1
"What do you mean Zie's gone over to the enemy?"
We're in the office of Ted Langley and things are not looking good.
Er... Merry, who the hell's Ted Langley?
Oh, he's the the head of the so called secret world government, though he'd bristle if you did anything stupid like addressing him as Mr President. As all truly great and powerful leaders, he likes to keep things low key, and avoid the public gaze. "It's Ted. Just call me Ted," he says to anyone who starts taking this all a bit too seriously.
Rewind...
What do you mean Zie's gone over to the enemy?
Take a look at this - says Ebert, that's Ted's right hand man, or one of them. Ted doesn't like to rely too much on any one individual for obvious reasons.
Ebert, his actual name's Heinrich but to all his colleagues and dare I say it, friends, he's always plain Ebert.
Where was I?
Take a look at this...
Thanks Paula... and Ebert pings a hidden switch bringing Zie's latest blogpost to the heads-up display. The holographic screen in the centre of the room, or wherever you choose to view it.
What the hell? Ted glowers. I don't believe it? Why wasn't I informed?
Er... isn't that what I'm doing now? - Ebert shifts on his feet uneasily.
Before it happened... idiot.
Er, with all due respect Ted, it was impossible to predict this particular turn of events.
What do you mean "impossible to predict?" We've invested billions in the best predictive software ever created. We have the world's only truly operational full spectrum quantum computer, Deep Thought, with processing power matching or exceeding that of every computer in existence, and you're telling me we couldn't nail this one?
Apparently not.
Heinrich, you're trying my patience.
Ted, there was an event prior to this publication.
What kind of "event".
Merry was involved.
Jesus Christ. That should have sounded the alarm if nothing else.
Well he didn't actually do anything. It was all being closely monitored. He simply quit.
What do you mean "quit"?
Exactly that. He's been mentoring Zie for some time now. The usual claptrap. Zero equals one. The infinity drive... what not and nought.
Yawn. Does he never grow tired of all that?
Apparently not, until completely out of the blue he flipped his lid and simply quit. Zie was left all alone to figure it out for himself.
Well that's fine. You should have known he was in danger of unpredictable shifts. Imagine having Merry as your mentor, and then finding yourself completely alone. It's bound to tell. I don't get why the predictive system didn't flag this one.
Apparently either Merry or Zie know how to outsmart it.
Impossible. No one can outsmart Deep Thought.
That's what I thought too, which is why I didn't bother to exercise caution and inform you of Merry's departure.
Where is he now?
Nowhere in physical reality - or nowhere we can locate.
Ok, fine. Damage limitation or exploitation? Can we turn this to our benefit or do we need to brush it under the carpet.
That's what I'm here to discuss. Deep Thought doesn't think there's anything we can do.
What do you mean.
Well, it took about 42 seconds to analyse the data, that's several orders of magnitude longer than it's ever taken before.
And?
And it's conclusions are... how should I put it? in the range of bleak to dire.
What on Earth do you mean?
Zie may just be a b-class international celebrity, but he occupies a vital node in the information infrastructure of our reality. We knew he was important, but until he flipped we didn't know how important.
I simply don't understand how these things can be missed. We've always managed to stay on top of the curve before now.
Well, Zie's latest publication in itself triggered a quantum shift in our reality. It altered time lines, so to speak. We're in a completely different environment now. The old rules of the game no longer seem to count.
Well, why don't we eliminate him.
It's too late. This is energetic. It has nothing to do with his personal presence. Eliminating him will simply accelerate the awakening of the sleeping masses.
Well, let's shut down g-nome portal for once and for all.
Apparently we can't.
Ebert. I pay you to find solutions - not to tell me what we can't do.
Shutting down g-nome portal is a complete waste of time, even if we could do it, because it's open sourced itself. It's no longer centred in any one organisation, institution, or group of individuals. This is what Merry seems to have achieved in his dramatic move.
I need more information.
He created a kind of vacuum. It was a sort of Jesus moment.
What the hell do you mean by that?
Well, whenever highly conscious beings stop acting in accordance with the rules of the game, and do something wholly unpredictable, in the name of Love for example - that crashes the existing system - momentarily disrupting the data flow of 01s.
Well if you're telling me about this now, you should have known what to expect.
I did, but Merry didn't, nor did Zie. It was truly a cosmic event. One of the few entirely random events the world has ever known.
Ridiculous Heinrich. Random events are happening all the time.
With all due respect, Mr President...
I'm warning you Ebert.
With all due respect, Ted, truly random events are the rarest things in existence. They are the seed crystals, the infinitesimal grains of dust that can spontaneously trigger Creation.
