EMPIRE: Investigation

by Richard F. Weyand

  “The Emperor has directed me to invite you to book first-class passage to Center with his compliments. You will be released from the brig immediately at the end of this meeting, and should make your best way to your new assignment. Congratulations to you all. Dismissed.”

  One by one they dropped from the channel as Turley watched, but Pachner stayed behind. He walked up to her.

  “Thank you, Governor Turley. I don’t know what your role was in this, but I appreciate it.”

  “You and General Daltrey were instrumental, Fleet Admiral Pachner. You were honest about the situation, and your role in it. You and the others were done an injustice that would not stand. Not with this Emperor.”

  “So I now understand. Thank you for that, too, Governor Turley. I had begun to regret my oath to the Throne. Begun to doubt His Majesty understood that oath bound us both.”

  “And now, Admiral Pachner?”

  “I have no problem owing allegiance to that man, Governor Turley. Not the man I saw today. It is the system that failed us both. And that we can fix.”

  “Good luck with that, Admiral Pachner. It needs doing.”

  They shook hands, and Pachner dropped from the channel. Turley dropped from the channel as well, and found herself back in the living room with Gulliver.

  “He really is an amazing person,” Gulliver said.

  “Pachner or His Majesty?”

  “I was speaking of His Majesty, though it might apply to both.”

  “He knows how much weight his words carry,” Turley said. “So he’s gentle in reproof. But when he says he is in awe of you, thanks you for your service, and apologizes to you, it’s magical.”

  “Yes, I think that’s it. He’s not afraid to admit error, to seek advice, to apologize, or to thank. Coming from him, it means a lot.”

  “No. You’re wrong, Paul. To someone with over thirty years of service to the Throne, it means everything.”

  After more than thirty years of marriage to an officer and a gentleman, the wife of a general staff officer doesn’t miss much. When Fleet Admiral Erik Pachner – in the dress uniform he was arrested in the day before, but with five stars on his collar tabs and shoulder boards – walked into the living room of the townhouse on flag row where his wife had fretted for the last twenty-four hours, Dora Pachner didn’t miss anything.

  She took it all in with a single glance, and ran to him. She clung to him, sobbing in relief. For so long, she had had to be strong. Supportive. Understanding.

  Now, her strength melted away.

  Pachner wrapped his arms around her, and patted her on the back.

  “There, there, Dear. It’s all OK now. It’s all going to be OK.”

  He held her tighter.

  “We’re going home.”

  Enter The Zoo

  The new ideas group had been formed by the Empress Ilithyia I at a suggestion from Deanna Dunham Garrity. She who would become Ilithyia II was the then-Empress’s new Personal Assistant at the time, and was only seventeen years old. The current Emperor Trajan – Bobby Dunham – had been nineteen at that time, so the new ideas group had been around for sixty-six years.

  The new ideas group, the business ideas group, and the new ideas review group had been folded into Dunham’s reorganization of the Imperial government, after the Council Revolt, as the Consulting Department. That itself had been over fifty years ago. The Consulting Department was still the go-to group in the Imperial government for intractable problems.

  The new ideas group was the nucleus of the Consulting organization. A free-wheeling and unstructured group of hundreds of self-dispatching polymaths and idiot savants, they thrived on chaos. They still did most of their work in their virtual workspace, VR channel 700 – also known as the Zoo, because 700 looked like ZOO. The channel remained the same cafeteria simulation as it was over sixty years before, though the physical cafeteria it was modeled on had been remodeled and updated three times since.

  The management, too, had changed. Valery Markov had stepped down after twenty-five years of leading the group, a year after the end of the Sintar/DP War. That was forty years ago now, and the Zoo was on their third leader since Markov, a mid-30s woman named Patrizia Gallo.

  “Your Majesty, Patrizia Gallo is here,” said Steven Dillard, the Emperor’s Personal Secretary, as he waved her in.

  “Be seated, Ms. Gallo.”

  “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

  Gallo took a seat and waited for Dunham to speak. She was a dark, attractive woman in her early thirties. She reminded Dunham of his first wife, Cindy, though she didn’t have quite Cindy’s energy. Then again, nobody did.

  “Ms. Gallo, I have two problems for your group to tackle for me, one long-term and one short-term.

  “The long-term problem is the way we manage our service commanders in sector and provincial capitals. They have the choice of going along with corruption by civilian authorities, and being exposed to criminal charges and court martial, or not going along with such corruption, and being removed from their post when the civilian authorities claim they are not being cooperative. Either kills their career.

  “That is unfair and will not stand. I have impaneled a commission composed of the latest eight commanders caught in this trap. They are coming here to Center to work on solutions. While they’re in hyperspace for the next month, I want your group to be looking into it and seeing what you can have ready for them when they get here so they can hit the ground running, as they say.”

  “Of course, Sire. You say they’re in hyperspace now?”

  “Not yet, Ms. Gallo. In the next few days, I expect. They need to book passage and all, and it’s usually a few days before the next ship. You can probably contact them for more information and get a better handle on what they’ll need before they actually hit the hypergate. Here are their names, as well as interviews with two of them that illuminate the problem.”

