Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction

by Nalo Hopkinson

  So when the boardroom’s back door banged open wide, Kevin whirled toward it in anger and in wonder, knowing that the door led to a set of fire-stairs, and that only someone who needed to reach the boardroom faster than the elevator allowed would charge up those stairs and burst in on him.

  But who the demo-crasher was, Kevin couldn’t quite make out.

  The intruder had stepped into the colorful streams of light being cast by a digital projector across the boardroom’s back wall. And what was being projected — a SOOPE simulation representing global mass media — cloaked the newcomer in a shimmering aura that made Kevin Dunbar hesitate. Hold his breath. Grasp at a memory remaining just out of reach.

  For an instant Kevin stared down the boardroom table past the confounded faces of his clients, seeing only projected pools of quicksilver consumer-viewers dotting the SOOPE’s abstracted landscape; seeing multicoloured wisps of opinion and reaction wafting up from those pools into an atmosphere raging with media storm systems.

  Seeing someone half hidden behind this abstraction-curtain.

  An image from Kevin’s childhood. A distant memory, a deep desire that almost surfaced — then faded out of reach as the figure emerged from the curtain of light, materializing into a young intern-programmer named Nathan.

  “Urgent message from Anton Caety, Mister Dunbar,” Nathan called out down the length of the table. “I’m to tell all of you immediately: Iraq’s invaded Kuwait!”

  All of Dunbar & Caety’s clients were downsizing defence contractors, coaxed to attend today’s demo to hear how Kevin’s proprietary SOOPE simulations could help them rebrand experimental military apps into civilian market spin-offs. So Nathan’s announcement had the effect of a food drop in a famine-ridden third world country. The boardroom resounded with cries for attention, demands for immediate sustenance.

  “Kevin! Can you get me an outside phoneline—”

  “—a shuttle to Logan International—”

  “—any news channel up on your wall TV, there?”

  Hands were reaching out hungrily toward him, seemingly eager to snatch the remote Kevin was holding, which controlled the pre-taped images playing on the big wall screen beside him — actually a four-by-five grid of 20 mini TV screens, each with its own closed-captioned text crawl. The 20 taped images currently rotating around the wall screen were demoing a rapid evolution-path for a rising brand…

  But Kevin obligingly shut off his firm’s most important demo to-date, called up as many all-news channels as he could with the remote, then sat back, and listened to the powerful men around him, who were already claiming that the post-Cold War peace was about to end in a big way.

  With a big war.

  “Look at that — C-SPAN’s reporting the capture of Kuwait City.”

  “Puts Hussein within striking distance of Saudi’s Hama oil fields.”

  “Iraq’s got a clear shot at monopolistic control over most of the world’s crude.”

  “Security Council won’t sit for that. Gentlemen, we’re about to see the fastest resolution in the U.N.’s history.”

  “So much for the ‘peace dividend’…”

  To Kevin, this sounded like wishful thinking. Naturally, defence industry clients hoped for a new era of big military budgets, hoped it might finally be time to pull out their test-bed technologies, the unmanned drones they were trying to market as traffic spotters and Mexican border patrol cameras.

  Still, Kevin heard the logic of their thinking all too clearly.

  “Iraq, they’ve what? World’s fourth largest army, am I right?”

  “They’ve plenty of experienced combat troops. Tank divisions blooded by eight years of war with Iran.”

  “Want to dislodge them, you’re talking a protracted conflict.”

  If they were correct, Dunbar & Caety was about to find its contracts put on hold just as a slew of big bills came due; the company could fold during a protracted war. Kevin sat back, did what he always did under pressure.

  Broke out a blank notepad.

  He began a new word list, jotting down catch phrases, isolated ideas in no particular order. It was a habit he’d developed in college, back when Kevin first conjured up the concept of a media firm specializing in ideas about ideas.

