Cassandra Kresnov 5: Operation Shield

by Joel Shepherd

  “Sandy,” said Vanessa, “these are some cool folks I know. I'd tell you who they work for, but they don't actually have a name.”

  “No name?” said Sandy drily. This game of “our organisation is more secret than yours” was becoming a little silly. Usually it was just silly acronyms and pseudonyms. “Good heavens, you must be important.”

  The young man who extended his hand to her grinned. “No, actually. We're only as important as people think we are. I'm Steven. These are Reggi and Abraham.” At the woman and man with him. “Please, I understand you've been injured, have a seat.”

  There were tea and biscuits waiting for them on the table. Neatly arranged. Sandy sat, increasingly suspicious. But if Vanessa had pointed her into a room containing the devil, she'd still have gone inside.

  “Now, Commander,” said Steven, as they all took seats, “we basically run some interesting software programs. Social sciences, predictive routines, I'm sure you know the stuff.”

  Again, if it had been for anyone other than Vanessa, she'd have politely, or less politely, excused herself. “Poli-sci cubed,” she said. So called because it was, as some wag had described, political science in a box. “And what's your success rate running at lately?”

  Steven's face fell. He was very young, no more than early twenties, blond and small and earnest.

  “Sandy,” said Vanessa with an assertive smile. “Be nice.”

  “That's not the nature of our software,” said Abraham, a tall man with a goatee, skullcap, and a gentle Bengali accent. “We've no interest in predicting the future of broad events. As your scepticism suggests, there is little productive sense in such a path. We only try to analyse trends along specific axies.”

  “Pyeongwha,” Reggi added, a little impatiently, as though she thought the boys weren't getting to the point Sandy needed to hear. She was African, round-faced, with long, girly dreadlocks. “Our research comes from the data on Pyeongwha.”

  It did get Sandy's attention.

  “What about Pyeongwha?” she asked.

  “Pyeongwha has been classified as a mass isolated outbreak of Compulsive Narrative Syndrome exacerbated by Neural Cluster Technology, a branch of uplink tech that was supposed to be banned in the Federation for precisely this reason,” said Abraham. “The theory has always been that NCT causes this because NCT is a defective technology, leading to defective outcomes.”

  “Well, I've never bought that,” Sandy said cautiously. “NCT isn't defective, it does precisely what it's supposed to do—allow data-sharing across multiple neural levels to create a multi-dimensional neural environment for all members of a society to enjoy a collective emersion experience. Which is safe if the human brain were constant, but it's not, it adapts and develops pathways depending on usage, so if you make it behave like a hive mind, it will eventually grow into one. That's what we see on Pyeongwha. Not defective, just deadly efficient.”

  The three suits exchanged looks with each other, and with Vanessa. As though just now reassured that they hadn't made a mistake in coming to Sandy.

  “Good,” said Abraham. “Not defective technology, no, it's an entirely reasonable outcome, if you understand the psychology and wiring. On the larger scale, it creates nightmares.”

  In Pyeongwha's case, a totalitarian state addicted to NCT and its advantages, creating a collective sense of “we” that labelled anyone not similarly addicted as an enemy, even its own citizens. Six hundred thousand dead over several decades, most of those in the last five years as the terror escalated, before the FSA raid led by Sandy and Vanessa had smashed it. News was still coming out; only now were the more gruesome details becoming public, though not having the impact it should have thanks to a media more obsessed with the “scandal” of the Grand Council's decision to attack in the first place.

  “We've come to you because we think a similar phenomenon may be occurring here on Callay,” said Reggi. Sandy just looked at her. People who didn't know her often found it intimidating when she did that. And a few who did know her. “At first Intel Chief Naidu found our reports interesting, and they were circulated amongst some CSA people, mostly…a few FSA, but it's not really a Federal thing yet. That's how Commander Rice encountered our work, and she recommended you.”

