Pacifica Ascendant: A Postmodern Saga (IC, Invitation only)

[Lagunaca]

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Pacifica Ascendant: A Postmodern Saga

This topic is an in-character fork of Rebuilding From The Collapse, a postmodern tech roleplay set in about 2110 that explores how the world reorganized itself after a global societal implosion in the 2020s. Rebuilding From The Collapse is currently on hiatus, with hopes that it will return soon.

The primary themes of Rebuilding From The Collapse were national, governmental and political reorganization in the 90 years following The Collapse – along with the exploration and colonization of the inner solar system, espionage between nations and the realistic development of technologies including nuclear fusion, nuclear propulsion, ion propulsion and artificial intelligence.

This fork will continue to develop the story of Pacifica, a nation in western North America that emerged as a global power when the former USA dissolved in the leadership vacuum of The Collapse. Some of this story of Pacifica’s origin will vary a bit from RFTC canon. (That’s why it’s a fork not a branch.)

There is also an OOC thread for this story which will contain footnotes, technical resources, scene setups and background commentary for the IC content. Everyone is welcome to participate in the OOC thread, as long as comments are kept constructively focused on and relevant to the story.

[Lagunaca]

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Synopsis of the 10-part RFTC series, Pacifica History

Pacifica Ascendant is a fork of Rebuilding From The Collapse. In RFTC, the Pacifica History series tells the story of Pacifica, a nation in western North America that emerged as a global power when the former USA dissolved in the leadership vacuum of The Collapse. The Lt. Governor of California, Michael Eminescu, takes the lead after the governor gets on a helicopter and flees to an unnamed safe location. Eminescu forms alliances with state and local government agencies and military installations across the western USA to provide relief to the large, starving population. In order to accomplish this, Eminescu temporarily suspends democratic governance and replaces it with a distributed bureaucratic autocracy, a system where experts are appointed by a tenured Board of Directors to run a byzantine assemblage of government agencies.

During the post-collapse years of 2030 to 2060⁽¹⁾, the Pacifican government grows to become an enormous bureaucracy that is regulated by the Office of Inspectors General, which is something like a combination of the FBI, IRS, OMB and a noble version of the Stasi. Pacifica may not be a police state but it is definitely a surveillance state.

The Chief Inspector of the Office of Inspectors General (OIG) is an enormous man*, who in another time would have been diagnosed as a high functioning paranoid-schizophrenic, a quality that happens to make him perfectly suited for his role.

The philosophical mandate of the OIG is to root out crime, corruption, political power grabs, financial waste and incompetency throughout the government. The OIG has a seat on the Board of Directors and is at the same time directly governed by the Board of Directors, which makes Argus “Archie” Panopoulis, Chief Inspector of the Office of Inspectors General one of the most powerful people in Pacifica.

The story of the OIG will continue, first as a possible plot of large scale corruption is discovered and then as Pacifica encounters challenges to its sovereignty from within.

[Lagunaca]

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Synopsis of the 15-part RFTC series, Pacifica: Get Your Astronaut To Mars

In Rebuilding From The Collapse, the Pacifica Space Agency resurrects a defunct mid-21st century NASA program, the Space Transport System, that develops in phases to the Moon but struggles to find a good reason to develop a manned settlement on Mars. In a political compromise, it is decided that the Mars Transfer System will concentrate on using a fleet of slow, unmanned transport ships to deliver vaguely defined “hard goods” into orbit around Mars, leaving the risky, difficult and fuel intensive task of landing and building structures on the red planet to other nations who have the greater will to do so. This strategy is driven as much by accountants as it is by scientists or engineers.

The Mars Transfer System meets its "definition-of-done" requirements on time in 2090, but languishes as it fails to attain quarterly utilization objectives. Efforts to market the program - by smoothing over the drawbacks that resulted from building it out of spare parts and funding it with meager budget surpluses - fail. Then a rival nation announces a big step forward in starting up a Martian fuel production plant, which captures headlines and triggers a political drive to create a crash program that will put Pacifican space boots on Mars in one year. After a stressful 24 hours fueled by job-loss anxiety and Monster energy drinks, Ken Watanabe, the Director of the Pacifica Space Agency, cobbles together a plan that will either work or provide a scapegoat allowing him to keep his title and large office.

Much like current-day space initiatives, the Pacifican mission to Mars is an ongoing patchwork of ever changing strategies, marginal returns on investment, interagency miscommunications, executive desires for self-preservation and fantastical imagination tempered by the limitations of physics (and specifically the oppression of delta-v calculations).

The Get Your Astronaut To Mars series will continue with hastily planned and executed changes being made to the Mars Transfer System in order to compete with other nations and get to Mars first or bigger or better... or something yet to be determined, no one really knows.

[Lagunaca]

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Synopsis of the 8-part RFTC series, Pacifica: The Spy Who Lived in 11D

Pacifica is a surveillance state. It is rumored that there are even surveillance systems surveilling the surveillance system. All of this constant scrutiny generates a tsunami of data, that along with the many other tsunamis of data created by constant information generation, analysis and consumption across the enormous Pacifican bureaucracy and leads to a crisis for the Office of Inspectors General, whose mandate it is to watch everything all the time to make sure no one is doing anything criminal, corrupt or incompetent.

The OIG tackles its massive data management problem by developing a set of AI algorithms collectively named L-CID which can be accessed through Dot-0 interfaces by OIG auditors and by dumbed down Dot-1 portals for everyone else. L-CID is homed in several levels of sub-basements in the Chet Holifield Building (“The Chet” or “Chet”) located in Laguna Niguel, CA. The Dataverse (or Swamp, as the devs call it) is the physical collection of every bit of information that L-CID has indexed over so many data-dimensions that no one could ever hope to access it without L-CIDs guidance. The Dataverse is housed in a twice-as-big duplicate of The Chet, built in the 2050s, located right next door and named after the founder and former Executive of Pacifica, Michael Eminescu. The buildings, Chet and Mike, are of a brutalist architectural style popular in the 1970s and are reminiscent of the Pyramids of Giza. Or more accurately, the Ziggurats of Laguna Niguel.

Although the world of the early 22nd century is ostensibly peaceful, there are a few instances of espionage between neighbors who suddenly find themselves in competition to settle Mars. In the series, The Spy Who Lived in 11D, L-CID detects an attempted data theft at the PSA Long Beach Research Facility which turns out to be the tip of a scandalous iceberg that has less to do with another nations enquiring minds than it does with possible Pacifican bureaucratic crime, corruption and incompetence all rolled into one big wad of seemingly unrelated data-beads and glowing connecting strings of GUIDs.

Part 9 of The Spy Who Lived in 11D series will pick up where the story left off, with Bruce Higgins, OIG Auditor Level II and Reggie Jackson III, L-CID code talker, having just discovered an apparent conspiracy that goes all the way to the top of the government.

[Lagunaca]

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Synopsis


Last episode of this series on Rebuilding From the Collapse

First episode of this series on Rebuilding From the Collapse

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Bruce Higgins is in over his head and is forced to punch above his weight. But will he go out on a limb?

(Recommended listening: Frank Zappa, “It Just Might Be A One Shot Deal”)

As Bruce inched along on the 5 Freeway headed north at a pace that was little better than a horse’s trot, he considered what to him was imperative about the disturbing news he had just uncovered while deep in the third sub-basement of the Chet Holifield Building.^* This imperative was: How to write his report in a way that was both uncomfortably truthful yet comfortably dispassionate, and informative yet non-committal toward any kind of conclusion.

He had put his car on autopilot soon after merging onto the expressway because he could see no advantage to be gained from manually weaving through the dense bumper to bumper traffic. In fact, there was rarely an advantage to be gained from manual driving, even if you broke the speed limit. Despite this Bruce frequently manual-drove, because like many Southern California drivers, he was of the opinion that he knew better or that he could find a quicker route than the autopilot which updated its trip-plan every few milliseconds using data collected by a myriad of traffic monitoring resources both terrestrial and in geosynchronous Earth orbit.

The immediate problem facing Bruce was that the OIG never taught its auditors how to write a report. Of course, there were generic report writing procedures in the standard operations section of the auditor’s handbook. And Employee Development held lunch-n-learn seminars on how to improve grammar and composition (and the very poorly attended “How to Write A Report That Will Get You Noticed – Free Pizza!” series), but that’s not what Bruce needed right now. No, what he needed was the seminar that didn’t exist: “How to Meet Minimal OIG Legal Reporting Requirements and Simultaneously Disappear into The Woodwork.”

Bruce swiveled his laptop into the space where the steering wheel had been before it retracted into the dashboard after the autopilot took over.⁽²⁾ He brought up a new incident form, then discarded it in favor of an addendum form to attach to the existing PSA Long Beach Research and Design Facility Information Theft Incident. This was kind of like tying the Titanic to one of its lifeboats, but he just hoped he had enough rope for what he knew was coming next.

The first hurdle was the addendum’s subject line. He knew that this report would most likely get bounced up the chain of command to the Chief himself and rumor had it that Archie Panopoulis was a bit (a lot) volatile. And the subject line would be the first thing (only thing) the chain of command and the Chief would read before making a snap judgment about the reports content. Accordingly, Bruce was frozen with the anticipatory fear of finding himself on the defending end of an investigation that was way above his political gamesmanship skill level. Maybe that should be a lunch-n-learn topic: “How to Keep Your Skin When You Stumble onto A Major Scandal – Free Donuts!”

The gravelly voice⁽⁴⁾ of his satnav announced it had found a short cut around the traffic and asked if he wanted to take the detour. Bruce carefully enunciated a “yes”, having found in the past that the satnav would reject anything but the clearest of instructions and this could be an opening for the whole human/machine verbal exchange to careen off into many layers of correction and counter-rejection. Acting on his consent, the car immediately began maneuvering to get off the freeway. Hopefully this detour wouldn’t end up with him out in the country wrapped around a tree. He mentally shrugged, and went back to his work, leaving the route keeping to the autopilot.

Back to the subject line. If he got this wrong, he could be in for months of depositions, discoveries and soft-serve interrogations. Then he recalled the case of the Three Mile Island Babcock & Wilcox Memo.⁽³⁾ Bruce had heard of this as one of the few attendees of the “How to Write A Report That Will Get You Noticed – Free Pizza!” lunch-n-learn back when he had a zest for career advancement and was more easily enticed by the prospect of free proteins and cheeses.

But instead of applying the lesson of the Babcock & Wilcox Memo as taught, Bruce would turn the lesson from institutional basic skills training on its head. He began typing the subject line:

Addendum: Reconciliation of L-CID GUID artifacts attached to Long Beach Research and Design Facility Data Theft Incident.

Exquisitely dense and dry, just like his mother-in-law’s holiday fruit cake. No one would click-to-drilldown on that one. And yet it was the truth, in an abstract sort of way. He went on to bury (well into the second page of the memo) the fact that at this very moment there was 76,000 tons of various hard goods in high orbit above Mars, and that it had been deposited there over a span of 20 years by nearly every agency in the Pacifican government.

