LJ Idol, Week 3: Tsundoku

Ora Frakes may have been added to the Timehop Squad accidentally, but it was done now. She wished the other squad members would take her more seriously. It wasn’t like they had all that much more training than she did. Plenty of them had been friendly enough before HQ realized its mistake in her appointment and announced it. Now most of them acted like they were doing a favor for not throwing her back out into the multiverse. As if Multigov had the resources to waste a fully integrated Timehop Squadsman.

She rubbed absently at the spot where the nerve-wave transponder-dampener implanted in her right wrist raised her skin slightly. The transponder-dampeners were part of the system that allowed her to travel through the great rings, transcending space and time, without suffering nerve-wave burnout. There were 11 of them embedded in major nerve junctions in her limbs and torso and another ten within her cranium; each fine-tuned perfectly to her nervous system. The process of implantation had taken months and integration even longer. It wasn’t the kind of project that you wasted when you realized your new-minted agent had accidentally been selected using a faulty algorithm that valued creative thinking too much.

The real trouble was that there were so many problems in the multiverse. Timehoppers were only allowed to intervene in some of them. Universes and societies that didn’t look like they would mature sufficiently before they made contact with the Multigov were left to evolve or devolve as they would. But societies that looked like they might discover and make contact with the Multigov before they obliterated themselves, those, Timehoppers were allowed to try to save from themselves. As non-invasively as possible, of course.

Ora was assigned to a team dealing with a particularly thorny little planet, the inhabitants of which called themselves humans. The humans were a fairly typical bipedal, large-cranium race. And they were caught up in that most typical of sentient-race killing struggles; pre-diaspora resource allocation.

They were a surprisingly mature race for one that was still so splintered. They had gorgeous art and interesting philosophies, and they were so close to uniting and figuring out answers to so many of their problems. Some of their tribes were developing very impressive sciences. They even had one early luminary who had coined an elegantly poetic name for the problem they faced on their little blue planet, “the tragedy of the commons.”

But even having identified the issue that plagued them, they were not uniting to face it. Their science was clear about what they faced, but they weren’t making policy to deal with it. In fact, they were mired in political battles to apportion resources. They still hadn’t figured out that however they apportioned things, they were going to suffer serious losses as a race and as a planet if they didn’t get ahead of the way they were changing their planet’s climate.

Ora ran her hands over the data and pleasure ports across her sagittal crest and wondered what it would feel like to have hair growing out of parts of her skin the way the humans did. The strangest thing about working with these cultures and planets on the brink was the way that immersion in their ways got to you.

She let herself into the working space that she shared with her partner Brannon. Brannon was already surrounded with lit data displays, and inside his globe of glowing data, Ora could see that he was still practicing his “full immersion” methodology. He’d replaced his standard issue jumpsuit with human clothes, and he’d managed to program his hygiene system to give him some of that strange hair.

“Ora, their AI and their algorithms are getting so good!” he exclaimed. “It almost seems like their best hope is to put all of their energy into developing those, and then maybe when their AI becomes sentient, it will be an effective leader for them.”

They’d had variations of the same conversation so many times in the last five-day. Ora wanted to get him out of his rut, but she also disagreed with that approach. She couldn’t help but fall back into their tired argument.

“Yes, but remember who on the planet is developing those technologies. It’s mostly actors who are investing a lot in self-interest, alone. Do you think you’ve found a way to think in more planetary terms?”

The humans had spun themselves quite the net of data transfer all around their little world. Parts of it were very mature, but there was still a bewildering amount of energy used to share information about the pleasures of sexual relations and of watching the antics of smaller non-sentient life forms on the planet. There was some anecdotal research on the multi-web indicating that the more warm-blooded bipeds were prone to this enhanced sympathy toward their nonsentient warm-blooded brethren- something about ontogeny begetting it. She kept meaning to reread the article.

Brannon grunted in response, turning his attention back to the globe of data around him. He didn’t want to rehash their arguments either, it seemed.

The two of them were working an angle that was often used in these situations with rapidly developing cultures: they were looking for methods that the cultures already used among themselves that could be used to win hearts and minds over for a sustainable course of development. Brannon had keyed into the way humans were using algorithms on some of the platforms into their data net to make some data appear more frequently for profit.

There was actually controversy among one of the major cultures on the planet over how much an effect these algorithms coupled with targeted pushes of data had on the humans’ behavior. From what Brannon and Ora could see, the effect was significant. HQ had green-lighted their plan to explore the angle and start into deep development in that direction.

This morning, Brannon was shoulders-deep in developing datapoints and algorithms of his own, with the help of a few AI friends he had housed with the Timehoppers. It was likely he would be ready to start pushing some of them out by the end of the five-day.

Ora had given herself the task of studying the cultures more to try to find other analogous ways of pushing data to decision-makers. Although the humans’ data-net seemed to be the way that many of them consumed information, there were also still older communication methods that were a little harder to casually effect. They used wave-form and cabled communications networks that were more one-sided than their data-net still. These were communications that they tuned into without the ability to interact with them in real time. These would be harder to stack into any logic-bearing conclusions, because they were widely known more as entertainment, or to have established partisan tendencies.

But, the humans also had fondness for even more historical modes of communication. Many of them still consumed written words non-electronically with regularity. It was actually pretty fascinating to Ora how in many of their cultures it was still considered a mark of a scholar to own a collection of these physically written words. Indeed, she wondered as she began to pull up her own data-globe around her work station, if there was a way to work manipulation of these physical works of words into a strategy to get the humans thinking in the direction that they needed to be thinking in.

*^*

Ora squared her shoulders and prepared to address the assembly of Timehop Squads that had gathered to hear about the help her team was asking for. Brannon and the AIs had just finished their rundown of the algorithms and data that they would be pushing out over the various data-net modalities on the planet. Now she needed to explain the more physically-intensive part of the plan that she developed.

“Happy Fifth-day everyone,” she started, hoping to get them thinking positive thoughts. Then she was explaining how a lot of the planet’s important decision-makers didn’t obtain all their data electronically the way the majority of humans did at present. Instead they were still dealing with non-electronic words on paper. While those weren’t as easy to manipulate, manipulation was still possible, and that was the task her squad needed help with.

It didn’t take her too long to explain: She and Brannon had identified 200 key decision makers on the planet who still had inordinate fondness for physical written data. Squadsmen would be assigned to each of these humans and tasked with studying the physical data sources around them, then rearranging those to ensure that the data that was most helpful to making logical decisions would be closest at hand for the space of a human week.

For some, this meant restocking papers on desks. For others, it would be the rearranging the bound stacks of paper, called books, so that the books on top of stacks most likely to be reached for were ones that would encourage logical thinking. The hope was that if they were targeting their efforts well enough, influencers on the planet would experience a synergy of clear thinking for a week that would wake them up enough to their plight that they would work together.

As she finished her explanation, Ora could see that a few of her fellow Squadsmen were unconvinced that their plan was workable. But she was heartened by the number of smiles and nods she saw among experienced squads. At least they didn’t all think she was completely crazy this time.

She found herself smiling out at her colleagues with real hope for the humans of the planet Earth.

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Tonithegreat has been trying to rearrange her own tsundoku in more logical fashion at least once a year or so. But the effort is pretty hit-or-miss. Nevertheless, she hopes you’ve enjoyed this journey into data-stacking!