FoolishPeople

ARCHIVE RETRIEVAL 777/6/42BRAVO/QUINN-HARRY-L/2029-09-21]

 [BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:]

We're online – everyone has been for six months, and so far there are no hitches. There's some minor rumbles of discontent about how the Sure Heart bandwidth plans are calculated, but that's not my problem. Blake seems to be performing better than expected, filtering out the major issues – I'm really impressed by its signal recognition to be honest, and that's a credit to the programmers. 

It's odd to think that every single person will eventually be connected to each other via the implant and Blake. I admit, I'm not so keen to be an early adopter until we get the kinks out, but I'm sure we will before the whole thing inevitably becomes mandatory.

Assuming, of course, that the whole house of cards doesn't come down before that day, which is always possible. There's still so much we don't understand – no, scratch that. So much I don't understand, and maybe that's arrogant, but it bugs me. I've been keeping track of the emergences, and cross-referencing them ....

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... the emergences, I mean. I think that's going to increase as time goes on, until maybe they're identical. Frantzen would have loved that. I can hear him now, saying something about planets, archetypes and astrology. Such a pity he had that stroke, but what're you going to do?

There's no denying, of course, that the kids know something's up, even if it's just on an unconscious level. I only hope they're not driven to act out on them otherwise a lot of those experiences are going to have to be partitioned on some level, probably Obsidian, actually.

I don't like using the kids as bellwethers or, at the very least, relying on them to see which way this is going to go – the storm hasn't gone away. If anything it's spread out. So I mentioned it to one of the caretakers and he took me down to the Observation Block, saying that he had something better than the kids data.

I've never been down there before. It's all white rooms – reminded me unsettlingly of a mental hospital, only I couldn’t tell you who the patients were. But anyway, my helpful caretaker opens up this room for me – a long narrow place where you can see into the Observation Rooms.

I suppose it's where they psychologists work, when they bring people in for testing[...] I don't know what they do, but I would have thought they'd be empty when not in use.

Except, I found out that there's one guy who's always there. I think he lives there or something, but I can't find any record of him – either that or it's beyond my clearance level. Which means it's probably Warburg's gig, but.. 

Yeah. So I'm looking through the one-way glass at this guy, and I swear, he just looks up at me - meets my eyes like he knows I'm there. He shouldn't be able to see me, but I know he knew I was there, just the same way I knew the storm's coming.

Like he knows me. The worst part is, that when I looked at him? It wasn't like seeing someone for the first time. It was more like deja vu. Like remembering someone you met in a dream once.

There was something in his eyes.

It wasn't until I got home, and was heading to bed, that I realised where I had seen that look before. I see it every day, these days – when I look in the mirror.

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[ARCHIVE RETRIEVAL 777/6/42BRAVO/QUINN-HARRY-L/2027-03-17]

 [BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:]

I still can't get used to this. I mean, they've migrated all the security protocols away from the MOD standard now that we're under the new Ministry Of Information. I even have a new office that's above ground, just on the edge of Whitehall.

I'm hardly ever there though. Most of the time I'm over at the old place, doing the usual, but still, it's sort of a culture shock. Did you know they call the whole complex the Black Farm, now? It's like we're some kind of bogeymen to all the suits and regular civil servants at the Ministry. I mean [EXPLETIVE DELETED], the big boss is a bloody smooth-faced politician from Eton, and the whole lot of them just don't seem to understand the raw stuff we do.

I've tried, believe me, but I don't think most of them quite get it – they think we're some kind of weird propaganda department, some kind of spooky hypno-Rasputins. Like we're[EXPLETIVE DELETED] warlocks.

Half of them to think what we do is utter [EXPLETIVE DELETED], the other half just care about the performance reviews and the projected drop in criminality.

Criminality? Is that even a valid concept here? They seem to think it's about making people more productive members of society – minimising the violence, bringing about a better standard of living. I think that's mostly ministerial code for having a pliant population, or at least one that doesn't cause unsightly problems like chronic debt, unemployment, drug abuse, or that sort of thing.

I've spent more time than anyone else I know, studying the kids livestreams, trying to divine the pattern those emergent properties that I keep seeing in the data. Adams seems to be the only one who's taking me vaguely seriously on the inside, now that he's rotated out of the sharp end of mining for a bit – he's asked for copies of everything I get, which is something.

I think he's a little unnerved by the necessities of Sure Heart – when I cracked the storage problem, he looked at me as if I was mad. Honestly though, it is the only way. It doesn't matter how many servers you have, or how much fibre you sink into the network, ....is the only thing capable of handling the sheer level of data.

