NEW WORLD TRILOGY (Trilogy Title) (42 page)

After retracing the recorded histories of Sascha’s and Yanyan’s movements, they isolated the first instance of the anomalies during their visit to Venus Space Station.  A social modelling program quickly drew a priority listing of candidates for further investigation: Andreas was initially placed seventh on the list, but after several leads failed to provide results, he soon became the prime target of investigation, not least because of his R&D history and the fact that he was reassigned to facility 7 shortly after the meeting.  Once they had Andreas in their sights, a long series of curious trace patterns was uncovered.  Within moments of identifying their main suspect, the AHC hacking team began targeting Andreas’s virtual laboratory on facility 7 with all their technology and technique at their disposal.

Andreas interpreted this to mean that the game was up and the Virtual Cold War proper had begun.  He responded by putting substantial effort into developing new versions of software for the defence systems of his virtual R&D facility and the AI interface for himself and Yanyan and Sascha, which were followed by the issuing of a range of patches and updates.  Nevertheless, it was obvious that infiltration would not only be inevitable but imminent if a final solution to dealing with the infestation was not forthcoming sooner rather than later.

Over the following months, Andreas maintained his isolation from Sascha and Yanyan, who both did their best to remain patient and wait for him to contact them with any news…

Eight months after initiating his R&D agenda, Andreas conducted a systemic purge: this consisted of a panoply of offensive programs that targeted the fundamental data infrastructure of the mainframes of each hub in the solar system, essentially destroying and supplanting all supporting code; the re-representation of authorised data through filtering processors then disseminated throughout the entire network.  It was hoped that this would provide no further means for unwanted code to exist parasitically within the system.

Andreas didn’t stop there, though: being as circumspect and rigorous as he could, he conducted data surveillance sweeps and installed new versions of the operating system and the purge programs
ad nauseam
.  He continued with this follow-up programme for two months before finally feeling that it was time to approach Sascha and Yanyan with his results.

• • •

Sascha and Yanyan sit opposite each other having a late dinner in a restaurant near the main laboratory wing.  Yanyan spots Andreas walking towards them and her eyes widen in hopeful surprise.  Sascha immediately spins her head around in response and attempts to gauge his mood; he remains inscrutable, however.  They all stay silent until after he sits down next to Sascha and looks around at the restaurant that he’s never set foot in before because of his gruelling schedule and his preference for snacking while working.

“Well?” asks Yanyan, suddenly unable to wait any longer, “What have you done?  What’s happened?”

Andreas glances at them both and stares out the window into the darkness of space as he transfers his final report to them both.  He waits for a moment till they respond with relieved smiles.  “The results I’ve given you are the best we can do at present, I’m afraid.”

“They’re pretty good results!  I mean … if it’s what it appears to be,” says Sascha.

“I have to say,” begins Yanyan, “I really didn’t think you could even come close to this.”

Andreas pulls one of the spare cups closer to him and slides the coffee pot across to it.  “It’s all just statistics, though.”

“Yeah, we know” says Sascha, “but you’ve really reduced the probability to as close to zero as you could; that’s obvious.  We couldn’t ask for more.  We know what the game is.”

Andreas pours himself a cup of coffee and takes time to smell the aroma before responding.  “I agree, but I’ve thought about these numbers for a long time, and as I’ve obsessed over them, my satisfaction and sense of safety associated with them has somehow been correspondingly diminished.  What I think every time a new statistic comes in, no matter how good it appears … what I end up reminding myself is that it just provides a certain kind of theoretical confidence; as you know, it doesn’t provide us with a clean and clear bridge to reality, and …”

“… what’s critically important for our particular case,” says Yanyan, “may not bare any relationship to the statistical significance obtained.”

Andreas nods.  “Essentially, you’re right.  These results are entirely consistent with deception.  And I can’t shake that fear.”

Sascha puts her hand on his shoulder.  “I still think that we need to treat the purge as being successful but with certain qualifications: given the exceptional nature of our circumstances, it’s rational to do so, and we can do that by …”

“… continuing to do system sweeps, analyses, purges and more R&D,” completes Andreas, fully aware of what lies ahead for him.  “It’s more or less endless.”

Yanyan looks at him sympathetically.  “You don’t have to do it by yourself anymore, though.  Part of the outcome of this should probably mean that we make it a public programme, don’t you think?”

“Some of it,” replies Andreas.

After staring out the window for a moment towards the stars in the darkness, Sascha turns back to the both of them and says, “Conclusive proof is for simpletons; we can tolerate the ambiguity.  That’s not a problem.  But, actually, I still feel relieved because we’ve done all we possibly could and our options have opened up now.  I mean, even if we’re wrong ultimately.”

“I agree,” says Yanyan.  “In the worst case scenario, we’ll just fight it again … if we have a chance, which is just business as usual, right?”

Andreas frowns.  “That’s a pretty depressing ‘business as usual.’”

Sascha smiles slightly.  “That comes with the territory, I’m afraid.”
 

• • •

As Andreas shared his results, Samuel and Henry were
en route
back to the system of Earth after having experimented with New World Dynamics on their colonised expolanet.  They were set to arrive eighteen months later and were quite keen on getting back to share their results and also to see what progress had been made terraforming Earth since their departure.  Their experiments with limited populations and a range of community-oriented experimental conditions provided their team with a powerful model for keeping anti-social deviance to a negligible statistic; it was determined that such emergent conditions could be redressed by a wide range of socio-technological techniques in the premature stages of development to such an extent that populations capped at ten million were unlikely even to see anything greater than stage 2 deviance every ten thousand years — stages 1 and 2 were deemed minor and essential for psychological growth and ultimate stability.

Samuel and Henry were well aware that the conditions that enabled these results were themselves classified at stage 5, and that if they had not reached the extremes that they had in the history of human civilisation, there was every chance that modelling New World Dynamics would never have had a chance to come as far as it had; moreover, higher levels of anti-sociality would perhaps still have been unaccounted for and even ‘tolerated’ in the social system more than they should, maintaining endemic pain, suffering, inequity and a continuing high potential for destruction on a grand scale.

In addition to the tens of thousands of deep-space exploration pods that were sent out from the system of Earth prior to the ‘Venus Incident,’ Henry and Samuel, and the teams on the other six colonised exoplanets also deployed tens of thousands of their own further afield and naïvely continued to do so with rigorous regularity.  As a result, three independent alien exploratory fleets relayed their discoveries back to more central hubs for further consideration; two were compelled to wait for authorisation before beginning to navigate their way towards the coordinates provided in the pods’ continuous transmissions.  The first of these fleets was on course to reach Earth three years after the return of Henry and Samuel…

•

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