H-17 [part two: just regular glow-in-the-dark vodka]

mada (63)in #fiction • 8 years ago

A fictional story about radical transparency, societal complexification, and all of the weird stuff that might happen when total system instability meets everyday life in a high tech world. In case you missed it, part one is available here.

At about ten pm, Kyle emerged from the spire's base. Over the wind, he could hear some kind of heavy metal rave happening in an area that he'd have to pass on the way to his cabin bubble. The desert night was briskly cool, and he paused to look up at the myriad stars and handful of satellites visible behind the communications blimp's unlit mass high above. Once he started cautiously navigating the LED delineated road home, it occurred to him that he'd better be doing something important and work-related in case Hanna Fisk was prowling about looking to foist a great time! on him after the long but surprisingly enjoyable day. So, though it was after one in the morning back home, Kyle dialed Harold on his cell. And then tried again when the first call went to voice mail.

"Uhh, Kyle..." Harold said, with a detached grumble.

"Yeah," Kyle greeted, wondering if he was competing with Netfix for Harold's attention.

"What's up?"

"This a good time?"

"It's fine," Harold said, a measure of focus entering his voice. "How's the whatever you're doing? Do you need me to upvote a kareoke performance or something? What channel are you on?"

All fair questions.

"They've had me on a special project in the catacombs. That's why I'm calling. The weirdest thing happened - have you had a chance to look over last Thursday's logs? And have you heard about something called self organized criticality," Kyle asked.

"As a matter of fact, I've just been reading up on that very thing. Let me guess, you want to talk about the 'forest fire model'," Harold offhandedly replied.

"What, are you getting reports on this project too?" Kyle asked, sounding uncharacteristically cross. One of the perks of special projects was that they weren't subject to public scrutiny until after they were completed.

Harold was taken aback. "I'm taken aback," he said. "Either the higher ups are having a bit of fun at our expense, or we're into something weird. Meaning, someone just anonymously dumped a bunch of data on me that just happens to have to do with what you asked about," he clarified.

"Freaky. I mean - well - if that's the case, I don't really know what I should say," Kyle confessed. "If this is on our agenda, we're probably racing against at least some of the big privateers to get the, uh, new thing into our client's hands and then into the public domain before it hits the patent pirate pipeline," he said. "Any chance your source is a competitor ahead of the curve, looking to bait us into a lawsuit?"

Harold considered the prospect for a second. "Doubt it. Anyway it sounds like I should just send you what I have, if you're on this 'Causeway' thing there. I'll put it under 'general study', in a folder named 'lowercase oh, uppercase oh, zero'. Check it out, pass it around the catacombs, and SkyFu me in on Monday if you need me," he said.

"Lowercase oh, uppercase oh, zero," Kyle repeated. Then, puzzlingly, he loudly bleated, "Hoooley fuck!"

"Gocha," bragged Hanna Fisk, who'd jumped out of a shadow with a bright flashlight in one hand and a squirt gun in the other. A squirt gun filled with some liquid that glowed in the dark and smelled like vodka. Much as Kyle now did.

"Kyle? Kyle! You still there," came Harold's concerned inquiry from the phone which had lightly embedded itself in the desert sand without disconnecting the call.

While Kyle pulled himself together and began laughing - because there wasn't much else for him to do - the hospitality chief killed her light, retrieved the fallen handset, blew the dust off, and spoke to Harold in perfect mockery of professionalism, "This is TAOnet Hospitality Chief Hanna Fisk. Kyle is temporarily indisposed. Would you like me to hum some elevator music?"

"Ha!" Harold said. "Whatever you did to him, I hope you recorded it from a good angle," he said.

"Do I want to know why you're running around with a squirt gun filled with glow in the dark vodka?" Kyle asked as he loosed his phone from the amused woman's grip. He did not say attempt to continue the call, but did, for Harold's benefit, ask, "or why my pants are wet but not glowing?"

As his eyes readjusted to the pathway's dim LED lighting - to which his own spotty phosphorescent illumination was now added - Kyle saw Hanna Fisk raised an eyebrow. "Notta chance, miss Fisk," he said. "It takes more than that to scare the piss out of me," he asserted. "But seriously," Kyle inquired, surprised to find himself feeling more agreeable than he probably ought to, "why ARE you carrying around that squirt gun, and what EXACTLY is in it?"

