Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction

by Nalo Hopkinson

  Sammi nodded more enthusiastically. “Allies are cutting the top of the Iraqi pyramid off from its base-the Republican Guard and regular army soldiers bunkered-down in the desert.”

  As the sphere continued its dissection of the pyramid, Kevin called up the output path-code on his own laptop, saw that the graphically-abstract infrastructure attack was actually a massive aerial bombardment of Iraq. The SOOPE’s goal-orientating code indicated the Allies were attempting to soften up enemy ground forces from the air … “Accelerate the sim-time,” he said.

  His team-leads obliged, quickening the pace of the SOOPE’s progression.

  The back wall graphics showed the Allied aerial bombardment continuing for several days, as more and more elements within the Iraqi army-mimic were cut off from the pyramid’s top-down control architecture.

  “If this scenario turns out to be plausible, Hussein’ll have great difficulty getting orders to his troops shortly after the war’s opening,” Kevin mused. An intriguing development.

  But it didn’t stop the SOOPE from plunging into a long-term stalemate loop. Days of Allied air campaigns became weeks of air campaigns, yet the sphere still failed to achieve its objective, failed to target enemy troop-positions. And so a second-stage ground war remained on hold.

  “Here’s the problem.” Rachel was frowning at her laptop’s scrolling path-code. “Prospect of high Allied casualties transmitted via media back to homeland populations. Looks so risky the sphere can’t resolve it.”

  “So sim failure.” Kevin was standing now, pacing slowly around the boardroom table.

  “Well, war failure, at any rate,” Rachel allowed. “Republican Guard divisions mimic as too dangerous, too well-trained to take on without a significant ‘softening’.” Rachel appeared to find that euphemism distasteful.

  “Guard divisions are all bunkered too deep to get at from the air,” Grant explained. “Had time to bury themselves in during the prep-period. They may be communicationless, but they’re completely intact.”

  “Okay, stop the sim there.” Kevin continued to pace, taking up the mantle of commander-in-chief, hands braced behind his back as he issued orders. “Want you to boil this SOOPE through as many Borgean repathing runs as the mimics can handle without evaporating. Try pushing initial parameters past the edges of your reality-limits scale, do whatever you have to to find the fault-lines in this scenario.”

  Everyone around him paged their teams waiting down in the cubicles of the warehouse floor below, and the regular programmers got the repath variants underway.

  But by the end of the day, all the tweaking and testing and bending and near-breaking couldn’t alter the outcome of their Gulf War SOOPE: virtually every run ended in a casualty-averse loop, as Allied air campaigns failed to get at the enemy troops fortified in their desert bunkers.

  Kevin was delighted.

  Consistency was what he most wanted to see in the repaths… He stayed late again, composing an encrypted email to Anton Caety, telling Anton about their new SOOPE, about its prediction that the war would start with a Catch-22 stand off.

  Asking him if the Pentagon was anticipating a similar problem in the real Persian Gulf.

  Kevin sent the email shortly before midnight, then drove home to Salem, found his wife Cress was out late with her friends. Which was fine, the way Kevin liked it: his consistent workaholic hours had convinced her to find something else to do, which was good for both of them.

  August 8th to 20th

  Next morning, Kevin opened an encrypted response from Anton.

  My sources confirm members of Gulf Ops Command are worried about that issue.

  Anton Caety happened to be a fabulously wealthy former Navy contractor with an array of important DOD contacts, friends in the Pentagon’s planning directorate. Anton also had a computer science background, so shortly after the cold war ended Kevin had approached him, peddling the potential of Self-Organizing and Optimizing Programmable Evolution sims. Kevin knew a hot prospect when he saw one.

  And so did Anton.

  Would like to see this new SOOPE of yours.

  Kevin fired back a one-line reply:

  Come by in ten days for a look.

  Then he summoned his team-leads once more, told them he needed their Gulf War sim fattened up with the hardest data available, looking robust, body-builder muscular, absolutely unbreakable within ten days.

