Below are the 8 most recent journal entries recorded in info jockeys' LiveJournal:

Wednesday, June 16th, 2004
6:23 pm	"But there have been numerous examples of analysts predicting and influencing unprecedented events. What about the Deoxy Accords? Everyone knows that was the first major decision the WTC made based on analyst influence." I ignored the gross generalization of lumping the WTC-calculators in with freelance analysts. "All of the technologies covered by the accords were theoretically robust before the conferences were convened, and many of them already had limited field implementations. The existing data set allowed for accurate, though imprecise, analysis. But the technical information behind those predictions lies outside the scope of analysis; we can't replace the work of research scientists. The relevent material presented in just the first week of those conferences involved fifteen original basic patents, close to a hundred PhD's, and roughly one trillion dollars research capital. You can't just use analysis to get around all that." This was all a bad variation from the standard interview procedure. Sometimes you'd get small-time concerns -- start up data farms or hypo-legal inventors -- who'd try to convince you that analysis could solve all of their problems. But Rheinauer-Glick was big time and this wasn't just ignorant, it was unprofessional. It was like begging. Why should they try so hard to convince me to take the job, rather than just hire another analyst? "But we have data on this." "Hard data, or rumors that it's being developed?" "Reports on startlingly unusual behaviour among some of the guerrilla strike teams." I paused, appearing to consider it. The same stories were almost as old as analysis : mythical cyber-zen warriors who could forsee their opponent's every move. Variants had actually been attempted, with analysts wired in through remote headgear coaching elite units. As soon as there were analysts behind both sides of a conflict though, absolute mayhem broke out as recursion limits set in. The practice was quickly discarded as too expensive for little to negative change in field performance. . . . . It's what we call 'recursive limiting.' Some situations become so densely self-referential that no algorithm can adequately take into account the number of parallel but interrelated processes occuring. It's why analysts don't work together. It's why situations involving too many analysts influence invariably degrade into chaos. Each analyst attempts to take into account each of the other analysts' predictions and behaviours, including these analysts' predictions of other analysts' predictions and behaviours, and their reactions to those predictions. Normally a dataset is reanalyzed until developing into a stable attractor. Stability and precision are determined similarly to asymptotes and limits in algebra or calculus, as an acceptable margin of unpredictability. The rate at which uncertainty increases in these situations is so high that predictions are not just inaccurate but predictably incorrect. (Comment on this)
6:00 pm	His name was Erin Brynn, an Irish from a Dublin suburb. There are no records of him before Germany, but his undergraduate work was done in Berlin; a major in polyvector mathematics, a minor in philosophy and religion. He published a few startling articles on the identity of God and mathematics before moving on to his graduate work in Bremen, at the short lived Schule Datenleitung. His thesis was on obscure vector theories and their relation to rainforest insect population. His work was widely discredited, called "sensational" and too abstract for the application he proposed. For another five years there are no records for Erin, except a tax return listing his occupations as maintenance and short-order cook. Then he enrolled in Buenos Aires. The Schule's prestige held out long enough to get him into a doctoral program at a state university. His thesis was "The Vectorization of Social Behaviour," and involved enough Lobachevsky and Reimannian mathematics to almost obscure his source material. He was an overnight celebrity. To simplify his initial theory -- humans are possessed of free will if they so choose, and statistics is not a matter of natural law. The mathematics to phrase those points are immaterial; he made the point clear, and used these premises to show that human behaviour - due to the possibility of free will and the known effects of chemical consciousness - was predictable. He allowed for unpredictable behaviour under a set of limits, including radically new technologies and certain styles of "precognition." He always included quotes when using that word because he wanted his PhD. The nail in his coffin came just before his Nobel nomination. He left sealed predictions of three major world events that were popularly considered unlikely. The first was the syndicate movement in Columbia, and its spread to Mesoamerica and Africa. The second was the economic collapse of the rapidly expanding East Asia Coalition. The third was the Second Glass War. As each event came to pass he would order the vault to deliver his prediction. The day after the nuclear strike on Giza Erin was shot twice in the head by a Christian zealot who declared that Erin's witholding of prophecy constituted a "mortal sin." The next day the Loomis Fargo company unveiled the final prediction, which was not only of Erin's assassination but the background and precise birthplace of the assassin. The murderer was apprehended two days later in an abandoned building in Biloxi and requested the death sentence. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 15th, 2004
