Sharing

 

Today Ronald Wingate vehemently denied that Evolution over Devolution (E.D.) or any of its affiliates had anything to do with yesterday’s emergency, including the pollution-eating microbes and drone dispersal technology.

Shortly afterward, the Denver office of the Extinction Response Unit announced that the escaped drone was a prototype undergoing verification testing by the military due to its access to the necessary test equipment. The problem has since been found and fixed, and an investigation revealed that there actually was no significant risk to the public. 

Sally, meanwhile, told Maura that the question of jurisdiction is now officially settled, and refused to elaborate further on the answer she gave me yesterday.

“That brings up the question of how people will know what’s natural and what’s not,” I said to Al and Maura during a long lunch together at a restaurant in downtown Boulder. It was the first time in two weeks that the three of us had been together. “I know WICO wants maximum feedback for their coordination role, but people need to have realistic expectations to just live their lives, and they’re not always going to have phones.”

“It’s a cluster that everyone’s responsible for,” Al said. “Your PFR folks are creatin’ stuff just like the war machine. WICO’s hopin’ that they can know it all, figger how it all fits together, and share the picture in a way that makes sense. Which of course they can’t.” He turned to Maura. “How did the campers take to the observin’ protocols?”

“They did okay,” she said. “The testers running Possibilities from Responsibilities have the protocols integrated into the curiosity part of the game…”

“The crazy questions Will wrote about?” he interrupted her.

She nodded. “Describing objects, conditions, and events, before and after actions where possible. Though they see the creation of understanding as the fun part, and prefer to internalize the rest.”

“You can’t let ‘em. There’s too many dependencies. Everyone sharin’ is what we need; it’s a great take you had on that empathy ruleset.”

“Tied in with responsibility,” I reminded him.

“It’s all tied in with responsibility,” he agreed. “Discovery’s great, but it’s no more than self-gratifyin’ consumption if you don’t communicate it to everyone whose lives might depend on it.”

Reality Check

Following up on yesterday’s post, this is more exposition of the core “rulesets” of responsibility, empathy, and curiosity. Interpretations are my own.

Questions

 

Three questions have been running through my mind since Monday: What is it, how good is it, and what do others think and feel about it? Answering them and the questions that follow from them was a game started by Louis Delambre on Sunday to train the bootcamp’s participants in the application of curiosity, responsibility, and empathy to actions, objects, conditions, and events. He introduced the game before the tours of Vitalla began, driving Maura and her fellow educational consultants crazy both as targets and sources of the questions.

“I’m getting tired of this,” Maura complained as we crossed the Colorado border yesterday, “and don’t you dare ask why!”

“Don’t worry,” I remember answering. “I feel the same way.” It took less than an hour for us to start up again. We both luckily had the rest of the day off, except for the time I took to write yesterday’s blog post. 

Today I joined her for a debriefing about the trip in my first visit to the Rocky Mountain Operations Center since resigning from WICO. We were interrupted by a rare Homeland Emergency Alert broadcast to everyone’s phones, warning that it was unsafe to be outside until further notice. While the rest of the public guessed the reason, Sally announced to the staff (which she considered me an honorary part of) that an experimental drone used for dispersal of pollution-collecting microbes had been accidentally released from a test facility in Colorado Springs. It was being tracked, and a search-and-recovery operation was underway using Air Force drones.

The whole story sounded fishy to me, but it was confirmed publicly three hours later along with news that the drone was safely recovered. I asked Sally if the Widely Dispersed Pollutants (WDP) group was still involved in experimental technologies development now that the Extinction Response Unit is in charge of trying to stop self-sustained impacts, but she refused to specifically answer, saying instead that “jurisdiction is currently fluid.”

When I was alone again with Maura, I recalled Ronald Wingate’s discussion on Blue Planet Day about commercial pollution cleanup technology, and Sally’s comment suddenly made sense. “What was the drone, really?” I asked Maura.

“Not this again,” she said plaintively.

“Seriously, who was controlling it?” I insisted. “Who, or what?”

“What are you thinking?” she asked, her expression revealing that she was taking me seriously.

“Why did it have to be hunted, unless it was under control? And if it was under control, what was the controller thinking? Was it being used as a delivery device for microbes, if it even had them, or was it being used for something else?”

She closed her eyes for a few moments, but they kept moving like she was reading a book or watching a movie. Then she opened them with the force of a revelation. “It wasn’t the WDP group, or Extinction Response, or the military. It was private.”

I nodded. “E.D. has a lab down there. Or it could be something externally controlling it.”

“The what,” she said, as if she was recalling something, like the conversation we had before we left for Montana. “You don’t think it was Sally, do you?”

“She was a little too vague when I asked about the WDP group,” I pointed out. “That answer left the door open for several answers, and several motives.”

“Like testing a commercial product,” she said. “Or manipulating perceptions to change the future.”

Once again, questions led to more questions.

Reality Check

One point of focusing on curiosity, responsibility, and empathy is to develop a consciousness of context for experience that can guide future experience toward desired goals. In my experience, asking and answering questions is a critical part of the process, and well worth the effort even if it initially leads to more confusion.