Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  With the summaries out of the way, Todd turned the podium over to another consultant, some analyst from Toronto. “Now I’d like to do a little exercise,” he was saying as Rob leaned over to Jeffrey.

  “Who is this guy?”

  “One of the founders of Wegetit,” murmured Jeffrey. “Got his start in something called Structured Dialogic Design.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “What I’m going to do is ask a series of questions,” the consultant was saying, “about the issues that’ve been identified on Wegetit.com over the past few days. I want you to put up your hands if you agree. Those of us who are still traveling can IM their answers. Let’s start with this question: Do you think that cheap access to the mainland would help ease the problem of the ‘barrier to employment’ we talked about earlier?” Hands were raised. “Now, do you think that better access to employment opportunities would make access to the mainland easier?” Hands went up again.

  This exercise went on for a while. Rob raised his hand with the others. Most of the answers to the questions were obvious to the point of inanity. He couldn’t see how it helped to know that a lack of education hampered one’s job prospects.

  After half an hour, the consultant pushed his glasses back on his nose and said, “Right, we’ve got enough answers. Our software’s been quietly working in the background, doing a root cause analysis on all the issues we’ve talked about. Here it is.”

  He brought up a diagram on the wall screen, and suddenly Rob snapped to attention. There, laid out in graphic boxes joined by lines—a kind of flowchart—were the problems the Haida and related stakeholders had identified, organized according to which problems caused which. The chart formed a tree, with issues like suicide rates and drug use and abuse clustered at the top. They connected down into poverty, schooling issues, cultural genocide, and so on. The tree continued through these too, down to the single root cause that the exercise had shown underlay almost everything else. That flowchart box contained the words The Haida Do Not Control Their Land.

  Rob swore under his breath. He’d done scenario exercises many times, but never one that had so quickly, seamlessly, and completely nailed down an issue. The causal tree had emerged from a series of perfectly reasonable—even obvious—answers to questions about how social problems were connected. The problem was, the tree was upside down: all those obvious answers should have led to the obvious conclusion, namely that it didn’t matter how the damned islands were governed, individual people had to take responsibility for their own lives. Instead it said the opposite.

  Rob had agreed with every answer that had built this tree. How could he not agree with the result?

  It had to be a trick; he wasn’t sure how yet, but the game had been rigged.

  It was break time, and Rob spent most of it being visible. He shook various newly arrived hands and congratulated the organizers on the amazing progress they’d made today. Eventually he was able to make it to the bathroom, where he rendezvoused with Jeffrey.

  He leaned on a sink and glared at his aide. “Did we just get blindsided?”

  Jeffrey looked uncomfortable. “They’re following the program. It’s just that . . . what’s happening here is connecting into other systems, like Wegetit, in ways we hadn’t anticipated. I mean, you saw . . . processes that normally take months are taking hours.”

  “Politics is slow for a reason. You don’t steer a supertanker like you steer a canoe. Not without damage. Who are these people?”

  “You mean the ones doing the systems stuff? Well, there’s Wegetit, but it’s just a front end. It’s a filter that groups people according to how well they’ll understand one another, but we’ve just learned that the data from it can be used by another set of tools in a system called ‘Cybersyn 2.0.’ ”

  “And what does that do?”

  Jeffrey hesitated. “I think you’d better ask your son. He’s the CEO.”

  The break over with, and all the attendees finally there, the conference went into full gear. Todd Swanton stood up and began to introduce the afternoon’s agenda. “The technical term for what we have after two hundred years of tug-of-war between the Haida and the Crown,” he said, “is a wicked problem. A wicked problem is not just a problem. You can solve an ordinary problem; at least, you can describe it. With a wicked problem—also called a mess—there’s no definite formulation of the problem. There’s no stopping rule for a mess—no way to prove you’ve fixed it. Solutions aren’t either right or wrong, just different, and every solution is a ‘one-shot’ that can’t be compared to any previous attempt at fixing it. You cannot fix a mess. The best you can do is improve it.”

