Adrianne Hammer was a blogger.
Regularity. Reliability. Those were qualities she demanded of herself, and her tiny audience had always appreciated the results. She posted every Sunday, and the only postings missed were because of one bout of swine flu, and before that, her husband’s messy suicide. Thousands of people had her tools and intellect, or they had better. But brilliance likes to be focused. The average genius wants to fall in love with some narrow cause, a topic that generates passion and that she can master better than anyone else. And the most powerful minds often ended up being driven by the rawest, most predictable emotions.
But this human didn’t suffer from a narrow focus.
In fifteen years, that lifelong Republican had successfully predicted elections and civil wars as well as giving shrewd warnings about which stable nations would fail to rule effectively. She warned her readers about stock bubbles and the diminishing stocks of easy petroleum. China was on the precipice of ten environmental disasters. Russia was a rotted husk. She studied SARS and MERS and then successfully predicted the onset of GORS. Climate change was a growing maelstrom worth visiting every couple months, and with a perpetually reasoned tone, she warned her careless species to watch out for even more serious hazards. Comet impacts. Solar flares. Nuclear war between small players and firestorms born from mistakes made in North Dakota.
In one popular posting, she wrote about the Singularity. “I can only guess when the day comes, but self-aware computers are inevitable. In fact, synthetic intelligence is more likely today than it was yesterday. And it’s a little more plausible this afternoon than it was just this morning.”
At the heart of every posting was the inescapable truth: The future was chaos smothered inside more chaos. Even at her best, Adrianne cautioned that no marriage of learning and insight can envision what comes in another ten years, or in some cases, in another ten seconds.
Yet even the most difficult, disorganized race had to have its winner.
And Adrianne Hammer was among the quickest of the best.
THE INVISIBLE LORDS made her one candidate among twenty-three. Each human was secretly examined, every life measured against an assortment of ideals. Adrianne was fifth on the list, and she wouldn’t have climbed any higher. But her son called her at home one evening. Intoxicated, plainly furious, the young man began by telling his mother that she was a bloodless bitch, unloving and ugly.
Adrianne reacted with a soft sigh, shaking her head.
The son’s rapid prattle continued, insults scattered through recollections from childhood. Old slights and embarrassments were recounted. One cold, wicked parent had destroyed the young man’s future. Didn’t she see the crimes? Didn’t she understand what a miserable mess she had made of his little life?
Once and then again, she said her son’s name. Quietly, but not softly. The tirade finally broke. Then he muttered, “Dad.”
She nodded, apparently unsurprised by the conversation’s turn. “Yes,” she said.
“You should have known,” the young man said. “Of all people, you should have seen it coming. Why didn’t you sense what he was planning?”
“Because he didn’t give clues.”
“Dad didn’t have to kill himself,” her son said. “He wasn’t that sick.”
She said, “Honey, he was very ill. And that doesn’t matter now.”
“It does matter.”
“Not after the gunshot,” she said. “That’s why people kill themselves. One action, and everything else is inconsequential.”
Both stopped talking.
Forty seconds passed.
“I wasn’t there,” her son complained.
“Nobody was.”
“Poor Dad was alone.”
“We’re all alone, honey.”
By a thousand means, the Earth’s new owners studied the woman’s pain. They watched the candidate open her mouth and close it again. They measured her breathing, her heart. The electricity running along her wet neurons. They even tried to read her thoughts, which was difficult with most humans and quite impossible with this specimen.
To their minds, opacity was a noble quality.
“After he shot himself,” her son began.
“I know.”
“At the funeral –”
“I remember.”
“You were angry at him. Because he used the .357. Because he aimed up and made a mess in the ceiling, and you’d have to find someone to come pull out the bones and make patches and then paint. That’s why you were angry with him.”
“I wasn’t angry,” she said.
“Yes you were.”
“No, I was reasonable frustrated,” she said. “You’re always the furious one.”
“Don’t fucking say that.”
Eyes narrowed. Adrianne fell silent.
Her pulse was slow, regular.
“You see everything, Mom. You should have predicted this.” Just then, Adrianne’s heart rate elevated. Slightly.
“You could have taken precautions,” he said.
“It was my mistake,” she agreed. “I underestimated your father’s fears, and overestimated his aversion to violence.”
Her son sobbed.
Honesty was easy for the woman. “I always assumed your father would drink himself to death,” she said. “Which perhaps was how he made himself sick in the first place.”
“Listen to yourself.”
“I always do.”
“You don’t care. You make an awful mistake like that, and it’s nothing to you.”
“One error among thousands,” she pointed out.
The young man said nothing.
Adrianne’s pulse had returned to normal.
“Do you miss him, Mom?”
She said nothing, apparently giving the problem some thought. “I miss you,” she said at last.
Her son broke the connection.
Adrianne set the phone down on the desk, and after a sigh and seven seconds of introspection, she glanced up at the patched, repainted ceiling. Then she returned to work, crafting a long, tightly reasoned blog about thorium reactors, their blessings and why they were coming too late to the discussion.
Those watching came to one enduring conclusion: This was an exceptionally tough-minded, determined beast.
Which was why a month later, without warnings or the barest explanations, an obscure blogger was given complete control over the secretly conquered world.