So here’s my take on the OPA. They’re a modern intelligence organization—in other words, a bureaucratic enterprise tasked with providing intelligence to policy makers and executing covert operations in accordance with their orders. All large organizations are either superorganisms whose cells are human bodies, or very slow artificial intelligences that use human beings as gears in the Babbage engines that run their code. Pick a metaphor and stick to it: I prefer the biological one, but it’s a matter of taste. Some of the superorganism’s cells are formed into organs that carry out various vital
...more