  Competing SOOPE teams spent the ensuing days restocking the SOOPE, fine-tuning the components and capabilities of both sides of the coming war, which were being scrutinized in extraordinary detail on C-SPAN and CNN special reports. Iraqi military analysts were consulted, experts on the emerging western alliance were called in. And Dunbar & Caety’s latest SOOPE was transformed from a Disney cartoon stick-figure sim to a down-to-the-last-detail Michelangelo mimic — although anyone viewing the SOOPE’s graphical rendering would still have seen it as a surreal piece by Dali.

  Kevin kept a close eye on every new rendering, kept scanning every new repathing. Over and over, the SOOPE replayed the same opening: blades slashed forth from the Allied sphere, weakening the enemy by slicing the means of communication, command and control. That would be the natural direction of an Allied war waged in the Gulf.

  And yet, the boardroom’s back wall revealed an alternate direction:

  A strong communications link seemed to be outlasting the constant simulated-air campaigns — an indirect link pulsing with red that ran between the two abstracted armies. At its midpoint, this surviving bloodline of communications arced up and off the back wall, so that the Iraqi pyramid and the Allied sphere appeared to be holding a glowing red wishbone between them. Both armies were receiving a flow of information from something ‘off the wall’. An out-of-SOOPE source.

  The red connection represented global media, satellite signals picked up from anywhere — the strongest source of information about the war’s progress that would be left open to Iraq’s leader, once the air campaigns began.

  Pulling out the spiral-bound notepad he’d started filling in on the day his inner doorway first opened, Kevin now added

  OPPORTUNITY

  to the bottom of the lengthening keyword list.

  Because now he was through his imaginary doorway, now the mountain path was clearly visible in his mind’s eye. Now he could actually make out his destination, see what waited behind the cloud-curtain wreathing the summit:

  An opportunity out of reach of humanity’s ordinary billions.

  A chance to gain not fifteen minutes of fame, but fifteen minutes of…

  Control.

  Fifteen minutes at the helm of the real world’s system-of-systems, that’s what Kevin saw waiting for him at the end of the path he’d committed Dunbar & Caety to.

  August 21st

  By the time Anton Caety finally dropped by for a look-see, Kevin’s team-leads had simmed a possible solution to the problem of a Persian Gulf ‘ground war stall’.

  UNDERDOG

  That was the keyword Caety needed to understand before he left.

  The team-leads were on hand when Kevin personally projected the SOOPE onto the boardroom’s back wall for Anton. And when the opening’s air attack severings had successfully left only the red wishbone as a communications link between pyramid and sphere, Kevin paused the sim.

  “At this point, the only way Iraq’s leader can find out what’s happening with his own troops in the field is to watch the one communications channel still fully accessible to him — the satellite TV channel, offering mass media broadcasts.”

  “Dunbar and Caety’s field of expertise,” Anton observed. “And?”

  “I’ve found a broadcast-response meme—” Kevin caught Vlad’s unhappy eye; Underdog was actually one of Vlad’s algorithms. “We’ve found a meme to get the Republican Guard up out of their dese
rt bunkers.” Kevin nodded to the others. Grant and Sammi ran the Underdog path-code into the SOOPE.

  Anton watched, asked questions, quickly grasped the abstracts, then gasped, and got very excited.

  “You be ready,” he told Kevin and his staff. “I’ll have you a Pentagon briefing room and a brass marching band to toot your horn, soon as I can convince the right people.”

  September 1st

  Ten days passed before the Pentagon meeting was set.

  Then on the night before Kevin was to fly out to Washington, Fiona, Rachel and Vlad confronted him. All three looked decidedly uneasy.

  “Nothing wrong with the SOOPE, I hope.”

  The trio hesitated.

  “You know about Mennochio?” Vlad asked.

  A blink. “Mennochio,” Kevin repeated. He saw his best and brightest exchanging knowing looks of disappointment, and added Mennochio to his must-look-into mental list. “What’s this about?”

  Another hesitation, then:

  “The thought that our algorithms are about to be given away to the government, the military—” Vlad choked himself off before saying more.

