Major Parnell had taken two battalions into town both days over the weekend and arrested the politicians and bureaucrats on the arrest list. Several of them had split town to homes in the country, and four platoons had to mount up in Imperial Marine assault shuttles and go out after them on Sunday.
With thirty-two platoons operating independently, over the course of two days Major Parnell had gathered up most of the rest of the people on the Arrest List.
When Dunham dropped out of the meeting, it was going on ten o’clock Monday night in Imperial City. Peters was curled up in her club chair opposite the sofa on which Dunham sat.
“So how did the meeting go?”
“Pretty well, I think. It reminded me, though, I really need to work on what the punishments will be for all those arrested. They range from the naive who took side money for doing what the boss wanted anyway, to the ringleaders who ran the whole thing. But, in each case, I need to decide.”
Peters nodded.
“Not easy.”
“No. Well, some of them are. The bag men. The high-ranking. The heads of the police departments. The judges. The people who participated in or covered up murder. The heads of the parties.”
“The parties?”
“Yes,” Dunham said. “You know both political parties were crooked. Sandy Hayes has now tracked the payments in the ‘out’ party as well, and they were also picked up this weekend.”
“Ah.”
“But I think all those get the death penalty. They knew what was going on, they were active in the scheme, they were in senior positions, and they violated their oaths. I need to send a message strong enough to keep people in line.”
Peters nodded.
“And the corporations that paid them off?”
“Some of the CEOs are up for the death penalty as well, I think. And some of the corporations are going to be banned from certain kinds of government contracts for a while. The boards should have done better oversight of their management.”
“Has Mr. Hayes come back yet with the list of the decisions that were perverted in this process? Which corporations benefitted, and which of their competitors were hurt?”
“He has a partial list,” Dunham said. “That will take time to flesh out completely.”
“Are there any Stauss Interstellar companies on that list?”
Dunham raised an eyebrow.
“Just curious,” Peters said.
“No. Not a one.”
“Why am I not surprised? His companies were probably some of the biggest victims of all this.”
“Probably so.”
Dunham sighed.
“What a mess.”
“Just be glad you caught it when you did.”
When Ann Turley woke up Tuesday morning, she had a mail in her inbox under an Imperial header. She opened it and gasped. Gulliver was already awake and getting dressed.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Imperial Death Warrants.”
“Well, we expected that.”
Turley scanned down them. They went on and on. Over fifty in all. No information on whether this was the end of them, or what other punishments might be meted out to others. Just death warrants.
Turley composed a message to Derwinsky and sent it.
To: Sector Governor Eugene Derwinsky
From: Provincial Governor Ann Turley
Subject: Imperial Death Warrants
I really could use some guidance on carrying these out. Not what, but how and when.
Turley got a meeting request back and accepted it for an immediate meeting. When she logged in, she was back in Derwinsky’s comfortable room, seated in an armchair across from him in front of the stone fireplace.
“Good morning, Governor Turley.”
“Good morning, Governor Derwinsky.”
“You wish some guidance here, you say?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m not surprised, Governor Turley. It does not often come up, and so it does not fall in the category of items I reflexively brush off.”
“I appreciate that, sir. I’m just a little shocked by it, I guess.”
“Recall this Emperor killed no less than ten thousand people on his first day in office, and billions more during the Alliance and DP wars, including the complete destruction of Olympia.”
“I understand that, sir. This is different. I have to carry these out.”
“Understood, Governor Turley. Well, as I say, it does not come up often, but it has come up in the past. I have my own method for carrying these out.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Each of the condemned is given the choice, Governor Turley. They can get dressed back in their civilian clothes, have a seat in a nice garden, with a drink of their choice. They are given a pulse injector with a drug that will make them fall asleep first, and then kill them in their sleep. They have half an hour to use it. This in fact is the same drug Sector Governor Gerber used to escape arrest and interrogation.”
“And their other choice, sir?”
“They can be stood before a wall in their prison uniform, blindfolded, and shot by firing squad.”
“Not much of an alternative, sir.”
“No, Governor Turley. I don’t believe I’ve ever had anyone take the second option.”
“But I have over fifty death warrants, Governor Derwinsky.”
“Really? I have close to a hundred, Governor Turley. The two provincial governments, of course, just as you do, but also the sector government.”
Turley nodded. That made sense.
“We don’t know this is even the end of them, sir.”
“Actually, I suspect it is, Governor Turley. It would be cruel, would it not, if someone was named on a death warrant later, having escaped the first round? This Emperor is many things – including absolutely ruthless – but he is never wantonly cruel.”
“Are any of these likely to be rescinded, Governor Derwinsky?
“No, Governor Turley. The Emperor also does not second-guess himself. Not in that way, anyway. Not that I have seen.”
“I worry about the impact on people who have to carry out these executions, sir.”