I beg your pardon?
Creation - with a capital C - the God variety. It's never triggered by anything predictable, rational or logical. It always happens from apparently nothing - the purely random event I'm referring to.
So we can't control this, you're saying, because absurd though it may seem, we've just encountered a Creation moment.
The Creation moment.
What do you mean? "The Creation moment".
There's only ever One. It pops in and out of reality whenever you least expect it... what you might refer to as a black swan event, and from that point onwards, nothing is ever the same again. The base parameters of reality are now completely different.
Well I don't care what you say - I want Zie now.
Yes, Deep Thought predicted you would, so I sent a team round to pick him up.
And?
They're sitting with him in his conservatory, right now, discussing the meaning of life.
A SWAT team?
Yes.
Jesus Christ Heinz, is there really nothing we can do?
We can try praying for a miracle. Or else, what was it Harry Potter says to Voldemort in the final book - "It's your one last chance… Be a man… try… Try for some remorse…"
Enough! How dare you start quoting children's literature at me. I can't believe you, of all people Heinz, would have the effrontery to do so.
Like I said, Mr President... the game has changed. I may not like it, but I can't argue with the data. 0=1, as Merry used to quote.
Ted Langley grimaces... then turns away. Flicks a speck of dust from his lapel and terminates Heinrich Ebert on the spot. "You've been a great asset up until this moment Heinz, but you know the rules as well as I do. None of us are inexpendable, myself included. I accept your challenge, Merry - he says, raising his voice, addressing the surrounding universe. I realise that in so doing, I'm probably merely assisting you, and playing into your hands or those of g-nome portal, but so be it - I am what I am, and I prefer to go down fighting, if go down I must.
10
Oh that? It's binary you know. "One zero" is in fact 2 in binary, not ten.
Er... if you say so. Look Merry, I've been thinking about that "one world government thing"... it's blatant conspiracy theory, isn't it. I wish you wouldn't discredit yourself with such nonsense.
It's funny you should say that Paula... that's exactly what Ebert's driver was thinking as he sat in his car downstairs, in the basement parking, waiting to take Ebert to a meeting with the Director of the Council on Foreign Relations. As far as he was concerned, these were just regular people doing regular jobs. Everything else was pure fantasy. The fact that his boss had just had a massive heart attack was, of course, a tragic coincidence.
Sorry to interrupt Merry, but where's the coincidence?
Oh, you missed their drive to the Lucent Technologies HQ, Delaware.
Well, yes. What happened on the way there?
Ebert was in a strange mood. He rarely spoke to his driver, normally. They hardly knew each other. This time, however, he'd asked him lots of fairly personal questions about family, prospects, ambitions... that kind of thing. On the one hand it had been flattering to feel that someone as senior as Ebert was starting to take an interest in him, on the other hand faintly disturbing. Peter Gunner liked his anonymity, but he was willing to sacrifice it a little at least when he felt genuine interest.
"I'm putting you in for a transfer Peter, if you have no objections. It'll be a promotion. Your pay will rise considerably and you'll be based out of town, at our new automotive division."
Peter didn't know what to say - it was all so out of the blue.
Er... that's nice of you Mr Ebert, but I'm happy to continue as your driver.
Yes - and I appreciate that, but I feel that there are going to be some sudden unexpected changes in the near future, so you might be grateful for the new opening. Anyway, you don't have to do anything. Think about it for a day or two. The transfer's already in the system but you can cancel it any time before you're due to start there.
Oh! And when is that?
Next Monday.
Peter Gunner's mind was in a whirl. Strange unexpected things like this weren't supposed to happen. They never had before. His life had always been so very predictable. He hadn't known what to say. He kept his eyes averted from Ebert as he saw him leave the car for the last time, as it later turned out.
"Strange coincidence", he muttered to himself, but was grateful nonetheless for the new position which got him away from what was now quite a big bump in the road.
11
I suppose that means three, does it, in binary?
Correct. You're getting the hang of this Paula.
Merry, I was meaning to ask... you're not er... in any way related to the Merry who was responsible for Zie's recent conversion, are you?
Where did you get that idea from Paula?
Oh, it's probably stupid of me - how could you be when you're here in Kentucky?
Yes... In any case, isn't that all just conspiracy theory? I'm not sure that Merry really exists, or g-nome portal either, for that matter.
Oh - so you know about g-nome portal?
I've heard about it, yes. What about you? It sounds a bit far-fetched, don't you think.