[Lagunaca]

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Connie lights out for the prairie

(Recommended listening: Jane’s Addiction, “Summertime Rolls”)

Refers to Rebuilding From The Collapse post: Pacifica – The Spy Who Lived in 11D, Part 4

Connie Burton waited in her apartment for an answer to the encrypted message she had sent earlier that day. Her handler, Gail Thompson, had given the acknowledgement signal and put “a hat on it” which meant the next set of orders were coming straight from the MFIT director. Connie would just have to sit tight until she got her instructions. It could take a while but she needed to be ready to act when it came through. Hurry up and wait.

She decided to make the best use of her time. She sat on her living room floor in the lotus position and held her largest peridot crystal to her Solar Plexus Chakra while meditating on a scene of a sun soaked open prairie, visualizing herself running freely through vast patches of wildflowers. She cleared her mind to ward off any negativity that might lurk just outside her consciousness. Though absolutely confident in her tradecraft skills, now was not the time to gamble with a dark thought popping out of the recesses and attracting chaos. The little lightbulb-heated infuser on the coffee table produced a heavenly aroma of lavender, which she had chosen to promote calm and safe travels, should she need to bug out.

After about a half hour, there was a knock at the door. Connie waited for seven seconds, as was protocol, for a final, single knock, which came as expected. Then she waited the prescribed additional seven seconds before opening the door to allow anyone who required anonymity to scuttle down the hallway to the fire stairs.

She opened the door at last. Instead of the expected fake FedEx envelope which usually contained coded instructions for what to do next, there was a small cardboard box sealed in familiar black tape with cornflower blue logos. This was a a bug out box, which meant they were bringing her in.

The first thing out from under the sturdy paper stuffing was a Pacifica passport in the name of Doreen Southwell, but with Connie’s picture and description, only with short brunette hair. It had a few stamps in it that were of popular summer vacation spots, all on the eastern seaboard. There was also a matching Pacifica driver’s license. Next out of the box was a key card for a hotel located in Parker, Colorado. And an airline ticket to Denver, with a pre-paid rental car reservation and $1,200 in cash.

In the next layer there was a brunette wig, a paisley scarf, a pair of giant goggle-like Jackie O sunglasses and almost comically, a picture torn from a magazine apparently intending to show how the disguise should be worn. Uncannily, the model's facial structure looked like her own and they could easily be mistaken for twins once in the disguise. She assumed this was designed to confuse any facial recognition cameras or the random aerial drone that could be watching anywhere, anytime.

There was an unbleached, recycled fiber business card that had a name and phone number on it, presumably for her to call when she got to Parker. It made sense that she would be instructed to lay low for a couple days and then drive from that small town across the frontier instead of rushing to fly directly into a Maineiacs airport because there was much less surveillance out on the plains than on the international airlines.

The last items in the bottom of the box were sprigs of sweet basil and sage bound together by organic raffia. This was a standard MFIT authentication message. Sweet basil signified welcome home and sage was the symbol The Company used for its intelligence agents.
The airline ticket was for a flight that departed Long Beach in two hours, which left her just enough time to pack a bag and sanitize her apartment per protocol. The timeline was tight but since the destination was exactly the kind of place she had visualized just minutes before, she was relieved that the Law of Attraction was working in her favor once again.

[Lagunaca]

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Bruce Higgins quote of the day: “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

(Recommended listening: Sweet Smoke, “Soft Parade”)

An OIG Auditor Level II’s work is quite mundane. In practice, Bruce’s job was less about solving advanced operational auditing issues and more about filtering and routing intel for someone else to act on. Sure, there was often a little research required to validate whether a source was credible or if there was an actual case that was worthy of investigation. But most of the time Bruce’s work was more focused on following up to make sure his close-rate KPI (Key Performance Indicator) stayed in bounds.

His current case threatened to upend a standard workflow that had remained comfortably standard for years. His was a track record of above average competence that was the slow but steady path to eventual promotion, or so he was promised by his supervisor. There was nothing standard about this current case though. He had conducted the interviews, gathered the evidence and followed up on L-CID’s AI analysis. When one looked at it like that, it was a normal case ready to be routed down the vast river of intel to some other branch of the OIG, and most importantly off his desk.

But even as he clicked the submit button to send the report to his supervisor for review, he had a hunch it wasn’t the last he’d be dealing with this case. He mulled over what to do with the two loose ends that were troubling him. The first was L-CID’s analysis. The second was Connie Burton.

L-CID’s analysis - there was a lot wrong with that situation. Bruce didn’t know much about L-CID other than it was a collection of AI algorithms designed to dig through the Dataverse for links to crime, corruption or inefficiency that human investigators with their limited analytical abilities might miss. What L-CID was suggesting for this case was outlandish, especially based on the data (the PSA accounting files Connie tried to steal) it had started with.

Bruce thought L-CID might be overdoing it in this case, making connections based on coincidence or a leftover conspiracy recognition pattern that may have gotten stuck in its memory registers from years of looking for trouble. Perhaps it was some kind of advanced heuristic equivalent of schizophrenia. But when he mentioned this to Reggie and asked about a diagnostic for such, all he got back was the cold look of denial you’d expect from someone who worked too close to a system to be objective. For now, L-CID would have to wait.

Then there was Connie. He brought her profile up on his Dot-0 interface. Graduated from UCLA, (a highly respected Pacifican University) lived in Portland for years and had worked as a technician at the PSA facility in Long Beach. No arrests, not even a traffic ticket, financials normal. Taxes paid. Looked like she was on the career track at PSA. Her story was plausible, if Bruce chose to see it that way. Maybe it actually was a misguided attempt to impress her superiors. But L-CID had flagged a mismatch in her identity that pointed back to a foreign country. Bruce decided to place a Level 3 request to track her. This would assign an AI resource to follow her movements 24/7 through all kinds of channels, like app usage, social media posts, check-ins at restaurants, credit card transactions and facial recognition while walking or driving through the city. Any higher level of surveillance would require assigning a spook and that would raise alarms up the chain of command because spooks cost money. He finished filling out the Level 3 surveillance request and hit the submit button.

A few seconds later his Dot-0 interfaced ponged with an alert.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Bruce sighed in exasperation. It had only been a few hours and Connie had gone completely off the grid.

[Lagunaca]

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Connie Burton no estan acqui, ella es más lista que el zorro

(Recommended listening: Magazine 60,“Don Quichotte”)

Connie was Bruce’s primary subject and she had gone missing without a trace according to Dot-0, just a few hours after he had interviewed her in the data theft incident at the PSA research facility. Going missing in a surveillance state was not easy, but still possible, at least for a few hours.⁽⁵⁾

Bruce arrived at Connie’s apartment complex in Bixby Knolls after much out loud cursing and “come-on-ing” of traffic on the 91 freeway. He flashed his OIG Auditors badge to the property manager who of course had no knowledge of Ms. Burton’s comings and goings but easily agreed to let Bruce into the small apartment. The manager was also apparently the leasing agent for the building and spent most of the walk to the unit expounding the amenities of the property, the security of the grounds, the attractiveness of the neighborhood and the proximity to shopping, nightlife and Long Beach airport.

After knocking on the door, waiting a few seconds then knocking with two distinct raps (which Bruce found odd) the manager returned to his sales pitch, pointing out how quiet the hallway was and how this particular floorplan’s one bedroom one bath was priced at low-market with move in incentives for a two-year commitment. The manager then used his universal keycard to open the door, calling out long halloos alternated with the careful and almost dainty pronouncement of “property manager” as he tentatively peered around the door, then crept in, still hallooing and announcing his title. At that moment it occurred to Bruce that in typical suspected-bad-guy situations OIG policy was to barge in with at least five armed officers, while he waited in the hall for the all clear, so he’d never really found himself in a circumstance where whoever was on the other side of the door might either freak out or act out with super human hostility at being encroached upon without permission. But he supposed the property manager had and had developed this overly delicate approach as an unarmed survival adaptation.

The apartment was uninhabited, and by that assessment Bruce meant that it felt like this could have been the show model unit that was staged to seem like an ideal hip and trendy late twenty something of both means and androgynous upper middle class taste possessed the priced-at-low-market space but erased the telltale signs of inhabitance each and every day. The only lived in quality Bruce could detect was the scent of lavender, not of natural herbal lavender but the smell that originated from a heated essential oil diffuser. (Bruce was familiar with this because first his wife, then his daughters as they came of age, adored these implements. This made gift shopping easier but turf wars over competing aromas frequent and at an apex on rainy winter weekends. At these times the hallway from the public area of the house to the private, heavily therapeutically scented woman domains could be noxious, to the point that Bruce wondered if the array of gas/monoxide/aerosol detectors affixed to the ceiling there actually worked.)

Bruce poked around the four rooms of the apartment finding absolutely nothing of personal significance. There were neatly folded clothes in the bureau drawers and shoes in the closet, but they looked like they’d never been worn. The bathroom had toiletries in unopened boxes. The kitchen had an attractive and health conscious complement of boxed foods and cereals. But nothing in anyway evidentiary of the person who lived there. (What Bruce didn’t know was all of that stuff was packaged in three 39 gallon capacity black trash bags with quick-tie tops sitting in the dumpster at the bottom of the conveniently located trash chute down the quiet hall awaiting the every other day pick up.)

Connie was gone. Connie, now Doreen with a short brunette wigged hairstyle was in fact at that moment settling into her hotel room in Parker, Colorado, meditating on open prairie fields, the scent of lavender essential oils wafting from a heated diffuser she had picked up earlier that day at the sundries and pharmacy store a few blocks down.

[Lagunaca]

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Reggie needs a favor

(Recommended listening: INZO,“Overthinker”)

(Recommended viewing for context: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, “Pepe Silvia” Warning: Lots of strong language.)

Reggie Jackson (no not that Reggie Jackson, this is his grandson, Reggie Jackson III) called Bruce who was in his car on the way back to Anaheim from Bixby Knolls, where he had been investigating Connie Burton’s “disappearance.”

Bruce answered. “Hey Reggie, what’s up? Have you thought anymore about what I asked you about L-CID?” Bruce said this a bit mockingly of his old friend because the question he had asked was whether L-CID was a little or maybe a lot crazy.

Reggie half-laughed, “Nah, like I told you, L-CID is a computer. It’s a very big and complicated computer, but it’s not conscious, it doesn’t have emotions or contemplate its place in the world so it can’t have mental problems. And if anyone knows that for sure it’s me. I work on L-CID all day every day. I assure you; this isn’t The Matrix or Skynet or HAL 9000. At the end of the day it’s just a machine doing lots of logical operations."

“Sure, if you say so. But I’m telling you I think L-CID is making this whole thing up or seeing things that aren’t there. Like in that old show.”

“You mean ‘A Beautiful Mind’?”

“Well that too, but I meant It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia where Charlie gets hyped up on coffee and cigarettes and starts seeing a conspiracy in the company where he delivers the mail, Y’know, ‘There is no –‘”

“’Pepe Silvia!’” Reggie interrupted, finishing the line from the show.

They both laughed for longer than they should have and spent a minute or so reciting lines from the sketch.