"Don't worry. It's just regular glow-in-the-dark vodka, left over from the talent show," she explained. "Your shirt's wrecked of course, but I'll get you a new one tomorrow. Hope I didn't interrupt anything too important."

Harold reflected on that.

"If you want, I can get you a new shirt right now," she went on.

Harold shrugged. "Something with long sleeves. And ... polkadots," he chanced.

Hanna Fisk did not have a long sleeved polkadotted shirt for Kyle. But she did have a white long sleeved shirt. And spray paint.

Fiona and Goodyear casually picked their way through the mountainside forest, each periodically asking, "Do I smell burning plastic?" They were soon joined by a fortysomething woman that popped out from between some trees, who smiled broadly to each of them in turn and confirmed, "Yes. Why, I do believe that I smell plastic burning right here in this little clearing."

"Very observant," said Goodyear, returning the smile, to the woman in the bright orange tracksuit. "And how are you today, Mama Waffles?"

"Good. Just patrolling the forest to make sure no one's burning any plastic," she said. Turning to Fiona, she asked "And you are?"

Fiona hugged Mama Waffles. "I'm Fiona. Mama Waffles? Nice to meet you," she said.

The trio sat by unspoken agreement, on some of the mossy boulders poking up from the forest floor. Goodyear lit a doobie that, remarkably, had been concealed somewhere on his mostly exposed person. Fiona tried to watch the lighter that had appeared in Goodyear's hand along with the doobie. But then the lighter once again vanished, and she still did not know where he had secreted it away.

"Fiona here's a social anthropologist," said Goodyear.

"Aren't we all?" joked Mama Pancakes.

"Why do they call you Goodyear?" Fiona asked, getting comfortable.

"Because he built a commune out of used tires. Do you want to know why they call me Mama Waffles? Come by Waffle Kitchen in the a.m. and find out."

"Sounds good," said Fiona. "Have you two known each other long?"

"She helped us haul some of those tires for that commune. Twenty-five years ago," answered Goodyear.

"So then, Mama Waffles, were you part of the same activist group as Goodyear? It's just, I'm writing this book and -"

Mama Waffles broke in, "Oh, I get it. He wasn't kidding. So are we a research project? Cool. I can tell you a story. What should it be about?"

Fiona pulled a small notebook and pen from an oversized mesh vest pocket. "I'm mostly just looking at one thing: did 9/11 change activism, and if so, how," she said.

"Is she for real?" Mama Waffles asked Goodyear while holding her breath, because it was her turn.

Goodyear shrugged, "Don't look at me. I already gave my answer."

"Oh okay sister. I'll bite. It's not like I'm going to be getting up off this rock any time soon. But I don't really know what to say about it. What kind of answer are you looking for?"

The younger woman was ready for this, "Well, I was pretty young when 9/11 happened. And people are always saying that it changed everything. So I want to know how it changed activism from your perspective."

"Okay," Mamma Waffles prompted, eager to have her turn again.

Fiona passed the doobie, "What I mean is - if you were part of, what was it, 'project earthship'? you were doing the anti-globalization thing like Goodyear, right? Making 'fair trade' into like a brand, going to protests. That kind of stuff. So did all that change after 9/11?"

Mama Waffles took it in. After her next turn, she began, "Yes and no, if I understand you right. I wasn't a lawyer like Goodyear or too involved in organizing stuff. I was more of a country mouse - still am - and we'd mostly just bring free food to the meetings or protests." She gathered her thoughts before going on, "but, now that you mention it, 9/11 did change things. Only probably not how you're thinking."