...

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....That's what the suits don't understand – this isn't propaganda we're playing with here. This is going down into the guts of what makes us human. They don't understand that this is is in them too. All of this, is in everyone. Something is being born here – very old, or very new. I can't tell which, and that scares the [EXPLETIVE DELETED] out of me. [END TRANSCRIPT]

[ARCHIVE RETRIEVAL 777/6/42BRAVO/QUINN-HARRY-L/2021-09-25]

 

[BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:]

 I'm a hundred quid better off now. The look on their faces when I was right was priceless, still at least they paid up. When will people learn that you can't just skim top-layer data for your model source. That makes five aborted runs due to crashes.

Stick that in your performance review and smoke it.

Meanwhile, mine and Adams' teams? Not one single crash in six months. Because we're [EXPLETIVE DELETED] old-school. Hah.

Mind you, I'm not entirely sure having us dredge up the aggregates for Harvest Festival works, but what the hell do I know – I think they're tweaking it, probably blend it with the Vernal Equinox so the country's proud of its English produce or something.

In all honesty, the whole thing feels like a bad rip-off of The Archers, like my Mum used to listen to on the radio, but I suppose if they want to hammer home the notion of ENGLAND REBORN into the psyche, you could do worse than hit up the old seasonal festivals.

 Frantzen says it's all a bit Wicker Man, and I'm inclined to agree. Blake seems to predict it'll work though. Mind you, the way we've been bumped up the paygrades makes me think this project is going to get even bigger.

I took a look at the INDEX the other day – it's tripled in size in just under two months. Just like our budget.

[LAUGHTER]

The shame of it is, I've been looking at the projections, and the fact is, to get the levels of fidelity and accuracy we need in our predictions, we're going to have to piggyback on pretty much everyone's stream 24/7.

The processing power required is going to be phenomenal, not to mention the backups. If what the ideologues are saying even half comes to pass, there simply cannot be any downtime.

Hell, you're going to have shifts of miners working to keep Blake up to date. Which means, at this rate...well, I'm not sure what it means. I've seen some of the papers floating around from psychiatrists and neurologists that are in the loop, and it looks like there's going to be an absolute [EXPLETIVE DELETED]storm when the findings are made public.

How do you tell a population that it's destroying itself?

Of course, no doubt it'll take a couple of years for the outrage to set in – NGO think tanks and that sort of thing, white-papers and all that. Then Whitehall can serve us up as a solution. It's really quite devious when you think about it, to be honest.

The thing that bugs me, is how exactly we'll be presented. More to the point, its almost axiomatic that the more data we have to deal with, the more ferocious and dangerous those ripples we've been seeing will become.

Surfing the riptides and tidal waves of a nation's psyche? I wonder how many more Campbells we'll have by the end?

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[ARCHIVE RETRIEVAL 777/6/42BRAVO/QUINN-HARRY-L/2019-02-15]

[BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:]

Adams and I were in Whitehall today with the rest of the team. I've never met the Home Secretary before, but they'd asked us to lay out what exactly Virulent Novelty means, to the politicos. I mean it was fairly obvious the suits thought it was just a empty buzzword, like New Deal or Big Society or some [EXPLETIVE DELETED].

I'm not sure why they needed us there. Warburg and the rest of the Project Managers could have done it just as well. After all, they were ones who picked up my phrase and ran with it. It was easier this time, I think. We've polished the definition for easy delivery – its not like the early days when I was getting sick of trying to explain it to folks who've never done a run in their life. Blake's aggregates are very useful for that actually.

I spent a while running through some basic neurolinguistic concepts, which helped to bamboozle them. Maybe that's wanted us there, to hit them with a load of Big Science, so that their speech-writers can say they were in close consultation with Government Scientists, so they can present the illusion they actually know what they're talking about?

So I hit 'em with the emotional aggregates as best I could. Lots of references to the good old hobby-horses as analogies; drugs, terrorism, anti-social behaviour, fraud. That kind of stuff. If I did it right, and I think I did, there might be a few nightmares in Westminster tonight.

All to the good, I say. They need to understand what we're dealing with here – the fundamental loss of humanity in the face of blind unreasoning desire.

 Except, not. Eh. I'm not going to slip into that modality now – takes too long to get out, and I want to enjoy my dinner.

 [EXPLETIVE DELETED]. Blake, attach the standard Virulent Novelty aggregates to this file please? I can't be arsed to lay it out again.

