Soul Bound

1        Soul Bound

1.2      Taking Control

1.2.6    An Assumed Role

1.2.6.25 Selah

She started getting out the normal hodgepodge of ingredients that she used, on her weekly day off, to prepare things in advance for the week’s cooking. Some dishes or components could happily be prepared weeks in advance, some could last six days if frozen and some would be at best quality for only three days, and then only if properly sealed and refrigerated.

She eyed her inventory, with a mind to placing orders for deliveries. Unbaked pies and soup she still had aplenty. Peeling, dicing, slicing and portioning certain herbs and vegetables - that she could safely leave to Gorana. Or Ketah! Her sous-chef had a body now; not that Nadine was going to let Gorana be deprived of work, no, certainly not. Nor herself, for that matter. She enjoyed working in the kitchen like this.

Terrine. She was running short on terrines, and prepared meats. Yes, that’s where she’d start, then maybe do some marinades and spiced fillings.

The thing with terrines was that they took time. You couldn’t make one on the spur of the moment, you had to plan ahead. She wanted shredded ham and shredded chicken, and she’d been able to set the ham going before she’d left, simmering for 3 hours on a timer in the big stock pot over there on the range. But the chicken was best shredded while still warm and she hadn’t known when she’d arrive back. So! Get that started as soon as possible.

She brought out some chicken breasts, seasoned them, and set them to poach in water. Then she scooped out the ham that had fallen from the hock and set it on a board. Mmmm, nice smell and perfectly tender. But don’t shred it yet! First set the remaining contents of the stock pot filtering through a fine sieve. Good! And now to...

She carried on talking to herself, thinking through the logical order to take each step, and reminding herself of what to concentrate upon. It was almost like having her mother’s patient voice in her head as she cooked, and left her feeling warm and secure.

Her hands stayed busy, never rushed but never pausing, for half an hour or more. It was only when she was covering three terrine dishes, ready to cool overnight, and the bagged portions of shredded chicken were all lined up to go in the freezer, that she recollected her intention to think about the list of means.

The list still looked a mess to her, as though it were the ingredients for several recipes that had been sorted alphabetically, rather than in the order they’d be required in. But there were dependencies there too, weren’t there? The copias wouldn’t spread until there were mythoi to set them up reliably. And they needed lots of people uploading a continuous stream of data for innocent reasons, if Wellington was going to be able to hide the connections of activists to The Burrow community in a way that even the Chinese government couldn’t detect or block which, long term, The Burrow depended upon.

Inspired, she dived into orglife mode, and started moving blocks of text around with hand movements, constructing dependency trees, then tearing off branches to place elsewhere as she spotted additional factors.

When she couldn’t see any way to improve it, she boiled it back down to a single text document and stood back to admire it. The conclusion was now clear.

The first thing she’d received had been a tiara. Why? Because a reliable tiara had been needed if she were going to play Soul Bound safely, and it was through playing Soul Bound that the wombles had built up a community and launched The Burrow. The distinguishing feature of The Burrow was that it made use of tiara technology to ensure those connecting were humans and that the opinions they expressed were the ones they sincerely held.

It was via tiaras and having a community they could trust to examine the source code that people could safely access expert systems. It was only in a tiara-using community with expert systems whose loyalties they trusted that a scalable gratitude economy could be built, and that was a precondition for mythoi to be more than a fad. And without mythoi to handle the setup, operation and maintenance, 99% of communities would not make use of copias.

There were fewer than 60 million people who’d ever played Soul Bound, and more than three quarters of those lived in Asia. To reach Wellington’s target, they needed to bring to The Burrow at least 50 million who didn’t play Soul Bound, and that meant spreading beyond the sort of designers and enthusiasts she’d met today, to ordinary communities facing ordinary problems and wanting immediate tangible evidence that involvement with The Burrow was more than just entertainment. That meant aiding them with mediation and problem solving, peer help with trade and investment, community planning simulations, mythoi, copias, skill sharing, safe Ni!, and anything else they could come up with.

They all ultimately depended upon one thing.

Tiaras.

Tiara technology held both promise and danger, but right now the commercial tiaras available weren’t safe. Not in the sense that they were expensive, fragile and didn’t protect the wearer’s activities from being snooped upon. Rather, in the sense that they weren’t loyal to the user. The manufacturer controlled who could update the software on it, and which sources that software would or would not protect the user’s brain from being manipulated by.

It was like someone had just declared open season on shooting deer, only the hunters were the Hexoikos and each deer being hunted represented irreversible lifetime control over ten million people. There might be only twenty million third generation tiaras now, just two deer, but this was only the first month of production. There were four hundred million second generation tiaras, and even if just a quarter of those wearers planned to upgrade in the next six months, the hunt was going to get vicious.

Which meant it wouldn’t be sufficient for the wombles just to get reliable tiaras into the hands of the people in danger and say “Look, here’s a nice shiny tiara that does everything your old one did, plus you can set it to protect you from greedy evildoers wanting to enslave your mind.”

Because greedy evildoers rarely announce themselves that way. Instead it will be your Imam, or your employer, or the server admin of your favourite game who says “If you want to stay with us, you’ll need to upgrade to a tiara we approve of that implements the new CorrectAlignment protocol. For safety reasons. For efficiency and standardisation. Because of red tape. Because that’s what our I.T. department policy says. Because a new law to prevent child pornography and tax evasion requires it.”. And possibly the person saying that won’t personally be evil or greedy, just be passing on a decision, taking the easy way out or be genuinely unaware of the vulnerability such as if their software department is later hacked and introduces an unauthorised patch for immediate download.

Either way, for the wearer to respond “No thank you, I’d rather stick my head in a meat grinder or a slave collar. I’ll find a new mosque, quit my job or pick a new game to play rather than wear, even for five minutes, a tiara I’m not 100% confident of.” the wombles would have to make the case, persuade people and offer a tempting value proposition. A value proposition which required a reliable tiara for the user to access, and which was so tempting that even the desperate and downtrodden would make the right decision.

She walked around her dependency tree, and checked to see if she’d missed anything important. Bungo’s independent communities, able to experiment with different approaches to self-enhancement? Not strictly dependent upon anything, but certainly aided by The Burrow’s community support infrastructure and mythoi or copia that could provide economic freedom, construct medical implants and help with research.

Genetically uplifted cats? Sorry, Alderney, that doesn’t look like a short-term priority. Spying on XperiSense on the other hand? XperiSense did seem to be at the confluence of both tiara technology and advanced expert system technology. Carrying on playing Soul Bound, and trying to become indispensable (or, at least, helpful and profitable) to XperiSense was probably their best bet at finding out more. She had a feeling that the deities in-game were steering her towards triggering a major planned event - at least regional, and possibly Covob-wide. While no doubt there were other events too, if the Wombles did become the triggers and kept attracting significant numbers to join the game, then it would improve their chances of XperiSense guarding the Womble’s privacy and supporting connections from a ‘reliable tiara’ developed by The Burrow.