"You know about the WTO protests in '99 - they called it the 'battle in Seattle' or some such - well, from what I remember, that's when things changed. Because, there we were, tons of people trying to fight this big, complicated new idea - global corporate dominance - and no one really knew how to do it. All we really knew was that it was important. Hell, it must've been, because the cops, acting like an army, turned that city into a police state in no time flat! But it was weird. The whole thing was weird. And scary. I spent two days hunkered down in a garden shed trying to keep sandwiches and ace bandages going back to the warehouses where some of the wildest fools were holed up under siege. It got weirder afterwards, when some people started getting sick from whatever experimental riot control gas they'd been hit with, and it came out that the feds had people in with all the major organizing groups. Lots of 'em just kind of fell apart after that."

Fiona looked up from note-taking and nodded gently for Mama Waffles to continue.

"Anyhow, I'll get to the point. You see, I didn't know what to make of the WTO protest until 9/11. After that, Seattle started to look like it was just a dress rehearsal for how to keep people in line and control what the news said. Like, maybe our protest wasn't that important to the powers that be except as a test of their new toys and propaganda machine. We - all of my friends anyway - saw those towers get hit and basically panicked, not because we were afraid of big bad foreign terrorists, but because we knew the country was getting locked down and didn't know how bad it would get."

She paused for her turn and checked to see that Fiona's face displayed no argument before going on, "Where was I? Alright. The lockdown. So what I remember of Seattle before the battle was that it was like any other place. Then we had a parade. Some people caused trouble. Some of these were undercover cops, the way I hear it. But I didn't see any of that. I was in a big crowd, walking along, carrying one side of a big cooler filled with bottles of water, when suddenly there were people fleeing and shouting and a big cloud of gas rolling in. A friend ran by and said to follow him, so we ran that cooler uphill fast. Spent the rest of the demonstration in that garden shed. And do you know what, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like the protest's main purpose wasn't big and political. More like its main purpose turned out to be exposing the fact that that city was locked down all along. Like freedom was just a curtain draped over this big cage, and the protest was like peeking behind the curtain."

Fiona didn't quite get it. "I don't quite get it," she said. "I mean, about 9/11," she added.

"See," Mama Waffles said somewhat emphatically, "when I saw what happened on 9/11, I knew that the whole country was going to get a good long look behind that curtain."

Goodyear nodded slowly, presumably in agreement.

Appearing to choose her words carefully, Fiona asked, "I see. But, how did that change activism?"

"I guess it made things clearer? But weird. I don't know. It'd gotten too obvious that what we were saying and what people were hearing were different things after the WTO protest. 9/11 just sort of drove home the point. For me, activism became about things that were right in front of me, because I couldn't trust anything else. I opened a little restaurant and kept chickens. Still make it to these things sometimes, though," Mama Waffles concluded, gesturing to the general area in which they were sitting."

A sound rose above the dim background cacophony of percussion instruments and various waves of shouted messages repeated across the thousand acre camp. It was the sound of dozens of voices combined into the word "circle," called loudly and from a distant meadow.

"Did they just call circle?" wondered Mama Pancakes.

Franklin Franklin was not the name he'd been born with. Rather, this was the result of a legal change to the most versatile name he could come up with at age eighteen. It could be easy to remember or easy to forget, depending on how he used it. Today, it would be somewhere in between. "Frankie Franklin. Pleased to meet you," he said while shaking Andy's hand.

"Right on time. Let me show you what I've got," said the older man, gesturing towards a large table in the living room, visible from the house's front door.

The old, three by eight, rusting-metal-legged folding table looked incongruous in the Ukia-furnished den. There were dents in the carpet where the room's sectional couch - now precariously balanced in a pile in the corner - had been before the table was set up.

Franklin studied the old saw blades - two of them quite large - piled on the coarse green army blanket serving as a makeshift table cloth. He checked their forge marks, hefting each in turn and testing its pliability while assessing the degree of corrosion to which time had subjected it.

"Looks good," he concluded aloud. "You're asking three hundred for the lot, right?"

"Yup. These things were in the rafters of the garage when we moved in. I saw one like that," Andy pointed in the general direction of the larger blades, "on gleebay for two fifty. I know they're worth something, but I dont want to mess around with 'em too much."

Franklin nodded, shrugged, and pulled a small bundle of twenties from his shirt pocket. "Seems fair. As long as you throw in the blanket, too, so I have some way to carry them without getting rust all over," he said.

