Crash

TIME TO GLOBAL STRATEGY DEADLINE: 4 DAYS

“NR53X C310119JNK” was the last communication from Sally, sent as text to my phone exactly one minute before all 350 of the worldwide WICO computer servers crashed. I can now reveal that Sally was in fact Sanda, the artificial intelligence used by WICO to develop the global strategy for dealing with the Death from Imminent Extinction (DIE) threat. 

There is no trace left of Sanda according to Ambassador Lazlo, whose voice was the template for the AI that I practically considered a friend. In a statement, Lazlo said, “All electronic records of the final strategy were erased in what WICO considers a crime against humanity. An investigation of the cause is in progress, and the results will be made public when we have them.”

It took two hours to hypothesize the meaning of the puzzle Sally/Sanda sent to me. The first part, NR53X, refers to the origin of the crash (denoted as “X”), which is a region or nation with a normalized population-to-nature ratio of 53%. The second part was a direction to “see” my junk mail from January 19, 2019, which I had tentatively assumed was sent by her/it. Stripped of its details, and considered in the context of our discussions, I interpreted the message as confirmation that the core strategy was a set of simple rules, and that people in a stage of collapse were most likely to resist implementation of those rules.

Ambassador Lazlo refused to comment on my hypothesis, or give any clues about what WICO will do next.

Reality Check

Of the ten most populous simulated nations, only one is in the collapse stage. Its real-world equivalent is marked by telltale signs of collapse: the death rate exceeds the birth rate, and demonstrates a strong preference for hegemony that could potentially reduce its population-nature ratio.