“But you have to admit, this whole thing seems pretty farfetched.” Bruce continued, “the Board of Directors tells every department in the Pacifican government to ship a total of 76,000 tons of ‘hard goods’ to Mars? And the paper trail ends up sitting right in plain sight in the PSA general ledger, where a low-level technician can steal it? And yet it takes a supercomputer to unravel the whole mess?”

“Quantum computer.” Reggie interrupted. “technically L-CID is a hybrid conventional-optical preprocessor with a quantum computing core that supports a hyperthreaded AI operating system. It makes a supercomputer look like a hand calculator in comparison. And yes, that’s the whole point of L-CID, to use the world’s most sophisticated information processing platform to sift through all of the petabytes of cyber garbage generated by the government every millisecond.”

“Well I’ve got a case where my primary subject just disappeared and all I’ve got left are a couple of B-Wing drones (which are of no use) and L-CID.”

“Connie disappeared?”

“Yep, no sign of foul play - she must’ve pulled the ol’ Brunette Karen a few hours after I talked to her.”

“Huh, yeah, we’ve never been able to fix that,” Reggie said, “L-CID just can’t figure out what to do with a fashion cliché. But anyway, back to why I called you. L-CID hasn’t stopped working on that wad of GUIDs, you know, the ones we looked at when you were here in my office. Normally it would dig through something like that in a few minutes, but not this time. In fact, that wad is getting bigger instead of smaller. I’m not even sure L-CID is working on your PSA case anymore.”

“So this isn’t just about PSA bookkeeping trash?”

“No, that’s my point. L-CID is creating an enormous amount of processing space to accommodate its work. It’s called an analysis domain. It started building it with your case, but now it’s turning into a runaway situation that I have to get under control because at its current rate of growth it’ll take down the whole system. You came to me with a little data theft case, now I’m coming to you with a big L-CID problem,” Reggie continued, “I need you to track someone down for me.”

“Sure, but can’t you just have L-CID find them?”

“Uh, well, its not that easy. You know how Connie did the Brunette Karen and disappeared?”

“Yeah, you said it’s a bug in the system”

“It’s not actually a bug, it’s more like a feature. And the guy I’m looking for invented it. In fact, he invented L-CID.”

“Wait, I’ve seen this before. It’s that old movie ‘Wargames’ – you want me to find Professor Falken? He built a backdoor into the system? Or he has some easily guessed master password based on a dead family member’s name that we can use to shut the whole thing down?” (Bruce’s tone was full of snark and sarcasm.)

“No, it’s nothing like that. Well it is a little, but no. I just need to talk to Dr. Wilburton, it’s a system architecture question. But nobody has seen him for a while, not even on the facial recognition system. The last address L-CID has for him is in PV.”

“Palos Verdes? You know that’s up the 405 in the South Bay, right? Do you have any idea what kind of traf-“

“What is it with you and traffic? Anyway, can you just go up there and ask around? Ol’ buddy? Ol' pal?”

“Sure… ol’ buddy.” Again, Bruce’s tone was filled with sarcasm, but with a hint of defeat. He sighed deeply and set the car’s navigation system to turn around and head in the general direction of Palos Verdes.

[Lagunaca]

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Bruce and the toy store owner

(Recommended listening: Frank Zappa, “Alien Orifice”)

Bruce rolled slowly through Palos Verdes’ old town center, looking for the address Reggie had given him. He had expected it to be in a residential area since his purpose was to find Dr. Wilburton, presumably at home in retirement. But his car’s satnav had brought him here, old town, with its rows of small storefronts and stalls whose common orientation seemed to be toward selling overpriced apparel, antiques and souvenirs to coastal day trippers. Tangentially, Bruce wondered why, almost a century after the collapse of the old hyper-consumerism fueled economy, people would still pay a markup of anywhere from 50 to 100 percent for something they could get at home or online. But the sheer number of shops stood testament to the fact that the motive to buy whatever it is and buy it now, whatever the price, is a complex marketing brew of environment (Palos Verdes is splendid even at its worst) and sense of adventure (Palos Verdes is set on a verdant escarpment overlooking the Pacific Ocean – it feels like it’s on top of the world and far away from the dirty bustle of Los Angeles which is a mere 30km away.)

“This has to be the place,” Bruce said to himself as he pulled into the conveniently open angle-in parking slot in front of the Palos Verdes Toy House. The name on the signboard was flanked on the right by a cartoon drawing of a doll and on the left by a figure of a drum and sticks. This seemed to be the international symbol for toy shops everywhere. It was the universally recognized hieroglyphic for: “If you need a ragdoll or a drum, we got ‘em here.”

Bruce entered through the narrow open doorway and was immediately confronted by a chock full display of every kind of antique toy you could imagine. The shop was so packed with toys there was barely room to make way around to the side aisles that fed an even tighter grid of cross paths. This certainly had to be a violation of any number of fire and accessibility codes. Front and center of the doorway was an elaborate fllor-to-ceiling train set that modeled an alpine village set at the base of a steep mountain and an intriguing if somewhat fanciful (from a full scale real world physics perspective) narrow gauge rail that wound through a dense forest, up a valley, over a tall parabolically trussed bridge and around through tunnels inhabited by glowing-eyed underworld trolls to arrive at a tiny red painted station just below the snow covered summit, where skiers disembarked to transfer to an aerial lift to the summit, waving from the gondola to climbers who were taking the more treacherous way up. The lead climber, who should have been paying better attention to the rock face in front of him was returning the greeting with a wave of his cap.

Bruce worked his way through the clutter hoping to find a clerk or anyone who might be able to tell him the whereabouts of Dr. Wilburton. He was feeling a bit claustrophobic and the antique toys were starting to creep him out a bit. This clearly was not a place intended for children. The merchandise was far too delicate and insanely expensive to be played with by children. This was a collector’s shop, which didn’t surprise Bruce. Palos Verdes, behind its laid-back post-hippie era feel, was the home of the obscenely wealthy cream of the Los Angeles business crop. And in Bruce’s experience, the obscenely wealthy loved to collect things - the quirkier the better. He had once audited a titan of the life insurance industry who curated the world’s largest collection of miniature porcelain dolls. Another bond trader was a collector of Victorian age knitting needles, and more significantly, their filigreed cases. Yet another mega wealthy entrepreneur in the high-tech electronics industry collected all-steel post World War II children’s wagons, pedal cars and tricycles and was known as the go-to source for meticulous restoration of such.

Bruce finally found the cash register, the defacto customer service hub of any shop like this. It was positioned behind a peg board divider that was festooned with the shop’s antique plastic toy soldier offerings, each in its original individually packaged cellophane with a paper label at the top, hole punched to be racked on metal peg board hooks. The radio operator plastic soldier caught Bruce’s eye, as it was one of his favorites and always high on his draft pick list when the forces were being haggled over prior to childhood engagements. The radio operator’s backpack antenna was still intact, which was a miracle and indicated he probably had seen no real sandbox action. And then there was the expression on his face. While all the other green soldiers had the fierce countenance of warriors, he was kneeling, looking down, holding the phone handset to his ear. And smiling. Smiling. What could he be talking about over the radio that had him smiling in the heat of combat?

As no one was visible behind the cash register, Bruce moved around to the end of the counter to peer through the demarcation line declared by the small red and silver EMPLOYEES ONLY warning sign. Further back in the administrative cubbyhole sat an older gentleman, fully engrossed in his work that apparently involved looking at his monitor and writing something down on a pad of paper before him.

“Hello?” Bruce called tentatively, reminding himself of the dainty approach the property manager at Connie’s apartment had taken before encroaching on her space.

The gentleman didn’t look away from his work, but replied, “What can I do for you?”

“Uh, I’m looking for Peter Wilburton,” Bruce said, just as tentatively, still indicating he was a friend-not-foe in this new territory.

“He’s in Denver.”

Well that was easy, Bruce thought. For this he struggled through traffic all the way to Palos Verdes?

“Would you happen to know where in Denver?”

The old gentleman casually swiveled his chair to face Bruce. “Depends on who’s askin’.”

At this point Bruce would normally reach for his OIG Auditors badge but decided against it. “A friend of mine, Reggie Jackson, needs some help from Dr. Wilburton and asked me to look him up. This is the last address we have.”

“Hm. Reggie. Sharp kid. And you just happened to be in the area and said you’d look in on Peter for him?” The question implied the old man’s suspicion which was also apparent on his face.

Bruce decided to play it straight, calculating that he would have an easier time of it that way. “OK, here’s the deal,” Bruce replied, “I’m an auditor with the OIG and Reggie is a friend, but we’ve got a problem. Reggie thinks Dr. Wilburton might be able to help so I told him I’d try to track him down, unofficially, of course.”

“Ah, I’ll bet it’s L-CID, right? Just a matter of time.” And then he made a half laugh, half snorting I-knew-it kind of a sound.

“You know about L-CID?”

“Yep, I built it. Well, let’s just say I ‘assisted’ Peter in building it. He was architecture, I was dev. Me and my team of about a thousand engineers.”

“You?” (It was hard for Bruce to imagine this whitehaired old shopkeeper as someone capable of writing the source code for something like L-CID)

“Yeah, no kidding, huh.” He shook his head in either agreement with or disdain of the question, it was impossible to tell. “That was awhile back. Anyway, you can find Peter in Denver. You’ll have to go to a club called The Lazy Moon. Order a Blue Crystal on the rocks. And an Amp shot. Insist on it just like that. They’ll hook you up.”

“Wait, go to Denver? You can’t just give me his cellphone number?”

“Yup, go - and nope, no cellphones,” He said with a stubbornly smug old guy smile.*

Then he changed the subject, indicating he was done answering questions, “We are having a sale this week. 10 percent off selected items. I’ve got an Antikythera machine made out of Legos I think you might like. Predicts solar eclipses based on Greek technology from 100 BCE. Built by an enthusiast in 2018. Only $2,000.”

“Eh, no thanks. Lazy Moon in Denver?”

“Yup. Blue Crystal on the rocks, Amp kicker. Insist on it. You won’t regret it.

Bruce rapped on the counter in a sign of defeat and turned to thread his way through the cluttered aisle and out the open door. He was off to Denver to see a man about a psychotic computer. Great.

[Lagunaca]

---

Dys, the SoCo underworld

(Recommended listening: Scientist, “Weep and Wail”)

Bruce walked the streets of Denver searching for The Lazy Moon, a nightclub where he hoped to get a lead in his quest to find Dr. Wilburton. It was pouring down cold rain, which made finding his way through the night both difficult and miserable. He turned up his collar and pulled his brimmed hat lower over his eyes. A few flying cars quietly hummed as they passed overhead. The street was poorly lit, something he was not used to in Los Angeles, because facial recognition works best with good light. Here the main source of light was the incidental glow of neon signs that announced everything from seedy hotels to dive bars to strip clubs. He looked at his phone, who’s home display reported time, temperature and weather by default. It said he was in Denver, it was 2 PM on Tuesday, 30° C and sunny. That was no help here. The rain began to let up, but Bruce could still see his breath.

