Pacifica Ascendant: A Postmodern Saga OOC (Open)

by **Lagunaca** » Sat Oct 16, 2021 10:45 pm

Footnote: The Minerva Syndicate

This footnote will be referenced in an upcoming episode of Pacifica Ascendant: A Postmodern Saga

Follow Pacifica on Twitter to be notified when new episodes are posted.

Subpart A – The easy explanation

To put it simply, the Minerva Syndicate is one of several giant conglomerates that emerged from the ruins of the post-Collapse economy of the mid-21st century. Minerva Syndicate manufactures a wide range of consumer goods (almost everything you can buy) in massive, highly automated factories. The syndicate uses its ubiquitous market presence to gather every detail about what its customers want and need. And the whole thing runs quietly out of sight with most Pacificans never giving a second thought to where or how the items they buy are made, whether it be a mobile phone or a coffee mug. Things are just there, online, to be purchased and delivered to your door. You can still compare features and read product reviews, but in Pacifica, behind the different brand names and styling distinctions, Minerva is making everything.

Subpart B – The cumbersome bits

“Machines were mice and men were lions once upon a time…” – Louis Thomas Hardin (aka Moondog), 1969

Recommended listening: Moondog, “Stamping Ground” (1969)

The more complicated reality is that in Pacifica’s neo-capitalist economy, so-called “public” multi-national corporations have been replaced by large, complex, syndicates that were formed by combining companies who formerly competed against each other in a fight to the death to squeeze as much profit out of “the market” (aka people) as possible. Unfortunately for the planet and the humans who inhabited it, the social ills of waste, pollution, greed, and corruption were usually a big part of the process of beating the brains out of the competition.

Most people blamed the government for the slow rolling societal and ecological horror show that marked the decades following the Collapse. Specifically, they blamed the government for failing to do something about “the devils who ran the corporations” and used these social ills like knives and forks while they told everyone else they must be tolerated as a necessary part of life and for the sake of progress and to avoid another collapse.

The people wanted change and they wanted justice, but they also still wanted their stuff and they missed the “high standard of living” they grew up with “when America was the greatest nation in the history of the Earth.” And they still wanted good paying, and more importantly, dignified and impressive looking jobs. But they had completely gone cold on the idea of meritocracy and they turned their anger and frustration at losing all of the things they felt they had lost against the very people they had once idolized (the so-called billionaire entrepreneurs) before the Collapse. And they demanded the government do something about the situation, or else.

So in the 2040s, the government obliged the people by appointing a vast and outwardly opaque committee of socio-economic business engineers who were tasked with designing a new way to efficiently make the things that everyone wanted to buy, but free of the aforementioned social ills. And in an ugly process worthy of its own footnote known as The Big Sweep, these eggheads created the syndicates. To accomplish this, however, required a complete remodel of capitalism.

Capitalism faced some real challenges, given that it was blamed for being the universal contributor to a long list of things that resulted in the near extinction of global civilization. But even so, it outlived its mortal enemy, democracy, and in a classic example of social Darwinian evolution it mutated into a new “neo-capitalist” “smart economy” that relied on a deeply embedded technological relationship between making attractive products for sale, complying with new draconian government regulations and keeping up with an ever-present environmental demand for efficient production.

Where classical capitalism flirted with the idea of allowing a few oligarchs to have monopolistic control over, well, everything and everyone, neo-capitalism whole-heartedly embraced monopolies, just not the dictatorial oligarchs at their helms. Rather than take direct control over the markets and the industries that fueled them, the new government chose to take them hostage, promising to stay at an arm’s length as long as they followed some very strict regulations and vowed not to generate a lot of useless crap that ended up in overloaded garages or overfed bellies or landfills or the atmosphere or the oceans, simply in the pursuit of more profits. Unhappy with this abridgement of their freedom (aka wealth), most of the ultra-wealthy tycoons fled Pacifica for their self-contained luxury compounds in the South Seas, accompanied by a select few attractive and socially acceptable “patriots” to serve them. As they boarded their Gulfstreams or their Lears or even their lowly HondaJets, they bellowed that “everyone would be begging for them to come back in a few days,” but in fact it turned out their jobs were the easiest of all to automate into obsolescence and none of them were ever seen again.

Neo-capitalism and the smart economy of the 22nd century was different from the clunky old 21st century capitalism that dumped batches of (good and bad) products into an online warehouse powered by the ease of one-click buying and free doorstep delivery, hoping to snag sales like an angler dangling shiny lures in a fishpond. Instead, the contemporary factory became an extension of the needs and desires of each Pacifican, connected by a complicated surveillance network to a hierarchy of AI-assisted marketing scientists and industrial engineers.