  Glancing at Vanessa, as though hoping for assistance. Vanessa just looked thoughtful. Measuring. Ah, thought Sandy. Not a fan, no, Vanessa was rarely so simple. Just looking to start an argument, perhaps. But to what ends? Sandy didn't think Vanessa would give her much help either. Vanessa liked arguments. Could chew your ear off for hours, then depart with a hug and a smile, taking none of it personally.

  “Go on,” said Sandy. “I'm listening.”

  Relief on surrounding faces. There followed the lecture. It was complicated, social science types always were. There were data inputs, algorithms, collation models, cross-reference systematics, network pattern analytics. Programs that stored and cross-referenced huge volumes of historical and current events, within certain parameters, to try and trace trends. Sandy found it somewhat impressive…though with her own network skills, she could immediately see areas where their processing software could benefit from significant upgrade. Unfortunately for them, the programs she had in mind would be largely illegal. Stuff she'd invented herself that could extract personality profiles from construct matrixes.

  But her main problem, as always, wasn't with the software, it was with the human operator inputs. Events had to be classified into groups for the software constructs to work. So a Callayan Parliament vote on a particular piece of legislation had to be classified as an “x” type of event, and placed into particular categories…but was it really? And if those choices were bad, or misleading, that rendered all data collation pointless.

  “So here's where it gets interesting,” said Steve, with building excitement. He was the software guy, the young genius who ran all the network stuff. “We have some very interesting network constructs that analyse personal constructs and the interfaces between them and visible network traffic.” Opening up a whole new window on the holographic presentation he had hovering above the table. “Now what this enables us to do is gather and collate very rough psychological profiles from visible traffic.”

  Pause for emphasis. Crazy voodoo shit, right? his smile said. It sounded entirely too familiar. Sandy's suspicion, recently suppressed, now resurfaced.

  “How?” she asked, cutting off whatever he'd been about to say next.

  “We can't say. It's classified.”

  “You made this stuff yourself?”

  “Well…no.” But he badly wanted to say yes, it was obvious.

  “Because I've had success running psych profiles off network traffic by running co-receptive parallax cognitive matrixes off the primary support bands in an echo pattern…only I can't say more than that, because that's classified.” Blank looks. “Looks a bit like this.”

  She fished out a rough draft of her particular illegal function and showed part of it, just shoved it onto their hologram without asking a passkey, and spun the fancy bundle of intricate, glowing lines around a few times.

  “Looks familiar,” said Vanessa, with feigned surprise. She'd been in on those meetings too, the ones where several intels had nearly flipped their lids at what Sandy was proposing.

  Reggi put a hand to her mouth, eyes wide. “Oh, my God.”

  Abraham exhaled hard and looked at the ground. Steve looked confused. “You mean it's…it's yours?”

  “Don't worry,” said Vanessa, “it doesn't make your research unoriginal, it just makes the parts that processed it unoriginal.”

  Sandy uplinked to Vanessa. “Naidu gave it to them, didn't he?”

  “Pay attention,” said Vanessa. “The kid's right, this is where it gets interesting.” And hadn't answered her question, Sandy noted. Not Naidu? Ibrahim? Ari? Not without permission, surely? The trouble they'd all get into if some outside rights agency discovered they'd been running this stuff on actual profiles, not just dumm
y tests.

  “Okay,” said Steve, “I'll do this more quickly then, since you probably understand what we've done better than we do.”

  “Wouldn't bet on that,” said Sandy, “I just write software for a hobby, I'm built for it. Third- and fourth-generation extrapolations aren't my thing.”

  “Okay, when you look at Pyeongwha network traffic, using this software, what do you see? What makes it different from Tanushan networks?”

  Using this software? That she wasn't allowed to have and could be imprisoned for using on unsuspecting folks without their consent? Now she understood the secure room, given what she was being asked to admit to.

  “Less deviation,” she said. “I've analysed automated traffic from user-generated construct patterns on Pyeongwha from about a month before we hit it. Usually you'd expect pattern deviation thirty to forty percent higher than what I saw.”