10:21 pm	"What's your bag?" Hopelessly antiquated slang, definitely safe in a futant club like this. "I study the poetry of life," I replied. It was a poor pass phrase when you got right down to it, a major in joke with analysts. If music is mathematics, and poetry is the music of language, then our algorithmic reconstruction of life was poetry. "Good to see ya, buddy. I'll assume this is business." "Yeh. I need some background. Rheinauer-Glick, familiar?" "That's kinda funny. I just ran for them last month. A two-zone job, even. They're pissing somebody off." So it was pretty obvious I was set up, already. Willing to talk business here, already. Willing to meet somewhere like this. Willing to name a job, and a time frame. At least he was trying to warn me. Or this was a longer con than I could plot yet. I was nodding already. "Maybe somebody sohemi? Blood moon types?" "Never sure about it, really." Impossible. Chrome didn't take blind jobs. "Augmented like military, though." That's when he gave me the grin. I nodded back, curt, and kicked the table straight into his chest. "Here's what they wanted to give you," I holler, taking the time to dramatically pull the DaeWesson 9 from the shoulder holster. Slim's already moving, rolling back, up onto his hands, then a spread-eagle drop back to the floor. Spider walking backward, those graphite shoulders spinning him faster and tighter than a courier's trike. I lobbed two rounds into the floor near him for good measure, and make a believable break for the entrance. First obstacle are the graft-jobs near the pool table, still trying to score points with the skin jobs. They spread out, flexing, until I waved them off with the 9. Only one tried anything, and the Swisse monograms on his irises pegged him as a spotter for whoever sent Slim to meet me. While he watched the muzzle of the pistol I wrapped my palm around a GinGinseng bottle and floored him. The bouncers knew enough to hug the door. At least two were showing weapons. That was not the problem. The doormen were obviously well trained, therefore predictable. One of the armed men would fire warning shots near me while the other got a solid line of site to my torso. The problem was that I was out of data again. If R-G was setting me up, why? Was I a liability because I'd turned down the job? Because I might have been checking up on them through Slim? How'd they tracked me down to NOleans? Slim's metrics had shown he wasn't lying about the job for them. If he was still under a legitimate contract to them he wouldn't have tipped me off; he was pro-league, and I'd be in a much worse situation than this. So they were putting a lean on him. Possibly to lean on me. One runner, unguaranteed, and one spotter as backup didn't look like a planned hit. But there were no odds yet on what I'd find outside. The club definitely wasn't in on it or the security staff would have been warned, and the room would be flooded with delta-blockers. (Comment on this)
Friday, January 16th, 2004
10:39 pm	Notes, sketches, background These were true Handlers : each a specialized personal analyst assigned to an overclocked globalist. The globalist would be in a demented autist-style trance, wired on endorphins and high-powered serotonergics. The right brain and whole frontal lobe was wired back into an optical processor, designed neurally to supplement basic analytic operations. The handler would take a sort of shorthand readout from the secondary processor, which roughly translated into event matrices and vectorizations. Then, depending on the developing trends the Handler would alter the data streams and drug levels for the comatose analyst. That's why the Handlers were usually personals -- so that they could predict what stimuli would produce the desired predictions. The first several hours of the process were usually spent normalizing the globablist's bias and response. Once the personal had "enough" data the procedure changed. The endorphins were pulled, the serotonergics were raised and [anti-time] serums added. Then all of the matrices and sum-overs were fed back into the globalist at once. Apparently the globalists reliably reached a 115 degree F body temperature during that part of the process, even in the ice baths. The Handler would try to maintain them long enough to get the final sum-over-history. Even if he did, the personalist was lucky if his brain