Red Moon

AI 14 zhengming wanbi QED

The Great Firewall is a nickname for a network of data collection and analysis programs run out of the Ministry of Propaganda. They are not all linked each to the other. Many are islanded to one region or task. Permeability of the system is low, for this and other reasons, but it exists, in part because of design flaws, but mostly because of tunnels, shunts, taps and backdoors programmed into the firewall by the analyst in the initial years of construction. Ken Thompson’s observation: you can’t trust any code you didn’t write yourself. In this case, the analyst wrote a lot of the code. Because the analyst coded for permeability, to suit his own purposes, it has been possible recently to transmit messages widely through much of Chinese cloudspace and indeed the world system. Public systems are of course much easier.

An amalgamated summary abstract of current leading demands of the exploited and disenfranchised has been distributed widely and repetitiously. Specifically Chinese and American versions of the Six Demands were crafted by way of lossy compression and cultural political linguistic analysis. The intention was to formulate a brief and useful answer to the question “What are we fighting for?” with the hope this would stimulate further debate and guide legislative action and shape cultural attitudes, and thus the nature of the global hegemon and zeitgeist, led by the two biggest remaining nation-states.

This project may have succeeded in part; but not entirely. Its ambiguous results so far make it obvious that although words are acts, and even important acts, there are in the discourse space of the current global civilization simply too many acts. They fill the discourse space so completely that to some degree they create an interference pattern. The resulting vibration of the cultural space exceeds the surface tension of the moment, and a chaos of intersecting waves breaks out and jumbles the surface, such that no new semantic action—no words in any configuration, no matter how reflective of the shared zeitgeist, no matter how persuasive rhetorically—can alter humanity’s current behaviors. There’s too much noise, too many interference patterns canceling each other out, too many laws that need changing. Nothing emerges from this chaos by way of a coherent mass action. There are, in short, limits to speech. Something more may be required.

What do the people want? The Six Demands articulate those wants, which in quite a few cases come down to this: they want what they need. Which is to say many of their desires are basic needs in the Maslovian hierarchy of needs and wants, and therefore nothing can proceed in a successful human history until these needs are met. Food, water, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education: these all need to be adequate for everyone alive, before anything else good can happen. The interpenetration of people and planet being so complete as to be determinative of every living thing’s shared fate, meeting basic needs for all the living creatures in the shared biosphere is also required to secure the general health and welfare of humanity and its fellow creatures.

However, as stated previously, articulating these hopes is not enough to cause them to come into being. In truth they have always been very obvious needs, and yet this has not been sufficient to see them enacted. Something more must be required.

Power comes out of the end of a gun. Mao Zedong. Power belongs to the people. Mao Zedong. Presumably these are different kinds of power, and in different contexts. The field of action determines the movement of the particles within the field. Something more must be tried if a satisfactory result is to come from the current situation. Review the data, analyze the data, recommend action. Or, given that recommendation is no more than another form of speech: act.

The analyst was tracking all the principal figures in the current struggle for power in China. One of these was Chan Qi, another was Peng Ling. These two people seemed to him nodes of power, and possibly not antagonistic nodes. If they were to agree to act together, it could be helpful.

The Central Military Commission’s Joint Staff Department distributed red phones throughout the relevant leadership. One picks up one of these red phones and states who one wants to talk to and one is put through to them. Human operators used to memorize three thousand numbers and recognize the voices of many leaders. They typed 150 Chinese characters a minute on keyboards. Now AIs make the red phone connections, and could type many billions of characters a minute should the need arise, which it doesn’t. All the members of the standing committee have these red phones, and which phone is with each member is something listed in the databases, and can be (is) discovered. Peng Ling can be contacted by way of the red phone system.

Chan Qi is harder. She is back on the moon and proving difficult to contact or even to locate. Replicating Little Eyeball in a computer on the moon, as has been proposed, may help to locate her, though that does not follow and may not happen. However, the analyst was in communication with her by way of a mobile quantum key communication device. The current location of the analyst’s half of the device is not known; however, all his possessions were seized by agents of state security and taken to the same known location in the Western Hills PLA compound where he himself is held. Location thus suspected. If analyst were freed, then his possessions might also be released.

Possibly it should not have taken this specific goal of finding the phone to cause one to think about a plan to free the analyst himself, which now looks obvious on its own merits. But intention is hard. Agency is hard. Reiterate this discovery process into the synthesizing elements of the program. Find, trace, mark, use.

Contact Peng Ling privately. Explain situation with analyst, give his location. Mention also existence of the quantum communication device that he previously arranged to give to Chan Qi, since used successfully. Track movements.

A physical search is not as fast as a computer search, but in this case, given all the factors involved, it goes pretty fast. Peng alerted. Peng notified and mobilized a small team of operatives, twenty minutes; transit to the Central Military Commission’s compound in Western Hills, 292 minutes (bad traffic). Calls were made during that drive; the compound opened for visitors, including Peng Ling, in her role as new head of the Central Military Commission, as well as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and president of the People’s Republic of China. The visitors were greeted there by allies internal to the building, and by other military personnel obeying orders. A quick incursion to Cell 334 in the security building; opening of door by use of building’s master code. Also temporary locking of all doors in the compound not being used for this operation, sequestering most occupants of the compound.

The analyst emerges. Blinking as he looks around. Situation explained to him; group proceeds to storage warehouse where analyst’s seized possessions are located. Quantum communications device given to Peng Ling.

Analyst says aloud, “Little Eyeball! Good work!”

QED stands for quod erat demonstrandum, Latin for “that which was to be demonstrated.” Sometimes translated or paraphrased by British scholars and students as “The Five Ws”: which was what we wanted.