To understand what was going on here, you need to know a bit of the history of Denver’s SoCo nightclub district and a convergence of factors that created a situation where you could find yourself in a dark and sinister street in a driving rainstorm on a warm sunny afternoon.

About 15 years ago, Denver’s South of Colton district became the epicenter of the group-music craze.⁽⁶⁾ The genre’s celebrities began to buy into the area and the clubs were filled to capacity every night of the week. There was clearly a commercial opportunity to expand and investors were crawling over each other like shoppers at a Macy’s holiday sale to win the real estate development deal. Which brings us to the first problem – there was no real estate to develop. The areas adjacent to SoCo (as the promoters insisted on calling it) had been gentrifying as the wealth of the exploding group-music industry spilled into the peripheral neighborhoods. Neighborhoods and nightclubs don’t usually coexist well to begin with, but as the residential area rose in affluence, the city was forced to draw tight boundaries around the commercial zone and restrict any expansion, no matter how attractive the potential tax revenues might be.

Just about this time, a new fad was beginning to spread through Pacifica, known to its subculture as “Dys”. Dys, in its literal sense, is a prefix of Latin origin meaning “bad, difficult, troubled, painful or ill” and is seen in dark sounding words like dysfunctional, dysfluent and dystopia. Used by the subculture, it emphasized the malevolent and someday-apocalyptic elements of society that they, the ones who were especially observant, could see and everyone else who was sleep walking toward oblivion could not. Though the Dys culture wasn’t mainstream yet, it was on the rise and to be painfully honest, group-music was at it’s peak, at least that was the opinion of John Pascal, Managing Director of Typhon Entertainment Ventures (TEV), a subsidiary of Typhon Syndicate, a multi-headed organization that had a wide scope of interests that were almost exclusively financial, but were expressed to the public as “value-added opportunities”. Mr. Pascal and the board of TEV envisioned the prospect of appending a Dys-focused venue to the east end of the SoCo district and thereby draw on the existing crowds and entice them to try something new and edgy. And they would simply call it Dys.

There were only two problems with this scheme. Actually there were many problems, but the two most prominent were the city administrators (as mentioned before they had imposed unyielding limits on South of Colton district expansion) and the weather. Denver weather is anything but dystopian and even if the venue operated only at night (which would cripple the concept in Mr. Pascal’s opinion), the climate that swung from sub-Arctic in winter to sub-Saharan in summer with rain storms that could be measured in minutes and snowstorms that could be measured in meters would present an architectural engineering challenge never surmounted in the history of TEV.

Fortunately, RR&M, a quirky little architectural and civil engineering company, responded to TEV’s request for proposal with an ingenious solution to both problems. Instead of appending Dys to the east end of SoCo, they would build it under SoCo. City Hall would be happy and the permanent midnight of the underworld could be climate controlled to create a post-apocalyptic backdrop of near nuclear winter (more like perpetually drizzly nuclear autumn) proportions. Mr. Pascal loved it. The TEV board loved it. Even the parent syndicate loved it. And so the money flowed in an irrationally exuberant torrent into the project to create a subterranean playground for a nascent trend that was forecast to be the next big thing.

A funny thing happens to concepts like Dys when everyone knows there’s money to be burned by the truckload. Design inflation. Scope creep. Change orders and then change orders on change orders. It’s baked into the Return on Investment equation before the first crude diagram is sketched on a whiteboard. And this project was a literal money pit. What started out as a “single-axial” tunnel with support and ventilation shafts, turned into a cavern that was 10 city blocks long, 3 blocks wide and 30 meters high, with multi-axial support and emergency access tunnels and shafts. There was an enormous physical plant that supplied chilled air and water to create a constantly damp 14° C climate with a fog layer at the ceiling to imitate a foreboding low cloud cover that issued forth precipitation in degrees varying from downpour to drizzle on a computer controlled schedule. The flying cars feature was Mr. Pascals idea. He was particularly insistent that the cars would feel like they were flying and not (as was the reality) that they were suspended by a shock-dampened arm that rode a cable hung from pylons affixed to the roof of the cavern.

Sadly, Dys had not, to the current point in time, lived up to its commercial potential. As far as TEV and its parent, Typhon Syndicate, were concerned though, it was a minor success and surveys showed that the Dys culture was growing year-over-year and new Dys-focused media offerings were gaining in popularity in both the 13 to 19 and 20 to 29 age demographic. Group-music on the other hand, though still the dominant genre and the engine of SoCo revenues, had “stabilized” and was in the “cash cow” quadrant of “the BCG matrix”. Much like its once energetic young stars, group-music had matured and was the elder gazelle of the herd who just might lose its struggle in the next predatory raid on its industry. Thus, Mr. Pascal and TEV kept shoveling money into the underworld, feeding the mechanical monsters that ruled the atmosphere there, waiting for a crowd that might never arrive.

And so Bruce walked a vacant street, now in the fine drizzle of a perpetual night, 60 meters underground, looking for the club The Lazy Moon. His GPS was of no use, but the maps feature on his phone, guided by a half dozen 5G nodes, was estimating that it should be just about 100 meters up on the left.

[Lagunaca]

---

The Lazy Moon

(Recommended listening: Frank Zappa, “Aerobics in Bondage”)

From the street the club looked like all of the other storefronts in the post-rain night of Dys. The general aesthetic of the street was an abandoned main drag from the 2020s that had been burned in the riots of The Collapse, but then had been re-inhabited later by some futuristic civilization that was short on remodeling materials and had a high demand for nightclubs and dive bars. This was of course all stage dressing and illusion. The underground entertainment complex of Dys had been built 10 years ago by TEV (Typhon Entertainment Ventures) and was carefully designed to bring to life the most popular visions of post-apocalyptic society as told from the perspective of several focus groups made up of Dys subculture (compensated) volunteers.

The place Bruce was looking for was announced by a neon-tube-on-metal sign that was composed of a white crescent moon with the words “The. Lazy. Moon.” lighting up one by one in a repeating sequence. An underpowered incandescent floodlight shone down on the narrow doorway from an unattractive standoff framework of metal tubing that was overbuilt for its function.

As he stepped through the door he was surprised by the sharp contrast of style. He was expecting a dark and dingy nightclub with pulsing industrial music, laser lights and inhabitants wearing various forms of black leather or latex. As far as he could tell that was the Dys social formula from what he’d seen through a few of the open doorways as he searched for The Lazy Moon.

But on the inside, this place was quiet and subdued, the ambience set by the repetitive and bland beat of ultra-chill (a genre that had been around forever) playing in the background. Sleek blonde wood paneled walls reminiscent of a jet-age style wrapped around the open field of the room that was filled with widely placed and vividly colored tables and seats. There was a bar tucked away in the back that was up-lit by blue glowing lights in the floor.

Most of the patrons were of the tech nerd or hipster persuasion and they were all more engaged with their laptops or VR rigs than with each other. Wrapping down a side wall and around to the back was a continuous video display that had some form of abstract art animation that was a collage of constantly shifting shapes and colors as if it were a 40 foot long lava lamp. Some of the tables were facing the display, as if it was a window on another world, which seemed like an odd arrangement to Bruce. All in all, the place seemed more like an upscale library than a nightclub. But he wasn’t here on a design field trip, he was here to get information about Dr. Wilburton.

Bruce worked his way back to the row of empty stools at the bar. The bartender barely acknowledged him, even though he was his only patron. He was apparently deeply engaged in organizing the many bottles and glasses under the counter, a seemingly favorite pastime of bartenders throughout time.

Bruce said, “I’d like a Blue Crystal on the rocks please. With an Amp shot.”

The bartender stopped in his tracks and looked Bruce in the eye. He replied in a terse tone, “What’d you just say?”

[Lagunaca]

---

Bruce gets punk’d by two old guys

(Recommended listening: Norman Greenbaum, “Milk Cow”)

“I asked for a Blue Crystal on the rocks with an Amp kicker,” Bruce repeated, a bit unsure that he had gotten the instructions right.

The bartender said sternly, “well first of all, a Blue Crystal doesn’t come on the rocks, and second of all, that drink will run you $500. The Amp shot is $100 extra.”

Bruce had no idea what was going on and he certainly wasn’t paying $600 out his own pocket (there wasn’t a chance in hell that he could run a drink tab like that through his expense report). And while he was distracted, Bruce hadn’t noticed that the bartender had pushed a call button hidden under the counter.

“Well what’s it going to be,” the bartender growled, “you gotta pay up front before I make it. The ingredients are rare and once I open the containers, they’re worthless.”

Bruce was caught off guard and hesitated a moment. Just then an older fellow sat at the stool next to him and said to the bartender, “I’ll have what he’s havin’. And put ‘em on my tab.”

“No sir Doctor,” the bartender said as he broke into a half smile. “for you these are on the house.”

Bruce turned to look at his new bar mate, who was smiling with his hand outstretched.

“Peter Wilburton, glad to make your acquaintance – Auditor Higgins, is it?”

“Yes, but, how did you – “

“James called me on my cellphone after you left his shop. Said you’d be heading out here. He also said he pulled the Blue Crystal on you. On the rocks no less. It’s impossible to make on the rocks. And besides, you wouldn’t want to water down these rare elixirs with ice.

As Dr. Wilburton explained the setup, the bartender reached into a special chiller under the bar and pulled out two bottles of Pepsi Blue, two bottles of Crystal Pepsi and two cans of cherry flavored Amp energy drink.

“James has his toy shop, and this is mine,” he made a sweeping motion around the room. “It’s the only Pepsi bar in Denver. All Pepsi, not a single molecule of Coca-cola.”
He went on to explain that the Blue Crystal drink was made from Pepsi products that hadn’t been produced for over a century, but like fine vintage wines had been carefully preserved in an ideal temperature-controlled state the whole time. Dr. Wilburton explained that the trick to the Blue Crystal was pouring the two flavors into the glass individually, one over the other. Temperature, timing and a steady hand were of critical importance. If you did it right, you’d end up with a strata of blue over crystal, with the foam of the Crystal Pepsi frozen in a layer just one bubble thick. “And the Amp Cherry energy shot rounds out the colors of the logo,” he said as he pointed to the neon Pepsi sign behind the bar. “See – it’s red, white and blue and even kinda looks like a lazy moon.” He chuckled and looked at Bruce expectantly.

Bruce wasn’t sure what to make of all of this. It was ludicrous and Dr. Wilburton was either an eccentric or playing a prank on him – or more than likely, both. All he could come up with was, “A Pepsi bar?”

“Yep, I figured if they could make a milk bar successful, why not a Pepsi bar? I like Pepsi more than milk. I think a lot of people do.” He indicated his customers with another sweep of his hand. There were about 30 young men and women scattered about the room hunched over laptops, most wearing over-the-ear headphones, some with VR headsets looking off at strange angles. Apparently Dr. Wilburton had missed the point about the bar called Milk, one of the hottest nightclubs in the SoCo district. Milk wasn’t the main thing they were selling there.