  He meant his algorithms, Kevin thought, stunned by this outburst. Vlad had signed the same terms and conditions of employment that everyone in the company had to sign. Dunbar & Caety owned the rights to software mandated and created on the premises — including all specific path-code sequences and generalized algorithmics, of course. Vlad knew that.

  More to the point, Kevin had given Vlad, Rachel, and Fiona their break in the industry. But he tried to suppress his anger, tried to appeal to the trio, digging deep for some truth to offer them, to win back their hearts and minds.

  “You all believed in the post-Wall peace,” he asked them, “didn’t you?”

  Their turn to blink at him.

  “But war is coming, I’m afraid, and more wars will follow. Unless,” he told them, “this Gulf conflict can play the role of … well, of a global demo. A really impressive demo that’ll suppress other resource-seizing rogue states. Vlad,” he said, “you stocked the sim. You know the free world’s signed onto the alliance against Iraq, the U.N.’s sanctioned it. So now this demo-war in the Gulf can either go over big time or it can stall, even crash.” He paused before adding:

  “Think of the impact a demo that flops badly will have on a worldwide audience of tyrannies and rogue states.”

  The trio stared at him, Rachel visibly upset now, actually in tears. Reminding himself that he’d loved these three for their idealism, still was very fond of them.

  “Iraq has to be the free world’s big-hit demo if the post-Cold War peace is going to have any chance at all,” he added, knowing he was channeling Orwell’s ‘War means Peace’ doublethink. And to a trio of Harvard science grads smart enough to recognize Newspeak when they heard it.

  They looked at him doubtfully; Kevin sensed they were mentally distancing themselves from him, knew he was losing them. So he sighed, assured them all SOOPE algorithms would remain Dunbar & Caety’s alone, knowing he was betraying his young team-leads even then.

  Because he wasn’t confident he could control the Gulf War SOOPE.

  On the moonlit drive out of Boston back home to Salem, while worrying about his firm and wondering how much he’d have to gamble, Kevin saw it again: a tantalizingly familiar image in the rearview mirror, in his mind’s eye. A young man half-hidden behind curtains of light and power.

  Kevin himself, maybe?

  In his house by the sea Kevin found Cress asleep with the TV still on, the screen an off-the-air snow of soft white noise. Cress, one of the ordinary billions dazzled by the chimera-curtain of the news, lying there with that child-like look everyone takes on when unconscious. Cress didn’t know about his Gulf War SOOPE, Kevin hadn’t bothered to tell her. Anton had cautioned him to keep it under a very tight lid to ensure the Pentagon contract.

  Besides, Kevin suspected Cress would react much the same way Vlad had.

  Standing over her sleeping form, feeling the distance between them, the emptiness that had been growing for years. He put it out of his mind, popped downstairs to his basement office, pored over his notes for presenting the Gulf War demo, feeling a draft in the basement, a chill intimation of the coming of war and of winter, though it was only the 1st of September.

  Kevin fell asleep on the basement’s spare bed, got up before dawn, packed, wrote a note to remind Cress he’d be in Washington for a week, left the house before she woke to catch the first flight out of Logan.

  September 2nd

  One month to the day after the Iraqis marched into Kuwait City, Kevin Dunbar marched into the Pentagon with a simulation that echoed the new credo ringing through the hallowed fortress. Down with Clausewitz, out with the fog of war! Up with Computation, in with battlefield-dominant awareness!

  He met with the staff of a Navy admiral named Owens for his closed-door demo. A former associate of Anton Caety’s, Owens now had the ear of the Joint Chiefs. The admiral’s staff began shooting a lot of questions at Kevin as he fumbled to link his laptop into their whitescreen projector, then activated the SOOPE-mimicked Persian Gulf scenario in stand-by mode. The questions came faster as the screen filled with two translucent geometric abstracts-one for each Gulf War force — preparing to face off against each other.

  The admiral himself struggled to come to terms with Kevin’s claim that the SOOPE wasn’t a model in the traditional top-down sense. That the graphical-armies pulsating on the whitescreen were bred from the bottom-up inside a computer, bred to be entirely self-sustaining ‘system mimics’, bred into an abstracted Iraqi military and an abstracted Allied force.

