Bad as the situation was, Cooper laughed, but then he called Jasmine back and told her, and she transferred his call to an Air Force general who brought in an admiral and a Secret Service liaison in conference, and Cooper went over things with them a few times. By the end of that he figured there just wasn’t going to be much to laugh about for quite a while.
ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. WASHINGTON, DC. 9:40 A.M. EST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.
The Department of the Future contained three “Offices-of,” each headed by an assistant secretary. Besides Heather’s Office of Future Threat Assessment, Jim Browder’s Office of Technology Forecasting watched the science and technology possibilities from the perspective of an old grouch of an engineer-science writer who was quite certain that most things wouldn’t work most of the time, and that if they did, it would make things worse. In theory, Noel Crittenden’s Office of Political Futurology tried to understand developing situations around the world, focusing partly on what governments were doing but mainly on trends in the political class and nascent mass movements. In practice, Crittenden was a broad-but-not-deep historian who could easily call to mind six other times when something had happened but couldn’t seem to reach a conclusion if his life depended on it.
Normally, Heather ignored her two colleagues, with Graham and Allie’s tacit encouragement. Allie liked to say Browder was mad about a girl getting hold of the boy toys like guns and money, and Crittenden’s office was actually the Office of Whatever a Retired History Prof Remembers; she made it abundantly clear that in the battle for funds and attention, she thought Heather’s office was the department’s only real star.
More than once, Graham Weisbrod had given Allie and Heather a stern lecture about everyone’s being on the same team. Heather wondered if he’d ever said the same thing to the two men.
So far, the meeting had gone exactly as Heather had anticipated: Browder was vocally, and Crittenden was sullenly, impossible. Browder, with malicious sarcastic glee, had forced Heather to explain and defend each slide, turning aside all suggestions that he wait and ask Arnie in a few minutes.
Meanwhile, Crittenden looked every stuffy ounce of his Cambridge doctorate. His ancient three-piece suits and the slash of his gray mustache against his dark skin made him look like some old-time big-city mayor of 1990 or so. He sat with his arms folded, his good ear pointed toward Heather, watching each new slide with the same sour glare.
Crittenden’s the reserve force that’ll come in to loot the dead and shoot the wounded after Browder finishes his massacre. And where’s all the support Allie and Graham told me I’d have? They’re both sitting there like lumps. Allie isn’t even looking up from her laptop.
Heather drew a deep breath before tackling Browder’s latest hostile question. “That’s why Dr. Yang’s statistical semiotics research is housed in our office of our department. It’s not about intuition or recognizing patterns. It’s about the mathematics that finds things that
would
be recognizable or recurring patterns—if anyone had ever seen them before. And Daybreak’s signprint—”
“What’s a signprint?”
Heather suspected that Browder already knew.
At least I know this one, and I won’t give him a forty-minute version like Arnie would
. “In the noosphere—the overall total environment of all the communications going in all directions at any one time—”
“I know what a noosphere is, Yang wore the subject out for me once.”
“Oh, good. Well, in the noosphere, we only detect signs when they move—we only know a word exists when someone speaks or writes it into a message, we only know an image exists when someone includes it in a bigger image, we only know a mistake is there when it’s spotted and corrected, all that. The signprint is the pathway in the noosphere that a group of signs, uh, flying in formation, I guess you could call it, they’re separate, but they stick together—it’s the pattern they leave—”
“Like a wake in the sea of meaning,” Crittenden suggested.
Hunh. That was almost friendly.
“Good enough! Well, different kinds of organized populations of signs leave different kinds of signprints. In fact, from a historian’s perspective, a signprint and the thing it’s a signprint of are really just the same thing, one’s what you see and one’s the thing that’s there, is the way Arnie puts it.”
“That’s a very old idea,” Crittenden said, “with considerable merit.”