  “Wait,” said Vanessa. “Pattern deviation in what?”

  “Standard communication. We're talking now. We're speaking words, sentences, grammatical patterns that modern software can run, and analyse things like our degree of intelligence, education, relationship to each other, social structures…”

  Steve was nodding excitedly as he spoke, following her intently. Clearly this was his thing, and he looked like he might be in love. Sandy was used to that.

  “And you can verify that for accuracy?” asked Vanessa, frowning in concentration. She was not an expert here, just an interested layman. But the results of this stuff determined how often she got shot at each year.

  “Absolutely!” said Steve. “We've blind focus test grouped it, many times, it's amazing how close we get. You add in stuff like voice stress analysis, microsecond pauses between words, then overlay the emotional state onto the words, then back into the broader psychological profile…cascade feedback, we call it…it's incredibly accurate.”

  “But between each of us in this room,” Sandy continued, “you'll find psychological deviation. Particularly with me, since my background and psychology, I'd hazard a guess, is the most distinctive of any in this room, and the most different from the rest of you. But again, the differences in speech patterns, identifiable psychologies, background influences from racial, religious, gender and other factors, ought to make for a reasonable level of deviation.”

  “Except between us three,” Steve added, pointing to himself and his two colleagues, “because we're in the same field and use the same socialised vocabulary and speech patterns when we talk, group dynamics are hugely important in measuring deviation. At least in this present conversation—if we were talking about football, probably we'd get a standard deviation result.”

  “So put you with a group of your GIs,” Vanessa said thoughtfully, looking at Sandy, “and you'll get a big drop in deviation levels.”

  Sandy nodded. “Probably even more so than with straight humans. GI psychology is influenced by mass early life formatting and tape teach, we're not as different from each other as you are.” Sadly, she thought, recalling the Droze rebellion. And shoved dark thoughts aside.

  “Now,” she continued, “when you run analytical programs on network traffic like this, you have to adjust for group dynamics and clustering, I mean you can see dramatic drops in deviation just here in Tanusha if all you listen to is people who share the same beliefs, same religion, same politics, etc.”

  Vanessa nodded. “The isolated mainstream, I know.” Every law and security person knew that one, the tendency of networks to bring like-minded people together. Even extremist views could become mainstream in a chat room where everyone was an extremist, and thus the net had always tended to cluster extremists together and make their own little mainstreams where they felt accepted and legitimised. Which could be very bad news, from terrorism to paedophilia.

  “But even adjusting for that, deviation on Pyeongwha was way down. NCT just produced a conformity. How much of it was simple fear of being seen to be different from others, and how much of it was the genuine hive mind rewiring that NCT does on people, we can't measure yet…or I can't. But on Pyeongwha, prior to the invasion, people were thinking and talking in general public conversation as though they had far more in common with one another, psychologically, than is typically or naturally the case, in human society.”

  “Makes you wonder what results you'd get if you could run that on a pre-uplink society,” said Vanessa. “Free information technology was always supposed to make us more independent and individual, but sometimes I wonder.”

  Steve smiled, with a glint in his eye. “Have you tried running those communication deviation figures against a full social spectrum analysis like we've compiled here?” Nodding to his holographics.

  “That,” said Sandy, “would be too far down the rabbit hole, even for me.”

  “This,” said Steve, “is the most illegal thing you'll ever see me do.”

  He activated a function, and a whole new graphic appeared on the display. A three-dimensional graph with multiple axies. Coloured lines squiggling all over the place. Sandy was good at processing complex three-dimensional imagery, but this took her a whole lot of staring and squinting to begin to make any sense of.

  “That's it,” he announced. “That's the great, Callayan collective conscience. Or Tanushan, mostly, as Tanushans generate six times more network traffic than other Callayans, the whole echo-response effect.”