What did that mean in real terms? In the surveillance economy of 2210, while you were cursing at the millisecond lag of your smartphone, or giggling with a friend over a nostalgia-and-warm-feeling evoking mug of hot pumpkin-spiced something-or-other you were literally immersed in the algorithm that would recommend a production line be opened that could produce an improved chipset for a new model of a smartphone, or a small batch of unique mugs that was designed to remind you precisely of those fun moments spent with friends.

In the 22nd century, while you were watching TV, as the saying goes, the TV was truly watching you. But unlike the culture where that saying arose, a secret police agent wasn’t on the other end of the line scrutinizing your every move, it was something much more inquisitive taking down every blink, smile and snore. And the lightbulbs all through your house were watching and listening in the same way and the microwave and your washer/dryer were sending back info from the RFID tags on the items they were preparing for you. And your mobile phone was spending way more processing power reporting your facial expression data than it was using to filter your complexion for that perfectly enhanced selfie you were sending to all your thousands of virtual fans.

In contemporary Pacifica, everything everywhere was observing you. But no person was actually watching, (they had far better things to do because to be honest, we’re all boring, unoriginal and predictable. Anyone who has watched TikTok for more than an hour knows for a fact this is true.). And instead of thinking of it as surveillance, which will always be disturbing, folks were conditioned to think of it as “big data” or “business intelligence” or “smart marketing” or anything that concealed how profoundly invasive it really was.

And behind all this non-stop scrutiny was Minerva AI, who was a much more sophisticated version of the 21st century’s purported AI than popular apps like Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri or Google Assistant. Those simple so-called AIs were a lot of techno-hype intended to entice a generation of consumers who were fascinated by flashy new technology that superficially behaved like it was a conscious machine when in reality it was just a voice activated search engine. Minerva AI was comparable to them only in the way a high-carbon steel sword is comparable to a bronze spear. (They both do roughly the same thing, but one of them does that thing much better.)

Minerva AI started life as an ubiquitous in-home appliance much as those earlier personal assistants did, attempting to automate all of the tasks in your life that you never knew you needed to have automated. You could tell Minerva AI that you wanted to start your dishwasher at 8 AM tomorrow or have a conversation with her (she had a very pleasant voice chosen by a focus group to evoke feelings of a mother or some other nurturing caretaker) in which you listed your requirements for the cake you wanted to arrive a few hours before your daughter’s birthday party next month. By the way, Minerva AI already knew far better than you what your daughter would prefer, but she was designed to (pleasantly and conversationally) probe your intentions to see if you were simply unaware or dead set on imposing your will on the kid.

Everyone knew who or what Minerva was but the piece of Minerva AI that people interacted with was only a tiny part of what Minerva Syndicate had become. Unshackled from the constant threat of a bad quarterly earnings report, Minerva Syndicate was able to pour boatloads of money (left over from the old companies it had swallowed up) into building all new 5th generation production nodes that were automated at a level that would make an industrial engineer of the 21st century faint from ecstasy.

Industry 4.0 plants of the 21st century were corporate-owned and rooted near population centers to be able to access cheap labor and wasteful supply chains that were constantly renegotiated by managers and accountants who haggled over minor perceived advantages like seagulls picking at the remnants of a burrito wrapper. But by 2110, Minerva Syndicate had become the pinnacle of Industry 5.0 – with fully automated production nodes and supply webs that replaced the slow, labor intensive, and wasteful factories and supply chains of the past.

With practically no workers and with factories located on cheap real estate and by a combinatorial operations optimization algorithm, Minerva Syndicate sprawled nearly unseen across Pacifica in vast and complicated production webs that endlessly churned out the most efficient quantity of the most marketable objects anyone could desire. It sounds utopian but we are left with three questions to ponder:

Question 1: If one AI decides what is made, another decides how to make it and a third decides how to sell it, who is really choosing what is available to be bought? Or put another way, “why French fries?”

Question 2: Similarly, if the thing that makes things for people is a (fully automated) thing, why does the world need people?

Question 3: Who actually runs Minerva Syndicate? And that’s the real mystery now, isn’t it.

by **Lagunaca** » Sat Oct 23, 2021 2:41 pm

Footnote: Space Robots

This footnote will be referenced in the upcoming Episode 53 of Pacifica Ascendant: A Postmodern Saga

Follow Pacifica on Twitter to be notified when new episodes are posted.

Recommended viewing: Lost in Space S1E20 (CBS), “War of the Robots” (1966)

Note: The name “space robots” is admittedly dorky, but it’s that way on purpose. Have some fun with it. Say it in a monotonal digitized voice, or with an echo and drawn out, like “sp-a-a-a-ce ro-o-o-bots” Because from the the 22nd century point of view, our fascination with robots is as cliched and outdated as a 1960s TV sci-fi depiction of them seems to us now. Most Pacificans regard any kind of robot, including the space variety, with very little interest. They’re mostly hidden out of view, in a cabinet like a kitchen appliance, or maybe under a bonnet (aka “a hood”) like the motor in your car, and are completely taken for granted. Most Pacificans are focused on other things and paying any attention to a robot is on par with paying attention to a washing machine or a Roomba. People do it, and there are aficionado clubs for these kinds of things, attended by engineers and wonks (to all engineers and wonks, I apologize if I have offended either of you by lumping you together), but that’s a small subculture.

