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.

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.