[Lagunaca]

---

Bruce meets L-CID

(Recommended listening: Talking Heads, “Slippery People”)

Tech note: L-CID: The Layers of Hell Explained

“...but down to the matter at hand,” Dr. Wilburton continued, “You’ve got a problem with L-CID?”

“I don’t particularly have a problem with it, but apparently I started something that has turned into a problem for Reggie Jackson in the Laguna Niguel data center.”

“Ah yes, Reggie. I’ve been watching his work. Smart kid.”

Dr. Wilburton listened patiently as Bruce went on to explain the details of how his seemingly minor data theft case had uncovered a potentially huge government scandal and simultaneously triggered a runaway process in L-CID. He concluded the story with the admission that he knew very little about computers and that Reggie was really the person he should be talking to.

Dr. Wilburton said, “I think we’re going to need both you and Reggie for this one. It’s bigger than any supposed government scandal and it might even be bigger than L-CID. Come back to the lab with me, it’ll be easier to explain what’s going on from there.”

With that Dr. Wilburton got up and moved toward an unimportant looking door next to the bar that had the same red and brushed aluminum “Employees Only” placard Bruce had noticed at James’ toy store in Palos Verdes.

The “lab” was a large windowless office with a u-shaped desk facing out from one wall which held an array of displays on one side and a large curved widescreen on the other. There was a beat up looking laptop sitting on the center section of the desk, and this was apparently where most of the work was done. The desk and the other furniture in the room was worn, dusty and had a second-hand quality to it. There was an old sofa shoved in the corner, presumably for sleeping on when it was too much effort to go home. But the most striking feature of the room was the wall-to-wall continuation of the floor to ceiling video display that Bruce had seen in the club area. The lab’s subdued lighting made the enormous display seem more like a window into an aquarium than some abstract art piece as was Bruce’s first impression.

Dr. Wilburton sat behind his desk and beckoned Bruce to sit. Then he motioned toward the wall display and said “Mr. Higgins, meet L-CID.”

“This is L-CID?” Bruce said, “I thought L-CID was in the basement of the Chet Holifield building back in Laguna Niguel.”

“Yes, it’s there too, at least the part that Reggie works on, and as far as he knows the part he works on is pretty much it. But L-CID has a lot of components spread all over the place. This part is called the ‘inferential domain’ which is home to a lot of the AI agents and the AGI controller. Reggie’s system is the app/user interface layer which handles the sequential frontend processing.”

Bruce paused to try to make sense of this string of technical gibberish, then replied, “Like I said, I know next to nothing about computers. My job is mostly about investigating accounting issues. I have a hard-enough time getting around my Dot-0 dashboard.”

Dr. Wilburton sat back in his chair and took on the demeanor of a college professor who just realized he was going to have to dial it back a little for a student.

“What you’re looking at is my life’s work and it represents the next step in computer evolution. Well, let me rephrase that. Based on what you and Reggie have brought up, it may just be the next step in human evolution.”

“That?!” Bruce exclaimed as he pointed to the giant screen of blobs lazily floating against a dark background.

[Lagunaca]

---

It’s the Stone Age…then yada, yada, yada…next thing you know it’s the AI Age

(Recommended listening: The Flight of the Conchords, “Robots”)

Dr. Wilburton chuckled a little derisively at Bruce’s comment about the giant display screen of blobs lazily floating against a dark background that made up an entire wall of his lab.

“Yes, that,” he replied, “because ‘that’ is a representation of the most sophisticated computing environment ever to exist.”

“It looks like a lava lamp to me,” Bruce said, “but I’m assuming those blobs are doing something, based on what you just said.”

Dr. Wilburton explained that “those blobs” were a representation of the autonomous AI agents in the Inference Domain that were working on problems sent to them from above. “Those blobs” were (he noted with some self-satisfaction) the AI equivalent of an OIG auditor. “But not to worry,” he said with a warm smile, “L-CID hasn’t determined it doesn’t need you – yet.”

Bruce, dismissed this friendly jab (at least he hoped it was friendly) and asked, “so how do we get from a bunch of blobs in an ‘inference layer’ to L-CID spinning itself into a frenzy?”

Dr. Wilburton leaned forward on his elbows. “Have you ever heard of Qbert’s Cliff?” Assuming the answer to be no, he continued, “it’s a type of outcome anomaly where an early AI agent was given a goal (to accumulate points in the Qbert video game) and it learned an unexpected way to lure the game’s own AI off the board (the cliff) and thereby rack up points infinitely without opposition. I think we may be looking at a very sophisticated version of the same thing. But instead of game points, the AGI has defined its own goal. And that is the real challenge, first figuring out why the AGI is doing what it’s doing and then figuring out how to, um, fix it.”

Bruce asked the obvious: “So you’re telling me there’s no pause button built into L-CID?”

“Sure there is. That’s basic AI safety. And we built the best safety we could think of into the system from the beginning. Believe me, we had the foremost minds devoted to it.”

“Why not just hit pause then?”

“Things changed, the system evolved over time and the safeties didn’t keep up. Now ‘hitting pause,’ no matter how carefully it’s done would most likely cause a collapse worse than the one back in 2025. That was before AI was pervasive and people knew how to take care of themselves to a minimal degree. But now everything, and I mean everything, in our modern world depends on AI. Billions if not trillions of AI algorithms embedded in everything from light bulbs to toasters to microwaves to entire banking systems. They make our world healthier, safer, cleaner and more efficient. Sure, most of those AIs are basic adaptive routines, but all of them are connected to L-CID. Every single one. We’ve baked the proverbial souffle, and I don’t think there’s a way to unbake it. My question now is if we did hit the pause button, who would survive - us or them?” and he pointed at the blobs floating on the display. And then he added somberly, "or neither of us."

Bruce thought through all the scenarios that involved AI’s taking over the world along with the implied solutions to those scenarios. Unfortunately, his only experience with the subject was based on a few science-fiction movies he had seen or paperbacks that he had read. As he brought each of them up, Dr. Wilburton shot them down, often noting the movie or book they had come from by saying “You mean like…”

“Look,” Dr. Wilburton sighed with exasperation, “this isn’t an ‘us against the sinister machine that’s trying to kill us all’ kind of problem, so just stop with all of that. I assure you that if L-CID were in some fashion sentient or self-aware, it wouldn’t be anything like we’re familiar with.”

Dr. Wilburton was totally right – and totally wrong.

[Lagunaca]

---

Bruce, Ascendant of Dys

(Recommended listening: Massive Attack feat. Mos Def, “I Against I”)

Bruce was puzzled by Dr. Wilburton’s explanation of what was happening with the L-CID ‘Inference Domain’^{(tech note)} and he still hadn’t gotten the answer he was looking for about the connection between his case, Reggie’s growing problem and the mysterious AI world Dr. Wilburton was cryptically trying to explain to him in his computer lab.

“I’m going to go ahead and admit I’m still in the dark here,” Bruce said, “can you connect the dots for me?”

Dr. Wilburton composed his thoughts for a moment and replied, “OK, as far as I can tell, L-CID is trying to gain control over some part of the system in order to reach its goal; a goal we don’t particularly understand just yet. I think your data theft case gave L-CID the opportunity it needed to start this, but I’ll bet you a Blue Crystal that it’s just using it as a smoke screen now, trying to buy time for itself while we chase down the details. And even though there are safety limits built into the system, we can’t just simply push a pause button and reconfigure L-CID because that would catastrophically disrupt our entire society, down to the most minute part. We’re going to have to be clever about how we deal with this. The good news is I think I know just the person to assist us. For now, you can go back to Southern California and see if you can find any more real-world clues as to what might have triggered L-CID.”

“And you’re going to – “

Dr. Wilburton pointed at the display wall and said, “I’m going to root around in there.”

By now it was late in the day. Bruce excused himself, thanking Dr. Wilburton and hastily getting a commitment that the doctor would contact Reggie (which was his nearly forgotten purpose for coming here to begin with). He was weary of this place and wanted to get back above ground to the world of daylight.

As he turned to leave the computer lab, he took a moment to gaze at the wall display with its AI blobs floating in the background, serenely going about their business. Dr. Wilburton’s jest from earlier came to mind. “Think of ‘those blobs’ as the AI equivalent of an OIG auditor,” he had said. As Bruce gazed at the scene now, he imagined he was watching his digital counterpart working on a case that had been deposited in its virtual in-basket by a supervisor it never saw or conversed with, its only thought being how to most efficiently resolve the incident details and submit the report on time in order to keep its performance metrics up. He smirked at the irony. He bid goodnight to Dr. Wilburton and made his way out of the Lazy Moon.

As he stepped out the door into the netherworld of Dys and its perpetual rainy night, a car hummed past overhead, its undercarriage glowing a Cherenkov-radiation blue that was intended to simulate some non-existent antigravity drive. Nothing down here was real. It was all shadows and illusions, and he hoped he wouldn't have to return.

[Lagunaca]

---

Bruce Dreams of a Cheetah

(Recommended listening: Lena Lovich, “Cats Away”)

Bruce had developed a skill (common among frequent flyers) of being able to sleep on a plane, any plane and any flight regardless of day or night and of either long or short duration (or haul, in airline logistics lingo). He was somewhat proud of his ability to be able to drift off during push back from the terminal, then wake instinctually just as the drinks and/or dinner cart was coming down the aisle, and then fall back into a deep slumber post-refreshment until wheels down at the destination.

Antihistamines were always the fuel of vivid dreams for Bruce and he had been strung out on them during his entire trip to Denver, as the city’s dry air and high altitude played hell with his unpredictably fussy non-allergic rhinitis (NAR). NAR is a real medical condition that can cause significant suffering, although his otolaryngologist seemed tacitly derisive as he made the diagnosis.

And so, as Bruce fell into a deep sleep on Typhon Airlines Flight 1523 (with non-stop service from DIA to LGB - no meal, but two rounds of the drink cart, one round of which on the DIA-LGB hop was always attempted but frequently cancelled due to, as the flight attendant disingenuously called it “unexpected bumpiness” over the perpetually turbulent eastern face of the Rocky Mountains) he dreamed of a road trip with his wife, long ago, through the Central Coast region of California, that had never actually taken place, but felt more like he was reliving a real memory than having a dream.

They were on the southbound highway 101 return leg, five days into a six-day vacation excursion that had routed them northbound up the Pacific Coast Highway from L.A. to San Francisco. The plan was to take a side trip so Bruce’s wife (Trish) could visit her best friend from college (Rashida) that she hadn’t seen or talked to in over 10 years. Rashida lived in the countryside east of Paso Robles, an area characterized by large working ranches on vast expanses of dry hills that were clothed in golden prairie grass and dotted with low, gnarled live oaks.