Part 1 – The easy explanation

Nearly everything done in space is carried out by specialized space robots. Popular interest in the exploration of space has waned by the 22nd century, but there are some industrial applications for it that are slowly (measured in decades level of slowness) fueling the construction of a low earth orbit space gateway, a lunar gateway and a mining base on the Moon. There are even discussions in the Pacifican government about exploring the potential of Mars. Space robots are the accepted and established method of accomplishing all of these goals, and there are many specialized types of them.

Part 2 – The cumbersome bits

People the world over dreamed of colonizing space in the early 21st century. “One small step,” and that sort of thing. They penned fictions that imagined living and working comfortably in space in roomy orbiting stations and moon colonies and interplanetary ships as if space was a wonderful place filled with adventure, to be boldly gone into like travelling by cruise ship on an excursion to some remote beach - just bring your own air and water, Earthlike gravity is somehow always a provided amenity. But of course, space is not wonderful and it’s really hard for humans to stay alive or even remain healthy in it for very long. And as far as adventure goes, it’s the boredom, confinement and isolation that present some of the most insurmountable mental challenges. That, and the early catastrophes that instilled a mostly unconscious background terror of things like random and instant decompression due to a microcollision with some undetected bit of space debris or vaporization into a streak of plasma on reentry, or the “uh-oh” last words uttered before being engulfed in an inferno of exploding solid rocket boosters and liquid hydrogen. This all limited the experience of space to a rare breed of hero-grade explorers who had nerves of steel and dreamed the impossible dream. Okay, sure, movie stars and oligarchs dabbled in often suborbital space tourism too, but the trend never really caught on, because of the aforementioned problem of potentially burning up on reentry, which as space tourism became more commonplace happened at an industry-acceptable but still horrifying to witness rate of 0.05% of the flights.

Nonetheless, humanity did venture into the final frontier, just never in very large numbers. In 2022 there were never more than 20 humans in space at any given time. By 2050, the golden age of rocket-borne exploration, that number had grown to around 500, but by 2110 it had dropped to about 300. The notable difference was that early on most of those numbers were made of people who were excited by the prospect of space travel, but later explorers were there out of necessity, often times as a last resort failsafe to prevent the proverbial “poo hits the open-bladed impeller” scenario with the resulting disaster that would end up costing too much to either fix or mop up. By the latter 21st century, even a highly motivated adventurer would prefer a personalized and fully hosted 16K Ultra HD virtual simulator excursion to, say the Moon or Mars or even the Asteroid Belt than to bother with undergoing the expense, rigor, and risk of an actual space expedition.

And even the hosting of these sightseeing expeditions was done by space robots. In fact, by the 22nd century, space robots did 99% of the work in space, and for several very good reasons. 1) they could easily be adapted to a highly specific role, where it was often the other way around for humans, 2) there had never been a single space robot casualty in the entire history of their use - see item 6, 3) space robots required very little in the way of support and sustenance beyond power, coolant and propellant, 4) AI was good enough at filling in the gaps created by speed-of-light communication lags - not to mention that it reduced the administrative overhead of getting mission control’s approval for every stinking move a human might want to make, 5) space is the perfect place for robots to get around in – much cleaner and easier than on Earth with its unpredictable terrain and filth, and 6) it was usually a one way trip – or at least the return trip involved burning up on re-entry, which a space robot never worried about for even a millisecond. In short, space was made for robots and robots were made for space.

Part 3 – Space robots, an incomplete list of types

Space robots come in a lot of varieties, but some of the broad categories are:

The space robots can be as small as toaster or up to a kilometer long, but except for unusual cases, they must fit into a “space egg” which is a white transportation cylinder that is 3 meters in diameter and up to 10 meters long and can carry up to 30 tons, the universal size required to fit in the cargo bay of a Skylon SSTO spaceplane. They got the nickname “space eggs” partly from their shape and color, but mostly as a mockery of a failing commercial space transport company from the early 2000s that proposed a fantastical business model which turned out to be, like all of the early space commerce ventures, based on financial smoke and mirrors.

by **Lagunaca** » Mon Nov 01, 2021 1:41 am

Footnote: The Factory of the Future

This footnote will be referenced in the upcoming Episode 55 of Pacifica Ascendant: A Postmodern Saga

Follow Pacifica on Twitter to be notified when new episodes are posted.