could maintain a pulse, let alone consciousness. --------------- Everyone heard the stories sometime during their training -- analysts found locked in a room, surrounded by personal effects, records, maps of places they had lived, over and over barking subtle permutations of their lives into recorders, reanalyzing their histories, bark bark bark, eyes dead as blown fuses. ------------------- They called it "hi-tem." Most folks would say it stood for "high temperature." The definition I had heard was "highly temporary," but they both fit. Either way it meant a pay check for me. I did private data-analysis, and hi-tem also meant "data-dense." Once upon a time there were sociologists and economists and social philosophers and hundreds of professions all trying to categorize, predict, and alter the human environment. You could say that they laid the groundwork for what I did, but I'd say they did it all backward. True/false and warm/cold questionairres? Controlled environments? Control groups? That was the real laugh. All the sciences had become so isolated, they seemed to think they could isolate humans. They utterly failed to take into account that there could not be a "control" as far humans go. As an example : if you had been studying "stress levels" in urban situations around the time of the Great Feint where was your control? The stress level of even the rural Americans would have been near the top of their handy one-through-five scales. No absolute stress measurement could have given you meaningful results. Humans are adaptive. Human psychology is modular, like their bodies. Under the right circumstances even some of my johns could act like pretty solid joes. You just needed the right attractors. "I've been watching ibbim," he said. He gave himself away that quickly. Even a rough newshound would have said "eye-beem." Contractions and abbreviations had become words, but there were obvious ways this was done. But he wanted to be league, be in the know, so I started warming up to him. They didn't haggle so hard when they though they were "in." That was one of the rules. No self-analysis. You had to be self-aware, know what habits would stabilize you. But you didn't look into why. Myself, I liked to stick a needle full of high-delta neural refreshers in my arm a few times a week. It was habitual, but the habit was unlikely to progress and I knew how to break myself of it if it interfered with work. Why did I like a brain-frying three-hour static trip? Didn't know. Had a hard time even formulating the question in the first person. ----------------- Chromega Slim was a small time runner based out of Noleans. He worked enough different industries to rank as a second tier data source, and we had a relationship going back to my courier days. Professionally speaking he'd be fucked if anyone knew I got hand downs from him, so we had an arrangement. As long as his clients and sources were purely used in early iterations he'd pass me data. In exchange I'd run figures on prospective customers for him -- whether they'd pay, whether they were handing him a box of contraband organics, whatever. So I couldn't use him for Rheinauer/Glick or the Keffira crew, but I knew he could feed me news on the United Muslim movements in that area. The Nation of Islam had eventually broken free of its North American moorings and spread to South America. Mostly Venezuela, Dominica, the Brazilian states, and Bolivia. And, like anything else that spent too long in those jungles, it had gone tribal, splintering into an innumerable collection of para-Islamic sects. Some groups had gone so far as to claim that blacks were the first Americans, driven across the Atlantic by the warlike and cannibalistic asians coming down from Alaska. The black stone of the Ka'aba was to serve as a reminder of the obsidian riches of the jungles. The destruction of Mecca in the Glass Wars was a sign from Allah that the Nation was to return and reclaim the true holy land. Slim was a runner, though, so he was far too paranoid for even three-band trans. I needed to get down to Noleans. ------------------ I had just passed the seventy-hour mark. The second sight was intensifying, bleed-over from Daughter Brain's tallying functions. I head heard some of the Czech models had cut-offs to prevent that. I hadn't planned on it mattering, however, and those same cut-offs would disable DB's passive tallies. But now, following this gang into the gutted tunnels beneath the complex, the bleed over was warping my surroundings. One moment I was following ragged children done up in ten year old myofibre suits, the next we were creeping out of the jungle into some cracked and ancient Incan monolith. The leader, Julio (pronounced with a hard 'J'), waved to me. "Eyanhighty Man, this way." Julio coudn't have been much more than twelve. His pheremone counts were too low to be fully pubescent. He was still the obvious leader of this troop. His teeth were blackened with a pitch and ash mixture, and both forearms showed a precise set of scars and