Movement

 

All nations today officially signed the Open Borders and Mutual Assistance Treaty (OBMAT), developed and negotiated since Blue Planet Day as part of the Threat of Imminent Extinction Global Strategy. As WICO Secretary General Decatur said in a joint statement with the signatories, “This critical step in the strategy’s deployment ensures that people and material can freely move wherever is needed in order to maximize the chances of the most people surviving for as long as possible… People experiencing problems implementing the strategy and dealing with unexpected events are guaranteed help by anyone who can provide it, regardless of affiliation or identity. We are one world now, where boundaries to our joint survival are not our own.” 

Pushback from religious and cultural purity groups was swift and clear. “This is the new world order we always feared,” the Commanding Triumvirate of the International Alliance of Descendants announced at a rally in London. “Intermixing of the clean with the unclean is now assured, sacrificing the lives of the chosen so that a mongrel breed can take its place. We must follow the rules, but we will resist wherever possible.” A similar message was broadcast by the Clan of Light over all social media platforms, including a promising to “take celibacy to a whole new level so we can live and die with dignity.”

 Leadership of Possibilities from Responsibilities worried that groups like the Descendants and the Clan would attempt to coopt and corrupt its creative message in an effort to subvert WICO’s coordination mandate, which some had accused them of secretly wanting. As one of the organization’s spokespeople, I can honestly that I have seen no evidence of such intent within PFR, and don’t believe the concern is warranted. Our values are clearly consistent with the global strategy, and any other group likewise making their values clear would stand out as obviously different.

Reality Check

I expect a treaty like OBMAT to be necessary under highly variable environmental conditions like those expected for self-sustained impacts and interactive failures of ecosystems made vulnerable due to the mechanics and magnitude of species die-offs. Just as members of other species must move to survive, so will members of ours.

Dream Job

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 87 DAYS

Lazlo set aside today for a briefing by Sally to all of STRIDE on the status and content of the current version of the global strategy. Following are some highlights.

“There are three types of problems we must solve simultaneously within the next twenty years: cultural, ecological, and physical. The cultural problems involve just humans, and relate to values, population, and consumption. Ecological problems center on the ability of other species to survive and thrive in healthy ecosystems that maintain conditions of global habitability subject to physical constraints, whose variability represents the third type of problem. The order of presentation for these problem types is the same as the order of difficulty in solving them, with the amount of difficulty increasing by about an order of magnitude for each.

“Every problem type has its own section in the strategy, with another section devoted to the relationships between each of them. Another section provides an integrated timeline of actions, events, and expected status for each system and capability of interest, which can be updated dynamically based on observations during execution. The final section is a combination summary and operator manual that enables all users to determine appropriate action at least eighty percent of the time based on their local conditions. Separately provided is educational material that includes baseline knowledge and concepts for all users.

“The amount of completion for each section ranges from eleven to eighty-six percent. Cumulatively, the strategy is sixty-three percent complete with eighty-two percent confidence in quality. Reconstruction of lost databases using cached data that was not on the sabotaged servers is now at fifty-six percent, which has forced creation of an annex to the strategy that provides for collection and analysis of needed data on a real-time basis from now through the end of the execution timeline. Projections of success that include estimated uncertainty currently range from twenty-one to fifty-eight percent.”

Sally displayed several graphs during the presentation, along with status summaries from each group within STRIDE. From what I understood, they all supported her story, mostly adding detail to each identified problem and what could or might be done about it.

“What did you think?” Riddick asked me as we sat in her office after the presentation. She looked the same way I felt: tired, overwhelmed, and somewhat depressed.

“If there wasn’t so much at stake, I’d start looking for another planet to live on. This place is too far gone.”

“Starting fresh,” she said, staring at the ceiling. “That’s not a new thought. It’s also a very reasonable one. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people here who wouldn’t get to go.” She closed her eyes and yet they kept moving.

“Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?” I asked tentatively.

“Sure,” she said without moving.

“What’s the deal with what you’re doing now? Forgive me if this sounds crude, but it looks like you’re watching a movie inside your head.”

She smiled and opened her eyes. “No apology necessary. I love honest questions.”

“So?”

She leaned over and stared at me. “What does this feel like?”

All I could see was her eyes, and a swirl of peaceful thoughts began replacing the ones that threatened to destroy my sanity. I struggled to summarize what was emerging, and couldn’t help but smile back. “It’s almost as if I’m in a different world.”

“When you see me like that, I am in a different world.”

She sounded crazy, but in a good way. “It must be nice,” was all I could say.

“Would you like to talk about your future now?” she asked, sitting back and breaking the mood.

“Sure.” I assumed she was talking about the fact that my mission here was done.

She pressed a button on her computer and familiar face appeared on the screen. “What do you think, Sally?”

For a second it looked like they were the same person, and then the differences returned. “Will is a great friend.” She turned to me. “You are a great friend. We wouldn’t be here without you.” I sensed a “but” coming. “I think… we need someone looking over our shoulders, asking the odd questions, questioning assumptions we didn’t know we were making.”

“You’re pretty good at that, yourself,” I told her, recalling her personal survival strategy.

“I agree,” Riddick said, and grasped my hand. “Call me Maura from now on, after you write about this.” She paused and said to Sally, “I’ll recommend to Samantha that we keep the current arrangement after his testimony.”

“In case I screw up,” I said reflexively, but Maura took no offense.

Reality Check

Numbers listed are all fictional, including the estimates of required effort for the problem types which are ballpark at best.

Sally’s version of Will’s job description matches what I would write for my dream job, for which I am available. 

To be continued on Tuesday…

Lessons Learned

TIME TO GLOBAL STRATEGY DEADLINE: 25 DAYS

Today the Strategy Integration group posted the briefest update ever to appear on its WICO web page following a weekend of total silence: “Completion of the global strategy remains on schedule. Thank you for your patience.” Calls to members of the group were met with recorded versions of the same message.

The majority of press coverage focused on lessons learned from the national strategies released by WICO on Friday. A common theme among national security and political affairs analysts was that the release of the strategies by itself is forcing a global partnership because there is now no significant advantage in knowledge that any one nation can hold over another. 

The most quoted observation about the strategies was by social science professor Archibald Ali, which to me sounded a lot like my anonymous source Sally. “It is now obvious that the notion of cultural superiority is based upon an assumption of localized stability across many critical variables that is not valid in our time, if it ever was. All we can count on is our universal ability to learn and change our behavior as needed while maintaining a common bond that leverages both our similarities and differences.”

My contacts in the business community were generally unimpressed with both the strategies and the reactions to them. “That’s what the governments want, not what the people want,” Ronald Wingate told me. “The same goes for the global strategy. Meanwhile, my people will keep working on something real that the people will be willing to pay for.” Mark Luke reiterated his belief that “the emergency is fake and a distraction from the important work of replacing the natural supply chain with one that transcends it in availability and reliability.”

“The good and the evil have identified themselves,” said Reverend Frank Lanton. “We await whether and how the evil ones will be aligned under the banner of the beast, and we will devise our strategy accordingly.”

Reality Check

The perspectives presented here are fictional, most with a basis in previous posts.