Another Trip to the Year 2020
Michael
"Right then. Jocasta? Roger? Sophie? Shall we all head back to the castle?" David says brightly. "And don't worry Mr. Ransom, Charley: we'll put together a full report of what March-April 2020 looks like for you tomorrow."
Leonard
Jocasta is ready, and will do her not-fooling-anyone medication routine beforehand again.
Bill
With Sophie and Jo going, Roger is in. “Sure, let’s head back.”
Michael
So the drive up to the castle as the May sunlight recedes in the west and darkness comes on is, well, spooky. There are no lights out here and the wall of the Pennines in the east creates an oddly claustrophobic effect as the five of you (Roger, Jo, Sophie, David, Catherine) drive back up to Brougham Castle. Apparently a bunch of the staff running the machines and checking your vitals (including the programmer Elias) have stayed up here at the castle and did not go back to Dufton for dinner and rest; one has to assume that David told them to stay up here. Elias this time gets into the Control chair that Charley used during the first jaunt, to keep a god's-eye-view on the proceedings. Jo, I'm assuming, doses prior to entering the sensory deprivation tank and putting on the helmet, and this time four instead of six of you enter the simulation. More later, but when you guys wake up I could use a Will roll from both of you.
>>> SUCCESS, SUCCESS
Instead of your morning wakeup routine, Jo and Roger (and Sophie) find themselves thrown into the bullpen at El Dorado Opinions, mid-day, near the end of March 2020. As Joshua/Roger, Andrew/Sophie and Deirdre/Jo get used to being inside the simulation, a few realizations hit them all at once:
Victoria is not here; she's in DC meeting with GOP brass about some of the advertising and belief engineering campaigns to come in the coming months to help out Jim Rentoul win a second term in office and help downballot Republicans in Senate, House, and state races. She's also consulting with the folks planning the Republican National Convention, and is due to give you all an update via electronic mail at 4 pm Pacific when she gets back to her hotel.
The Democratic primary is settling down into selecting former Hollywood action star (put out of business once computer-generated action actors started becoming the norm 10-15 years ago) Ed Merril. He was the favorite from way back at the beginning of the campaign in summer of 2019 and he's on the verge of locking up a delegate majority.
As usual, the Screens are blaring at you, even here in the conference room at El Dorado. All people are talking about is this genetically-modified rice blight in India which seems to be sweeping across the subcontinent, destroying paddy upon paddy and threatening the country with hunger. Other countries in the Chinese-led Co-Prosperity Sphere have closed their borders with India, relegating them to further isolation and possible famine. No one wants this plague to hit their crops.
Joshua, Andrew, and Deirdre are supposed to be going over the reports on their sketchpad-like handheld computers, reports about the public's response to the new branding and logo for the GOP.
Roger-as-Joshua is looking at some of the polling returns from the reactions to the primary campaign so far... the good urban(e) Republicans of the country are responding well to Rentoul's "have you ever had it better than this" campaign, but out in the rural and exurban areas, there's been a sharp swing to the Democrats. And possibly most ominously, a lot of vandalism and even burning of the Rentoul/GOP posters and signs. People even smashing Screens playing Rentoul ads (smashing a Screen is a major federal felony, as the 'Net infrastructure is all owned and operated by the U.S. government, punishable by up to 20 years in prison.) People left behind by the Republican information economy are hopping mad. Roger-as-Joshua wonders how much of that widespread Revulsion is due to the very subtle outlines of a certain terrorist-cell-supplied glyph he deployed in the new GOP logo ...
And Jocasta-as-Deirdre (still sporting some measure of aura/reality vision, but not nearly as strongly as Jo's first acid trip earlier in the day) is concerned by the two threads of chaos she sees in the news and polling reports: physical violence against property among enemies of the GOP and the establishment, and that report of famine in India. Deirdre's own skill at esmology is melding with Jo's having taken the acid to peel back a little of the reality of this historical timeline; she can see lines of events converging out of her site into the near future... but they're leading nowhere good.
Sophie-as-Andrew looks at the GOP poll numbers, and to the biggest Screen in the conference room, as if waiting for Victoria's electronic-mail to arrive, and says, "Are we doing something wrong here? I mean, with the campaign narratives. All we're doing is adding to our numbers among urban professionals. Which is enough to win if people in the heartland aren't pissed off." A pause, as Sophie-as-Andrew looks pleadingly to Joshua and Deirdre. "Don't they seem a little pissed off?"