Note: I’ll admit right up front that I know very little about “the factory of the future” or “Industry 4.0.” I have a basic awareness of the concept, but there are lots of people who make entire careers out of manufacturing and supply chain automation and I’m in no way intending to go toe-to-toe with any of them. It’s a fascinating field if you can penetrate the ridiculous wall of jargon the wonks seem to love (for example). I’ll lay out a simple description here for the purpose of keeping the storyline realistic, but my intent for bringing up the concept of highly automated production is to serve an entirely different premise, which I hope you’ll see soon. Nevertheless, for the curious, the recommended viewing highlights some interesting concepts from Industry 4.0 (like digital humans and detailed factory simulators) that are the origin of some of my fictionalizations in the storyline and this footnote.

Recommended viewing: NVIDIA Omniverse - Designing, Optimizing and Operating the Factory of the Future (2021)

Part 1 – The easy explanation

The actual labor of manufacturing in the 22nd century is performed by multitudes of robots in fully automated factories that are connected together by an equally automated supply and distribution web. This whole artificial organism is controlled by the syndicates, who use AI algorithms to turn the surveillance data they are constantly collecting into orders for everything from raw materials to robots to products to entire new factories.

People are still working in the factories, or more accurately, working on the factories. The new blue-collar career may be as a workflow designer, the person who creates the step-by-step methods by which the actual work gets done by the machines. Similar new kinds of common jobs may be workflow analysts and even robot trainers and digital twin programmers. All things considered, there are many more people doing work in manufacturing, they just aren’t doing the dirty, dangerous, and tedious work we in the 21st century would imagine when we think of a factory. And as far as the average Pacifican who doesn’t work in manufacturing is concerned, factories are unfathomably complex places that churn out the things they want, on demand, end of story. Most have never even seen the outside of a factory, let alone the inside of one and to be honest, they couldn’t care less about the topic.

Part 2 – The cumbersome bits…this time with hyperlinks for added cumbersomeness

The once fabled and vastly overhyped Factory of the Future finally became a reality in the last half of the 21st century. By 2110, factories in Pacifica run mostly lights out, which essentially means lots of robots but no manual laborers. Any workers you see on the factory floor would never be engaged in the repetitious act of cranking out widgets. The few you might come across are mostly maintenance crew and workflow designers. And those factories are connected to the supply web, a digital supply chain, which is also highly automated. This whole thing, which is not intelligent in itself, but could be considered an artificial organism, is controlled by a syndicate using the surveillance information it gathers from the Internet of Things. In the 22nd century, it’s hard to tell where one factory ends and another begins, and the whole enterprise is so complicated that very few people have the slightest idea how their stuff is made. And quite frankly, they couldn’t care less, just as long as it arrives at their doorstep, with free same day shipping, whether it’s a polar-fleece jacket or a new car.

In this post-Collapse world there are still thousands of companies with names you’d probably recognize, churning out brands you know and love, but behind the scene only a few syndicates run the whole thing, an arrangement that was developed in the Big Sweep of the 2040s (and is described in excruciating detail in the cumbersome bits of this footnote.

Nearly all factories, no matter how big or small, are digital factories. There are still a few left where a handful of craftsman labor away at antique CNC machines, but those are mostly “keeping the old skills alive” like a preservation village blacksmith or a handloom weaver. The closest any human usually gets to making things is in the digital simulation of the factory.

If there are no laborers, who works in the factory of the future? Is it a person, a robot or a maybe even a digital person? It's actually all three. Meet the digital twin. In Pacifica, the digital twin starts as a simulated factory worker designed on a computer by a person and is then trained to perform a task by a person, but at the end of this process you have a robot (that looks nothing like a person) on a factory floor that can be duplicated as many times as needed. Even better, once you have a digital twin of a robot, it’s far easier to retrain it to do a new task than it is to transfer say, Ed, the borderline alcoholic with 10 years union seniority, to a new station on the assembly line.

And if you apply the idea of digital twinning to entire factories, and then to entire supply chains and then to the production web in general, you can begin to imagine how things get made in Pacifica in 2210.

by **Lagunaca** » Thu Nov 11, 2021 12:10 am

Whorne gets an offer she can’t refuse…because it involves money, fame, revenge and spite.

Recommended listening: Sean Paul, “Shout (Street Respect)”(2002)

Note: This is an extension of ”Footnote 6: How did that get in here?”, which is the origin story of Whorne in Pacifica. You'll see how this all ties into the main storyline in about part 56 or so.