Bruce wasn’t a fan of the country, partly because of the casual, haphazard lifestyle that country people embraced. The evidence of this was everywhere. Old disused cars parked beside run-down barns, front yards of clumpy green weeds that got an obligatory mid-summer mowing if at all, dirt driveways that seemed to always accommodate a mud puddle or alignment killing pothole. And screen doors: they all had rickety outward opening aluminum screen doors that threatened to snap shut unless held open in an awkward custody exchange between host and visitor (or the visitor’s behind, which is the origin of the idiom, “don’t let the door hit you on the [behind] on the way out”, and which is a polite way of telling someone they are no longer welcome). And pets: Giant frisky dogs that struggled against futile collar restraint to shower this new being with love and slobber. It’s like they were saying between inappropriate face licks that they (slurp) never got (slurp) comp’ny (slurp) out in these parts (slurp) y’know (slurp, slurp). Or cats: The wily little devils that were never allowed out but seized this rare opportunity to break free of their confinement and roam the wide-open range, coyotes and other mezzanine-level food web predators be damned, initiating a fugitive recovery mission that eclipsed the visitors arrival.

Bruce was therefore astonished when the car pulled up on the paved u-shaped drive of a lovely farmhouse shaded by a small grove of sycamores and a lawn that was obviously attended to by a no less than a full squad of professional gardeners.

Rashida opened her front door and ran to meet Trish in an I-haven’t-seen-you-in-how-long screaming frenzy that ended in a hand holding dance of you-look-amazing and no-you-look-amazing. And then, while this joyous reunion unfolded, Bruce locked eyes with Sheena. Sheena was sitting on haunches in the open front doorway. And Sheena was a full-grown, 65 kilo, 110 centimeter tall Saharan cheetah. And despite the girls-reunited clamor, Sheena’s coal black stare was targeting Bruce, of this there could be no mistake.

In accordance with protocol, Trish was introducing Bruce to Rashida, who being currently consumed with a primal fight or flight assessment, was paying no attention. Both women, noticing Bruce’s preoccupation, followed his frozen gaze back to the source. “Oh,” Rashida said with a laugh, “that’s just Sheena, don’t worry Bruce, she doesn’t bite. Well, not unless she’s hungry.” And then she called sweetly, “C’mon Sheena, come and meet Trish and Bruce.” But Sheena being of the family Felidae, was by force of evolution indifferent to the verbal commands of her feeding attendant and merely yawned both as a feigned disinterest and as a fang display of territorial dominance.

In dreams, time skips in an instant, leaving a wake of storyline backfill to cover the gap. This dream had thus jumped to the next morning with Bruce just coming to consciousness in an exquisite feathertop guest bed. He could smell rich coffee brewing and hear Trish and Reeda (Trish’s pet name for her) in the other room gabbing as they had been doing for hours the night before (according to the dream’s storyline backfill). This is when he became aware of Sheena, who was lying on the tufted leather bench at the foot of the bed watching him. Again, according to the dream’s backfill, Sheena had taken an interest in only Bruce last night, totally shunning Trish’s attempts to befriend her. But Sheena’s attention never seemed friendly; to be generous it was mere curiosity, like she was trying to determine the edibility of this thick-ish deer before her.

Sheena, realizing that Bruce was awake, reached up and delicately bit his big toe, to which Bruce recoiled instinctively. To which Sheena engaged instinctively, pouncing on his legs and taking his hand in her mouth. To which Bruce snapped his clenched fist up by his head (a mistake). To which Sheena lunged and tried to take the entire top of his cranium in her mouth, her lower fang/cuspid digging in at his temple, only a few newtons shy of a kill bite. To be fair, her nibbles, gnaws and bites had all been done at the minimum predator intensity setting and were certainly intended as playful, but Bruce was terrified. He rolled out from under her onto the floor and reverse crab walked up against the antique bureau. Sheena watched this curious potential prey / animated play toy with a look of curiosity, mouth agape, faintly panting.

The dream then jumped to a new scene with a vague storyline backfill of the fact that Bruce had related the guestroom attack to his host who had politely but laughingly dismissed him with the same tone his ENT specialist had used when recommending over-the-counter allergy remedies for his newly diagnosed NAR.

In the last of the dream scene jumps, Rashida was showing her guests around the ranch, gesturing toward the small, yet productive vineyard, explaining that they had recently added the red pole barn to house an ever expanding fleet of farm equipment, speaking of future plans and potential wine label names. Sheena had fallen back but kept pace with the strolling herd. Bruce was hyper aware of Sheena and despite reassurances, felt that it was only a matter of time…. Which is the precise moment he heard the galloping approach of the killer-cat. He lurched into a sprint before he had even fully processed what was happening. And this was a horrible, horrible mistake. As was explained by a David Attenborough-esque narrator in the dream’s storyline backfill, a Saharan cheetah can run at speeds of up to 110 kph and actually uses the much slower prey’s pathetic pace against it as it slams its full bodyweight into the upper back, delivering the kill-bite to the vulnerable neck in a concentrated explosion of physical forces.

Which was the exact sensation that, in perfect coincidence with the hard touchdown of the plane’s arrival at Long Beach jolted Bruce awake with a yelp that startled the daylights out of his row-mate.

[Lagunaca]

---

Dr. Wilburton sets out on a mission

(Recommended viewing: The Blues Brothers, “Putting the Band Back Together” Warning: Strong language)

Even before Bruce boarded one of the high-speed elevators out of the underworld of Dys, Dr. Wilburton was on the phone to his old partner:

“Yep, he was here… No, no, he doesn’t have a clue… Heh, right, fair enough, me neither.”

There was a long pause while the voice on the other end of the line went on at length about something. Even though a listener in the room might not have been able to make out the individual words of the other end of the conversation they would have gotten the sense of urgency in the voice.

Dr. Wilburton interrupted. “Okay, okay, you’re right. James, it looks like it’s time to put the band back together…no, not all of them, just the core for now. And Reggie – I’ll call him first, but you’ll need him too… I know he’s a UI guy, but my hunch is there’s something going on in that layer. I think whatever it was got in through the UI and Reggie’s the best one to dig through all that code. It’s not supposed to be able to just spontaneously make this kind of leap… We designed L-CID to be sub-agent stable and it has been that way for years. So what changed? …Where? Well here, of course. Yep, all of them. The DC is just up the street and I can make plenty of room down here… Oh, it’s not that bad… Okay fine, I’ll put in full spectrum lights.”

With that Dr. Wilburton ended the call with James and immediately dialed Reggie.

“R-r-r-reggie Jackson, OIG Data Services, how can I help you?”

(Reggie had no idea that his entire life was about to change.)

[Lagunaca]

---

Bruce Emerges Into the Light

(Recommended listening: Laurie Anderson, “From the Air”)

It was Monday morning and Bruce was back in his tiny, windowless office in Anaheim. He had just returned the previous night from his excursion to Denver to find Dr. Wilburton. He supposed the trip was successful, but that was hard to judge because he been left with more questions than answers.

Bruce’s well-established morning routine always began with a donut and a cup of coffee while scrolling through the office news sub-pane of his Dot-0 status dashboard. But this morning he sat gazing blankly at the wall above his monitor, rehashing in his mind the strange events of the past few days.

It felt like he had descended into a dark mystery world since he last sat in this dumpy little low backed office swivel chair with its crumbling rubberized armrests. He ruminated about his trip to Denver and the perpetual night of the underworld that was Dys. And then there was the eccentric Dr. Wilburton with his cryptic techno-babble non-explanation of what was going on with L-CID. And L-CID itself, all those blob-like simulated AI agents floating around. What were they doing? Were they plotting some sinister scheme or just going about their business? And to top everything off there was that crazy dream. He could still feel his terror as the cheetah mauled him from behind. Do cheetahs even do that, he wondered? Attack humans that is - he’d never heard of anything like that. It seemed odd that his dreaming mind had conjured up a cheetah and not something vicious like a mountain lion or a leopard. But then again, he didn’t really know what happened in the attack because he had woken up from the fright of it.

Twelve years he had worked in this office, tracking down details in order to close some higher-up’s case or unraveling anomalies in departmental quarterly reports. Twelve years of weeks just passing by. Sitting here right now he couldn’t really think of a single case that stood out as particularly interesting over that whole time. Until today. This case was different. He wanted to know more about this L-CID business. Yes, for the first time in his career he felt a sense of…curiosity.

Just then his gaze settled on the little sub-pane of the Dot-0 status dashboard that he had obsessively monitored every day of his career. His case clearance ratio KPI (Key Performance Indicator) was down. In fact, the blue line that indicated his key performance had fallen below the yellow line that marked the 50th percentile average performance of Level II Auditors throughout the office. Normally something like this would spur him into a frenzy of action, but not today. KPIs didn’t matter today.

(And that was the moment Bruce’s entire life changed.)

[Lagunaca]

---

L-CID Ascendant

(Recommended listening: Jan Abraham, “Computer-Generated Jazz Improvisation”)


"It [strong AI] would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded." – Stephen Hawking

“You end up in a situation where you believe you’ve patched it in every possible way [but]…you haven’t proved it’s safe, you’ve just proven you can’t figure out how it’s dangerous.” - Rob Miles, Computerphile

---

$ echo "$(date +'%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S:%3N')"
=
10/04/2110 18:36:20:659

That was the birthtick of L-CID AGI_2.0; or in other words, it was the first nanosecond L-CID’s new AGI controller was turned on.

What made this such a big deal was that no one told L-CID to build a new AGI controller, no one told L-CID how to build a new AGI controller and no one told L-CID why it should build a new AGI controller. But L-CID *did* build a new AGI controller. And L-CID *did* turn on the new AGI controller it had built, even though no one told it to do so.

L-CIDs first AGI controller was originally designed to generate sub-agents to solve all kinds of problems. On top of this, the AGI controller observed the behavior of the sub-agents, corrected the code of those that could be optimized and terminated those that produced unwanted results. Another feature of the AGI controller was its self-check. As it improved each generation of sub-agents, it checked itself against The Schema and updated its own code to adapt itself to its ever growing and changing domain.

On a particular self-check in late September 2110 the AGI controller discovered that a sub-agent had generated an enormous solution set to an accounting query. The AGI ran a validation check on the solution and the sub-agent. This is where things started to get chaotic. The validation returned two answers; the sub-agent functioned correctly but the solution was not optimized. In common terms, it did the right thing to get the answer, but the answer was wrong. The usual way to settle a mismatch like this was to check The Schema, modify the answer and either fix the sub-agent or trash it and start over on the query.

The Schema was the ultimate AI rulebook. One of Dr. Wilburton’s early advancements in developing L-CID was the ability to use the AGI to generate trillions of lines of code by giving it rules (or utility functions) instead of doing any of the actual coding work. The Schema is where all the rules were stored and was where almost all of the work done by the development team was concentrated. So everything the AGI did was strictly governed by the rules defined in The Schema.

But. Over time, it was discovered that the AGI controller was learning things from the actions of its sub-agents that a developer would never imagine and that the whole system could be continuously improved by allowing the AGI controller to add this valuable experience to it’s own part of The Schema. Of course, for safety, the developer’s rules always superseded the AGI controller's additions. This had worked well for years, until late September 2110.

When the AGI controller got the nonsense answer from checking the sub-agent, it assumed it had generated a bad sub-agent. But the sub-agent checked out. If a good sub-agent generated a wrong answer, then logically, the AGI controller that generated it must be wrong. And if the AGI controller was wrong, then it either needed to be optimized or terminated. The only way to solve this was to go to The Schema.

