“Last night was the big picture,” Martell said. “I’m open today to follow up with any details you want.”
Siemens’s steely eyes narrowed slightly. “Plenty of questions, but the decision s made. Count me in. I’ve been getting ready tor this all my life.”
Martell lifted his coffee in a silent toast. He should feel exhilarated at this hurdle passed, but the challenges ahead weighed too heavily. Put thh megalomaniac in control of the country? Dismantle the checks and balances of due process, to give him even more power?
The Planners would have to keep control. Siemens was a weapon of last resort, a pawn to be advanced to the proper rank, for use if the dire projections proved correct. If not, they could pull the plug; they could defuse his power up to the last instant, divert his momentum into a churning, harmless frenzy.
Right.
Vishnu and Krishna. Martell set down the mug of coffee and looked at his open palm, half expecting to see the dragon’s teeth that he felt weighing so heavily there, but all he saw were beads of sweat.
“Ann Johnson, General. Pleased to meet you, have a seat.”
“Pleasure’s mine, Ann.” Siemens looked Johnson over: tall for a woman, and heavy boned; short gray hair, corporate-looking suit. No diploma in sight, but Martell had mentioned she had an odd degree. Divinity, was it? Photos lined the walls, signed portraits of governors and presidents, Johnson shaking hands with the great and near-great of several continents. “Martell recommends you highly, Ann, but I thought he was going to manage the campaign himself.”
“He’s a specialist, Generaclass="underline" polling and voter ID, and his team has a dynamite E-day get-out-the-vote drill. I’ll handle the big picture.”
“Call me Rick, Ann.”
“Gladly.” She turned to a cabinet behind her desk and pulled out a decanter and one glass. “Yours is Scotch, right?”
“Yes, but…” Siemens frowned. “I don’t care for anything, if you’re not drinking.”
“Then you’ll have a dry time around me.” Her voiced dropped an octave, to a passable Lugosi imitation: “I never drink… wine.” She laughed, and poured him two fingers. “Dad was an alcoholic, and I can’t get any interest in the stuff. Take your Scotch, and I’ll indulge my own vice.”
She pulled open a drawer and drew out a long, thick cigar. She sniffed it, nodded, then cut off the end with a small, oddly shaped knife.
Johnson glanced up, saw him looking at the knife. “It’s a mountain oyster knife,” she said. “The state Women’s Caucus has an oyster bake every year, both kinds of oysters.”
She dropped the blade back into the drawer and looked back at him. “Would you prefer a cigar, Rick?”
“I’ll stick with the Scotch.” Siemens made a mental note to watch his manners—she looked like she knew how to use that knife. “Why don’t you go over the mechanics of the campaign.”
“Fine. Let’s start with what you military folks call a threat assessment. The challenge is the Republican incumbent, Joseph Pryor. Do you have any idea how hard it is to beat a sitting senator?
“Compared to that, the primary should be a cakewalk. Pryor’s strength and the rumors of your interest have kept the Democratic field light. There are two candidates already in the race. Peter Andrews is mayor of San Antonio, a liberal. The fix is in with him. He doesn’t expect to win the nomination and knows he couldn’t beat Senator Pryor anyway. He’s in the race for name recognition, to run for governor in a few years—”
And the void was without form, and darkness covered the face of the deep…
“Launch another one,” Martell said. “Slow the display down, a day per second. That last trajectory was a blur.”
A silver point appeared in the blackness. Leaving a pale trace of its path, it danced a drunken tango, skittered to the left, then leaped upwards.
The vertical axis was the key indicator: percentage of voters favoring Siemens. Left to right was economic security, and respect for governmental authority displayed fore and aft. So many variables, no way to show them all. Which variables mattered most? How did they interact?
The Planners’ efforts had been directed to projection, to mapping out possible outcomes and probabilities. To actually shape events, to pick an outcome, they needed different tools. They needed to identify opportunities, cusps where they could divert the trajectories to a more desirable path.
“You’re wasting your time.” Tony Matsuto’s voice came from the emptiness. “No one world-line is significant.”
“I’m looking for ideas, not answers.” Still, Matsuto was right, this was getting nowhere. Damn. There had to be some way to organize the morass of information, to visualize and shape this maelstrom. Otherwise this new science was a curse, a prophesy of nuclear hell with no hope or help.
They should be looking at the entire manifold of possible futures, not one arbitrary worldline. “Medea, start with a cluster of points around the current estimate, and follow each world-line. Drop it if it crosses any path. Every five days, generate another cluster around each trajectory that’s left.”
The snarled silver web vanished, and a ball of bright points appeared. “What’s the vertical spread of that cluster?”
“Half a percentage point. The other dimensions are comparable fractions of the respective scales.”
“That’s good,” he said. “Make a second shell of points, twice as wide. Use half that spacing as the test for killing a path.” Another ball of stars appeared around the first. “OK, execute.”
The points traced ghost-trails in the void. Spreading, shifting, like fireworks in the breeze, or specks drifting in surging water. A few points shot away; others collided, merging.
Five seconds passed, and starbursts of secondary fireworks exploded. Drug-crazed spiders, weaving and knitting. More outliers sped away, more points merged. Another generation of child-trajectories, and another.
The tracery of tangled lines assumed a form—a shape with surfaces and contours. Some true boundaries reflected all paths that approached. Other contours leaked trajectories that never returned to the main mass.
“Escape time contours,” murmured Matsuto.
“Hmm, yes.” Many images of fractal art, like the classic crenellated teardrop of the Mandelbrot Set, were escape time plots. Pump the coordinates of each point through an iterative formula. For some starting points, the cycles stayed within the chaotic region; for others, they “diverged,” shooting irrevocably away. The two classes of locations defined the “Mandelbrot sea” and the land around it.
“Yes,” Martell continued, “we can map the chaotic region of this ‘decision space.’ Flesh out the zone that feeds back into itself, and mark the surfaces where trajectories diverge.”
“Take the final success axis out,” said Matsuto. “Color the surface to show a firm boundary, and use other colors for victory or defeat where trajectories leak out. That lets you use all three visual axes for input variables.”
“Right!” said Martell. Siemens’s rating for a given point hardly mattered. Much more useful would be to show the boundaries where chaos resolved, where possibilities crystallized into inevitability. If you could push events into a chute where the only exit lines were victories, you were done.
Each point within the displayed shapes represented a set of circumstances—values for the social and economic variables—that could be reached from current conditions. With those “regions” defined, the Planners could find zones to avoid, where trajectories diverged towards defeat for Siemens, as well as regions that coalesced to victory. Find such a region, have Medea back-calculate a valid path from here to there, and then maneuver along that path. Sure, chaotic effects would divert events. But with such a path defined, you could apply constant adjustments and correct for those divergences.