  He smiled cheerfully. “We’re here today to improve the mess we call Canada-Haida relations. We’re going to start using one of those sophisticated techniques that used to be jealously guarded by small groups of highly paid consultants and doled out at great expense to rich clients. Like so many other things that computers have made cheaper and easier, they’ve made morphological analysis easy—so easy that we’re going to turn it into a game. We’re going to play the game for the rest of this afternoon. The name of the game is ‘Addressing the Root Cause.’ ”

  “What the hell,” muttered Rob. It was too late to get out of it now—he’d agreed to this scoping workshop—so all he could do was smile and look like he was enjoying himself, and think about firing Jeffrey. For the next four hours Wegetit and the Haida pulled out all the stops, creating multidimensional matrices whose nodes were the various different aspects of the mess that was government–First Nation relations. Using projectors, glasses, tablets, and anything else they could get their hands on, the organizers spun around, expanded and focused in on, drilled down into, and exploded the dimensions, eliminating literally millions of potential configurations until they’d narrowed down the class of possible solutions. The name for this technique was morphological analysis, which was bad enough, but it wasn’t just the name that was exhausting; the many solutions would have all blurred together in a migraine-inducing mass except for one thing:

  Each solution was displayed on the screens as a face. They were goddamned Dorians, and Terry had been right—even the subtlest difference between two solutions was instantly visible as a slightly different expression, ethnicity, or emotion on the parade of faces. You could sort through twenty of them for the best in the time it took to scan your eyes across them. The best solutions were happy, healthy, youthful, and ethnically Haida. When the room unpacked the data on a solution, it always turned out that their instinctive assessment had been right, through a problem space containing millions of possible answers.

  As they did this Rob found himself swinging between his own multidimensional matrix of reactions: annoyance, indulgence, euphoria, and shock. The problem—mess, rather—was too big for any one human being to understand all its parameters and possible solutions; but it wasn’t too big for a group of stakeholders to understand, if they were guided properly through the process.

  At the end he raised his hand and asked the consultant, “What do you call what we just did?”

  The man smiled. “We call it ‘rewilding politics.’ ”

  They broke for the night. Swanton finished by recapping, then said, “I know we’re all tired from today’s mental workout, but luckily it’s a different kind of work we’re going to do in the next session. Today was all about finding the problems. The next session, in two days, will be about nailing down the shared understanding we developed today. It’s been proven that the best way to share an understanding of complex issues is through storytelling, so that’s exactly what we’re going to do—and it’s why we’ll all need a day to prepare. We’re going to share our stories, through speech, in writing, in song, and in dance. Everything that we’ve come to understand intellectually today, we’re going to know in our bones by the end of that session.”

  As they filed out, everybody was exhausted but hyper, and conversations and arguments spilled out into the parking lot and beyond. R
ob headed back to his hotel and called Krishnamurti. “I know my son’s involved, but I want to know who else is. Who’re they working for, who else is funding them—I want to know everything,” he told the CSIS director.

  It was a voice-only line, slightly delayed as satellite connections tended to be. It was also late in the evening, Ottawa time, but Rob didn’t care. Krishnamurti should have been expecting this call.

  “CSEC’s been looking into Wegetit,” said the director. “But also into the Internet in the Queen Charlottes. It turns out it’s mostly a homegrown meshnet. The islanders aren’t buying their Internet connectivity from Rogers, Bell, or any of the other regulated carriers. They’re using solar-powered homemade antennas and store-bought routers. A lot of those are logging company data relays; they’re piggybacking on commercial equipment. They either pay in Gwaiicoin, or in goodwill. They’re a darknet, in fact—a whole Internet outside the official one. And there’s hints they may be using autonets, too.”

  “What’re those?”

  “Body-to-body data relays using Bluetooth or near-field. Almost impossible to detect or counter.”