piercings, more elaborate than any of the others had. Tooth-blacking as a style was the result of bricking. Bricking was the practice of smashing out someone's teeth with a brick. Bricking had as many rational explanations as toothblacking. The most accepted was that it was a biblical punishment, which made it popular among the superstitious low-tech gangs. Another popular explanation was the superior sexual utility of a toothless prisoner. ------------ People liked to say that Jews were the problem. Like any other time in history (since Jericho maybe) this was a gross misstatement. Some of the Jews were some of the problem. "The Problem" started at the end of the Third Glass War. After Cairo and the Suez were levelled no one believed the nuclear card would be played again. It was sheer luck that the primary detonations had been nearly ground level, burying most of the fallout along with Giza. The Third Glass War wasn't supposed to happen, but the Israelis had perfected their micro-nuke project. Gamma-bursting shoulder-mounted rockets, short range tactical missles that would precisely disintegrate a convoy, or a field base, with no fallout and no effective defense. The papers hyped it as the Israeli "Finger of God." The war lasted precisely six days, fifteen hours, and twenty-six minutes. That's counted from the first border skirmish to the moment when America's illega, and somehow still secret, missle defense system detected multiple simultaneous launches. It intercepted five thirty-some-odd year old Russian MIRVs, which strewed fissile material across Syria, Iran, the Western Iraqi Confederacy, and the People's State of Mesopotamia. The missles that weren't intercepted pummelled Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Northern Recolonization Sector. Between half-detonations and shoddily reconstrcuted missiles the attack became a pyrrhic last blow in the thousands of years of war in that area. The Middle East was no more, replaced by an irradiated wasteland. The number of survivors was never properly established. Weeks later a few scarred half-blind survivors staggered into neighboring countries. They were so ill and deranged that it became international policy to shoot any on sight. No more Israel, no Ka'aba, no holy land for much of any of the western world. No Zion, except for the Rastafarian colonies swaggering up through Florida. Overnight world religions changed. The various Xians took it best, though the Pope soon relocated the Vatican compound further from the wind-borne fallout to jsut south of Paris. Some of the more fundamentalist churches declared that it had been the battle of Armageddon, and that God's Chosen People had been vanquished by the armies of Lucifer. Who these armies were was never well established, since all of the combatants were extinguished nigh-simultaneously. {Allah turning his back on Islam/Mecca}The Muslim world was struck a blow comparable to the fall of the last temple at Jerusalem. In the month after the war thousands of pilgrims died in a preposterous attempt to reach Mecca. The remaining Muslim population was left in a state similar to the Jews of the diaspora. Islam became a penitent religion. Orthodox Judaism was shattered. Even the most hard-headed had to admit that the hundreds of millions years wait until the area would again be habitable was unacceptable. --------- "What you're asking for I can't do," I told her. "Analysis can predict synergetic or otherwise startling events, but it cannot predict something truly new, and it cannot predict a specific vestor for an uncharted event. If it could I'm sure the government or the Wide Theater Council would have hired analysts to deal with hi-tem situations." "How do you know they don't already?" "I'm sure they try. But the nature of hi-tem events makes them less than predictable. I could come up with a time or a region for one, but not both, and definitely not with any meaningful vectors beyond that." "What if they weren't predicting so much as designing?" Of course I had heard this idea before. It was the candyman-myth of analysis. Uber-analysts hidden away with some magic bullet algorithm and enough raw data to plot out whole world vectors. Of course it was impossible. Even at a national level you had to set tight boundaries to avoid recursive limiting, and that was without taking into account analyst influence. That was what made broad spectrum analysis infeasible in the first place. Broad spectrum and long term analysis could not be accurate without taking into account analysts, and that meant overcoming the black hole of autoanalysis. Fractals, despite their almost total uselessness, introduced the idea of a strange attractor. Strange attractors are characterized by their unpredictability. Their range is finite, but their borders approach infinite length. Any behaviour falling inside the limits of the attractor will not escape, but its behaviour will never repeat -- that is, the algorithm will never plot the same point twice. In standard mathematical models