It was a good haul. Ninety pounds of high grade pre WWII steel - most of which was usable with minimal shop work - for about five hundred bucks, all things considered. He'd counted ten medium-sized pieces that could be quickly peddled for fifty each, which would leave him with dozens of pounds of free good metal to add to one of his raw materials stockpiles. Definitely worth spending half a day on now, while such things were still easy. He did not imagine that they would be so easy in a year.

As he sorted, cleaned and mentally inventoried the saw blades before storing them, the bulk of his attention was on vast networks of cause and effect unfolding elsewhere. By deeply engrained habit, he allowed his thinking to rest lightly on an awareness of large sections of this network, watching its most active scenes intently. The process was meditative as a by-product of its practicality, serving to anchor Franklin's hyper-intelligent but overly transliminal mind. This anchoring was necessary to sort out the otherwise incomprehensible volume of information that he absorbed continually while going about everyday life. But it did have consequences, the most pressing of which, currently, was forcing him to consider how much he wanted to meddle in the affairs of people that did not seem to grasp what they were playing at.

The events unfolding in Chicago were slightly worrisome, but the collision of institutional momentum with the basic limits of a constrained social mind would be an explosive shitshow regardless of what anybody tried to do about it, and had nothing at all to do with him. And by now, to some extent, the same could also be said of of all of October 5th's other flashpoints. Franklin had written up his usual analysis of these - stripping what little media coverage they'd received down to a list of verifiable facts and unanswered questions - and was not compelled to further ruminate on them. They were, after all, just drops in a very large bucket of down-the-rabbit-hole that he and a loose-knit hodgepodge of amateur and professional colleagues tracked, speculated on and sometimes published reports about. What concerned him presently, while leaving the building in which his latest materials haul had just been carefully stowed away, was the question of what, if anything, he should do about the cryptic letter he'd received.

The data-cache to which this letter pointed was weird. Documentation of corporate research projects. Some academic literature. Unpublished government reports of unidentified origin. Detailed records of unknown persons arguing about it all. At first, he had thought the whole thing was one of those elaborate games he'd run across from time to time - cooked up by intelligence agencies for recruiting or companies like TAOnet for crowdsourcing ideas - but the explanation didn't quite fit. Especially in light of the personalized physical letter - posted locally, no less! - inviting him to review the material. As Franklin looked more closely, what he was seeing began to take shape. And it did not look like a game, though some of the chat logs indicated that it might have started out that way for some of its participants.

A careful reading of a directory named 'synopticon' brought Franklin's perspective on the mystery into focus. The first part of this read like a think tank war-game simulating an inevitable total system crash in 2023. The game had apparently spooked some of the people that had created it, while their superiors had responded to their findings in ways that, when fed back into the simulation, also resulted in the 2023 crash. They went around and around like this, meticulously working through input variable combinations until it became apparent that no action that they or their superiors could possibly take or refrain from taking would change the outcome.

Eventually, these unnamed game makers/players broke away from whatever nameless institution had sponsored the problematic simulation and created a new game - built on the skeleton of the first one - that incorporated several new classes of input variables, and involved a far larger group of people. Finally, this new group found a set of inputs that would avert the 2023 crisis in the simulation, translated these inputs into analogous real-world events, spent a great deal of time arguing over how to bring these events about, and settled on a plan. It became apparent to Franklin that the other file directories on this fishy website all pertained to elements of a plan already in motion. Like, in real life - a suspicion that he'd verified by locating a shipping container in one of his city's industrial lots by gps data from the material online. The whole thing was madness, made vaguely terrifying by how sensible it might seem to these people after reducing the future to a math problem. He could not help but be intrigued.

As for what he could or should do about it, Franklin could not say. To clear his mind, he walked to one of the lake shore parks nearby, finding a large, familiar oak to sit beneath.

"What do you think, old Tree?" he asked aloud.

The tree did not answer.

"Oh come on. It's not like I can talk to anyone else about this," he went on.

The silently deciduous creature gave no indication of taking notice.

"Seriously. Even if I found someone capable of understanding this and took the time necessary to explain it to them - then what?. Hell, I don't even know why this thing was brought to my attention in the first place. Which is why I'm pestering you, Tree."