I feel so blessed,
she thought sarcastically, and said, “Good, all right, then the thing that Arnie’s kind of math has going for it is that it doesn’t look for signprints by looking for structures that are like preexisting signprints. It just finds things that stick together and move together. Another way Arnie says it is that the pattern-recog guys sit and stare at the screen and look for clouds that look like a horse or a ship. Arnie’s stat methods just look for clouds—which is what you want if you want to know the weather. It means his way of doing things can see the ‘clouds’ in the noosphere that no one else can and then try to understand them. Because in the noosphere, unlike in the atmosphere, there are often storms of a kind no one has ever seen before, and being able to see them the second or third time they show up is not good enough if we’re trying to foresee what messes might hit us in the near future.
“So—the signprint of Daybreak. Clearly there. Jumps out of the numbers like a sore thumb, according to Arnie.” She clicked to the slide.
Browder, to her surprise, nodded. “If I read that right, the variances are tiny, and the connectedness is huge. That’s not a cloud, that’s a boulder.”
“That’s right,” she said.
Both of them reasonable within a minute of each other. Who’d’ve thunk?
“That graph measures basically how distinct Daybreak is from everything else in the noosphere, and you can see it’s very distinct. So since it’s definitely there, the next question is, what is it? And the answer is, to quote my favorite book when I was a kid, ‘Something very much like something no one has ever seen before.’ Daybreak has some of the aspects of a religious cult, an artistic movement, a blogweave, a terror network more like the old al-Qaeda or the Japanese Red Army than like the modern il’Alb il-Jihado network, and some unique features all its own.”
“But that’s just how they communicate, right?” Browder asked. “What
are
they?”
“What are they, like—”
“Engineers or Catholics, old people, women, I guess I’m asking who, what do they have in common other than Daybreak?”
“Well, it’s a bunch of people who only agree that they hate the Big System, but they literally spend two to four hours a day making and consuming messages of one kind or another to each other about that. You could think of it as a mutual-hypnosis hate-the-Big-System club, maybe. No central office keeps them on message, either, it sort of runs by local consensus. They seem to have no permanent organization any bigger than three-to-twenty-person AGs.”
“AGs?” Browder asked.
Crittenden said, “Affinity group. Anarchist idea, goes back to the mid 1970s, sort of like a self-organized exec committee; team of people who are doing something or other they all think is the most important thing to do.”
“Uh, yeah.” Jim’s resemblance to the Incredible Hulk, gone old and soft with drinking, was especially noticeable when he raised one side of his single, massive brow. “And the Big System is what, the Trilateral Commission? The Catholic Church? The Elders of Zion? The Man?”
“The totality of plastic and computers, advertising and pornography, pop music and space travel, nuclear power and celebrities, everything that makes money, attracts attention in the media, or just originated after the Civil War. To Daybreakers, the whole freakin’ modern world is all just an avatar of the Big System.”
Browder’s tone sprayed mockery over them all. “And a pack of romantic loons like that is a
threat
?”
Stand your ground, Heather, he’s just a big bully, and you could drop him with one punch.
She made a point of sighing. “
Future
threat—maybe. That’s our territory; if they were trouble right now, we’d be handing them off to the NDI or the FBI.”
“Which is what I favor doing,” Allie put in, making Browder jump.
He tends to forget where the real authority is in the room,
Heather thought.
He was softer but just as sarcastic when he asked, “And—repeating my question—who
are
these scary-talking weird people?”
“Well, here in the States, it’s some of everything: greenie granola hippies with windmills on their goat sheds, wannabe mountain-man racist tax resisters, dope-farmer computer hackers, oddball fundamentalists who think bar codes are the Mark of the Beast, ex-Special Forces snake-eating back-to-Jefferson types.”
Noel Crittenden coughed and tented his hands. “That does
not
mean they aren’t dangerous, Browder. Who’d’ve thought the Nation of Islam could have worked with the Panthers
and
the SCLC? Or that de Gaulle could put together the French Resistance out of a dozen factions ranging from royalists to commies? Don’t underrate the power of a common enemy. If I may ask—what do they mean by Daybreak?”
Heather said, “The event that breaks the Big System, causes it to go down so it never comes up again. They almost always capitalize
Daybreak
, like
the Revolution
or
the Rapture
.”
Crittenden nodded seriously. “And it’s international?”
