by M.A. Harris
Purple Passion’s Surprise
In a nondescript old industrial building near the Baltimore Washington International airport Clarence Fish played solitaire. He was the watch tech for a computer network called Purple Passion for no reason anyone was ever willing to own up to, of course that was shortened to PP.
The building Clarence and a few armed guards occupied was full of servers but it was only a sort of launch pad and final processing center. PP was mostly a world spanning swarm of autonomous software agents infecting hundreds of thousands of computers. The agents mined data, scanning databases wherever they found them and could get access, allowed or not. Public or private, individual, industrial, government, military, classified, unclassified, PP’s agents gathered it all. Ad hoc nets then processed the data, linking it in humanly incomprehensible matrices while still other parts creamed off data.
By its very nature PP was rather chaotic; some very smart people had used that to drive something that could be called intuition. The system provided a lot of very pedestrian facts and figures, usually well in advance of ‘official’ pronouncements and often of a nature no one would have voluntarily provided
One of PP’s most public but least important outputs was a list of threats to the United States. The list varied in length over time but was rarely shorter than thirty or longer than fifty. The bottom of the list was unchanging, perennial favorites, catastrophic volcanism or global warming, asteroid impact, nearby supernova. While the top ten constantly changed.
A lot of junior analysts used it, a few senior strategic thinkers referred to it. ‘Real’ policy makers ignored it; they knew they were a whole lot smarter than any damn computer.
One of the PP’s data spiders resided in the Reagan’s ‘Event Log.’ The use of ballistic weapons to destroy a ship leased by the HFF in the South Pacific was noted as important but caused no major reaction.
The next ‘pulse’ of analysis a few hours later caught the odd sightings over the island of Palalo Sadong, also flagged as significant. These tags and others uploaded into the analysis net caused an avalanche of cross connections. The near temporal juxtaposition of the happenings near Palalo Sadong linked to the loss of three helicopters to laser weapons and the disappearance of experimental laser weapons in transit, then the loss of several moon bound spacecraft recently, these cross linked back to Aristide Industries, and a little town in Utah, and reports of financial irregularities. One cascade created another and then others.
Clarence was deep in consideration of his next move when the computer spoke quietly, his preference was for the breathy voice of HAL, the computer in 2001 A Space Odyssey, “I have a new top threat Clarence, and a new threat list for the US and Worldwide.”
Frowning at his game Clarence shrugged, “Fine PP, send it out to the usual list.”
“Very well Clarence, it is on your main screen, it is an interesting new top threat I think?”
Clarence blinked, his mind still half focused on his game, “uh, sure PP, what country is it?”
“It’s not a country Clarence; it is a company, Aristide Industries.”
Clarence shot bolt upright, “Uh…you sure about this PP?”
“Quite sure Clarence…but then I am a computer.”
Clarence was tapping his comm pad, he needed to talk to the lead computer scientist, PP had gone off the deep end this time, “Ah, hold back on sending out that e-mail PP?”
“Sorry, it is already gone Clarence, why?”
Clarence swallowed, “Ah, it’s an unusual call PP.”
“I have found my most unusual ones have a high chance of being right.”