Page 33 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Planetary Steward

sort of background for my protagonists. After all, they would have
to be stand-ins for the entire population. But no explicit religion!”
Rutger Schlager had something to contribute.
“Of course, mystifying or demystifying the system is all very
nice, but it wouldn’t hold my interest. You’ve almost got the
template for a war between brave freedom fighters and the fascist
army of an overgrown computer program. It’s obvious to me that
the central command has to be located by the guerillas and
assaulted with everything they can steal or assemble as a weapon
with their own unmanaged intelligence. David and Goliath. Readers
expect a fatal flaw in machinery, not in human beings. Crisis brings
out the best in us, right? Well, you don’t have to agree, Leith. But
the electronic overlord can’t handle anything it wasn’t programmed
to handle. You don’t agree with that, either? Then the battle will at
least be a heroic last stand against the oppressors of mankind,
ironically set in motion by the allegedly best and brightest among
them.”
“That might a lovely tale of martyrdom to some ideals,” Leith
rejoined. “Americans get a perverted pleasure from lost causes, like
their version of the fall of the Alamo, especially if it can be blamed
on betrayal. But Izzy nailed it, Perversity. You must pick one of the
alternate conclusions to the conditions you created, and then work
backward to a starting point. Reverse engineer it. That’s the beauty
of the short story: you can run a lot of half-baked assumptions past
the audience too fast for them to linger on the uncooked parts. But
Rutger did bring up an interesting point: how distributed a network
can this be? Is it protected with redundancy, self-checking circuitry
and inaccessible processors, removing the possibility of a
decapitating strike—by wrathful or ignorant humans, or rats
chewing on cables, or cosmic rays and meteors from outer space?
Omnivoyance is the all-seeing eye; we tend to preconceive that a
universal organ of sight must connect to a central optic nerve
plugged into an omniscient brain. That is a staple of kill-the-
mechanical-monster fiction. If David’s stone had hit Goliath
anywhere but his frontal lobes, the contest would have had a
different outcome.”

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