  The Iraqi pyramid and the Allied sphere contained the essence of each army’s infrastructure, technological traits, organizational dynamics, style of command, strategic intent, Kevin explained.

  And fortunately, the admiral’s staff seemed to grasp the essentials. Several gasped as Kevin ran the SOOPE into war mode, and the abstracted infrastructure attack began. Blades of light flashed from out of the denser Allied sphere, and again only one communications flow survived the constant simulated-air campaigns — the glowing red wishbone held between both armies, the flow of information from an off-screen source. The flow of signals from satellite TV broadcasts.

  “Here comes the interesting part,” he told them, as the SOOPE rapidly advanced through the air blitzkrieg, and what looked like tiny baubles began exiting the pyramid’s protective membrane. “Those are isolated Iraqi troop-fragments — units completely cut off by the opening air war — striking out on their own across the Saudi front.”

  All were eliminated by precise blade-flickers from the Allied sphere.

  Someone pointed out, “There’s no back-flow going up the red broadcast-wishbone.”

  “Signifies suppression of all news reports about those isolated strikes,” Kevin said. “Total suppression of bad news is the strategy favoured by the Allied army-mimic.”

  “And by the current administration,” Owens added. “There’ll be no repeat of Vietnam’s horror-footage in America’s living rooms.”

  Kevin pointed to the screen. “Actually, the sim suggests a slight deviation from the path of total news suppression: if just one enemy ground unit is allowed to cross into Saudi territory unharmed, after several weeks of aerial bombardment…” On-screen, an Iraqi troop-bauble wandered out of the pyramid and into the Allied-sphere controlled space without being destroyed by an Allied flash. “And if news of this one successful Iraqi attack is released to the press, an ‘Underdog’ response-meme will likely arise.”

  Before Owen’s staff could ask what a response-meme was, Kevin called up the very database he’d tried to show Dunbar & Caety’s contractor clients back on August 2nd: a database of real TV ad-campaign paths memetically reconstructed on disc, along with their associated response algor
ithms. “Note the number of promotions that generated an ‘Underdog’ response.”

  Owens’ staffers were frowning. “But most of those were political-campaign broadcasts.”

  “Or professional sports promotions.”

  Kevin nodded. “Underdog’s a well mapped out broadcast-response.” He pointed back to the whitescreen’s SOOPE graphics. “And in our Gulf War scenario, Underdog washes back through that wishbone, pours out over the top of the Iraqi pyramid—”

  “You mean over Hussein himself,” Owens said.

  “Look what happens when he sees Underdog,” he said, and showed the admiral and his staff the resulting SOOPE path, which gave the Allied sphere exactly what it required to secure a ground war.

  By the end of the demo Owens was actually grinning at him, and slapping him on the back, and sending him off in a limo to discuss a further demo for Gulf Ops Command with someone named Jones, a liaison newly assigned to serve Dunbar & Caety’s needs.

  KNOCKED OVER

  Kevin added that to his keyword list as the limo whisked him past the White House and into downtown Washington for a fast meal with Jones, who Kevin expected to be every bit the standard Armed Forces Professional Representative Officer.

  But the AFPRO who arrived late for dinner was named Jaegal instead of Jones — Jones having been replaced at the last minute — and came in a non-standard casing:

  Olivia Jaegal was a tall, dark and leggy liaison, an officer whose femininity overpowered the strict lines of her uniform. Olivia explained that she was a member of Advanced Decision Simulation Management group, and would be working closely with Kevin over the remainder of his week in Washington.

  More closely than he’d anticipated, as it turned out.

  September 3rd to September 9th

  What followed was a week of shopping the SOOPE to different groups within the Pentagon’s overlapping lateral hierarchies; encountering and overcoming varied degrees of computational expertise; explaining the basics of Complexity science, the breakthroughs that led to true SOOPE sims; and along the way, being shown pieces of the Alliance’s Persian Gulf war plan that few civilians were privy to, details Kevin personally encoded and fed into his now highly-classified Gulf War simulation to enhance its accuracy.