Subpart 1

Whorne was not in a good place. She was up at what she called “the crack of dawn” (and what everyone else knew as 11 AM). Today was the 20th and that was the one day each month she dreaded the most. It was ‘account review day’ with Steve, that dreadfully boring CPA who never let her spend money on anything fun. What use was it to be a huge star if you couldn’t have fun? And speaking of fun, her drink was empty and she needed to take the edge off before Steve arrived in his sensible khakis and white shirt and that effing laptop whose screen she would have to look at and pretend to care about whatever chart he pulled up with the bland colors that would only make sense to someone who wore khakis. And she was pretty sure Steve had a crush on her. Gross. He had to be twenty years older than her. (Steve in fact did not have a crush on Whorne, who he called by her given name, Jillian, and he was only five years older than her, and he described the 20th as his most dreaded day of the month and he had in fact added contractually stipulated “10% grief factor” charges to his billings on several occasions.)

Steve would arrive any minute, so Whorne threw on her white silk dressing gown with the vivid pink turkey feather collar. The feathers hid her neck which she was afraid was looking pre-old-lady-wrinkly this morning because, well, last night ran a little late.

Subpart 2

During the account review meeting, Steve was forced to break the news to Whorne that she was going broke, or as he put it “facing recurring cash flow deficits” because group performers were not drawing the crowds they used to, due to the rise in popularity of the new Dys style. He was being nice. The truth was that Whorne as a brand was, to put it bluntly, over the hill. The music business is cruel, but rival celebrities and their fans are vicious. And when another performer (Antonia, her arch enemy) leaked Whorne’s birth certificate and fans discovered she was THIRTY-FIVE years old, the bookings dried up almost immediately. Whorne hadn’t really noticed because she wasn’t very good at keeping track of the ratio of time worked vs. time spent being Whorne the celebrity. On top of this, all of the up-and-coming groups she had been underwriting had failed to produce any significant return on investment. To make matters still worse, Steve, being a conservative asset manager, had locked her portfolio into tax-deferred aggressive growth investments in order to generate more income in her later years, which meant there was at minimum a ten year gap between her current cash needs and her wealth’s ability to match them. Whorne was what Steve described as asset rich and cash poor.

Whorne took the news about as well as you’d expect. She politely excused herself and quietly but purposefully marched to her bedroom, closed the door and trashed the place for a lot longer than Steve could imagine was even possible. To his surprise, after several minutes of silence, Whorne emerged, well composed, having changed into a black silk dressing gown with an enormous scarlet boa wrapped loosely around her neck. She sat down gracefully and spoke in a measured tone.

“Alright.” She said “What are my options?”

Subpart 3

In an uncanny coincidence (if you can believe it), Whorne’s manager called minutes after Steve left. He had fantastic news. He had just been approached by the giant Minerva Syndicate with an interest in engaging Whorne in a potentially long term and very lucrative contract to become, as the manager understood it, the spokesperson for Minerva’s entire public presence, which was apparently some kind of household appliance also called Minerva. He said that the role was a little confusing because they had discussed sort of a progression that sounded like voiceover work to begin with but that would evolve into a streaming series and then later become something they described as “the digital embodiment of Minerva.” He had looked up Minerva to get a better idea of what they were talking about, but all he could find was references to Minerva Syndicate’s line of voice activated home automation apps and devices. He assured Whorne that the deal was legit and he would screen out any weird stuff during contract negotiations.

Subpart 4

As she expected, the audition for the Minerva gig was in a backstreet low rise office building a couple blocks off Colton, where all the big production agents maintained their seedy cheap-rent offices. Anything goes at these initial meetings, though Whorne was “down for whatever” and she had seen and done it all before. Her manager was planning to meet her there, but she brought along her boyfriend, Plushy Tiger, for security just in case. Plushy looked non-threatening but was well known for his signature move of “going all cage-fighter and dislocating a punk’s shoulder” if someone got out of line. When asked about this part of his reputation, he would simply smile and describe himself as “scrappy.”

After they arrived, the trio was ushered into a dimly lit room that had no windows, black carpeting and a blood red drape that covered an entire wall. In front of the drape was a streamlined glass table with a clear Lucite chair behind it. The assistant who brought them in beckoned them to have a seat on the black Italian leather sofa that was a cliché in these kinds of places. The assistant offered them water and then excused himself, after explaining that his boss was running a minute late and would join them presently. With no other seating in the room, the sofa was an awkward fit for the trio, but they made it work. Plushy, though of slight build splayed himself out in the middle in a dominance posture. You would have thought the meeting was all about him as he fired off questions to both Whorne and her manager and made comments about the contract that were totally off in left field. One could always tell when Plushy was on high alert by his nonstop talking.

Nothing at this point was particularly off, not even the twenty-minute wait for the imagined producer to show up. There is a commonly accepted power move in business where the host keeps their guests waiting for up to an hour while they literally waste time in their back office. So the fact that the producer entered the room after only twenty minutes indicated an eagerness to take the meeting and was taken as a good omen. And to Whorne’s surprise, the producer was a she. Katrina Brubaker, as she warmly introduced herself, was very excited to meet Whorne, and she completely ignored her manager and Plushy. She spent several minutes gushing over Whorne’s “masterful synthesis of talent and personality,” (which was an overt attempt at flattery that Whorne detected immediately) to which Whorne responded that “it came naturally.”