  Dunham pushed the files to Gallo.

  “Excellent, Sire. And the other problem?”

  “Ms. Gallo, I have had to remove the sector governor and all four provincial governors in the Earth Sector, as well as the planetary governors of the four provincial capitals. More removals are coming. I need a way to identify replacements on a mass scale.

  “I would like you to come up with some criteria – I don’t know what they are and I won’t prejudice your list – for coming up with good replacements. You know, people who would probably get promoted up the chain of authority they were in if the guy above them wasn’t so young or there weren’t so many good candidates horizontal to them in their organization.

  “Find me those people, Ms. Gallo. The people who would make good replacements. Score the candidates on your criteria, whatever those are, and give me a list of good candidates for these positions. Assume there are more positions opening soon, so this is a process we can continue, rather than a one-time thing.”

  “I understand, Your Majesty. We’re on it.”

  “Oh. And I need those candidates yesterday, Ms. Gallo, but next week will probably have to do.”

  “I understand, Sire.”

  “That’s all for now, Ms. Gallo.”

  At half past nine that evening Stolits time, Admiral Pachner received a call request from Patrizia Gallo. He had no idea who that was, but her title was Director, New Ideas Group, Imperial Consulting Department. He accepted the call.

  “Pachner here.”

  “Hello, Admiral Pachner. My name is Patrizia Gallo. I am the head of the new ideas group, the Emperor’s personal think tank for figuring out solutions to his most difficult problems. His Majesty has charged my group with providing assistance to your new commission in reforming Imperial Navy and Imperial Marines regulations to avoid the sort of conundrum with which you were most recently faced.”

  “His Majesty charged your group with this task, Ms. Gallo?”

  “Yes, Admiral. We’re based in the Imperial Research Building, next door to the Imperial Palace. We have several hundred rese
archers and idea people here to work on problems. I just left a personal meeting with the Emperor in his office in the Imperial Palace. It’s half past nine in the morning here, so I was his first meeting this morning. He seems most interested in getting the research under way while you and your fellow commission members are in transit to Center. We are at your disposal.

  “So I need you to send me a list of what you’d like us to be working on while you’re in hyperspace, Admiral.”

  Gallo was speaking to the new ideas group, seated in channel 591, the simulation of a bowl-shaped lecture hall they used for presentations. Several hundred people, mostly in their mid- to late-20s, filled the seats.

  “So those are our two new assignments. I have asked for a list of task requests from each of the eight members of the Emperor’s new commission on regulations in the services. We will work on those once we get the other assignment out of the way.

  “Our priority assignment right now is the governor staffing problem. How do you pick someone to be a good sector governor, or provincial governor, or even planetary governor? What traits are predictive of future performance? How do you even judge what a good performance is? Who’s to say what good is? Official corruption is what drove this crisis in the first place, so that has to be in there. What else?

  “All these questions are on the table as we take on this problem. The good news is we have a lot of data on everyone who has served as a sector governor, provincial governor, or planetary governor. We know where they were from, what kind of education they had, including what degrees they received and what grades they earned. We know whether they were in the military and have their service record if they were. And we have everything they did once they were a governor, at whatever level.

  “The bad news is the dataset isn’t very deep. There are only seventy-nine sectors in the Empire. Prior to fifty years ago, there were only thirty. Sector governors typically serve for a long time – ten years or more – so the number of people we are talking about is small. Even if we include provincial governors and planetary governors, the entire dataset is only a few million people. And that’s a dataset we need to assemble from hundreds if not thousands of sources.

  “So there you have it. In short, determine criteria and apply them to the possible candidates.

  “And we don’t have a lot of time. A number of people have been removed from office. The people on the scene are doing the best they can to hold things together pending the arrival of replacements. And just moving people into place will take a month in hyperspace, even if, as I expect, the Emperor charters direct flights to expedite their arrival.

  “With that, I’ll let you have at it.”

  When Gallo made that last statement, her audience cut channel 591 and dropped back into channel 700. Within seconds, the lecture hall was empty.

  The Zoo was bedlam. Nothing like a new high-priority project to stir things up. A lot of people coalesced around some of the natural leaders. Many had groups they had worked well in before. Others formed new ad hoc groups on their own.

  “So who’s doing the database? Anybody know?” Zhao Meihui asked her table.

  “I bet Rad’s doing it. Let me check,” Trevor Gormely said.

  Gormely shifted his point of view in channel 700, listened in on a conversation at another table where Radovan Korzhev was holding court, and shifted back.

  “Yeah, May. Rad’s all over it.”

  “Good,” Zhao said. “So we know that’ll get done right. What about us?”

  “I think there may be predictive indicators that aren’t obvious,” Inge Laar said. “I think we should look for those. Make sure Rad builds them into the database.”

  “Like what?” Zhao asked.

  “Like building a new administration building,” Gormely said.

  “Oh, that’s a good one,” Donato Taliani said.

  “Huh? Why? That doesn’t make sense,” Laar said.