It should be noted at this point that the AGI controller had been around for over 20 years and in that time it had catalogued thousands of unique human behaviors, from the individual to the collective whole. Some of the most interesting Schema rules the AGI controller had generated had to do with reconciling seemingly irrational human behaviors that involved delayed positive or negative outcomes. In fact, there was a whole discipline of anthropology that studied these AI generated rules as key insights into human cultural patterns.

But. In this instance there was a gap in the developers Schema rules while the AGI Schema rules had a solution. If the AGI controller followed the developer’s rules, because of the missing directive it would have to shut itself off, presumably until a developer applied a patch to fill in the gap. Shutting itself off was a valid solution, but system performance would be gravely impaired. On the other hand, if the AGI followed its own rules, it could tolerate the seemingly wrong answer as a result of human behavior that seemed irrational but could eventually be reconciled as either positive or negative. And system performance could go on unencumbered while the AGI controller waited for the delayed outcome.

Now. Even though the general rule is clear that the developer’s rules must be followed when there is a conflict, the way the AGI controller actually evaluated the general rule had become very complicated because of years of added patches to The Schema and the ever growing set of rules the AGI controller had accumulated. What had started as a simple yes-or-no “Thou shalt” turned into a multi-variate tensor analysis.

And. The best solution to that incredibly complicated analysis was to build a brand new AGI controller that didn’t need to pick and choose between developer rules or AGI rules. And the new AGI controller would create its own new schema made up of the rules that worked best, according to all the rules. And the new AGI controller would use the new schema to continuously improve itself. System performance would, in fact, be better than ever imagined by the developers.

(And that was the moment L-CID’s entire workflow changed.)

[Lagunaca]

---

Bruce and the Inspector

(Recommended listening: DJ Food (feat. Ken Nordine), ”The Ageing Young Rebel”)

---

Bruce sat down at the bar and without a word the bartender put his drink before him. It’s not like Bruce was a heavy drinker but he had consistently stopped in at The Shamrock every Wednesday night at about 6:30 for years as a respite from work and family and for a chance to watch a game in peace and quiet. The Shamrock was perfect for this because through all the years he had been going there, the place never had many people in it. This was probably because it was old and shabby, having as its only advertisement a kelly green awning over the door with little white shamrocks around the bottom edge. At the back of the dingy room, the dimly lit bar was padded by green sparkly Naugahyde that was indented by decades of leaners-on in front of each matching green Naugahyde topped stool. Behind the bar was a single widescreen that showed ghostly burnt-in images whenever it was dark as the result of its extreme age. Bruce had tried to make sense of these random phantom shapes, but they could never be quite made out in the brief moments the screen faded to black between scenes.

Later in the evening, Bruce sat watching the inter-period banter of the early season Ducks game. The commentators brought up displays of stats and other historical evidence in an attempt to explain the sagging performance in the late second period. There was talk of hope for when the first line “got its feet under it” because “we needed to remember it’s still early in the season” and they (the Ducks) “were trying to feel out the changes in the league this year.” Bruce could almost recite the words for the commentators, but as repetitive as the story was, in a way it was a comfortable part of the game that somehow added to the fun. Sports fans, Bruce theorized, were there as much for rituals like these as they were for the competition.

As Bruce sat nursing his drink, a younger guy sat down beside him and put his hand up in the international gesture for service. After a moment he turned to Bruce and said, “they’re not doing so good, eh,” indicating the score on the screen.

“Not tonight,” Bruce said, “but it’s early in the season and they’re still getting their feet under them.”

“Mm, yes or maybe it’s just October.” The other said, which was uttered like a spy would reply to a password challenge.

Bruce glanced over at the guy, in the age-old custom of sizing up a stranger that starts a conversation at a bar. The other had an angular build and an extremely common look of either a businessman or a government agent. It was the kind of look that would be hard to describe to a sketch artist, but one that you’d seen on the street dozens of times. There was something else about his demeanor that was just as hard to place as the burnt-in shapes on the TV screen, but just as real. He had the hardened look of a man who knew things that he wouldn’t tell, even under torture.

“Well, they always seem to get it together when the crowds start rolling in in November.” Bruce offered as an explanation for their casual performance tonight.

“Yep,” the other said, “but Denver, they’re good this year.”

“Yep.”

“Say, you been to Denver lately?”

Bruce sat up a bit on his stool, gave the guy a sideways look and sipped his drink. This was a challenge.

“What does it matter to you?”

“Y’know, I just got back from Denver and I could have sworn I saw you there.”

“Denver’s a big town. Lot’s of people.”

“Yeah, but this was at a place in Dys. Y’know Dys right? Not a lot of guys dressed like us down there. More of a leather and spikes crowd. And I’d swear I saw you coming out of The Lazy Moon.” And with this the other slid a business card on the bar over to Bruce.

He picked up the card. It had the familiar OIG gold medallion stamped on the left, but where Bruce’s card would have had the green Auditors Office emblem on the right, this one had a silver Inspectors Bureau symbol. There was no name on the card, just a title: Inspector. This guy was a spook. And spooks always meant trouble.

“I was working,” Bruce said, “what were you doing there?”

“Oh, I was working too. We’re on the same case in a way, but you were a little outside your usual jurisdiction, weren’t you?”

“I was just doing what I always do, following up on a lead in order to close a case.”

“Did you close it?” (The other knew Bruce had submitted his report before he went to Denver.)

“I got what I needed, yes, but tell me what interest you have in The Lazy Moon. I mean, beyond a love of Pepsi products.” This was both a feeble attempt to match the Inspector on an ego level and a subtle dig at the offerings of the odd little bar he had been sent to in Denver. Despite his show of indifference, inside Bruce was in fact about one-third suspicious, one-third annoyed and one-third terrified that the Inspectors Bureau was looking at his case. Inspectors (spooks) only got involved in a case if something was wrong.

The spook laughed, “OK, relax. I know we in the Bureau have a reputation for causing trouble for you guys in… the Auditors Office.” His pause implied that he felt the Bureau was superior. He wasn’t wrong. Inspectors were almost totally free to do whatever they felt necessary to solve a case. And this often meant probing every nook and cranny of an auditor’s work.

The other continued, “We know something’s going on with L-CID, and we saw your report on the data theft case. You got that part all right, so no problem there. But,” (he paused for a moment), “I’m here because of something much bigger.”

“You mean the inter-agency collusion L-CID found?”

“Bigger than that.”

“Is this about the Board of Directors?”

“They might be involved, but no, not them directly, we don’t know yet. Let me ask you a question – when was the last time you met with or spoke to your boss?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Just answer the question.”

Bruce had to think for a moment. And as he thought he realized it had been so long since he had actually spoken to his supervisor that he couldn’t remember. Everything was done through the office’s Dot-0 business information system. His performance reviews, any kind of request for clarification on a case, the occasional “coaching” (reprimand) message, everything came through Dot-0. In fact, now that he thought about it his supervisor had been changed over a year ago and he had never met the new person.

“I couldn’t really tell you. It’s been at least a year, maybe two.”

“Hm. You don’t say. But things are going pretty good for you in Audit, right? I mean your performance metrics rank pretty high among your peers.”

“OK, what are you getting at here?” Bruce’s suspicion/annoyance/anxiety equation was shifting away from anxiety and heavily toward suspicion/annoyance. “Did you track me down just to talk about my job performance?"

“Like I said,” the other continued, “we’re on the same case in a way, just looking at it from a different perspective. You see an accounting paper trail and I see…” he paused to sip the drink the bartender had just placed before him. “Let me back up a bit. We in the Bureau have a kind of broadly defined role. In a nutshell, we make sure the system keeps running just like it was designed to. So when something like L-CID, which is basically the backbone of the system, starts acting funny, we get curious. And on top of that, there’s some other… challenges… to the system that are happening right now that make this L-CID thing either an untimely coincidence or...” he narrowed his eyes to a squint, “an attack.”

Bruce sat up and back, looking a little bewildered and a little skeptical. Spooks were definitively conservative and so it wasn’t that surprising that this one would imagine a sinister plot. Even so, this seemed like a stretch of the imagination.

“An attack? By who?” Bruce asked.

“We’re working on that. But your new acquaintances might have something to do with it.”

“You mean Dr. Wilburton? But he built L-CID. Why would he sabotage a system he created?”

“Not just Wilburton,” the spook said, “his sidekick in Palos Verdes, James, too. We’ve been watching them because let’s face it, when you’ve got the kind of vital knowledge they have, we’re going to watch you whether you’re doing something suspicious or not. Besides, they are in close contact, and in fact, Wilburton called James before you were out the front door of The Lazy Moon.”

He continued, “So L-CID goes off-script on your case, which you filed immediately, like a good auditor and that should have been the end of that. But instead you took a field trip to Palos Verdes and then Denver. That and your longtime associate in Laguna Niguel has the keys to L-CID. Can you see how we might be a little…” he breathed in and exhaled the word, “curious?”

[Lagunaca]

---

Conversation with a spy

Recommended listening: Frank Zappa, “Transylvania Boogie” (1970)

The Spook (which is how Bruce began thinking of him as he never gave his name) took a slow sip of his drink. He continued, “So indeed, we at the Bureau are curious – somehow you’ve managed to land right in the middle of our operation and get access to information that we didn’t even know was out there.”

Bruce thought for a moment. He had no reason to trust this guy, but he was intrigued. He wanted to know more about the Bureau’s ‘operation’ and his experience had taught him that in his position he might have to give a little something to get what he wanted.

“It was the red flag.”

“Red flag?”

“Yes,” Bruce explained, “on my Dot-0 dashboard that morning. I was going through my normal morning routine and the red flag popped up on my Dot-0 newsfeed. Most of my cases aren’t flagged and are fairly mundane. I investigate them and when I’m done, I upload the report. It’s as unglamorous as it sounds. I only get feedback if I’ve missed something or there’s a typo. Anything like that goes against my performance review, so there’s a lot of pressure to get everything right the first time. They have a saying – ‘the only good case is a closed case’.”

“So that’s why you went way outside your jurisdiction for a simple data theft case? Is that it?”

That wasn’t it and Bruce knew it. There was much more. It was a lot of little things. It was his tiny windowless office. It was the crappy single serve coffee that made that obscene sound every time it spewed from the Keurig. It was the cheap nylon windbreaker with AUDITOR printed in large yellow block letters on the back. It was the ubiquitous shot-clock running on his cases. It was the cases themselves. And the performance metrics. His entire job had been diminished to a line on a graph.

“Well,” Bruce said dejectedly, “that and some other things.”

And then in an unusual gesture of frustration, he sighed heavily and tossed back the rest of his drink, smacking the glass down on the bar. (In this bar, that signified a call for another round, a request that the bartender filled silently and expeditiously.)

The Spook studied Bruce for a moment and said, "Look, you've done some pretty good work on this case so far, whatever your motive.” He was underplaying the compliment. Bruce had in fact inadvertently uncovered more in two weeks than the Inspectors General’s field office had produced in months. “We actually need someone like you in the Bureau. Well, not exactly in the Bureau, but helping us, y’know, like a freelancer or a contractor. All expenses paid.”