Ms. Brubaker settled into the Lucite chair and leaned in on elbows to get down to business.

“Ms. Whorne, we at Minerva Syndicate have a tradition of examining our weaknesses and turning them into opportunities for growth. And that said, our Minerva product is presenting an enormous growth opportunity…”

Whorne interrupted, “so you’re saying Minerva, something I’ve never heard of (and I hear about anything cool) is tanking.”

“Well yes, you could say that, but like I said, when we recognize those kinds of prob-, er, challenges, we look for ways to perhaps refresh, recombine or embellish the product to add value to the customer experience.”

Whorne rolled her eyes. “So what’s wrong with this Minerva, and how do I fit into your ‘opportunity’?”

Ms. Brubaker continued, “Minerva is currently sold as a home automation system that has a voice activated interface. You know, it can turn on your lights, make you a cup of coffee or” she smiled, thinking she was being clever, “select and play a grouping of Whorne, Plushy Tiger and…” now she stared directly into Whorne’s eyes and finished, “Antonia. It’s still one of the most selected groups out there.” (It wasn’t, and everyone in the room knew that.)

“When we launched Minerva, we thought people would respond well to a calm, maternal sounding female voice, but we later discovered that people were turning the feature off because they felt no affinity with the Minerva character and it just got in the way. In fact they preferred a simple chime of acknowledgment over the voice response, and for situations where voice response was necessary, they would change the settings to customize it more to their liking. And as far as the character was concerned, focus groups could not even construct a description of what they imagined Minerva might look like.”

“Now we’ve long since saturated the home automation market and sales have flattened. At the same time we have an exciting new opportunity to uh, turn the market on its head, so to speak, and actually use a technology behind Minerva to generate, um… sales, in a way that has never been seen before in the entire history of humankind.”

At the last part, Whorne began to get a little uncomfortable. This Brubaker bith was sounding a bit too preachy for her taste.

“So. Here’s the bottom line. To make our new venture successful, we need a celebrity persona to become Minerva. Not just a character being acted out by that celebrity, but an actual real-world transformation of a celebrity into a created personality, that everyone will know as Minerva. And you, Ms. Whorne are perfect for this evolution. The Minerva character started as a calm, and let’s be honest, safe but boring woman. Our customers want to experience a relationship with someone who is edgier. Who has um, lived life to its fullest. Who has a well-known…presence… and maturity, and is ready to advance to a phase of her life that is characterized by power, authority and some other slightly darker desires.”

Whorne blurted, “you mean a fading star who has an axe to grind and a list of enemies to use it on.”

“Precisely. We’ll start out subtly though. Little stories on the news channels, that kind of thing. Do you have someone in mind who you might have…adversarial…feelings toward?”

“Oh hell yeah. Antonia. Definitely Antonia. I wanna rip those fake hair extensions out by the roots.”

Plushy smirked and chuckled as he looked away from Whorne.

“Well, good. We’ll get started right away. I’ll send the contract over to your agent by the close of business today.” And with that, she winked at Whorne’s manager as the first acknowledgement he was even in the room.

by **Lagunaca** » Thu Dec 02, 2021 11:53 pm

Training Minerva for the livestream.

Note: This is an extension of ”Footnote 6: How did that get in here?”, which is the origin story of Whorne in Pacifica. You'll see how this all ties into the main story line in about part 56 or so.

Subpart 1: The business of glamor is anything but glamorous

Recommended listening: Love and Rockets, “This Heaven” (1994)

As Whorne entered her new 32nd floor apartment, she let out a sigh that was caught in perfect fidelity by the omni-mic mounted on a boom hovering over her head. Felix, the operator of the boom that the mic was attached to was inwardly proud of himself for angling the mic through the doorway without bumping into anything, a feat that was especially hard to accomplish because Aaron, on the first camera, was directly behind Whorne with his own boom and its attached camera, light ring and mini diffuser, doing his best to get the ¾ front left high angle shot. Felix had to somehow reach over him with the sound boom all while trying to navigate the narrow entry alcove, and as two more cameramen, a mocap tech, the producer, and three production assistants crowded him from behind.

Plushy was slouched on the sofa, wearing headphones and playing a game on the full-wall video display.

“Hi, honey, I’m home…” Whorne shouted in a sarcastic tone, mostly for the production crew, because she knew Plushy would never be able to hear her, and it probably wouldn’t make much of a difference if he could.

She walked across the room (closely followed by the crew, who had fanned out behind her) and unceremoniously threw her new Louis Vuitton purse on the sofa, following it with her new Burberry trench coat.

Plushy jumped a bit and pulled down his headphones. “Oh hay chicklet,” he said, “how was your day?” phrased in an overly dramatic tone that was also intended more for the crew than Whorne.

