Directive 51 by John Barnes Read Free Book Online Page B

recognizable or recurring patterns—if anyone had ever seen them before. And Daybreak’s signprint—”
    “What’s a signprint?”
    Heather suspected that Browder already knew. At least I know this one, and I won’t give him a forty-minute version like Arnie would . “In the noosphere—the overall total environment of all the communications going in all directions at any one time—”
    “I know what a noosphere is, Yang wore the subject out for me once.”
    “Oh, good. Well, in the noosphere, we only detect signs when they move—we only know a word exists when someone speaks or writes it into a message, we only know an image exists when someone includes it in a bigger image, we only know a mistake is there when it’s spotted and corrected, all that. The signprint is the pathway in the noosphere that a group of signs, uh, flying in formation, I guess you could call it, they’re separate, but they stick together—it’s the pattern they leave—”
    “Like a wake in the sea of meaning,” Crittenden suggested.
    Hunh. That was almost friendly.
    “Good enough! Well, different kinds of organized populations of signs leave different kinds of signprints. In fact, from a historian’s perspective, a signprint and the thing it’s a signprint of are really just the same thing, one’s what you see and one’s the thing that’s there, is the way Arnie puts it.”
    “That’s a very old idea,” Crittenden said, “with considerable merit.”
    I feel so blessed, she thought sarcastically, and said, “Good, all right, then the thing that Arnie’s kind of math has going for it is that it doesn’t look for signprints by looking for structures that are like preexisting signprints. It just finds things that stick together and move together. Another way Arnie says it is that the pattern-recog guys sit and stare at the screen and look for clouds that look like a horse or a ship. Arnie’s stat methods just look for clouds—which is what you want if you want to know the weather. It means his way of doing things can see the ‘clouds’ in the noosphere that no one else can and then try to understand them. Because in the noosphere, unlike in the atmosphere, there are often storms of a kind no one has ever seen before, and being able to see them the second or third time they show up is not good enough if we’re trying to foresee what messes might hit us in the near future.
    “So—the signprint of Daybreak. Clearly there. Jumps out of the numbers like a sore thumb, according to Arnie.” She clicked to the slide.
    Browder, to her surprise, nodded. “If I read that right, the variances are tiny, and the connectedness is huge. That’s not a cloud, that’s a boulder.”
    “That’s right,” she said. Both of them reasonable within a minute of each other. Who’d’ve thunk? “That graph measures basically how distinct Daybreak is from everything else in the noosphere, and you can see it’s very distinct. So since it’s definitely there, the next question is, what is it? And the answer is, to quote my favorite book when I was a kid, ‘Something very much like something no one has ever seen before.’ Daybreak has some of the aspects of a religious cult, an artistic movement, a blogweave, a terror network more like the old al-Qaeda or the Japanese Red Army than like the modern il’Alb il-Jihado network, and some unique features all its own.”
    “But that’s just how they communicate, right?” Browder asked. “What are they?”
    “What are they, like—”
    “Engineers or Catholics, old people, women, I guess I’m asking who, what do they have in common other than Daybreak?”
    “Well, it’s a bunch of people who only agree that they hate the Big System, but they literally spend two to four hours a day making and consuming messages of one kind or another to each other about that. You could think of it as a mutual-hypnosis hate-the-Big-System club, maybe. No central office keeps them on message, either, it