Well yes, it does, but on the other hand... you'll probably laugh but I've had a few dreams lately about it.
No!
Yes, like I was visiting this place which is kind of the control centre of reality as we know it... which keeps the whole 3D system up and running.
Now that's astonishing. Maybe you're unwittingly a part of it. You could be a sleeping member - an unsuspecting g-nomer.
I hope not. It sounds way too far out to me. And look at Zie. He's completely gone round the bend since he started talking about g-nome portal.
Yes, I've noticed. Did you see his poem?
You mean his Spell. That's what he calls it, about the Frog. Yes. It's er... original.
Not the kind of thing you'd expect a media personality like Zie to publish. On the hand hand childish, on the other hand profound. I can't see how that's going to help his career.
Oh his career's gone ballistic, at least, if you judge by the number of hits his getting or retweets... People seem to be strangely affected by what's happening to him.
Why's that?
I don't know. Maybe it's like a mid-life crisis, or a sudden shift of consciousness. He seems to be a different person now. It's almost scary.
How so?
Well, he writes a poem about a frog - no big deal. Then people start flocking to his house to see him. A swat team were sent to arrest him, I couldn't work out why, but they down their guns and quit their jobs saying they're no longer willing to work for that kind of government. I mean, where does that kind of power come from. Anyone else would be ignored or in prison. He's almost become the single most influential person in America. Maybe that's what we're all craving for - a public figure with a conscience, who cares, and more importantly, who seems to know what matters.
Or what doesn't.
Er?
What doesn't matter. Maybe that's his secret? Maybe he's got some insight into what is no longer important.
Er... ok.
100
"Son of a bitch!"
Ted Langley is looking through Deep Thought's log and he can't believe his eyes.
"The bastard knew all along."
Now understand that Ted didn't get to where he is today by blowing his top over trivialities. He's renowned for staying calm in a crisis, no matter what. Something now is evidently different. The game has changed.
Ted with his top level security clearance has access to all Deep Thought's user accounts, including Ebert's, and a quick scan reveals that Ebert knew the consequences of his death.
I trusted that bastard, Ted mutters, furiously. What was he looking for? A hero's death?
It appears from Ebert's predictive search log that either he himself had been affected by Zie's poem the Frog, or by Deep Thought's calculation that it was a subsequent wholly random event, a follow on from what Merry had set in motion simply by quitting. Zie had always been a profound mathematician at heart. He used to talk about the poetry of numbers. Well, two wholly random events was too much for his jaded mind. Something had given. It looks like the poet within, the long suppressed but unvanquished romantic, had won out. "What if I too join the other side of the equation," he mused. "What if I allow the possibility of the infinite to work through me? I wonder what my random event would be..." and that's where he left off. You cannot, you see, plan a random event. The infinite cannot be predetermined, but Zie had obviously been deeply affected. A quick scan of his activity in the days before his final meeting with Ted indicated that he was at least aware of the possibility of his own impending death, but he couldn't have known for sure, otherwise it wouldn't have been wholly random. He must have been uncertain which way things would go, right up until the final moment, otherwise...
Ted had the data before his eyes. He really couldn't argue with Deep Thought - this was biologic quantum computing at its very finest. Ebert's death had been the third wholly random event, and that was sufficient to sign and seal the new paradigm. Less than three - still left room to manoeuvre. Three was beyond equivocation. "But how did he do it?" Langley mused. "How did he keep it wholly random? It makes no sense. He must have known he was going to overstep the mark. It must have been on the cards at least. That should have made this a computable, quantifiable event. That would have negated the effect of his death. But now?
Ted Langley types in "End game" and waits... and waits.
Deep Thought has never taken longer than 42 seconds to compute anything, and that was when Ebert asked for a predictive response to Zie's publication of the Frog. Now, something seems to be... Deep Thought is either shutting down or simply lost in ever deeper thought. All the signs indicate it's biologic algorithms are functioning without...
"Without what?" Paula want to know.
Oh sorry about that Paula, I couldn't take my eyes off it. It really is an astonishing work of art. Poetry in motion...
So? What does Deep Thought tell President Langley?
It doesn't. It can't because, as it turns out, this is an act of Creation in the works, so no amount of predictive analysis can compute the likelihood of any particular outcome. Ted Langley stares at the screen in disbelief for a minute or two, then pulls himself together. The great statesman and strategist that he is isn't going to cry over spilt milk, or halt in his tracks just because he's now flying blind. He knows exactly what he has to do, starting with a strategy meeting of the joint chiefs of staff.
[the Frog, if you haven't read it, is at the end of the last post]
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