July 11, 2012

July 11, 2012

I sit in my new yet unstaffed laboratory…the racks of matrices and optical routers still sealed in their crates.

My doubts have returned…perhaps some reflection on my original motivations for coming here will help.

It started three years ago when I met the acclaimed Dr. Hopkins at one of those academic social mixers where everyone is charming and trying to impress project benefactors.  Even as a doe-eyed doctoral candidate, I detested these affairs, so when I heard Hopkins describing “the matrix mechanics of the socio- and politico- economic vectors of human expansion,” I couldn’t resist correcting him.  (His ideas were genius; his algorithm implemation obsolete.)

I outlined a corrective matrix calculation, revising the dimensional parameters in my head (he used 7 when he needed 16).

Hopkins – who had been coasting on the lecture circuit after his initial publication – didn’t appreciate the truth, especially from a young upstart.

The vice admiral (then captain), however, took note.

If I had known that Hopkins would commit suicide two years later, I may have been more charitable in my presentation. (Hopkins blamed himself for the very carnage he had predicted – a lesson for all scientists resides therein.)

Three weeks after that, my grant proposal for artificial intelligence control for N-dimensional matrices was green-lit by the UFMN…contingent on the successful testing of a model of their choosing.

Naturally, it was Hopkins’s.

I knew that his flawed model would produce flawed results.  To avoid having this reflect poorly on my technique, I ran my correct 16-dimensional variant in addition to his 7-dimensional version.

Hopkins’s model predicted a breakdown of social disorder in the United States within twenty years unless strict governmental control was established, reinformed by an immediate and permanent military presence.

The resultant vector was correct, but not the magnitude.

I ran more than fourteen hundred simultations, carrying every parameter, and in the best-case scenario the United States would rebel…and rebel soon.

With FTL- capable transports, ANY state could convert such vehicles into weapons of mass destruction.

Minimum effect was thirty years of war and five million dead.  The maximum effect was unbounded.  Interminable war.  Another Dark Age for humanity.

I took the results to the vice admiral.

But he already knew.

They had come to a similar conclusion (a slightly gratifying tidbit given that it had taken them three years of extensive research).


Then why make me do the same calculation?

The United Forces of the Marines and Navy had apparently had their eye on me for years and knew that the only way to convince me to join them was to get ME to convince me.

It worked.  I joined.

How many lives must be spent to save all of humanity?  Is any price too high to pay?  This may be our only solution.

Now, back to work.