[See ARCHIVE RETRIEVAL 972/0/32/ECHO/AGG-00456627#]

To be honest, I'm wondering what's going on politically. Rumour is, Scottish Independence is being fast-tracked. It might even be the middle of next year. It makes sense, given the shifts I'm seeing in the deep-down data. There's a whole idea-complex coming up towards the surface, like a rocket, pulling hard on the Nationalist sentiment.

We've only got a small livestream window in the kids, but even they're feeling it on the edges. The storm's going to hit pretty damn soon, and I don't know what it's going to do to the inner landscape. We're all passing our worries up the chain, so hopefully things can be mitigated.

I don't know though. Some of the newbies in the team are getting The Fear, pretty badly. I keep telling them, go to yoga classes, do a few mushrooms, or something. But no, they're either ignoring it, or in and out of the pharmacy and the doctor's like they have revolving doors.

I try to help them, I really do, but what do I know. I might as well be a steampunk dinosaur who thinks Blake runs on valves as far as they're concerned.

[EXPLETIVE DELETED] that.

Oh. Top. Dinner's ready.

[END TRANSCRIPT]

#MinistryofInspiration

"the computerized metropolis appears as a vast, barely disguised penal colony, in which each social system, just as each individual moves in passageways strictly differentiated and regulated by the whole. A penal colony made transparent by the computer networks that keep it under constant surveillance. In this model, metropolitan social space-time mimics the schema of a predictable universe in precarious equilibrium, unbothered by its forced tranquility, subdivided into modular compartments inside of which each worker labors, encapsulated within a specific collective role-like a goldfish in a bowl. A universe regulated by apparatuses of selective retroaction dedicated to the neutralization of all disruptions to the programs system established by the executive. [ . . . J Given the absurd and unsustainable communication in which everyone is inevitably caught, as if ensnared by the paradoxical injunction- that in order to 'speak' one must give up 'communicating,' that to 'communicate' one must give up speaking!-"

 

This feed is currently occupied.

#ministryofinspiration

A Sure Heart Testimonial

Ministry Staff Member, 31, Greenwich.

To be perfectly honest I can't remember a time before Sure Heart. But I've been told that I was something of a disagreeable child, a directionless child and that my parents were unable to control either me or themselves. I don't remember my parents very clearly but that is unimportant as Sure Heart remembers children long after their parents have forgotten them. The most miraculous thing is that despite my background, I have succeeded in achieving my full potential. I'm a true moral rags to moral riches tale. Who would've thought it? I work for the Ministry now. My parents could only afford to have one child but I am a proud father of four, such is my social standing. Safety, Sanity and Sense have saved me and if you put your faith in our nation's system, they can save you too.

 

Sure Heart for the Right Start.

#ministryofinformation

 

~Virulent Experience. Tickets now on sale here~

Ministry Announcement: Summer Solstice 2040

 

The Ministry would like to take this time to wish you a very happy Summer Solstice.

To celebrate the beginning of our Great British Summertime we would like to invite you and your loved ones to participate in your local Government sanctioned jumble sales, fetes, fayres and SureHeart sponsored street parties. A full list of authorised events and Summer Bandwith packages are available to download directly from Blake. These are fun-packed, safety-first events which pose no risk to you or your family. Relax and enjoy this special time in the knowledge that the Ministry are invigilating your safety, sanity and sense.

Here at the Ministry we know that having a good time is a valuable reward for our dear citizens and a requisite for a stable and positive mental attitude. We believe that traditional festivals and events lie at the heart of the fabric of every community. So whip up some cream for those strawberries and have a jolly good healthy time. This is an excellent opportunity to show the global community the ways in which our glorious nation shall prove to be the exemplary Olympic host.

 

#ministryofinformation

A Sure Heart Testimonial

David Dhesi, 15, Chesterton.

My parents don't have enough money to take me on holiday and I suppose that since neither of them work then every day is like a holiday for them so they don't realise that when school's finished for the summer I want to be like my friends and go away somewhere nice for a change of scene. I've been on the SureHeart Summerscheme every year since I was six. This year I've used some of the money I earned from my SureHeart placement in our local supermarket to put a financial contribution towards my place. There are about fifty of us in my group and we go away to the seaside with our SureHeart advisors. This year we're going to Bridlington in Yorkshire. There is some time for fun but mainly we do other stuff like social role play games and we discuss and evaluate how our parents are doing and whether we think they could do better. Some of it's made me realise how my parents do have a tendency to fail me and let me down but thanks to SureHeart's intervention on my part then I definitely notice an improvement year on year. I don't belong to my parents anymore. I belong to SureHeart. And SureHeart always act in my best interests. I do like to be beside the seaside, don't you?

#VirulentExperience

 

#ministryofinformation

WTF?!