  First word of this new list was…

  DOORWAY

  A doorway opens, a big change steps into view, an alternative pathway stretches invitingly into the distance — and once the world veered onto that pathway, there would be no easy way for the world to turn back. Kevin understood the momentum of systems-of-systems, oh yes.

  “Forget ideology,” said one of the men who couldn’t pull himself away from the boardroom’s multi-channel wall screen. “Gonna be resource wars from now on.”

  “Non-renewables are the new ideology,” said another.

  “Think the Russians’ll be on our side for this one?”

  “Now that’s a ‘Nineties alliance I’d give a lot to see.”

  It occurred to Kevin that the military industrialists arrayed around him were missing a bigger picture made piecemeal by 20 side-by-side TV screens. All seemed oblivious to the fact that they were watching reporters weighing from Riyadh, from Kuwait City, from the streets of Bagdhad via live satellite feeds.

  And so another door suddenly opened, deep inside Kevin Dunbar’s imagination, revealing a pathway climbing toward a place fantastically difficult to reach — the most fantastic place Kevin could imagine reaching. Suddenly possessed by a disorienting feeling that his life had been a prelude to this moment, this doorway, this pathway directing him toward an improbably high mountain peak visible through a break in the illusory TV images.

  DESTINY

  Kevin added that to his new word list, then began jotting down ideas about a whole new direction for Dunbar & Caety to take. And an hour later, after the last client had departed and only Kevin and his marketing VP remained in the boardroom, the rest of his staff began to trickle in, filling the empty seats around the long granite-topped table.

  First came Kevin’s SOOPE team-leads, the core group of college kids he’d hired to get the company off the ground. The inseparable Sammi and Grant, sim designers and gaming addicts; the brilliant and radiant Rachel, his chief Complexity mathematician; Vlad ‘the Impatient’, his adaptive computation wiz; Fiona, a fantastic media analyst. Kevin admired them all, considered them his close friends, though not quite confidants… Then came his finance VP, and then the kids from tech support, the junior programmers, the administrative staff, all crowding into the boardroom with their coffee, their cigarettes, their sweat and tension and expectation.

  For half an hour Rachel, Vlad and Fiona kept a moat-space open around Kevin, kept him isolated from the elbow-to-elbow crush of the rest of the boardroom, and kept the ongoing reaction-chatter to the news channel crawl-lines on the wall screen down to a dull murmur, with looks and nods toward Kevin, building expectation higher. His core group knew enough to leave Kevin alone when he was ‘creative keywording’; Kevin wasn’t just the firm’s founder, he was its primary visionary.

  And he’d given his team-leads the signal that he was preparing to pull a rabbit out of the hat for them.

  But he still picked up on the anger in the room, overheard the hushed rumour circulating that Anton Caety had effectively sabotaged a critical demo of the product they’d all worked on for half a year, by insisting that the Kuwait invasion be openly announced in the boardroom. Caety was their firm’s principal backer. What had he been thinking?

  Kevin understood that Anton had been firing a warning-shot across the company’s bow. The business focus for their defence clientele changed in the moment the tanks rolled over Kuwait’s border; so it must change for Dunbar & Caety too. Anton wanted Kevin to rise to the challenge right away.

  Rising to his feet, tie off now, shirt slee
ves rolled up, Kevin shut off the text crawl on the wall screen, stepped in front of the silent images, and said:

  “Our biggest clients believe the situation in Kuwait has only one outcome. A large scale war, coming soon to a TV screen near you.”

  Looks of uncertainty, incredulity. To his libertarian Complexity theorists and young programmers, kids raised on the permanent impasse-peace of the Cold War, a new war seemed a non sequitur.

  So Kevin said, “Think of what your seeing here in terms of SOOPE theory.” He gestured toward images of Kuwaiti oil wells on a corner-channel of the wall screen. “Oil production plays the role in high-tech societies that plankton plays in the food chain. It’s a cornerstone system. Scientific community claims we’ve burned through half the earth’s total reserves in only a century and a half. Production will likely peak in the next decade or two. Control over what’s left will likely dominate world affairs.” A more sweeping gesture, taking in all twenty news channels. “That makes oil both the activator at the bottom of our system-of-systems and the motivator at the top, the driver for state-level conflicts—”

  “So the oil system’s going supercritical,” Vlad summed up impatiently.