Leonard
Dierdre offers her analysis of the converging trend graphs, combined with some data about population patterns and demographics. "It's the lines you would expect at a time like this," she explains, "But ... there's something missing. There's something left out of the data, something we haven't taken into account but which is trying to make itself heard." She pauses and checks the data again. "It's a voice that's speaking clearly for the first time, and yeah, it's pissed off."
Bill
Joshua seems curious, for once. “Which people are mad? And is it up to us to give them a target? I could work up some visuals ... ” Joshua is inwardly giddy at maybe mixing ultraviolent imagery with that of the state. Roger is not giddy, but trying to ride out his revulsion rather than lose the connection. Roger draws on some cynicism to get a little distance from the feelings — everyone knows what people, and their skin color, he inwardly sighs.
Michael
Andrew sort of nods along to what Joshua's saying. “Suppose that the Democratic voter in the heartland doesn't have a globetrotting jet-setting businessperson in New York or San Francisco to mad at. Suppose we got them all riled up about someone else. And it can't be the usual suspects: European Communists, the Chinese, homegrown fellow travelers. Democratic voters don't hate them the way we want them to anymore.”
Leonard
(In this scenario, is China what it is in our reality -- that is, a huge nuclear powerhouse with a gigantic army and the manufacturing and investing base that supplies the US with practically all its goods? If so, Jocasta will probably point out that antagonizing them isn't a great idea.)
Michael
(All four superpower blocs have both nuclear arsenals and large militaries: the pan-Mideast bloc probably with the lowest arsenal but since they have the fossil fuels they largely get by on a tacit alliance with the Americas/Oceania bloc. As far as manufacturing goes, I would say the US in the sim is on slightly better footing than our US, maybe 10-15 years behind us as far as the economy turning into a primarily service-based one. The center of the country is starting to feel it, though.)
Andrew says: “If we get them hating each other, that would probably be best. It's a good thing that the Democratic base is a splintered mess between folks living in the country and the city, I guess.” That's as blatant as Andrew, who at this point seems abashed at what's he's suggesting here, can be. He looks uncomfortable, sad, and a little conflicted about the idea of sowing discord between city-dwelling have-nots and their rural counterparts, but both Deirdre and Joshua can tell that's exactly what he's suggesting.
The electronic mail from Victoria comes in at 4 pm on the dot ("the Boss" is carbon copied onto it). The three of you read it and see that the focus groups convened in crucial Congressional seats across the country are reacting more viscerally negatively to the new GOP branding than they have to anything yet. Victoria is furious. She says that "they associate us with a global transnational elite that they believe is bankrupting America." More than a few of the more recent focus groups from the past week or so blame Republican businesspeople for selling genemod grains to the Asian Sphere that are causing a lot of worry, both among extreme ecology-minded voters and American farmers, who are afraid that the new strains of feed corn they've been more or less forced to plant by their suppliers are going to lead to similar problems in the US. Overall there is distrust, disgust ... revulsion at the GOP brand. And Victoria says we need to fucking fix this now or we will lose this account.
Leonard
"Based on our polling and modeling, we seem to have a pretty clear picture of who they don't want, but have we asked them who they want? I mean, without presenting them with options, without push-polling, just across-the-board open-ended: Who do they trust?" asks Dierdre. (Jocasta, meanwhile, is contemplating the wisdom of trying to do a psychometry read while in the simulation. Her first trip gave her the impression this was something she could shape or guide, and she's wondering if she should push that.)