A couple of passing elderly power-walkers glanced in his general direction. Franklin smiled, nodding hello, and they rigidly strolled past without altering their pace.

Once they were out of earshot, Franklin resumed muttering the one-sided conversation, "I know you could probably have gone your whole life without hearing about it too, Tree, but the maples are all preoccupied, and elms are no help at all."

As he relaxed into the familiar game, the solution to his immediate problem became apparent. "Whoever these people are, they're smart and they do their research."

The tree remained quiet while Franklin's mind worked.

"It took me days to begin making sense of that jumbled up data-cache - which means it would take most people fucking ages to untangle it. That letter did not show up by accident, but there's also no reason to read too much into it."

The tree neither agreed nor disagreed.

Once home, Franklin inspected the letter again; more closely than he had before. It had definitely been written with a ballpoint pen. Something about it seemed too neat, however. Something about the letter spacing. Plus, the stroke depth changed too abruptly. Was it possible that the letter had been written with a printer furnished with a ballpoint pen tool head? On reflection, he figured that was possible. Given the lengths to which its sender went in service to anonymity, perhaps it was even likely. Was this some kind of weird internet marketing thing? It probably was. Or a research experiment. Whatever. The data cache was interesting enough to sort through, but there were some major gaps in some of the overall project's assumptions. Just for fun, he drafted an outline of these, added a new folder to the site's 'synopticon' directory, and added his outline to this.

There were more than five hundred of them in the meadow today. The ragtag amalgamation - ranging in age from newly born to one hundred and three - had spread out to form a big irregular circle. After twenty minutes of general announcements shouted from the middle of the formation - about water quality, fire safety, who to talk to if your car keys had gone missing in the woods, how to do dishes, where not to park, and so on - they all joined hands to sing or hum a long oscillating ooohhhmmm before clumping up into groups for the daily communal picnic. Seniors, children, and pregnant or nursing mothers were then called to the circle's nucleus so they could eat their fill without having to wait, while half a dozen volunteers jogged around the circle, armed with lightly bleached water or alcohol in spray bottles, insisting that everyone have clean hands before beginning the communal meal. Teams of two or three began hauling large buckets or giant steaming pots of food around to those seated, carefully serving each, in turn, without allowing their serving utensils to physically touch any of the dishes on which the food was deposited.

Fiona was impressed by the organic efficiency with which this subculture kept its people healthy and well fed. Reading about this in an academic setting as an undergrad was part of what had led her to include these people in her current research project, but seeing one of these events in action had proven far more interesting. Sitting there on a blanket, having eaten her fill of rice and beans and some kind of heavily spiced raisin mango sweet potato mush, surrounded by all these strange people in the unseasonably warm Appalachian forest evening, she found herself feeling unguarded and curiously daring. Goodyear - her self-appointed tour guide - had wandered away before the meal to eat with the people from Mama Waffles' kitchen.

While she recognized Kevin Rain clowning around with the rowdy Travelling Circus crew, and could pick out several others throughout the meadow that she'd met since arriving here a week ago, Fiona had taken her meal with a small, colorfully dressed group of five that she hadn't noticed before. This was a couple in their forties and their pre-adolescent son, along with a twentysomething and his son, all of whom were friends because the boys were friends. The boys were dressed in ninja costumes. The couple were all tiedye and complicated hair. The younger father was clad in industrial overalls, and wore a baseball cap that said 'Bob'. As a conversation starter, upon discovering that this was Fiona's first such event, Bob asked Fiona, "How did you come to end up at this gathering?"

Instead of repeating what had recently become her boilerplate response, "I came from Phoenix for a book I'm researching," Fiona answered with the more specific, "I was visiting a friend in San Francisco who was coming out here, and asked if I could tag along. See, I've been writing this book about activism and the growing underclass in a post 9/11 United States. But I didn't want to do some depressing expose. I wanted to look at what people were doing about inequality - to solve it or get around some of the problems it creates. I wanted to find examples of places where people are reconstructing the concept of 'home' for the 21st century in this growing inequality. The idea was to spend a month in twelve -. Sorry, I'm rambling," she said. Then, "What about you?"

