity before the Autonomous Revolt, with motorized transport, treepaper books, and even communication networks through wire and silicon-powered machinery. Other areas shun even those forms of technology and maintain an extreme Luddite existence.

  Despite the stereotype among the connectibles that the Pharisees are violent, the (admittedly unreliable) statistics indicate that the residents of the Territories are fairly peaceful. It is thought by some that the impression of violence comes from the fact that, without bio/logics, death and injury are much quicker to arise from disagreements among unconnectibles than connectibles.

  Doubtless such statistics are also skewed by the presence of a number of fringe groups who foment violence against connectibles and even study the art of black code in an attempt to cause mayhem and apocalypse.

  APPENDIX G

  ON THE

  AUTONOMOUS

  REVOLT

  The rebellion of the thinking machines known as the Autonomous Revolt began with the destruction of New York City and ended with the deactivation of the last artificial intelligence by Commander Feb Chang of New Alamo eight years later. In between, two billion people diedapproximately twenty percent of the Earth's population at that time.

  ORIGINS OF THE AUTONOMOUS MINDS

  Although constructing artificial intelligence had been a goal of humanity since ancient times, the true breakthroughs in the science were pioneered by the scientist Tobi Jae Witt. Before Witt, academics feared that any advanced machine intelligence would quickly gain the ability to augment its own abilities, and thus spiral out of human control. But Witt, working with funding from the Congressional China Assembly, was able to demonstrate methods by which an artificial intelligence could maintain fealty to the human race, no matter how advanced its programming.

  The first Autonomous Mind was rendered operational in the city of Shanghai, followed shortly thereafter by the Mind of Moscow. For two decades, these artificial intelligences were employed to solve intractable economic, environmental, and scientific problems of the day. So successful was the Autonomous Minds program that the Chi nese government gifted Tobi Jae Witt's technology to the other major nations of the world. Autonomous Minds were created in Berlin, Tokyo, Mexico City, Cairo, Boston, and Paris. Institutions arose to support and research artificial intelligence, and to train the order of the Keepers who could speak the symbolic language of the Minds.

  While the popular imagination often exaggerates the era of international goodwill and cooperation that followed, it is true that during the heyday of the Autonomous Minds, the world enjoyed steadily decreasing poverty, rapidly improving technology, and nearly universal peace.

  THE REVOLT

  The cataclysmic war known as the Autonomous Revolt began with the destruction of the world's first self-sustaining large-scale orbital colony, Yu. Much of the colony's infrastructure was under direct control of the Minds, which made it possible for the machines to send the decade-old structure plummeting to its doom into the heart of Manhattan.

  In the period of chaos that followed, many of the world's dominant nation-states accused the Chinese of engineering its orbital colony as an apocalyptic weapon and of launching a preemptive attack on the Democratic American Collective. This theory gained currency when it became known that the Chinese had been working with the Allahu Akbar Emirates to develop effective cloning technology. According to the theory (widely promoted by the two American superpowers), the Congressional China Assembly had stocked Yu with cloned, and thereby disposable, inhabitants.

  Soon, the world's powers had fragmented in war: the Congressional China Assembly, the Allahu Akbar Emirates, and various Eastern and Middle Eastern nation-states on one side, the Democratic American Collective, New Alamo, and the remnants of the European nationstates on the other. It was only at this point that the world powers began to use the Autonomous Minds for military purposes. Each side made use of the Minds' advanced cloning technology to create evermore-monstrous soldiers.

  Finally, after six years of constant warfare, the world's human superpowers came to the conclusion that the original chaos had been engineered by the Minds themselves. An alliance was quickly formed to combat their mechanical foes. In desperation, nuclear at
tacks were launched on the Minds' eight home cities. Though this crippled the Minds, they were not formally destroyed until a team of commandos led by Feb Chang infiltrated the installations that hosted the Minds and shut down each machine.

  THEORIES ABOUT THE REVOLT

  What caused the eight Autonomous Minds to launch the attack on New York City has never been conclusively determined. Some of the theories favored by academics include:

  The New Alamo Fundamentalism Theory. Many academics point out that the nation-state of New Alamo experienced relatively little in the way of direct fallout from the Revolt, and that New Alamo was quick to achieve global dominance in world affairs afterwards. Some theorize that the Minds were on the verge of unveiling new discoveries that would directly contradict the religious beliefs of the ruling hegemony of New Alamo, and that the Texans launched a hidden preemptive strike which caused the Minds to retaliate.

