Fourth Wall Banger

James Brown examined the decision tree for the next "Honor Guard" story arc one more time. He did not like what he saw.

It was produced by the program SIMPLOT, an application used for a huge number of tasks -- managing risky investments, planning complex projects with potential contingencies, preparing threat analysis trees for distributed systems, or scripting interactive fiction with semi-autonomous actors. The program presented complex processes as a directed acyclic graph, and suggested new branches and nodes based on inferences from a domain-specific knowledge base using a simple, sub-sapient breadth-first autonomous cutting inference engine*.

His collaborator, Judas Montclair, had a bad habit of pruning interesting nodes from his decision trees. Not long ago, Judas had failed to account for the possibility that the Reyll heretic Demonslayer and her team of miscreants, M-Seven, would be able to mount an attack on the Corporate HQ, Sedgewick Station.

That mistake cost Judas two weeks of interrogation at the hands of Corporate intelligence.

He returned a shadow of his usual hedonistic self, a distracted nervous wreck who seemed to lose himself in terrible daydreams. James had done his best to cover for Judas, but James' work was itself time-consuming and exhausting -- he had to choose from and mix together streams from a plethora of recording devices into a visual narrative that would make sense to and hold the attention of a distracted, not terribly sober audience.

James had been doing his best to pick up the slack as Judas recovered. The decision trees Montclair was producing had become dangerously sparse, and James would sometimes go through them and add nodes to represent other possible chains of cause and effect, possibilities that Judas had precluded in the plans and projections that would influence the next several months of "Honor Guard" vids.

Some of this was a question of style. Judas liked letting the characters drive the story, and that often meant leaving them a great deal of autonomy. The result of these scripts were broad trees with few nodes and many branches. The fans seemed to like these free-wheeling plots, and giving the talent more freedom made "Honor Guard" feel relatively authentic.

The coming story was completely different. It was a graph like a map to a rail line, a straight path from plot point to plot point. Worse still, a number of the nodes were encrypted, and Jack couldn't even open them to suggest alternative story-lines. Poking through the meta-data for the nodes, Jack saw that they were asymmetrically encrypted with a public key used by the Grays, Corporate military intelligence.

The parts he could read worried him. Judas was making a dangerous series of assumptions, and the involvement with the Grays made Jack nervous. Jack had tried repeatedly to arrange meetings with his colleague, but Judas had always put him off.

Jack's communicator beeped. It was Judas. Jack was finally getting his chance to share his misgivings with Judas.

Judas' voice was slurred, and Jack could hear blaring pop music in the background. They arranged to meet at a nearby bar.

Jack took public transportation to the run down drinking establishment. Judas had obviously been drinking heavily, and sitting in a semi-private booth off to the side of the dark bar.

Jack sat down next to him with a tablet computer. "Judas, are you sure you're up to this?"

"Oh yes. Hell yes."

"I can't evaluate a lot of the nodes on this next script--"

"Not your concern, my boy. It's out of our hands."

"Judas, listen to me -- if you miss a possibility like last time, they'll take you in again. I need you in good shape if we're going to stay on schedule."

Judas did not listen to Jack. He thought about being taken in again, the woman doctor in her tight leather suit -- her huge quartet of breasts (surely implants) heaving as she applied the neural stimulator and Judas arched his back in pain -- and he had a sudden, adolescent flush of shame as he wondered if his colleague could see his erection.

"Judas? You've been spacing out like that a lot recently."

"Sorry." Judas pushed away from Jack and crossed his legs, resting his left foot on his right knee.

"I need you to look at this." Jack gestured towards the tablet with its stylus. "If I add a branch here, the graph won't terminate where we planned--"

Judas blinked his eyes, and slowly read the branch in tree. "Oh, no. She'll never do that. Being a super-heroine is much too important to her. She'd never risk it."

"Are you sure? If they talk, there's a non-zero probability that they'll never reach the nodes down here." Jack gestured at the encrypted nodes. "If they use a genetic screening to identify--"

"Don't be silly, Jack."

"Judas, I know what her mother was. If she goes after her father, the whole project is in danger--"

"Please, Jack. She likes being in charge too much. She'd never risk it."

Jack shook his head in exasperation. He wasn't getting through to Judas, and it frustrated him. "This script is a lot more linear than what I'm used to from you. What's going to happen?"

Judas smiled. "We're going to win, Jack. It's that simple."

Jack was annoyed enough that he left Judas behind to the throbbing music and went home.

Jack wished that he had felt like drinking with his colleague. He was going to have trouble getting to sleep tonight.

* Imagine a "mind mapping" package melded with a slightly cleverer version of Prolog. SIMPLOT is about as ubiquitous in the Corporation as Microsoft Excel in a modern computerized office on Earth.