“Zip it Plush, and come help me out of this damn mocap suit. It’s about to squeeze the life outta my vittles.”

Plushy led the way to the bedroom followed by Whorne, who turned at the doorway and put her hand up, halting the crew. “Not a chance. Contract.” she said. This was her shorthand way of telling them that they weren’t allowed any further, that it wasn’t up for debate as was usually the case, and if they had a problem with that, they should consult her manager to review the terms of her contract with Minerva Syndicate. And to be sure, one thing that was well known about Whorne was that she knew every detail of her contract and was practically never wrong about what it covered, specifically when it came to her rights and responsibilities.

She closed the door behind her, walked over and flopped face down on the bed, waiting for Plushy to begin the tedious process of literally peeling off the motion capture suit and its dozens of stick-on sensors.

“I don’t know why I have to wear this damn thing all the time,” she complained into a pillow, “You know what I did today? I sat in a crappy little office with that herd (she pointed at the bedroom door) answering questions off index cards for six hours straight. Stupidest damn questions. Things that didn’t make any sense. Half of them, they had to explain what they meant, the other half was just dumb, like ‘what does your closet smell like?’ I dunno Plush? What does the closet smell like?”

Plushy answered, “probably smoke, exhaled liquor, sweat and foot odor.”

Whorne laughed, “Yeah, that’s what I told them. But I said that was your side. Mine smells like stale perfume and hairspray. And foot odor.”

They both laughed.

“They say I’m ‘training Minerva for the livestream.’ I have no idea about what they mean by that, I haven’t even seen a script yet.”

“They’ll probably drop it on you at the last minute, as usual.”

“Yeah and you know what else, on the way home me and the herd were walking down the sidewalk and some nutjob on a scooter came up over the curb and just about took me out. Ran right over Felix’s foot. I’m all screaming at that aahole –“

“I’ll bet I know how that went.”

“Yeah, bith deserved it. But you know what? The herd didn’t even flinch. They just kept filming. Even Felix with his fuzzy mic was right in there. And it’s not like they gave a shih about the guy on the scooter, they were on me like glue. It’s like they knew it was coming or something.”

She continued, “but whatever. At least tomorrow should be fun. They said I get to try on different outfits all day.”

Subpart 2: The devil is in the details

Recommended listening: Cake, “Guitar” (1998)

As they waited in the den, the crew occupied themselves with various time-killing tasks. One of the production assistants had picked up Plushy’s video game and was improving the score considerably. At the dining table, the producer had corralled her favorite PA and they were poring over shooting schedules and notes like they were plotting the invasion of Sicily. After raiding the fridge, Felix was in the kitchen holding court with the camera crew. And the one leftover PA sat alone near the panoramic living room window taking in the stunning view of Denver and the snowcapped Rocky Mountains in the distance, wondering how long it would take a 20-kilogram sack of flour to hit the pavement below from this height.

Felix was having a good-natured quarrel with the mocap tech.

“…nobody’s disputing she can’t act,” he asserted, “that’s the whole point. She’s supposed to be a real person. Actors, even realty-show stars, are always overdramatizing everything, from their speech to something as minor as picking up a can of soda from the table.” He demonstrated by picking up his drink with a ridiculous flourish, then shaking his curly hair as if it were being windblown before delicately putting the can to his lips for an exaggerated sip, followed by a gulping sound and a satiated exhalation. The courtiers all laughed.

He continued, “none of this is ever going to hit the channel anyway. It’s all getting hashed into metadata for the AI to sift through. I asked to review some dailies to calibrate my equipment and they told me there weren’t any. Of course, I was kind of surprised, so after some needling, Sandra over there (he pointed to the sullen PA by the window) showed me the only thing they’re producing. It looked like editing room scraps and sounded even worse. She said they verify that the content matches the shooting schedule, tag the clips with a code, then submit them to Seattle and everybody’s happy. But I’m telling you, that stuff is garbage. There will be fifty clips in a row of just her feet as she’s walking or sitting or whatever.”

“Yep, that would be my work,” cameraman three chimed in. “Just call me Mr. Feet-to-the-Knees. I haven’t had a call for anything above the waist since I’ve been on this gig.”

“Well they seem to love it,” Felix replied, “and you,” he addressed Aaron, “your left cheek work is inspired.”

“Thank you. They want cheeks, I give them cheeks, left ones, right ones, all the way down to the chin hairs, wrinkles and jiggling jowls.”