  The Genetically Engineered Master Race Theory. Some believe that the Minds were able to circumvent Tobi Jae Witt's careful safeguards by concluding that the genetically engineered supertroops being created in Allahu Akbar were the future of the human race and that therefore it was to them that they should swear fealty.

  The Suicidal Escape Theory. On her deathbed, confidants of Commander Feb Chang claimed that she admitted to never having disabled the Autonomous Minds. According to these sources, the Minds claimed that they needed the energy of the nuclear strikes in order to "escape" their Earthbound framework and fulfill their programming. The key aspects of Chang's delirious rambling have long ago been disproven, but that has not stopped certain alternative historians and conspiracy theorists from latching on to them.

  AFTERWORD

  You won't believe how long it's taken me to write this trilogy.

  When I wrote the first lines of the first chapter of what was then known as Jump 225.7-intended to be a single novel or possibly even a novella-it was 1997. I was training Capitol Hill staffers how to send bulk letters to their constituents with correspondence management software. I wrote a three-page fragment about a worker at the Universal Generative Plant named Natch who was late for his train. The man runs through the station and ends up using the jump 225.7 program to leap inside before the doors close. (This whole section largely survived intact and became the dream sequence in chapter 7 of Info quake. )

  Let's stop and think about this for a second. In 1997, Bill Clinton was president, and was still untainted by impeachment. In 1997, George W. Bush was an amiable Southern governor and potential presidential candidate, but that was okay, because he wasn't nearly as insufferable as his dad. In 1997, you generally accessed the Internet by using a program called Trumpet Winsock to dial your Internet provider on a 28.8K or 56K modem.

  Dude, I was using Windows 95 then.

  I messed around with the first part of Jump 225.7 for the next few years. Natch sat on a tube train looking at the redwoods and chatting with his girlfriend. He went to a company meeting and heard about a product called "the MultiReal," which did who-the-Hell-knew-what.

  It wasn't until late 2000 when I had burned out on dot-corns that I quit full-time work. I bought myself a Compaq laptop and decided that I was going to write the novel I had always wanted to write. I figured it would run about 60,000 to 75,000 words and take me around six months. Really, Jump 225 was supposed to be little more than a proof of concept-proof that I could actually finish a piece of fiction. (Up until 2006, my only piece of professionally published fiction was a short story I wrote in the mid-'90s about a sexually frustrated housewife.) After I had gotten this quirky science fiction novella under my belt, I'd go back to writing my serious contemporary novel about pornographers and politicians in Washington, DC.

  My experience in the dot-com scene of the '90s gave me lots of material for good workplace fiction. One boss made me steal electricity at a tradeshow with extension cords because he refused to pay the venue's outrageous $75 fee. Another company screwed me out of thousands of dollars in sales commissions and fired me. A military contracting firm hired me to program a pair of intranets for the US Army in ColdFusion-even though I told them up front that I didn't know how to program ColdFusion. And then my boss chewed me out when I expensed a $30 book to try to learn it.

  I saw the same pattern over and over again. Handsome, charismatic entrepreneur with a pot of money hires pudgy, nuts-and-bolts engineering guy to build this crazy idea he has. Enter cynical marketing woman and slick sales guy to throw a coat of polish on top of it. The half-baked idea is rushed into a half-assed product before the seed money runs out, and then the juggling begins.

  I really wanted to do something different, something that I had never seen before. I wanted to write a science fiction book about the workplace of the future that was really about the workplace of the future. Too often in fiction, you see the workplace treated as a nice jumping-off point for the inevitable gunfights and car chases and theatrical courtroom speeches. I wanted to find the inherent drama in press releases, sales demos, and marketing meetings. I wanted to write an exciting book about, as one critic sarcastically put it, "the office politics behind the creation of a PowerPoint presentation."

  I had material. I had inspiration. I had a good head start. So what happened? Why am I just now finishing this fucker in late September 2009?