"Oh, we just drove from Ohio. Your story's better," the older father responded.

Fiona gathered her thoughts, and took the opportunity to try and voice them succinctly. "Well, my book was basically done, but I still wanted to add a chapter on activism and how it had changed. My grant money ran out and I don't have a job, so I came here to do the chapter anyway and figure out the best way to default on my student loans. Because there's no way I can pay them," she explained.

"And ... how is it going?" asked the woman with the complicated hair, genuinely curious.

"Honestly? It's complicated. I've done some good interviews - people are really easy to talk to here - but the things I keep hearing! Like, if I look too closely at any issue, it gets all tangled up with every issue."

"So ... what's the best thing you've heard anyone say here? Can you give us an example?" the older father asked.

"Hmm," Fiona considered. "Well, one guy - a psychologist - said that there are these studies showing that two thirds of people will naturally follow almost any order given to them by an authority figure and not feel at all responsible for their actions, even if these are harmful. And that one percent of people are predatory psychopaths. He said that the scum always rises to the top, and the majority always supports them. That, before 9/11, the psychopaths had control of almost everything - the government, organized religion and the big corporations, anyway - and that, afterwards, they seized control of pretty much everything else. It's maybe not the best thing I've heard, but it's the one I've been thinking about the most," she said.

"What was this guy's solution?" the younger father asked.

"I've got a solution," one of the ninjas said, brandishing what appeared to be a very sharp throwing star.

They all laughed.

"I hope you ninjas also have a good solution to getting our dishes clean," the older woman suggested.

They all laughed again, except for the ninja who realized his mother was serious.

Fiona thanked the boy as he ran off with her bowl and spoon. Picking up the conversation, she answered, "He didn't really have one. He actually started that conversation to ask me if I could think of a solution to that problem."

"Have you looked into the basis for modern economics?" the man with the complicated hair asked.

Fiona shook her head.

"Well," he proceeded in a subtly pedantic tone, "it might shed some light on your problem." Noting the reservations forming on his wife's face, he pre-emptively shifted his tone, "Okay okay okay. No lectures today. But if you're thinking in terms of personalities, it might be a good idea to also look at the movie these personalities are acting in."

His wife did not interject, and Fiona remained silent.

Reassured by this, the man proceeded, "Think of it like this: people are like any organism. We take energy, use as much of it as we can, and pass on what we can't use. We are alive, but the system of information that controls how energy moves through our society is artificially scarce. I'm talking about money here. "Money sets up a very efficient system for distributing energy, but there is always more money owed than there is in circulation, so there is never enough money to go around, and everyone in the system is motivated to avoid being the one that does not get enough. "On any scale, this sets up a game that is structurally incapable of fairness. If you participate, follow the rules and do nothing else, you are creating a less fair world. And if you succeed, you are creating a less fair world for someone else. Most rational people prefer success to failure. "So you could say that psychpoaths are in charge, giving instructions to an obedient majority. Or you could say that a rational majority of people are understandably fucking over a structurally manufactured underclass because capitalism has colonised their minds and instrumentalized their bodies. Maybe both things are true, but does either statement would get you any closer to the heart of the matter?"

"I don't know," Fiona answered thoughtfully, not at all sure what the man was getting at.

"What he's getting at," the wife answered gently, "is that you've just mentioned your personal financial anxiety to us. Maybe if you reframe that as a social problem of immediate concern, we will become socially motivated to do something about it together."

The final presentation of Project Causeway had been posted to TAOnet's website, and the client funds that had been held in escrow pending the project's completion within the specified 30 day time frame had been transferred to TAOnet's accounts - divided amongst the parties who worked on it by prearranged formula - with mere hours to spare. From that point on, no one could successfully patent the project's software component, and the anonymous client who had paid for the job to be done could put the code to work however it wished. As could anyone else. In many ways, 'Causeway' was a stereotypical TAOnet project; a perfect example of the company's collaborative and transparent Task Accomplishment Optimization network in action. Still, something about it left Edith Chen feeling vaguely uneasy. This feeling blossomed into serious anxiety upon receiving a hand-scrawled note from Dr Connelly to meet him and that Trake boy in the special projects area conference room at eleven p.m. on the night before she was scheduled to leave.