similar values will produce similar results. In strange attractors near-identical values can produce wildly divergent results within just a few iterations. A brief attempt was made to show that these fractal behaviours, because of their similarities to organic and social processes, proved that accurate prediction of those processes was impossible. As my profession might imply, this simply was not true. Rather than worrying what part of the attractor you were dealing with you just needed to determine what type of attractor you were dealing with. At this point I had plotting data for almost 900 major attractors . . . ----------- Dalai Llama watch tradition Greater Tibet absolutely no electronics, engines (renaissance, pre-) luddite theocracy isolationist watch tradition -- a sign that time will not stand still with technology analyst traditions No self-analysis; "recursion disease" self-aware analyst : compare to charismatic fascism, precognition in Dune Licensing -- based on computable standards; standards out of date, less accurate techniques corporate analysts : "soft license" unlicensed analysis/"fake" licensing (cooking the books, corporate contracting) Independants ("objective") vs. corporates corporate bias emotional detachment ("professionalism") vs. "empathy" (Comment on this)
10:13 pm	Principles of Analysis Analysis can not predict something new (new technology, organizational structures) Corrollary : analysis cannot predict its own future development. An analyst cannot predict their own future. ("Thou shalt not analyse for personal gain") -- endless recursion The larger the system observed the more accurate the analysis. The smaller the system observed the more precise the analysis. All analyses must include at least on false premise. Variant : all analyses must exclude some possible futures. (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 15th, 2003
2:23 am	Fit 3 : Condensation History has had many shapes. Once, there was no history, only knowledge and potential. This is where science began. Initially then, time was a ray, from here to future. There were things, and they would change. The idealist supposed the universe worked thus. And, aesthetically, this was the ideal view. It's obviousness suggested it, as well as its defitness. This was actually the basis of the first analytic model : many of these time vectors, intertwined, with polarities and velocities and any number of other nonsensical attributes. But we had moved beyond this. Analysis had developed parallel to known history. Next the awareness of free will altered humanity's model of history. it became a line, branching at the point of Now into many futures. Depending on choice the current time could progress to many different ends. This, historically, was the age of the first city-states. Men realized that human power could be collected by collecting the resources they sought. With that increased manpower, as well as those concentrated resources, the physical world could be utterly altered. And so we saw ziggurats and pyramids. And as analysis coalesced so to did the structures it effected sort themselves into more rational hierarchies. Because of the analyst's rational predictions their clients behaved rationally, and so did economy and society grow. But only at the levels that could afford a psychic tailor. The rest of the worl progressed, and analysis had to catch up to it. The age of anlaytic firms and consortiums was brief. Because the next phase of history saw the line as a balloon. Time had an infinite and linear prior source, that had become many histories through seperate nations and peoples. But there was a final destiny which all those histories and cultures woud be subsumed into. These were the ages of conquest, Roman, Mongol, French, English, American. Empires built as a prelude to Rapture. This also was hopeless, and it's perpetuation through analysis paid off in data. That one future was impossible because of its infinite possible histories. Any number of related paths claimed contradictory histories and futures. There had to be actual paths without regard to context. So we had modern analysis. Infinite possible histories, infinite possible futures. Which made the job a little bit trickier. We not only had to find out what did happen, we also had to find out what could have happened. And then we had to find out what could still happen, and how likely that was. And then how much more likely a client could make it. That was the funny part of the job. Superstitious soothsayers and prophets had raved about what would or wouldn't happen, but they were definite about it, and were called on it when they were wrong. We were usually consulted under strict privacy agreements, and if we were wrong it could usually be shown to be the client's own meddling fault. (Comment on this)
