Responsibility

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 98 DAYS

“Take responsibility for all you do and what it causes, because it is your mark on the Universe for the rest of time.”

The people who crashed the servers being used to finish the global strategy to deal with the imminent extinction threat were forced to follow that rule over the weekend.  The World Information and Coordination Organization lived up to its name by simultaneously disseminating information about what the perpetrators did, and coordinating the international response to their treachery. No one ultimately cared why they put us all in danger, just that they did, and that they might do it again if left unchecked.

As Sanda the AI had messaged me just before its demise, the perpetrators lived in a place where their needs were 53% of the remaining natural resources, but it was a region and not a nation. Sanda was also right about when their plan became operational, which provided most of the clues that led to their identification. 

Even now, very few people have the expertise to directly or indirectly bring down highly secure hardware and software, navigating through the large but finite number of steps necessary to breach both security and functionality. Taking those steps takes an amount of time which probabilistically linked their beginning to their success, and WICO was able to enlist its members to collectively reduce the options to a list that could be investigated. As I suspected, the arrest of finance executives just before WICO enlisted my help was the first public evidence that the investigation was in its final stages. The nearly two weeks since then have been busy for an army of WICO’s best people who were made available for service by the success of the attack.

The test base where I now work was notified of the final set of arrests minutes after they occurred, and only an hour before the rest of the world learned about it. This morning Secretary General Decatur issued a thorough statement that included a schedule for prosecution and a tentative schedule for completion of recovery efforts. To the great relief of me and my coworkers, Sanda is expected to be back online by the end of this week, and testing of its functionality will hopefully be done and any problems fixed between the middle and end of April.

Those directly and indirectly responsible for the attack will be tried for attempted omnicide within two weeks, which is the highest crime on the planet and punishable by a life sentence cleaning up the most dangerous substances in the environment, based on the concept that the largest impacts require the most extreme offsets. As Sanda might have put it, “You must use the remainder of your life to make your mark as positive as possible, beginning with the erasure of its negative character.”

Reality Check

This episode highlights one of a group of high-level rules that all the rest depend upon.