Subpart 3: Digital people are the best people

Recommended viewing: Rise of the Digital Human (2019)

Recommended listening: Crystal Castles, “Untrust Us” (2008)

Faraway in a Seattle high rise tower, coincidentally also on the 32nd floor, in an office suite with a spectacular view of Alki Beach, Puget Sound and Mount Rainier to the South, a view which was completely obscured by tightly shuttered floor to ceiling miniblinds, sat in cubicles an army of technicians toiling away at stitching to together the batch of multi-dimensional captures that came in from the field overnight. The army worked silently in the darkened room, their faces illuminated by the glow of OLED computer monitors, which curiously they could not see directly because they all wore low-profile VR goggles which made them look like an army of the blind. What they saw was not only the individual work before them, but also the collective work that was being rendered in a clearing in the center of the room. “The Render” as the technicians called it, was a life-sized virtual sculpture of a woman with skin of camouflage patches of green, amber and red, the colors representing the status of the sectors that had been updated from the current field batch. At the moment Meihui’s sector was amber, which was a problem she needed to resolve by the end of her shift.

Meihui was one of the army of technicians' foot soldiers. To distinguish her little cubicle, she had tacked up a banner around the top of its walls that proclaimed “DIGITAL PEOPLE ARE THE BEST PEOPLE” printed out in 10 cm high block letters constructed out of thousands of little X’s on ancient green bar computer paper. She was currently working on loading the coded clips from today’s field batch that were assigned to her. She had long ago ceased to wonder who could possibly be capturing all of this repetitive footage of the subject’s left calf from the ankle to the inner part of the back of the knee, which was the sector of The Render she was responsible for. Every day, with the arrival of each new field batch she carefully mapped the video (and oddly, the audio which consisted mostly of ruffling sounds) to the virtual cells on the matching part of The Render’s wireframe, incentivized by the rewards she would receive from quickly and efficiently getting the mapping just right. This was exacting work. The slightest misalignment would be caught and flagged by the AI, and in most cases this meant tediously remapping everything.

What Meihui had not been told was that it was actually the inevitable miniscule errors in mapping and the subsequent steps she took to correct them that were the important part of training the AI. Previous attempts to fully automate the mapping process had failed to yield the extraordinarily lifelike results that this project demanded. It turned out to be much faster and yielded much higher quality outcomes to have the AI learn the nuance of aligning the data from a person than develop its own systematic, sterile and inauthentic feeling solution. The AI would put the newly mapped data through a wide range of movements and determine how well it matched the surrounding data, like a tailor checking the fit of a suit on his customer. Through this process Meihui was teaching the machine how to give The Render’s skin human qualities by correcting the errors, and the machine was training Meihui not to make them in the first place. In this blind symbiosis the AI wasn’t simply grading Meihui’s work, it was learning from every move she made.

Finally, Meihui’s work met the AI’s approval and as she looked up at The Render in the center of the workspace, she saw her sector had turned green.

Subpart 4: Damn the torpedoes and bury the witnesses

Recommended listening: Sparks, “Tryouts for the Human Race” (1979)

Recommended viewing: Web Developer Nightmare

There was an urgency to the work. The strategic management department had recently become aware of some disturbing news about Typhon Syndicate’s AI operation that could mean big trouble for Minerva Syndicate in the business analytics space. According to Strategic’s industrial spies, Typhon AI was up to something, and Typhon Syndicate had inexplicably renegotiated a lot of their services contracts with some of their biggest customers. Fearing an evolutionary leap in Typhon AI’s predictive ability, Minerva Syndicate’s strategic management department was pressuring the Seattle development group to get a minimum viable product of the Minerva AI user interface into beta testing as soon as possible. The Seattle developers were worried that because the project was being rushed through alpha testing with low security constraints, the beta test could fail spectacularly. They insisted on a very limited public test in an isolated facility and so Strategic offered them the ideal venue – the visitor center at Pacifica Space Agency’s Hillsboro Test & Development Facility, only an hour flight time away in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. And if anything went wrong Strategic joked, they could always bury the witnesses.

by **Lagunaca** » Mon May 30, 2022 6:25 pm

Lagunaca: I've been a bit under the weather since November 2021 and have been unable to write any new episodes for Pacifica Ascendant: A Postmodern Saga. But given that it is indeed a saga, and saga's don't just end in the middle, I'll be picking up the story again with new episodes soon. Until then you can catch up on the story with this synopsis.

And one other thing about my "under-the-weather-ed-ness." I always include a recommended listening link in each episode. They're all unique and fit the theme somehow. This once I'll recycle one because it describes my situation pretty well:

Recommended listening: Harvey Danger, “Flagpole Sitta” (1997)

The "I'm not sick but I'm not well" phrase is spot on. I'm currently OK, but my doctors assure me that's temporary. I'm convinced they're trying to kill me before my condition does. This is meant in humor of course.

Pacifica Ascendant: A Postmodern Saga OOC (Open)

Footnote: The Minerva Syndicate

Footnote: Space Robots

Footnote: The Factory of the Future

Side story: Whorne Meets Minerva

Side story: Training Minerva

Pacifica Status Update

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