  “But who’s behind it?”

  Again the delay dragged out. “No one,” said Krishnamurti at last. “At least, it may originally have been somebody in particular’s idea; but now it’s running itself.”

  He thanked Krishnamurti and hung up. Then he made another call.

  “Hello?” said Terry.

  “This is all your doing, isn’t it?” said Rob.

  There was that same brief silence he’d gotten from Krishnamurti—as clear as day a signal that the guy on the other end of the line was choosing his next words carefully.

  “We’ve got a rest day before the next session, right?” said Terry. “Why don’t you and me do something? I was thinking of visiting the old forest.”

  A father and son outing? That was just as clichéd and artificial as house-hunting. Still . . .

  Rob harrumphed. “You’re on,” he said.

  THEY TOOK AN OLD dirt road with green shoulders through a cathedral of inward-leaning trees. The brush was an impenetrable tangle, and Rob pointed that out to Terry. “It grows so thick! Where are we going?”

  “There’s an outfitter on Yakoun Lake. He can give us a canoe.”

  “Canoe?” Rob laughed uneasily. “It’s been years, you know.”

  “Oh, it’s okay. They also sell aspirin.”

  The road curled its way to the edge of a spectacular lake backed by white-capped mountains. On the shore a man in a red plaid shirt was flipping over a canoe as if it weighed nothing. With so much water in the air, the distant mountains were like silver cutouts, except for their white tops. Rob was distracted by this sight as Terry negotiated with the tour operator. When he looked back from the scenery, it was to see his son had stripped off his shirt. He was putting on something that looked like a sleek blue undershirt, and there was a second one draped on the canoe beside him. Rob had seen a few of these peeking out from under the clothes of islanders over the past couple of days. He’d assumed they were insulated, like fleece, but the outfitter grinned and shook his head. “You’ll see,” he said.

  “I don’t like wearing other people’s old bowling shoes, why would I wear this?”

  “Disposable liner,” said Terry.

  Rob sighed. What with everything else that was weird about this, it was just one more thing. “Whatever.” He put it on.

  They paddled slowly along the shoreline for an hour, then across to the western side. When they beached the canoe and Terry brought out a thermos of coffee, Rob looked back at the distance they’d come. The vista was glorious.

  Ahead of them lay something even more wonderful. The trees here were ancient, but widely enough spaced that light penetrated to the forest floor in hazy shafts. A covering of bright green moss, inches deep, draped across the roots and boulders alike like crumpled velvet. More dripped in long streamers from the branches, which started far enough up to offer long sight lines through the boles. When Terry stepped into the green cathedral, Rob eagerly followed him.

  He felt a kind of buzz on the left side of his torso; at that instant something bounded from behind a tree off to the left. He couldn’t see it, but somehow the sound matched up to the buzzing sensation.

  “Feel that?” Terry slapped at his chest. “A deer.”

  Rob stopped moving. He suddenly realized that this touch on his body wasn’t the only one; he could feel other creatures nearby. He slowly turned to the right, then pointed. “What’s that?”

  “You got it! There’s a bear about a kilometer that way. Feel how it has a different texture. And up there”—he pointed—“I can feel eagles. They’re especially prickly, I don’t know why.”

  Rob was amazed. “It’s the shirt doing this?”

  “It’s called sensory substitution. You can replace one sense with another. These vests do something like that, but in this case they’re using all the smart sensors scattered through the forest to identify the animals—what they are, and where they are. Then they paint a sensation across our skin. They’re actually cheap to make; they use speakers and vibrators from discarded cell phones, weave ’em into the material. Gives you a new sense. It works best if you don’t consciously think about it. Just let it wash over you. Come on, let’s go this way.”

  They strode through the ancient forest, and as they did Rob felt his sense of where he was, and even who he was, grow out from his chest like an indrawn breath that never stopped expanding. He could feel the deer, the ravens and foxes and bears, even if he couldn’t see them. His ancestors had lacked this sense, but maybe they’d made up for that with knowledge—reports from hunters and workers of what lived where and in what abundance.