“Indeed, Governor Turley. It is usually a matter for the Imperial Guard. They are very much the Emperor’s own force, and actually have training about this sort of thing.”
“So, on Dalnimir, it would be Major Parnell.”
“Yes, Governor Turley. And on Esmeralda, it would be whom? Lieutenant Colonel Packwood?”
“Yes, Governor Derwinsky.”
“Very well, then, Governor Turley. That is how we will proceed.”
“Yes, sir.”
Back To The Zoo
“OK, this doesn’t make any sense,” Zhao said, throwing up her hands. “There are no correlations. They’re just all over the map.”
The Zoo was pulling out its collective hair trying to make sense of the data. Everything had been entered into the database, including obscure data about each of the Empire’s prior governors and natural governor candidates. They had also entered the criteria they would use to measure how good each had been, then ran it against the candidates and scored them all.
The issue arose when they tried to predict their ultimate performance from what was known of them at the time of their appointment. They were all so different from each other, there were no variables correlated with strong performance.
Harlan Beadle stirred and held up his hand in front of his chest. All eyes turned to him.
“This is actually what I expected to happen.”
“You did?” Zhao asked.
Beadle nodded.
“I did. It is not in one parameter that we will find the answer, but in combinations of variables. What combinations of experience and circumstance result in a workable worldview for a first-class administrator? You can see it in people like the Emperor and his Co-Consul. They may have nothing in common, and yet they get to the same place, ultimately. By all accounts, they see eye-t
o-eye on almost everything despite wildly disparate backgrounds.”
“So now what do we do, Harlan?” Zhao asked.
“We walk through all possible combinations and permutations of the variables, looking for the hidden correlations with success.”
“That will take a ton of computer time,” Trevor Gormely said.
“No doubt,” Beadle said.
“We also have to program that up,” Donato Taliani said. “We can’t do it by hand. We need to have it be done programmatically to ensure completeness.”
“Oh, yes,” Beadle said. “No doubt about that either. But you see, I have already written that program.”
“You have?” Zhao asked.
“Oh, yes. As I say, I anticipated the problem.”
“Can we run it? Right now?” Gormely asked.
“No. We simply don’t have the computer power here to come up with a timely answer for His Majesty.”
“Does anyone?” Salma Norales asked.
“Oh, yes. I believe the big Imperial Navy simulators could handle this problem.”
“OK. Let me take care of that,” Zhao said.
They met in channel 32, the simulation of Hawker’s office.
“Be seated, Ms. Gallo.”
“Yes, Mr. Hawker.”
“You may proceed, Ms. Gallo.”
“Yes, sir. We have gathered all the data we need to do the analysis to determine good candidates for the open governorships. The problem is the correlations with success will not be in one variable, or two, but in combinations of variables. We believe we know how to do that calculation, and we have a program we believe can do it, but we need bigger computers. Much bigger computers. We need access to the Imperial Navy simulation suite.”
“Very well, Ms. Gallo. I will take care of it.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I can’t believe this,” Joe Abrams said. “Another special. What did I ever do to be so blessed?”
“Really?” Eva Dufour asked. “What is it this time?”
“A big database analysis.”
“Well, load it up and let’s see what it does.”
They loaded up the program and started it running against the database. They were watching the machine processing in a three-dimensional visualization.
“What the hell’s it doing?” Abrams asked.
“Oh, God. No wonder they wanted us to do it. It’s running everything against everything else, and in every possible combination.”
“This is gonna take forever.”
“Wait,” Dufour said. “How big is this database?”
“Big.”
Dufour checked the file size.
“Oh, come on. This isn’t that big. If we gang the memory blocks and parallelize access to them rather than assign them to individual processors, we can actually hold the whole thing in memory at once.”
“That could work. Let’s try it.”
They stopped the program running and reconfigured the suite. Then they loaded the entire database into the ganged processor memory, parallelized the access, and set the program running again.
“OK, there we go,” Abrams said. “Brilliant, Eva.”
“Thanks. It’s still going to take hours, but at least it’s hours and not days.”
Having gotten the problem set up and running, and it being late already, they went home for the night.
With the program sent off to the Imperial Navy simulation suite, the Zoo vacated just as fast as it had spun up. Having worked the next thing to twenty-four-by-seven from Friday morning right through the weekend, everyone dropped out of VR, staggered to their apartments in the Imperial Research Building, and collapsed into bed. Those living off-site collapsed on someone else’s couch or floor or slept on the floor of their office.
When the results came in, it would be all hands on deck again, and everybody wanted to be ready.
Tuesday morning, Joe Abrams and Eva Dufour were both in early. They wanted to be there when the database analysis completed, and they had estimated it for about eight o’clock. It actually finished at eight-fifteen, and they sent it back over to the Zoo.
When the data came in, Gallo sent an all-personnel alert to the Zoo denizens. The cafeteria simulation filled up with people within minutes, many of them logging in directly from their beds.