  Kevin nodded. “And so is another century-and-a-half-old system.” Turning to face the multi-channel screen, he held his arms out to it. “You’ve seen how mass media renders in a SOOPE sim. Looks like a surreal weather pattern. Print, television, film, radio, all swirling together into an overhead curtain of clouds, flickering with attention-getting images. Reverberating with distant event-echoes. Amplifying the outcries of the global village, and reflecting world opinion back on itself.”

  Standing in the light spilling off the 20 televised images, Kevin sensed the door inside him opening wider, saw the mountain path he’d glimpsed earlier — a steep route climbing high into the sky, all the way up to the shimmering cloud-curtain that mesmerized the couch-potato masses. The mountain path led behind this chimera curtain, led on up to the peak, a place from which the inner workings of the world’s system-of-systems might be viewed.

  A place from which worldwide changes and opinions might be previewed and predicted and, under certain conditions, might even be pre-programmed.

  A place that might be possible to reach with SOOPE theory.

  Turning back to the audience in his boardroom. “Say our biggest clients are right,” he suggested. “Say we’re about to witness the first big war waged in the age of realtime satellite reporting.” He pointed to images from Amman, Riyadh, Basra and Bagdhad. “A live-via-satellite war. And a test-bed war for some of the technologies we’ve been helping our clients spin-off into civilian products. Here’s what I want to know,” Kevin told them, folding his arms across his chest.

  “Could a broad-response SOOPE influence the course of this war?”

  The staff members crowded around the table blinked at him.

  “Can’t answer that without knowing how the war’ll play out,” Sammi said. “What kind of battle situations might get broadcast—”

  “So? You’ve a whole subculture of war simulators and strategists to draw on, from Boston, Baltimore, Annapolis, Washington. Ex-army and ex-CIA gamers, with sophisticated models for foreign battle-groups, armaments, all ready-made. One tournament runs regularly on Georgetown campus, isn’t that true, Grant?”

  “Woah,” Grant said. “Can’t use any of those models — they’re all top-down!”

  “Right. So borrow them, turn them inside out, then SOOPE them from the ground up.”

  Eyes lighting up among the younger coders; nudges as the team-leads saw where he was going.

  “You want us to brew bottom-up mimics—”

  “Of both sides in a potential Persian Gulf war,” Kevin agreed. “Contact your friends in the Georgetown strategy community, see if any have work-ups for a computational Iraqi army. That’ll be the easier part. Hard part’ll be booting up an American-led western alliance.”

  Vlad and Rachel and Fiona didn’t look particularly pleased about this potential new simulation project. Using SOOPE theory to help DOD contractors get out of the war business was one thing; using SOOPE theory to help the DOD itself, quite another.

  But all the sim designers and video gamers in the boardroom seemed excited by the prospect.

  “ABC’s doing an analysis of Iraq’s military capabilities at five PM.”

  “That’s in ten minutes,” Kevin observed. “Somebody record that, use it as stock for a mock-up Iraq mimic. Now get to it.” He waved them off. And after the regular staffers had scurried back down into the cubicle-maze that covered the ground floor of the converted warehouse Dunbar & Caety used as its headquarters, Kevin heard out the objections of Vlad, Rachel, and Fiona, who felt the prospect of war was overblown.

  “Kev, surely the challenge is to develop regular clients, non-contractor clients—”

  “Of course.” Kevin glanced over at his marketing manager, Brian, who was rolling his eyes. “But as Bri here will tell you, that’ll mean tackling hard-to-break-into markets with established ad-firms. That’s our long term goal, I assure you. But in the short term we may be facing a cash-flow crunch. And that’ll mean job cuts. Unless we can make an opportunity out of this.”