1:14 am	Fit 2 : Trepination The important thing became an adaptable memory. The types of data necessary in day-to-day life was expanding, so human comprehension expanded to meet it. Basically, sourcing softened. Certain legal definitions of source were enforced and maintained, but otherwise information rapidly lost identity. On a daily basis even a moderately literate individual would take it information from several major schools of thought, and multiple disciplines, both scientific and liberal. So, really, how do you fuck with that? Honestly, it would be stupid to. But, you can play inside of it. Hence, analysis. By telling the future we encourage the course of a rational future. Or so the cant goes. Honestly, I wasn't too mystical when I got into the profession. But after you've tried to turn back you understand that you have seen something utterly different. The first time a mortal looks you in the eye you realize that you cannot look like that anymore. That was actually when I started taking the metorphan blockers : the first time that I couldn't recognize my mother. We sat down, had a meal, and I rapidly understood that this woman would respond best if I treated her respectfully, as a clan-member. Afterward I made polite excuses, went home and spoke with my Instructor. When he left I opened a small carton left on the floor. I spat yellow and kicked the walls for three hours, and remembered a short scene of a girl, name forgotten, staggering up a hallway. The light abstracted her hair, turning her into an instantaneous print. My shin cracked in three places, and I shattered two bones in my foot. (Comment on this)
Monday, November 10th, 2003
3:11 am	Fit 1 : Oscillation I'd been working for three days straight through, and I about had it with translational matrices. I had had it with trying to connect Bolivian kamakaze guerrillas to abstract entertainment markets. I was up to my tonsils with current event postings on wheat manufacture and Algerian diamond cloning. I knew when the next bomb would hit, and why. The regional office of Clay, Markham, and Co. in Miami. I was even pretty sure it would be one of the cryptoStalinist groups in the Caribbean that would be behind it. I knew it was time to get paid. --Emerson, how can I help you?-- squawks the phone. --I have your inquiry completed. The files are on the way over, but you should shut down Miami. Atlanta and Dallas to be sure. And maybe make a friendly gesture to Kali Front. Everything else your analyst should be able to break down.-- Figures were exchanged, and we closed the call. I respooled the patch cables, as Motherbrain's status lights dimmed to standby. Catheter dumped into a sepchute. I could already feel the base of my neck growing numb. The phone lights up again. A force tranmission, greenlighting over a basic block signal. Maybe a player. I know I don't need to be living out of my wallet anymore, so I slump back into my suspension. Screen flicker. --Maya Carollyn, Klein Rheinauer and Glick. I understand that you work data?-- --I'm not a licensed analyst, if that's what you mean.-- I stepped through the hoop. 'I'm just a retrieval service until you prove you're not WTC.' --This line has been firewalled. 5-band encryption in tachy-layers, video and audio. We have three minutes until even the whit-tic could decrypt voice.-- And she gave herself away already. Reddish tint to the otherwise standard neu-warrior-fade haircuts, which everyone was dying in metallics at this point. Cheekbones rode high, indicating some hunter predilictions in heredity. Thick, paired-corduruoy tunic, off-olive green with gold trimming. Sat somewhat reclined, even during a first convo. But she said 'whit-tic,' trying to come off a player. 'Wit-cie" fit the standard WTC condensation. I warmed up to her, hoping to encourage her to feel comfortable. They haggle less when they feel comfortable. --And why would the double-you-tee-cee want to crack this tran?-- I said it smiling, letting her in on a joke. My jaw and shoulders just unparallel, saying 'You are doing well, you are making me comfortable.' --Because I am, on the authority of my employers, Klein Rheinauer and Glick, looking to hire an unlicensed analyst for a contract job.-- Which completed the formalities. She had indicted herself, and her company, in looking to commit the crime of unlicensed analysis, which she could not do as a law worker. The age-old tradition of entrapment had developed into a contractual formality, whereby companies could prove they legitimately desired to break the law. --What field?-- I fetch a half-empty Salino-pouch from the desk, sucking the aperture thoughtfully. --Research and development. We've been watching ibbim, Moto-Texaco and Darawanna closely.-- Should have been 'eye-beem.' I softened my eyes some, further skewed my posture. --A company, most likely one of these three, has been working on short-term predictive algoritthms and organic chipping for Southern Bloc insurgent groups. We need an analysis of potential players, results timing for these corps as well as our group, and probably expression vectors.-- I kept drawing on the salipac, trying a few quick numbers before I responded. --What you're asking I can't do.-- (Comment on this)