  “It's pretty,” said Vanessa, not even trying to analyse it. “What does it say?”

  “You've embedded psych signatures,” Sandy murmured, still gazing. “Psych profile categories, from network traffic. Holy fuck.”

  Vanessa looked at her. Sandy didn't swear often…or not in response to holodeck presentations, anyhow. It took serious data to impress her that much.

  “Psych categories?” Vanessa asked.

  “We arrange them in a grid,” said Reggi. “Different psychological profiles, they've all got technical terms that mean nothing to laymen, but surely you've read many profile categories dealing with dangerous people in your line of work…”

  “Right,” said Vanessa, “but these are just ordinary people?”

  “Chatting or transmitting or accessing VR or whatever,” said Sandy, “on private networks with no knowledge their transmissions contained enough data to allow a government agency to scan their brain and make a personality profile.”

  Silence around the table. Very illegal, yes.

  “And you collate all the profiles,” said Steve, “and you run them against particular events on the calendar…”

  “Oh, fuck, you temporised them too,” said Sandy, both fascinated and horrified.

  “Well, yeah,” said Steve. “So about here,” and a mark appeared on a running graph line, “is where President Singh won the election.” A group of lines, measuring various personality profiles in aggregate tens of thousands…and the lines wobbled as graphical waves hit them, moving in temporal simulation. “Those are wave cascades, breaking news, new data, you can check the lower windows to see what…this orange one here was the news the finance minister was going to lose his seat…and this one was news that Shanti Lal was pregnant.”

  Vanessa frowned. “The pop star?”

  “Hey,” said Steve, grinning, “you'd be amazed what affects the graphs. See, look at the reactions, these are people registering active connection to election results, that's verbal conversation, news uplinks, active alerts or seekers, even someone watching a show and the host mentions the election…”

  Sandy swore under her breath. Big Brother didn't even begin to describe it. This was uncomfortable, but astonishing.

  “…and yeah, celebrity pregnancy comes up on the feed too, we get that response as well. Helps to further refine a lot of psych profiles because we get data on alternate axies.”

  “I don't see anything unusual though,” said Sandy, eyes darting quickly over the zagging lines. “Deviation, differentiation, category spread…it all looks normal.”

  “Yes, it does,” said Abr
aham. He was the organisational theory guy, the one who dealt with institutions rather than people. Reggi was the psych. “But break it down by the key axies known to compulsive narrative syndrome…race, religion, political party affiliation, political philosophy, regional location, and others.”

  The graph separated into squares and displays. Still the lines danced and spun.

  “No change,” said Sandy. “Tanusha's very stable like that, even within the warning groups there's enormous diversity. Diversity across all axies remains the best indicator of stability, that's why the education department runs anti-polarisation routines through its tape teach education kits each year.”

  “That was last year,” said Abraham. “Now go to this year.”

  Steve made the adjustment, and now some of the lines were running noticeably in parallel. Following each other. Clusters, locked in tandem.

  “Same individuals?” Sandy asked.

  Abraham nodded. “See where they work.”

  Sandy looked, as new colour codings appeared to let her do that. There were lots and lots…but here were general categories, health, education, big business, small business, law. Aggregates still in tens of thousands. Mostly the spread was quite broad…but there were hotspots. Specific institutions, where the lines ran very close together.

  “It's not just the deviation, or lack thereof,” Reggi said somberly. “It's the speed at which deviation disappeared, given recent events, in certain institutions. Hiring practises can't account for much, their turnover isn't that large. It looks like site- and time-specific Compulsive Narrative Syndrome, at a speed that can only be accounted for by some kind of faulty uplink acceleration. Bad technology, like NCT.”

  “Only they don't use NCT,” said Sandy, “they use the same stuff everyone uses.”

  Reggi nodded. “But it's happening nonetheless. Balance in those institutions and areas, and deviation appears to be fading, we haven't yet made an exact profile of what the balance is changing to, but we're working on it.”