Michael
Michael
So given you hit the [Psychometry] target number on the nose, you're really limited to recent emotionally-intense happenings. And given the fact that Jo has taken acid, has been in the simulation once before this evening session, and thus has the ability to see beyond the ones and zeroes of the simulation, it means that Jocasta, as Deirdre, trying once again to regain that "aura vision" that she had a few in-sim months back, is able to reach out even further than the walls of El Dorado and the individuals within. What that means is that Deirdre/Jocasta is able to sneak a peek at "the Boss." The Boss is no one that Jocasta recognizes, but he is old. Perhaps in his 70s. He sits in a penthouse suite near the top of the Transamerica Pyramid, and if you thought ordinary folks in this future of 2020 were surrounded by screens, well, the Boss has that beat. He has five on his desk, and a few dozen mounted all over the walls of his office suite. They are tuned into news streams, financial indices, even some entertainment programs and films. His eyes dart across all of them as he taps data into his keyboard. It appears the data is all about not polling and public opinion and emotion engineering as one might expect from the head of a prominent independent belief engineering shop, but instead to the kind of research that one might expect David to be doing: population numbers, international trade, geopolitical tensions, and so on. David is using the Boss's reach to really internalize the geopolitical status of this simulated 2020. Probably the emotion that drew you here is fear: a deep-seated, animal fear coming off David/the Boss in waves. And it peaks when the Boss runs a program on his desktop computer (yes, David is using a computer within a computer) that appears to simulate the release of a viral agent in various megalopolises around the world. However, something is odd about the way this program is set up. Research roll when you get a chance.
>>> SUCCESS
The viral projections aren't for a biological agent. They're for a memetic one.
Leonard
So the Boss is investigating the effects of, basically, a memequake? Can Jo discern whether or not this is something he thinks is going to occur, or if it's something he's going to introduce?
Michael
Not clear. The program itself is just a garden variety simulation made to track contagions. You'd likely need to know more about David/the Boss's motivations here. The key thing, though, is that the Boss has set the memetic infection in this sim for the beginning of 2021.
I like this approach and also I am receptive to Jocasta trying to use Psychometry in the simulation. Didn't want us to lose momentum in the simulation!
I think that for the El Dorado team, the priorities over the next few months are clear: find out what went wrong with this early campaign approach in time to switch things up for the general election, do some authentic polling in the heartland to try and find out why distrust is so high there, and sculpt a new campaign in time for the convention in August. Victoria does think we can salvage the account, ultimately, but it will take even more hard work and more overtime. That being said, Roger/Joshua has received a couple of more communications over the past couple of months from his friends who fed him the glyph via encrypted electronic mail back in January. And what they want more than anything is details of the RNC in August. Logistics, planning, security, identities of VIPs... anything that Joshua can get them in the next few months. Nothing more than that. I bring this up because just a few in-simulation minutes after the meeting with the team breaks up, Joshua gets yet another electronic mail, encrypted and anonymized from these folks. They say it's fine to pull the logo and art with the glyph now; it's done its job.
Bill
Joshua will definitely swing over to Victoria and suggest the classic slight simplication ("knocking the edges off, make it gentler") on the logo. It will probably end up like something horrific to design tike the Google cloud app oversimplications. But maybe we've not that bad yet.
Roger will try to remember what he can about the email text, the words used, tone, vocabulary? He's no profiler, but given he's definitely no hacker, and Charley wasn't in this run, he has nothing else to try to trace this back to the source. And he will ask Charley, first chance he gets (assuming Houdini doesn't distract) to see if she can use her "godseye" view in the sim to see where the simulation sent the emails from, if indeed it was the sim.
Michael
Joshua's history is that he has hung around with rebellious, even borderline-politically-seditious folks in the last year or two, but given all these "requests" have come from an anonymous source, it's not like he's dealing with these mysterious folks in good faith, however much he might be sympathetic to their aims. I would imagine that the email addresses would be absolutely scrubbed of any suspicious markers: basically just numbers. But yeah, Roger can definitely remember the tone of the emails and maybe consult with the other folks outside the sim to work up a profile.
Bill
Hmmm, not in good faith. That means Joshua would likely think about using his new armament for the sake of his other buddies. Whatever influence Roger has on Joshua, he'll try to use, to implant that the thing is very dangerous, could get him in trouble, upping his paranoia, anything to make him hesitant to keep using it. Of course, once we leave the sim, who knows, but when Roger's the angel (devil?) on his shoulder, he'll be all about making the possible consequences sound dire.
Roger is thinking about consequences himself, so it's easy to think of them for Joshua. He is so sorely tempted to work to get this Revulsion glyph out to some extreme right-wing white supremsists as their new go-to-image. His own doubts are asking, It'd be OK to try it in the sim first, right? Nope nope nope nope.
Mel
After her briefing, Charley will wonder some things aloud. Strike that. She will wait to wonder aloud. And instead ask Archie, “Do you think we should interrupt the simulation? This sounds like it needs all of our immediate attention.”