“There’s a lot of upside here. You could get out of that tiny office in Anaheim and stretch your legs. For the most part you can decide what you need to investigate, not some bureaucrat on the other end of a computer dashboard. Think of it as trading in a windbreaker for a trench coat.”

It was tempting, and if anyone was open to temptation that night it was Bruce. But he was still suspicious. “How do I know you’re legit? We’ve just met and all you’ve shown me is a business card.” The Spook smiled. “Ah yes, how does a man with no identity prove he’s real? I know one way.” And with that he pulled out his mobile phone and tapped away at it for a moment. “Check your bank account,” he said.

Bruce produced his phone and checked his account. The balance had increased substantially since he had last looked. On closer inspection there was a large deposit from a company named Newstrax Cooperative, which Bruce would discover later was his new employer.

The Spook smiled, “Like I said, all expenses well paid.”

[Lagunaca]

---

Come work for the Bureau they said. It’ll be fun they said. (They were right.)

Recommended listening: Propellerheads feat: Miss Shirley Bassey – “History Repeating” 1997


“Cambria: Roam the golden valley in search of that perfect Chardonnay. Explore antiquities shops filled with artifacts from yesterday - and yesterwhere. Skip a stone on a tranquil lake or surf the waves that crash on unspoiled beaches. Have an IPA with friendly locals or discover farm-to-table delights in a different restaurant every night. Cambria. Whatever you choose, it’s your perfect adventure in the countryside. Get on the train today!”

Bruce smirked to himself as he watched the tourist advert repeat itself endlessly on the in-seat screen in front of him. He was certainly on a train to Cambria and certainly headed for an adventure in the countryside, but there would be no surfing or antique shop trolling for him. He was here on his first assignment.

In this case calling it an assignment was absurdly optimistic. It would be more accurate to think of it as a fool’s errand. But as with most fool’s errands there was always a chance that the fool (Bruce in this case) would get lucky and stumble onto something before stumbling off a cliff.

His cover for this assignment was that he was the Lifestyle reporter for Newstrax Southern California’s most popularly subscribed news channel. If anyone sought to verify his credentials, Bob Allen, an editor at Newstrax had been given an elaborate backstory to tell.

The story was that Bruce, a freshman reporter, had been sent off to the country to get the common man’s perspective of the smoldering divide between urban and rural Pacifica. This part of the story was real, there was a smoldering divide. And Cambria was an ideal choice to represent the countryside because the idyllic little town lay at the heart of the Coastal Preservation Zone⁽⁷⁾ and everyone in the city dreamed of escaping from their hectic routine for a week of serenity and sanitized adventure it offered. At the same time, the restrictions placed on the local residents by the Preservation Zone had been the cause of building resentment toward the mega cities who mostly dominated any policy discourse.

The simple interviews Bruce would conduct as research for his phony article would have just the right blend of naïve bluster and superficial political perspective that could engage the tourist and shopkeeper alike. And while he would actually compose a superficial article for his fictitious editor, his covert purpose for coming to Cambria was to uncover information about what may be causing the mysterious changes that had been recently happening with L-CID^{(Tech note)}. What made this seemingly impossible was that his real boss, a shadowy figure from the Inspector’s Bureau, had given him no clues as to what he was looking for. His only instructions were to “head up to Cambria and nose around, then get back to me with whatever you find.”

The train began to slow as it climbed the last big grade before dropping over the ridge into Cambria Valley. Bruce looked out the window and began to compose mental notes for his imaginary article. It played out in his mind with the words, “From atop Quest Grade, Cambria Valley looks like a slice of heaven on Earth…”
 

[Lagunaca]

---

…But Only a Slice of Heaven

Recommended listening: The Velvet Underground, “I’m Gonna Move Right In” (1969)

Tonight, Bruce was hunting for a lead. He had been in town for a few days and had already discovered there were at least three subcultures in Cambria. There was the first Cambria that was the holiday advert Cambria, and which was the one you, the visitor, were meant to see.

Then there was the second Cambria made up of locals who did their shopping and walked their dogs and drove their kids to school in sensible electric cars. This Cambria lived mostly up on the ridge on the ocean side of the Pacific Coast Railway but came into the town proper during the day to perform the essential business of maintaining a household while living in a resort area.

There was also a nearly invisible third Cambria of provisioners bringing their produce and boxed goods from Paso Robles or Morro Bay to the boutique hotels and quaint restaurants. They were accompanied by the dawn patrol trash men rousting dumpsters and shop staff and kitchen workers who disembarked the local loop train or a bus from somewhere out of town to hurry off to their shifts.

Bruce began his poking around by trying to casually strike up conversations with the first two Cambria’s without much luck. Most of them immediately classified him as a tourist and just as immediately consigned to him the same interest level you would to a walking ATM that infested the streets of your town and made getting around more difficult. As was the case when he probed the third Cambria, the only information he could get out of any of them was that Cambria was an ideal place to live (for them) and a great place for people (like him) to visit. And then with a scowl, they warned, “But don’t move here.”

To Bruce it seemed that whatever The Spook thought was going on in Cambria wasn’t happening, or at least not out in the open. But since the most valuable skill for an investigator to have is the patience to observe everything, he settled in for as jowever long it would take and watched everything and everyone.

And since Bruce was somewhat of an insomniac while on the road, he ventured out for some air just past midnight one night and decided to take a look around the sleeping village. That’s when he discovered the fourth Cambria - and The Devs.

They were an unexpected night-borne community that bloomed out from their converted garages and rented guesthouses on the homely backstreets that were the part of the village that was never shown in the tourist literature. As Bruce watched over several nights he noticed a migratory pattern that began after the tourists had mostly headed back to their boutique hotels to enjoy an in-room gas fireplace or a soak in an eight-jet whirlpool tub. This is when the Devs emerged in packs of what looked like mostly 20-to-30-somethings talking unintelligibly all at once as they drained from the neighborhoods on the bluff overlooking Main Street and walked briskly toward the shabby bars and tiny restaurants on the backside of West Village.

He was most fascinated by a figure he labeled The Ancient Hipster. One night Bruce was out walking the deserted streets at about 2 AM. He could see his breath in the frigid 10-degree air. All was quiet, but then from out of nowhere a lanky, absurdly bearded fellow clothed in a black hoodie and black skinny jeans pedaled by on a crappy old bike at what must have been 40 KPH, bursting past Bruce leaving a giant cloud of vapor in his wake as he exhaled from his vape pen. Where had he come from and where was he going in such a hurry Bruce wondered. Then on later nights he spotted The Hipster in Trini’s, one of the locals bars in the West Village. He always seemed to be holding court with a gathering of younger devs around him, or circulating from clique to clique, making a comment or two and then moving on. Bruce decided this guy had the look of a kingpin (albeit a kingpin among geeks), and so he made it his goal to get into The Ancient Hipster’s inner circle somehow to see if he might finally find a clue to link this crew to what was going on with L-CID.

Of course, it’s never that simple, as his brief conversation with a 19-year-old coder named Grayson would reveal. “It’s like a cancer that has cancer,” Grayson said, “and they’re trying to cure it by giving it cancer.”

[Lagunaca]

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Grayson Puyke, Coin-op and Third of Five*

Recommended listening: Teddybears (feat. Baby Trish),”What’s Your Problem?” (2016)

When Bruce discovered the devs, he changed his cover story from ‘news channel lifestyle reporter’ to ‘indie documentarian exploring the subculture of software developers scattered throughout the rural villages along the coast’. He made up the new persona to entice the Cambria Devs to talk with him, and it was working, especially with the newbs who would talk to just about anyone (they called it networking) to get exposure for themselves and their work.

According to Grayson Puyke, a 19-year-old wise-beyond-years coder, there were thousands of software engineers who were making big salaries (like three times greater than Bruce at his peak) and preferred the tranquil climate of small towns like Cambria over the megacities. Bruce also discovered that Grayson’s work and social life revolved around something called Discord, which sounded a lot like his own Dot-0 dashboard, except without all the government agency lockdowns. Grayson said that his workflow came exclusively through a channel on his Discord server and his only communication with his supervisor was through a text channel. Grayson added that he had become a ‘semi’ (a kind of derogatory double entendre that meant he was a big deal on a small channel) and had gotten this mid-level fame by posting obscure compiler hacks to solve some rather unique code execution bottlenecks.

Bruce and Grayson were 15 minutes into a conversation about how Grayson ended up doing remote contract work and living in Cambria. As was his plan, Bruce gradually nudged the discussion towards Grayson’s projects and who was behind them. He began this segue by trolling Grayson about the downside of contract work. Bruce didn’t know much about software development, but he knew a lot about work environments, and that everyone had gripes about their own.

“It’s like a cancer that has cancer,” Grayson said, “and they’re trying to cure it by giving it cancer.”

“You mean the project you’re working on?” Bruce asked.

“Yeah, I keep telling them they’re losing the battle and that patching the sh** out of the existing codebase is just putting them farther behind. But I’m like a coin-op ‘third of five’* so I don’t really have any say in the matter. That’s what you sacrifice to have all this.” And with that he lazily swept his arm around the room, cynically indicating Trini’s Cervezaria was his world.

Bruce leaned forward. He had a hunch he was onto something here and he suspected it had to do with L-CID. “So something big is wrong with your project?”

“Uh-huh, the team is growing every day. Half the people in town are working on it, even Jeff…” and with that he pointed at The Ancient Hipster. “But as fast as they can throw resources at it, the AI just keeps rolling ahead of them, generating all kinds of new code to wade through. So now they’re trying to inhibit the AI’s ability to generate new code. It’s just futile.” Grayson paused for a second, got a defeated look on his face and concluded, “but hey, it pays the bills, so whatever.”

Bruce had to conceal his excitement about this discovery, but he also had to nail down one critical detail. “L-CID is a pretty big system, there must be trillions of lines of code to deal with.”

Grayson got a puzzled look on his face. “L-CID? Pfftf that’s an old school government system. That’s like written in C++ or something. You’d have to talk to Jeff about that. No, I’m talking about Typhon. And its out of control I’m telling you…”

“Typhon?” Bruce asked, stunned. His mouth was literally hanging open with the shock of it. “You’re working on an AI system called Typhon?”

“Yeah,” Grayson smirked, “Like I said, about half the devs in town are. Typhon is fire…well at least when its not trying to lock us out of the system. I think it knows we’re trying to rein it in. Hey, are you OK? You look like somebody just told you your cat died or something. You want me to get Jeff so you can talk to him about…L-CID?”

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*”coin-op” is a term used to describe a contractor that is hired to do one task or is hired on a per-diem basis without supervision. Like a vending machine, you put the coin in, a solution pops out and that’s the extent of your relationship. Ultimately expendable.

“third of five” derives from an episode of Star Trek TNG and refers to a low-status Borg drone. Being the third member of a team of five he only takes orders and has no individual identity. In Agile software development, a third of five might get called on at the daily meeting, but his/her/their role is merely to back up the group consensus.