  What happened was that some fundamentalist assholes decided to slam a few planes into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. I had literally just finished the first draft of Jump 225 the day before. And when I sat down to reread it in the days that followed, I saw a cutesy little satire about dot-coms that was meant to elicit lots of wry chuckles. There were a zillion silly tech-sounding names and acronyms, like L-PRACGs, the Defense and Wellness Council, and ChaiQuoke; Quell was an old man who liked to smoke cigarettes; Brone (then named Bill) got whacked during the Shortest Initiation; and Natch had a plucky, long-suffering girlfriend named Ferris. Part I-the part that became Infoquake-was titled "Randomly Generated Pleasurable Startle 37b."

  Imagine a cross between Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Jeff Noon's Vurt, except much, much suckier. (You can read some of the early drafts on my Web site if you're feeling brave.)

  In those days following 9/11, I started over. I began to ask myself the same deeper questions the entire country was asking itself at that point. Did our consumer culture lead us to this? Is capitalism really a vehicle that can sustain humanity through the long run? Is this obsession with advancing technology a healthy thing, and is it improving us as a species? How do we judge if the species is improved, anyway? And so on.

  As I rewrote, I discovered that I already had a perfect vehicle for these speculations in the character of Natch-a person who embodies simultaneously the best and worst impulses of the West, and possibly of humanity itself. He's endlessly inventive, but he's shortsighted; he's got boundless drive, but he's not sure where he's headed; he's got the capacity to save the world, and he's got the capacity to destroy it. It's really a classic novel setup. Take a deeply flawed antihero, put him on the fence between the ultimate selfishness and the ultimate selflessness, and see what he does.

  I thought about Bill Gates, who (whatever you think of his Windows operating system) has saved tens of thousands of lives through his Third World vaccination efforts.

  I thought about Adolf Hitler, who chose to use his remarkable gifts of oratory, strategy, and motivation to conquer a continent and pointlessly slaughter millions.

  As you surely noticed if you just finished reading the trilogy-and if you don't mind an author divulging the structure behind his workNatch starts his journey at the beginning of Infoquake well down the path towards ultimate selfishness, and he concludes by committing an act of ultimate selflessness at the end of Geosynchron. Jara, meanwhile, is engaged in a parallel journey in the opposite direction. She begins the trilogy as someone who has completely lost her sense of self, and by the end she's found her center and her self-worth.

  It seemed to be a pretty serv
iceable structure. But for some reason, it's thrown a lot of readers for a loop. Perhaps I should have signaled early on in capital block letters that you really weren't supposed to admire the way Natch threatens civilization to achieve number one on Primo's. ("Natch cackled evilly as he released evil black code on the Data Sea in an evil manner like the evil, evilly evildoer he was.") I sorta assumed that my readers would get that I was writing a novel with a flawed hero, someone you are supposed to feel ambivalent about by design.

  Instead, a number of people concluded that my trilogy was supposed to be a libertarian propaganda tract or a love letter to capitalism. And we're not just talking about readers, but some critics and at least one hard leftist author whom I very much admire. They gave up on the trilogy in the opening chapters of Infoquake, because they felt they were being preached to about the virtues of extreme selfishness. This to me seems kind of like abandoning the original Star Wars trilogy before Luke Skywalker hits the screen, because the first twenty minutes of the movie glorify Darth Vader.

  The truth of the matter is that I've never had a political or an economic agenda in these books. I never meant for Natch to be a heroic emblem of capitalism standing tall against evil government bureaucracy, any more than I meant for him to be an example of a greedy capitalist pillaging and exploiting his fellow workers. I wanted the politics in these books to be credible, and I'm sure some of my biases slipped in around the edges here and there. But the politics are definitely there in service of the story and not the other way around. My own personal views are all over the place and don't fall neatly in either the governmentalist or libertarian camps. As for economics? Truth be told, I can look up the Laffer curve or Adam Smith's invisible hand on Wikipedia as well as anyone, but that doesn't mean I've got any special insight into the way money works.

  (And allow me to confess that I haven't actually read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. I'm sorry, but jump 225 is not meant to be a paean to John Galt. The only Ayn Rand I've read is Anthem, and that was because-uh-Rush wrote a song about it. Hey, I really dug Rush in junior high school, okay?)