That was the real question, he thought—how well could a silicon-based intelligence understand the complexities of recombinant memetics? A machine figuring out the most effective buttons to push, to change human cultures, to reshape Humankind . . .
That, Koenig decided, was a truly chilling concept. . . .
If you had enough small and disparate bits of information, if you could conduct Big Data mining on a large-enough scale, could you accurately and consistently predict human behavior?
Koenig knew the official answer, of course. Predicting the actions of a handful of people or, worse, of an individual, was possible only in fairly limited situations—if the subject was a sociopath, for instance, and following the dictates of his disease, and even then, predictions could all too easily be lost in the randomness of background noise.
Large groups of people, however, were another matter altogether. As with large numbers of atoms or molecules acting within the rules laid down by quantum dynamics and basic chemistry, the actions of large populations were more predictable.
And where actions were predictable, it was possible—if you were both careful enough and skillful enough—to guide them, to change the shape and course of those actions to achieve a desired outcome. The science was called recombinant memetics, the science of using one set of memeplexes to alter another. In much the same way that recombinant DNA can change genetic structures and give rise to whole new types of life, it was possible to identify particular memes within a social unit and change them into something else entirely.
But identifying and targeting key memes within a given culture could be tricky, requiring data mining on a scale only possible for an AI as complex and as perceptive as Konstantin.
And changing them was trickier still, requiring selective manipulation of memes within the target culture.
The word meme had been coined four centuries before by Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist who first suggested them as units transmitting cultural practices, ideas and concepts, or as symbols passed from mind to mind through writing, speech, rituals, mass entertainment, or imitation. Like genes, memes spread from person to person, and like genes they compete, vary, select, mutate, and attempt to ensure their own survival. Put another way, a meme is like a virus, propagating through a population, infecting individuals, and spreading by means of the behaviors it generates in its hosts.
The question in Koenig’s mind was how a computer network, no matter how complex, could understand how memes worked, how memes could infect and affect human populations without possessing a key human ingredient—emotion.
And if a silicon mind like Konstantin’s could understand memetics, it gave AI systems an absolutely incredible power with which to manipulate human civilization.
“Several possibilities present themselves,” Konstantin replied. “I could foment revolution within the Confederation by building upon the impetus already generated by the defections from the Confederation’s ranks—Russia and North India. Or I could create a new religion . . . one that would require Geneva to embrace peace.”
That statement rocked Koenig back on his figurative heels. A religion?
A cluster of related memes working together and supporting one another was a memeplex; religion was the perfect example. Religions evolve, spawn new and different offspring, become set or rigid in their ways, or they mutate under cultural pressures which are themselves memeplexes.
“I see. And how are you going to get around the White Covenant?”
“The White Covenant prohibits attempts to proselytize,” Konstantin replied, “and it directly prohibits the use or the threat of force to effect conversions as a basic violation of human rights. It does not prohibit the establishment of a new faith.”
Centuries before, late in the twenty-first century, a particularly nasty war between the West and radical Islam had ended . . . in part because Western psyops programs had created the White Covenant, a gentlemen’s agreement among the winners that proselytizing in any form was a violation of basic human rights to believe and to worship according to one’s own conscience. Ultimately, full membership in the newborn Earth Confederation for any nation had depended upon acceptance of the Covenant.
And at the same time, an early application of recombinant memetics, then in its infancy, had made proselytizing, the fear of hell or judgment, and even the very idea of fundamentalist acceptance of sacred writings as God’s literal word . . . embarrassing. Passé. Even insulting. Populations that rejected the Covenant were encouraged to practice their beliefs . . . elsewhere, in deep space colonies out beyond Pluto, or even on the worlds of distant suns. Mufrid, at Eta Boötis, had been one such colony, until its destruction twenty years ago by the Turusch.
What the hell did Konstantin have in mind?
“Good luck with that,” Koenig said. “People tend to take their religions seriously.”
“Some do, though for many it is more a matter of convenience. Very often, religion is an accident of where a person was born, or when.”
“True. But there’s going to be a lot of back-blast and noise when you launch it.”
“Secrecy will be essential,” Konstantin observed.
Konstantin had pulled off some miracles lately in its dealing with the Confederation, but Koenig thought that this time the system might have bitten off more than it could process. Propaganda always ran into the basic problem of knee-jerk rejection by the target society—called back-blast in RM terminology—and, more, there often were so many competing voices out there in the memetic ether that it was impossible for any one message to be heard over the noise. Basic commercial advertising starting back in the twentieth century had been a primitive form of RM, using jingles and product placement and sexy spokespersons to sell, say, a certain brand of ground car. But when a dozen other companies were countering with jingles and ads dripping with sex of their own, the result was . . . noise, and lots of it, enough to render such ads largely ineffective.
There were also defenses, AI agents that patrolled cyberspace in search of potentially dangerous memes, like antibodies.
The best way to get a memetic virus through the noise and the defenses was to do so without the target being aware.
“It is imperative that we end the civil war within the Confederation as swiftly as possible,” Konstantin went on. “A recombinant memetic attack on the Geneva leadership gives us a good chance of uniting Humankind before the Sh’daar or the unknown alien threat at Omega Centauri can act.”
“But we still don’t have a clue as to how to defeat the Sh’daar,” Koenig said. “And we know even less about the Rosette Aliens.” He hesitated, thoughtful. “It’s the time-travel aspect that bothers me, Konstantin,” he said at last. “With that one factor alone, they ought to be able to walk all over us.”
The Sh’daar Collective was a truly formidable enemy. No human knew just how big the Collective actually was. At the very least, it included within its far-flung embrace well over a thousand distinct star-faring species scattered across perhaps a quarter of the galaxy, and controlled the resources of thousands more that for one reason or another had never ventured into space.
The discovery that at least one TRGA cylinder gave direct access from the Milky Way at time now to the N’gai Cloud some 876 million years in the past added the dimension of time to the problem. What passed for a Sh’daar galactic government appeared to be based in what Confederation intelligence called Omega Centauri T-0.876gy, the designation for the N’gai Cloud as it was almost 0.9 of a gigayear before time now, but it evidently had spread through time as well as space. How such a possibility could be made to work without endless complications from temporal paradox remained one of the great unsolved mysteries of galactic history.
And with that kind of strategic