by Peter Gelf

The opening pages of a speculative fiction novel

In the familiar portrait, Lightfoot Andrew is inaccurately depicted as if in conversation with himself, on the day of his separation; one version colourful and animated, the other shifty and wan. An open doorway is shown to the right of the scene, a red planet in a darkening sky appears through a window to the left. The mood is sombre, the tones muted. One critic observed that “an air of unbalanced resentment somehow permeates the work, as if the artist had been commissioned by a forgotten benefactor for a price that satisfied neither.” To the uninitiated it appears more to depict quarrelling brothers, or a post-Modern bad dream, than a man duplicated. Despite this, the digitised version of the image appears on a hundred million technical, legal and educational webpages in all languages, generating countless respectful and less respectful imitations and a significant annual income for the Muriel Bradshaw Institute; while the original is widely known to have been lost and presumably destroyed. In fact it sits uncatalogued and overlooked in the basement storage rack of a provincial New German museum.

The room in which the separation event occurred was not as depicted – a gloomy Edwardian parlour with long shadows cast by a sputtering candle – but a sizeable sterile lab housed on a science park. It has been calculated that the majority of that century’s material technology successes were directly or indirectly connected to breakthroughs initiated in this one laboratory. Although an MBI researcher designed the ‘material technology successes’ calculation, the peer-reviewed academic journal that published the analysis is considered reputable, and the calculation has become accepted truth. In any case, few would dare dispute that Muriel Bradshaw Institute Lab 7.1 was the birthplace of teleportation science and law.  On the other hand, no professional historian would argue the case for the same lab being seen as the unwitting instigator of a new spiritual age concerning the nature of human identity, even though this may, with the benefit of extended hindsight, be considered the faculty’s greatest legacy.

The Machine

In democratic New Germany, all mainstream political parties are now committed, with few quibbles, to a Neo-Petersonian analysis of resource allocation and human behaviour management. The shocking inversions of the earlier C-Culture Era, when supremacists became free speech advocates and liberals became absolutists, led first to polarised street level violence; then to an atavistic weariness; and finally to an acceptance that big data analysis was generally a better guide to effective political decision making than the debating chamber. An emergency coalition government commissioned Kuno Foster to overhaul the entire apparatus of central government, which he was able to effect in six short months. While Foster described the resultant system, itself largely designed by algorithms, as having “the flesh of humanity, the bones of data”, the New Germans, perhaps inevitably, simply called it “The Machine”. Despite the pejorative moniker, within days the empire’s key wellbeing metrics reversed their rapid decline and have stayed in a continued, though slowing, ascendancy in the twenty years since, and the name stuck. The Machine, both in substance and title, is now almost universally held with affection.

Foster’s work was in response to an economic and existential crisis. Though of high quality, it was hurried. He defined the key people responsibilities, the main data and data analysis parameters, the interplay between them; and even the oversight, review and future development processes. But he was unable to satisfy himself that, amongst all the design principles he had set out, the quality of humility was sufficiently represented in the design. “In an unbounded world,” he said, at the ten year celebration of the Machine’s powering up, in a downbeat address that was widely overlooked, “no decision is ever right. As a species, we will only flourish, and allow our fellow creatures to flourish, if we recognise that every decision we make will always be partly wrong.”

As it turns out, Foster’s concern was partly misplaced. The Machine’s ability to learn – to spot patterns in the data – was its central competence, and one of its first steps was to make itself the subject of that learning engine. What do I need, it asked itself, continually to learn and improve? And the answer came back clearly: to avoid over-reach; to be careful to operate only within its own ever-expanding boundaries; in other words to balance the arrogance of an expanding understanding with humility in the face of an infinite universe. Its great strength was to sense-make, to find patterns in the chaos that is the natural world and its human generated subset, and to use those patterns to diagnose, to model, and to choose. When confronted with new phenomena, it was even capable of using patterns from unrelated fields to hypothesise about what might be happening and where it might lead. But, the Machine recognised, to turn those hypotheses into decisions, and enact them through budgets, programmes, and laws – as it did so effectively for known and predictable phenomena – would be to entertain hubris. Which, it could with irony predict, would lead not only to human unhappiness but also to its own destruction.

So, when a new phenomena emerged, the Machine trod very carefully. When rumours started to circulate that teleportation had moved from fiction to fact, the Machine took the action that it reserved for such cases. It established an Enquiry, and appointed its Chair.