The look on Dr Connelly's face as she entered the room did not help. "Why the cloak-and-dagger act?" she asked him sharply. Then, surprised to find that the meeting would include a fourth, unannounced attendant, as she found a seat, she followed up with, "what is this?"

"Sorry," Connelly explained, "but this couldn't wait. Dr Chen, this is Mr Sharp from NSA. They're looking at a problem that might have to do with us."

"Don't worry, Dr Chen," Sharp said, "this is an informal exchange, and no one here is in any trouble. I will, of course, forever deny ever having been here as a matter of policy, but we're not expecting any secrecy from you or TAOnet."

"Okay," she said slowly, "so what exactly is it that you want?"

"We'll get to that. And I apologise for the late hour, but this is a time-sensitive matter. Mr Trake said he'd fill me in on what I don't know about Causeway just before you arrived. Maybe we can start there?"

Though not quite mollified, Edith Chen was now more curious than anxious about whatever was going on. Saying nothing, she nodded to Kyle.

Unused to being put on the spot for anything important, Kyle took his time before proceeding. "As you know," he began, "'causeway' refers to Aristotle's telos or final cause. In the kinds of data mining and behavioral prediction that TAOnet nodes like mine specialize in, we sometimes run into instances where an event at one point in time appears to predict another event that occurred in the past. Since the future can not cause the past, the standard practice has been to treat such instances as unimportant artifacts of our software, like noise in a signal that needs to be filtered out, and treat the historic event as a probability. Usually we do this filtering in stages, beginning at the point when defining what data is to be collected. And if any of this kind of 'noise' gets past this low level filtering, we treat the anomalous pattern's 'final cause' like any other abstract mathematical attractor in our model. But 'causeway' was after something else - a model that looked beyond simple correlation into causal relationships, and incorporated telos as a significant variable in the equation, to the end of reducing the computing power needed to solve a certain type of common problem."

In a blandly encouraging tone, Sharp said, "Eliminate some complexity without sacrificing result specificity. Got it."

"Yes," Kyle continued, "So we developed a new way of processing data on a network using dynamically reconfigurable protocols. You know about physical computing, right?"

Sharp gave him a look that made Kyle feel foolish for asking.

"Well, here we took that to a whole new level. Based on the idea that the world can theoretically be treated as a massive computer, we used our architecture and software to find phenomena analogous to the problems we were trying to solve, mapped our system's computing problems to these phenomena, and then used the evolution of these phenomena to accomplish the bulk of our data processing for us. The tricky bit was filling in the gaps between what data we could track and the much larger volume of what we knew was -"

"Kyle, it's late, and you're rambling," complained Edith Chen.

"I guess the uh -," he glanced briefly at Dr Wang, "short version is that we found a smarter way to make predictions about real world complex systems. When disruptive events are likely to show up, and where, and how big they're likely to be. That kind of stuff. And we proved it out using real world data," Kyle finished.

The vague anxiety that Edith Chen had felt dissipating now resurfaced as crystal clear panic. The scenario data that Kyle had brought them early on hadn't been a clever mock up as she had assumed. It was some kind of actual event documentation!

"Hold on," Dr Connelly said, also looking suddenly less at ease, "Mr Trake, to clarify, you meant simulated real world data, yes?"

Kyle squirmed, not quite sure what was going on.

The NSA man became amused - a thing to which his face did not appear accustomed. Laughing at Kyle, he said, "You didn't tell them where your data came from? Brilliant! His work group's data mining operation snagged on a terrorism-related event in New York City that left two cops and a federal agent dead."

For the last few weeks, having impressed his superiors early on, and scored points with the viewers for wearing a spray paint polka dotted shirt continuously for seven days, Kyle had felt like a rock star. Now, as he began to work out the possible implications of this surprise meeting - whose purpose he'd naively imagined as being like a good-for-us! pat-on-the-back session with the higher ups he'd recently become more acquainted with, Kyle felt blind sided. "Like hell," he blurted, "What was related to terrorism about that event? The cops were undercover as potential terrorist group recruits. The feds were undercover as terrorist recruiters and arms dealers. They had a tragic shootout. But there were no actual terrorists anywhere!"