“What have we got?” Zhao Meihui asked.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Trevor Gormely said. “It’s all over the place.”
“This one is from a big city, this one is from a small town, but not everybody from a big city, and not everybody from a small town,” Donato Taliani said. “I don’t get it.”
“Actually, it makes quite a bit of sense,” Beadle said.
“OK, Harlan,” Zhao said. “What have you got? What are you seeing?”
“Well,” Beadle said, shifting his weight, “What we have here is combinations of circumstances that have a high correlation with good performance as an administrator. So, for example, someone from a small town, who has served in the military, and served in a relatively low-level position for five years. Or someone from a big city, whose parent was an able administrator, and who lived at home until college.”
“Yes, but why?” Inge Laar asked.
“That’s the problem with data analysis,” Salma Norales said. “You get more data, but you still don’t get the why.”
“But we can get there, I think,” Beadle said. “You see, it is about skill sets and values. There are multiple ways to get to the endpoint, but there is, apparently a common set of skills and values one needs. For example, small town values, participation in a large hierarchical organization like the military, and an earlier position close to the people where one gets experience with impacts and unexpected consequences.”
“And the big-city person?” Zhao asked.
“With a parent who is an able administrator, yes. Big city gives large organization experience in a sense, but one also gets exposure to the parent’s views on administration. It amounts to at-home training from someone who has the right skill sets already. And note the correlation is much stronger for both parents as able administrators, but only if the person lives at home until college. Which college matters as well, as does whether they had a job in high school and college.”
“So they pick it up over the kitchen table, as it were,” Taliani said, “but only if they’re resident, and if both parents are administrators, they’re more likely to talk about work over dinner. And a smaller college or entry-level job is also a positive, because they’re more likely to rub elbows with the common man, and with people with the small-town values of the other scenario.”
“That is my surmise,” Beadle said. “But I can construct a similar reasoning chain for all these high-correlation scenarios. Solid basic values, exposure to the common man, experience in big organizations, a few others. With a bit of thought, one can derive an overarching skill set from these scenarios.”
“But we don’t need to, right?” Zhao asked. “I mean, we don’t need to be right about why these correlations are predictive. It’s nice to have some understanding of why they’re predictive, but all we really need is the correlations.”
“That is correct,” Beadle pronounced over his clasped hands.
“OK, and if we then apply the correlations against the candidate portion of the database, we get the best candidates.”
“Which output begins here,” Beadle said, stabbing the output displayed on the table with a fat finger.
They met with the Emperor at three that afternoon in channel 22, the simulation of the Emperor’s office. Dunham had spent the day deciding on Imperial Death Warrants, which he had just sent off to Governors Turley and Derwinsky. He didn’t mark them Urgent, which would have generated a VR mail alarm, because he knew it was three in the morning Tuesday in Stolits.
Patrizia Gallo had brought Harlan Beadle along. It was quite a contrast between the dark, slim, high-energy Gallo, dressed to Imperial Palace standards, and the pale,
overweight, lethargic Beadle, dressed down to the bare minimum of Zoo standards.
“Be seated,” Dunham said.
“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Gallo said.
She sat, and Beadle maneuvered his bulk into the other chair. Dunham was surprised to see the chair resize itself to accommodate his avatar. He didn’t know the simulation would do that.
“Proceed, Ms. Gallo.”
“Yes, Sire. We have performed our analysis of past and present Imperial administrators, trying to eke out of the data some ability to predict future performance. Mr. Hawker made resources available, and the data problem proved large enough to consume the Imperial Navy’s simulation suite overnight. We did, however, come up with some answers, some correlations, and applied them to the logical candidate pool, people who are now at lower levels than those needed to be filled. We have a sorted list of candidates for you.”
“Outstanding work, Ms. Gallo.”
“Thank you, Sire. Harlan Beadle here was instrumental in setting up the problem and making some sense of the results.”
Dunham looked to Beadle, who simply nodded. He turned back to Gallo.
“So this was a more difficult problem than you originally thought, Ms. Gallo?”
“Yes, Sire. There is no simple correlation. There are correlations with combinations of experiences that, at first glance, seem to defy logic.”
“And the analysis turned up those – what would you call them? – hidden correlations, Ms. Gallo?’
“Yes, Sire.”
“Just curious, Ms. Gallo. Would those correlations have identified me?”
Gallo turned to Beadle, who stirred.
“Yes, Sire. Small-town origins, military service as an officer, raw intelligence, palace experience.”
Gallo blanched at Beadle’s answer, but Dunham nodded.
“And my sister, Mr. Beadle?”
“Yes, Sire,” Beadle answered. “Small-town origins, legal training, raw intelligence, palace experience.”
“What about my first wife, Mr. Beadle?”
EMPIRE: Investigation Page 24