  He’d never felt any sense of connection with those people. They were like shadows, as dark and inaccessible as the inward darkness below the pine boughs.

  Pensive, he followed his son, speaking less and less as the day went on.

  Gradually he became aware that the life of the forest lay behind them. Something was up ahead, and he assumed it was the sea, until they came to the edge of the forest and he saw the churned landscape of stumps and bare earth that stretched away for kilometers. Clear-cutting: the whole forest had been logged here, and with his new sense he could feel how empty it was.

  “Raven,” said Terry, pointing. Rob looked, but all he saw was an old logging road, and a pickup truck. Terry was walking out to it, so he followed.

  There was a man standing next to the truck. The raven sensation was coming from that spot; did he have a bird with him? No; as Rob came closer he couldn’t see the animal, and yet the raven signal kept getting stronger. It was as if the man were a raven.

  And yes—of course he was.

  Robert remembered his grandfather telling him that their family was part of the Eagle clan. It had seemed silly and superstitious to him at the time, just one more piece of the past that he’d have to reject if he was to make some sort of life for himself in the modern world. He still felt that way. And yet . . .

  They greeted the man, who was working with Parks Canada to do a census of the local bear population. As they walked back to the trees, Rob said, “He was wearing one of these sensory substi-whatits, wasn’t he?” He’d seen a hint of blue under the red plaid lumberjack’s shirt the guy had on.

  When Terry shrugged, Rob said, “So was everybody at the workshop . . . they could all feel each other’s clan, couldn’t they? Including ours? Did that guy back there see two Eagles come out of the bush just now?” Terry didn’t answer, which told Rob all he needed to know. He stopped, suddenly aware only of his son and not the moss-covered cathedral of trees where they stood. “I know everything, Terry. That you’re the one who’s backing this. You’re a Haida separatist?”

  He expected the kind of evasion or argument he used to get when Terry was a kid. Instead Terry laughed.

  “Dad, this is the twenty-first century. We’re way past separatism here.”


  His conversation with Bill echoed in his head. “What, is this some kind of takeover? The First Nations’ revenge?” But Terry was still laughing.

  “Dad, we can’t separate because there’s nowhere to separate to. The world’s too small now. Nobody can do it. And take over what? Canada’s not a well-defined thing anymore, any more than the States or anywhere else is. We’re all crammed together. It’s the global village, right?”

  “So what is going on here?”

  Terry crossed his arms, serious now. “The shirts, the Dorians, Wegetit . . . they’re just people using cognitive science to improve their interactions. And their decision making. Hell, you use the stuff yourself!”

  “I do not—”

  “Oh, yeah? What about SimCanada? It’s all through Parliament Hill.”

  “Those are just brainstorming tools.”

  “Tools to think with, right.”

  “You’re saying the Dorians are just like SimCanada?”

  “Exactly like SimCanada, Dad.”

  “I don’t like it, Terry. You’re letting a goddamned machine make your decisions for you.”

  “Your Dorians don’t make your decisions. They’re just making visible the invisible: the interplay of all the complicated factors at play in your life. Like which animals are around us, and where all our Eagle brothers and sisters are right now.”

  “As well as who owns what?”

  Terry grinned. “Ah, you saw that overlay, eh? Wait’ll you see the stranded assets overlay for the carbon bubble.”

  Rob carefully looked through the dripping green branches at the complex depths of the forest. “If I put on my glasses right now, what would I see?”

  “Us,” said Terry. “You’d see what you’re dealing with.”

  Like mountains, the Haida and Tsimshian territorial claims would loom over the trees—not claims entirely of men and women anymore, but of Bear and Raven—and Eagle. And he was sure he would be able to see other things, too, like logging concessions, company names. Who owned what. How much the forest was worth in cold cash. In that moment he got it.