  Kevin waved up at the multi-channel wall screen again. And saw that Fiona was on board, and Rachel grudgingly so. Vlad glared up at the twenty muted channels, unhappy with the world, with Kuwait, with Kevin.

  “Just get a crude demo tossed together,” he told them, “in case there’s merit to the contractors’ assessments. Next few days’ll tell which way the Kuwait crisis may go…” Kevin privately believed the contractors had it right. So after the others trooped out he called his wife Cress, left a message saying he’d be late again, had a lot to work out.

  All that evening, Kevin watched the news channel crawl, jotted keywords on his notepad. As the hours wore on, he became more and more convinced that the post-Cold War era was changing tack, turning toward a new systemic configuration on the international level. The door deep inside Kevin cracked open further, revealing more and more of the imaginary mountain path, winding up toward a cloud curtain concealing the workings of the world. Again he glimpsed a familiar figure, a young man partly visible behind that curtain. The intern Nathan from this afternoon?

  No, something more. A distant dream-memory from childhood. Something he’d seen as a boy had convinced Kevin Dunbar that the world around him was decipherable, decodable, ultimately programmable. Perhaps that same something had prompted him to study SOOPE theory, just so that he might one day peek behind reality’s curtain.

  Or do more than merely peek.

  A strangely unnerving thought that made Kevin rub at his eyes, and shut off the wall screen, and head home to bed; for it suggested another, far more sobering thought.

  That the door opening inside him shouldn’t have opened. That it led to a place impossible to reach. That he was gambling with his future, and with the future of all those employees who depended on him.

  August 7th

  Still, all business was a gamble. And gambling on the prospect of a Persian Gulf war seemed promising enough in the early going. Five days after the invasion of Kuwait the White House began massing American forces in Saudi Arabia. And on the same day Kevin met with his team-leads in the boardroom again, to witness the first test-run of their Gulf War SOOPE.

  “Voila!” Sammi activated the digital projector at the far end of the boardroom’s table. “Ladies and gents, boys and girls, I give you both army-mimics in standby mode.”

  “Meaning both are prepping for launch of combat operations,” Grant added.

  What Kevin saw splashed across the boardroom’s back wall was two huge translucent objects — one for each army involved in a potential Persian Gulf conflict — preparing to face off against each other, and rotating in ways that revealed their inner component-struct
ures. On the left side, a pyramid representing the Iraqi force slowly pirouetted; on the right, a denser Allied sphere spun much faster. The Iraqi pyramid’s interior was criss-crossed with spines and spokes that connected its many modules—

  “Note the Iraq mimic appears more rigid, much simpler than the Allied sphere.” Grant moused a projected arrow over to the sphere mimicking an American-led Allied force. The arrow flickered around, pointing out the fluid organelles within the sphere that were constantly shifting, metamorphosing in shape. In place of stiff spokes the Allied force was configured with thousands of flexible linkages.

  “Capillaries of command are much denser here,” Grant said, “visible at much lower levels.” For an instant the entire sphere seemed to flex, reconstitute its size and density.

  “Run the mimics into war mode,” Kevin told them.

  Grant complied. The other team-leads held their breath as the projected display remained unchanged. Nothing seemed to be happening.

  “I’m on it.” Rachel had her laptop open before her, was scanning the SOOPE’s realtime output, a scrolling of path-code sequences. “Okay, the Allied sphere’s taking stock of the high value placed on the life of its soldier-cells… Taking stock of its superior remote-targeting hardware… And hey, here we go, it’s choosing a strategy—”

  The back wall projection dramatically changed: blades of light flickered forth from the denser Allied-labelled sphere, severing spinal spokes within the Iraqi pyramid, lobotomizing its internal connections, its governing intelligence.

  “Great,” Vlad sighed. “We’ve got ourselves a first strike infrastructure attack.”