He had read the news, and heard what was happening from Harold and Chris. "And obviously government agencies are ideal candidates for testing Causeway - everything about those networks is machine readable, so they're great externalized fuzzy logic processors. And perfect environments for tracking the accuracy of predictions," he said, his outrage abating as no one appeared ready to argue. Sharp looked distinctly satisfied.

Connelly answered this sympathetically, "You've nothing to fear here, Mr Trake. That's just how his type talk. If anything, it's Dr Chen and myself that should be embarrassed - me most of all. Not knowing the origin of the stuff you brought us made no difference to our project - hey, it worked, right? - so we never clarified this. But I think that all he's trying to say is that Causeway touched on something they have an ongoing national security interest in. Isn't that right?"

"It is," Sharp replied. "We have to be able to definitively rule out the possibility that the October 5 event was caused deliberately. We're about ninety five percent there. We also have to see how our models of the probability of another such event occurring in the future look when compared to predictions your model would make with the data we have access to. Simply put, I really just want to borrow your new computer for the night. I asked Dr Connelly here to make this happen discretely, but he insisted the both of you be looped in to avoid even the appearance of his harboring some secret loyalty to his former employer."

"Plus," Dr Connelly added, "I don't trust you one bit, and know that these two can help me make sure you don't break anything while you're down here."

At six am eastern time on October 31, 2017, the aggregated contents of several massive databases went online as heavily mirrored searchable websites. Details of nearly half a million persons with security clearances became accessible to anyone with a computer, along with military service and law enforcement personnel records. Twelve hours later, a similar leak site went up containing the details of many classified programs, including every patent the Department of Defence had deemed top secret for reasons of national security. At nine pm, a third such site containing an unbelievable volume of corporate data appeared online, exposing sensitive research and development programs, trade secrets, account information and client details. At midnight, a site indexing the personal and financial details of approximately ninety thousand of the country's richest and most powerful people went live. A previously unknown 'radical hacker collective' took credit for this "exposure of the elite war machine's secrets to the power of the Synopticon."

At six am November 1st, unbeknownst to any TAOnet executive or contractor, a fifth such site went up. This contained roughly five hundred million emails, audio and video recordings, computer use profiles, and criminal investigation records that had been conveniently bundled into roughly sixty million 'active criminal suspicion profiles'. The site's initial launch data was sent from TAOnet's company's special projects area under the Nevada desert, and came to rest on a server farm located on a man-made island off the California coast.

Over the next three weeks, these leak sites went down repeatedly. And came back up just as fast. Air traffic was briefly grounded, but resumed within seventy two hours. Trading on the NYSE was halted for a week. The major media downplayed the event for the first few days, then claimed that it was an attack on the country by the Chinese military, then blamed Islamic terrorists for the whole thing, then announced that there would be an emergency presidential inquiry into the matter and whom to punish for it. Meanwhile, all over the world, similar massive leak sites were launched, and people began adding to their contents by connecting them with geographical maps, facial recognition software, and specialty search engines.

A niche industry sprang almost up overnight, as software developers leapt at the abundance of of new data sources to connect with existing programs and devices. By December 1st, if you wanted to download a .pdf of your secret FBI profile, there was an app for that. If you wanted to get directions to the home of the prison guard that you held a grudge against, there was an app for that too. If you wanted to quickly identify a person from a smart phone photo, a five dollar program made this simple. And if you wanted to find out who owned a car by its licence plate number, you could find an instructable that would facilitate this very thing.

But if you wanted to access the funds in your bank account, some new restrictions applied. Cash could only be accessed in person, with proper id, and no more than two hundred dollars per day could be withdrawn unless your account had showed a balance of over one hundred thousand dollars when your last pre-leak bank statement was issued. Many ATMs were taken offline following the public disclosure of their exact specifications and vulnerabilities. The credit card systems got glitchy, and went down more frequently. The world didn't stop, of course, and most people's lives went on more-or-less as normal.