“Dr. Yang reports that over seventy percent of the messages with identifiable locations are outside the US. There’s one mostly Asian cult, geeky engineers in Tokyo and Seoul, who read a lot of Tolkien and think that once the iron all rusts, the elves will come back. They might be the scariest of all; those guys are burned-out, frustrated engineers and technicians—single men in their forties with great salaries whose lives have gone by with no prospect of starting a family, sitting in concrete boxes full of pricey toys in Osaka or Seoul, figuring out where the modern industrial system is vulnerable.
“And plenty of others—young Islamic fundamentalist men, stuck sitting on their asses in perpetual unemployment, who want the good stuff they’d have had in 1400. Hindu fundamentalists, ditto except they mean 1400 B.C.
“What scares me the most is that they’re
not
all loser-nuts; far from it, there are a lot more dissatisfied successes. People with serious tech skills who aren’t finding happiness in a big paycheck, who sit in comfortable apartments beating off to American porn on the web and insisting that life should have a meaning.”
Crittenden made a face. “ ‘Whenever some damn idiot starts wanting life to have meaning, he finishes by helping other people to meaningless deaths.’ ”
Graham grinned. “Source?”
“Me, of course. In my first textbook. Out of print now.” Crittenden’s smile stayed on when he turned from Graham’s not-at-all-subtle flattery back to Heather.
Thanks, Graham! This could be worse.
She explained, “Meaning-of-life stuff accounts for the usual-suspects component of Daybreak, too. French poets who think any words that resonate must be true. German performance artists who want to overthrow the tyranny of words and live in a world of pure action. Popomos looking for something to replace the Revolution. Back-to-peasantry long-bearded Tolstoy wannabes.
“The really big innovation with the ‘Daybreak’ crowd is that they don’t talk about purpose, plan, or program anymore. It’s Daybreak for Daybreak’s sake. They often say, ‘The point is, there’s no point.’ ”
“Why do it if there’s no point?” Browder snarled, now more angry than amused.
“The Daybreakers would say, ‘Why do it if there
is
a point?’ The idea is that they’d all like to blow up all the Wal-Marts, so why worry about which reason—”
The door opened, and Arnie came in. “Heather,” he said, “something big.”
“Um, Arnie, I’ll call you when it’s time to—”
“Lenny Plekhanov had some extra time and people this morning and they got a breakthrough on the keys for Daybreak, so we caught up with one—”
“Arnie, we’re—”
Arnie stopped leaning forward, stopped gesticulating, and stood as still as if he were at attention; that stopped Heather when nothing else would have. In a perfectly normal conversational voice, not moving a muscle, he said, “Heather. Secretary Weisbrod. I’m sorry, but it’s urgent. Daybreak started today, at midnight, GMT. There are at least nine hundred AGs reporting they’ve started their actions, which means maybe seven thousand people doing some kind of sabotage or other for Daybreak just here in the States, right now. That’s just what I’ve been able to attach an ID to. I’m guessing there are maybe as many as twenty thousand. Probably three or four times that overseas. Up to a hundred thousand participants worldwide.”
They all sat, stunned, and it was Crittenden who broke the silence. He stared out the window at the trees, red and gold in the autumn morning sun, as if somewhere in the wild colors, there were a puzzle to be solved. “A group of saboteurs the size of a medium-sized national army—”
Browder snorted. “With no point and no plan. And many of them seem to be people who couldn’t get a job delivering Domino’s.”
Crittenden speared Browder with his over-the-reading-glasses stare. The heavy, rumpled man sat back, as if startled; Heather thought,
I’m glad I never had a late paper with that guy
.
The old professor’s mouth crooked sardonically. “You
haven’t
been listening. Engineers, technicians, applied scientists—
dissatisfied successes
, in Heather’s useful phrase. And if that’s ten percent of their movement, that’s all they need; a pizza-delivery boy can carry a bomb if someone builds it for him.” He glanced back at Heather. “You had me once you said they were leaderless and programless. Daybreak sounds far too much like nihilism or futurism, back around 1900.”