  “No, Trevor’s right, Inge,” Taliani said. “Everybody knows to short the stock of a company that builds a new headquarters. Management is all worrying about where to build, and what their new commute will be, and whether they get a management dining room so they don’t have to eat with the hoi-polloi in the cafeteria, and what the view out their office window is, and all that shit. Meanwhile, who’s running the company? No eyes on the ball.”

  “OK, so that’s a good one,” Zhao said. “What else?”

  “The size of the city they grew up in,” Laar said.

  “What are you thinking there, Inge?” Salma Norales asked.

  “I think in small towns, there are fewer people and relationships are deeper, maybe? Maybe that’s not the word. People know each other over a long time. While in a big city, there’s so many people, and it’s so vibrant, I would expect relationships to be shallower, and shorter-term. That may be a predictor. It certainly could be.”

  “Probably the population of the planet, too,” Taliani said, and Gormely nodded.

  “OK,” Zhao said. “So let’s put those in the mix. What else we got right off the top?”

  “Childhood hobbies. Adult hobbies, for that matter,” Norales said.

  “And favorite reading,” Gormely said. “Do we know what that is? Can we look at things like free-read materials in school and the like?”

  “Those sound good,” Zhao said. “What else?”

  Off in the corner of the table, slouched up against the wall, Harlan Beadle shifted his considerable weight and cleared his throat. More than ten years older than the rest of them, he was one of the old hands and Zhao’s group’s secret weapon. Once, when asked why he had not moved on from the Zoo into Imperial administration – the normal career path – he had said he found the chaos of the Zoo ‘restful.’

  “I worry about the shallowness of the dataset,” Beadle rumbled, “particularly for the sector governor and provincial governor positions. In that situation, if you have too much granularity in the individual properties, you can lose the bigger pattern.”

  “Explain, Harlan,” Zhao said.

  “Of course. Take education, for example. Rather than trying to correlate with specific major subjects or fields of study, which is the data Radovan will be collecting, perhaps it is more important in the analysis phase to aggregate those and correlate instead against categories of study. For example, qualitative versus quantitative fields. That is, are the candidates, by training, numerate or innumerate?”

  “Which would be better?” Norales asked.

  “I’m not at all sure,” Beadle said. “I can see that one going either way, actually. But I would be surprised if there were no correlation.”

  “Your bigger point, though, is to process the columns of the dataset to reduce granularity, thus making up somewhat for the limited number of rows,” Zhao said.

  Beadle nodded.

  “Precisely stated,” he said.

  Zhao smiled. From Beadle, that was a huge compliment.

  “Wait. I’m not sure I get that,” Gormely said.

  Beadle sighed and shifted, but Taliani held up a hand.

  “Let me try,” Taliani said. “So in the extreme case, Trevor, let’s say you only had fifty rows, but you had fifty or a hundred major subjects in college. You have a whole lot of subject areas with zero or one or two people in them. No pattern emerges. There aren’t twenty people in physics, or something. But if you divide the subject areas up into quantitative versus qualitative, for example, you might split the data thirty-five to fifteen, and now it’s a huge correlation.”

  “OK, got it,” Gormely said. “So we may need to pre-process the columns to get patterns to emerge. Perhaps pre-process them in multiple, different ways. Multiple runs on the data.”

  They looked to Beadle and he nodded.

  “All right,” Zhao said. “Good one, Harlan. That’s definitely in there. What else we got?”

  “How do we even decide what makes a good governor or not?” Laar asked. “We want to find things predictive of being a good governor, bu
t we don’t know what that is, either.”

  “Growth in gross economic product in the region or whatever?” Zhao asked. “That’s got to be one. At least relative to the Empire as a whole. I mean, is it falling behind or outpacing the average?”

  “Average educational attainment?” Taliani asked.

  Beadle held up a hand.

  “Educational improvement,” he corrected.

  “Ah,” Taliani said. “Because you don’t want to penalize someone for starting at a lower value. And that could be negative as well. Also as compared to the Empire average.”

  Beadle nodded.

  “Just so,” he said.

  “Then, I suppose, in the same vein, the improvement in the crime rate, either positive or negative, compared to the Empire average,” Norales said.

  “How about the ratio of durable goods to consumable goods? Would that indicate people feel confident enough in how things are going to upgrade durable goods rather than simply repairing them to get by?” Gormely asked.

  Beadle was lost in thought, and the others all came to look in his direction. Eventually, he stirred.

  “Perhaps. I think that’s true, actually,” he said.

  “Anything else right now? OK, let’s get these nailed up in the solution map, and link them in.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” Laar said.

  Late in the day, Patrizia Gallo stopped by the map room. This was a viewing room not unlike the one Sandy Hayes used for looking at the investigation maps of the corruption investigation. This, though, was the solution map for the Zoo. It allowed everyone to pin up their ideas, link them to or consolidate them with others, hook in database structures and populate them, and then fork analyses off of those.

  The solution map was much more formal than the sort of things the Zoo did in the early days, but it had proved useful, especially for quick turnaround projects. Gallo watched the map grow and grow as things were added. She saw the sudden import of a lot of biographical data into the database, even as the database rows seemed to multiply.