Borderless (Analog #2)

by Eliot Peper

Step one of any op, the older woman had said, is to figure out who the principals are and what they want. Her voice was always so light, so sweet, the dulcet tones belying the heavy implications of her words. Until you’ve sorted that out, nothing else matters.

It was easy to forget, but cars were just computers that drove you around. Houses were computers you lived in. Hospitals were computers that healed you. Factories were computers that made stuff. Farms were computers that grew food. Utilities were computers that delivered power and water. Everything and everyone was connected to the feed, which made everything and everyone dependent on it.

Some people needed a reminder of debts owed, some needed a credible threat, others just needed a pep talk. Knowing the difference made you an intelligence officer.

Governments around the world had long ignored Commonwealth’s growing influence. The company’s policy of maintaining the feed as a neutral piece of global infrastructure helped sustain the illusion that politicians were still the ultimate power brokers. The feed was a tool. A useful one, to be sure. But the people who used tools were the ones in charge, not the people who made them. That’s why, from Washington’s perspective, Silicon Valley was the nation’s inventor, not its ruler.

“Everyone worries about the future.” His voice lost its affected madness. He was quiet now, incisive. “They freak out about technology. They obsess over how tomorrow might be different. But it’s the things that do not change that we should pay attention to. If you want to make sense of the world, focus on finding the constants. They’re the rare truths that everyone’s too busy to bother with.

The problem was that data told you what people did and how they did it. But it revealed little as to why they did what they did.

Was the ubiquitous flow of data any less a natural resource than the Rockies or the Mississippi? Shouldn’t the digital world be subject to the same checks

As she moved, she felt her mind settling into flow. The moment she had been preparing for had finally arrived, and with it came a sense of mental clarity, like a windshield wiped clean of condensation.

Connecting the world, weaving every human, satellite, database, widget, and transistor into a throbbing, cohesive whole. That was her refuge, her obsession. It wasn’t the intricate result of marathon brainstorming sessions with legions of experts. It was Rachel’s obvious thing that should exist. She was just assembling the pieces until reality reflected her imagination. She was a mogul, a power broker, a force of nature. But more than any of those, she was a builder.

“How we do things shapes what we do.”

If you truly wanted to sway someone, you had to understand them first, figure out how they felt and why they felt it. Then you worked your way up from emotions and values to beliefs and points of view. The long route to decision-making was the only accurate one.

Voyager was somewhere up there, arcing through the absolute stillness of interstellar space, bombarded by dust and cosmic rays, its equipment long dead, but its precious cargo still intact, humanity’s first offering to the greater universe.

Diana rolled the question around in her mind like a marble.