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TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 111 DAYS

For four days there was no word from anyone at WICO about the status of its repairs and investigation into the server crash. All of my contacts outside the organization had gone dark too; and the mainstream press wasn’t any better-informed, judging by the dominance of speculation from virtually every outlet.

About 10 a.m. Eastern Time yesterday there were reports of high-level finance executives being simultaneously arrested in a dozen cities, but no one could find out what they were charged with. I was unable to correlate the arrests with any of the nations I considered suspects in the WICO attack, which suggested that they were unrelated.

An hour later I was “asked” to accompany three F.B.I. agents to an undisclosed location where I would be asked to perform a task related to national security. Curious, I complied. After three more hours I sat alone in a small, bare conference room, having been assured that I was not under arrest, and that I was free to leave at any time. I could write later about what happened (which I’m doing now), subject to censorship of sensitive information.

A dark-haired woman in her twenties took a seat across from me and introduced herself as Maura Riddick, a historian attached to the Extinction Response Unit, one of the government organizations working with WICO to coordinate its strategy development and implementation. “I’ve been working on identifying the range of possible outcomes from certain actions taken during this process, and to develop tests that can identify their probabilities at any given time.”

“It must be difficult without Sanda around to help,” I said with genuine empathy.

Riddick nodded. “Sanda has been a great assistant. We hope to have her at full capacity by the time her attackers have been neutralized.”

“Do you think that will be soon?” I asked, happy that she/it wasn’t damaged beyond repair. 

“For obvious reasons that’s classified. Meanwhile there is a lot to do, which is why we asked you here.” She sat back and closed her eyes, though they were still moving. “Sanda suggested that you could assist us with a related task.”

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one she/it left messages for. “What exactly?”

 “Checking Sanda’s past work for bugs.” Riddick opened her eyes and explained that the test team discovered several inconsistencies in the strategy that Sanda should have identified before certifying it for final testing. That suggested a flaw in the process. "When we confronted her, she admitted the inconsistencies, but had no insight into their cause since all of her diagnostic results were within acceptable ranges. She suggested we consult with you, and the attack happened an hour later. Now we have no direct way to identify the flaw, or a system that can be analyzed to find a possible mechanism for it.”

“I’m confused. Can’t you just have your test team check it out when you restore her? Also, you said ‘bugs’ in the plural. What did that mean?”

“There’s the flaw, if there’s only one cause, and there’s a problem with Sanda finding it. Sanda is so complex that it took a year to evaluate her the first time, and anything we missed then is likely to be virtually undetectable now. I hate the metaphor, but we really need to think outside of the box if we’re going to implement a strategy by our hard deadline.”

“It sounds like you’re going on faith anyway,” I observed. “Maybe it’s just better to fix what she gives you.”

Riddick smiled. “We’re preparing for that. There’s also the possibility that she and we missed something else, or several somethings. I suspect that’s why she said we should bring you in: to provide some leads about what to look for...”

“By looking at what she did in the past,” I echoed her earlier answer. The word shortcutspopped into my mind, maybe because it was a theme common to several of our discussions, and maybe because Riddick and her team were now gambling literally everything on my finding one.

Reality Check

The four days of silence in the real world were due to my focus on testing and refining the simulations, which is just a shadow of what the people in the imaginary world would be concerned about. 

One “inconsistency” I found involves global wealth, which was overestimated in the model. When fixed, it revealed another inconsistency: a mischaracterization of monetary inflation used to calculate current values of wealth and Gross World Product. 

A byproduct of that effort was a more realistic and defensible way of generating a “range of possible outcomes” (Riddick’s specialty) for wealth per person within a group of regions. This led to what may be a controversial - but in retrospect unsurprising - conclusion that wealth inequality is built into civilization’s means of processing and consuming resources as a linear process (each activity depends on another, and is rewarded by doing so).

The updated simulations revealed another surprise, with major consequences for a strategy like that being considered in the imaginary world. Essentially, a voluntary reduction in population is so inconsistent with the observed relationships underlying the model that the intended result (lowering ecological impact to sustainable level) can best be achieved with a final population only a little less than what we have now, and each person consuming only what is barely needed for survival.