Insight

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 117 DAYS

In retrospect, it was understandable that January 19 would stand out in my mind. That was my first full day with WICO’s Strategy Integration group, and when I first interacted with its artificial intelligence aid Sanda, who would later be my most prolific source of information about the international efforts to fight the imminent extinction threat. 

It was a month before Ambassador Lazlo announced the tripling of regions used in the global strategy, as well as the introduction of the four-stage group classification scheme that the test team challenged with the alternative Professor Ali told me Sanda was evaluating just prior to last week’s server crash. This meant that the e-mail message we found yesterday was a deception, planted five weeks after the date on its timestamp so I would accidentally find it, and both identify when the attack was becoming operational and trigger a major revision of whatever could be salvaged of WICO’s global strategy.

I wondered if Sanda had left any other messages, and I wasn’t the only one. Early this morning I was served with a Global Security subpoena for all my records, electronic and otherwise, and they were taken both directly and remotely from every place I would have kept them or sent them. Luckily, they left this blog alone, presumably because it is already in the public record. What I write now is based on that record and on my memory, which is clearly not to be trusted. 

The message I originally thought Sanda was referring to prior to the crash seems particularly relevant to this point in time: “Prepare for the worst, work for the best, question everything, and fully accept nothing.”

Reality Check

One of the nice things about fiction is that it enables the author to correct his mistakes by disguising them as flashes of creative insight.