Feb 2018 v01 online

wondered briefly what kind of ransom he could
ask, should he threaten to give the resultant
simulation data to the media. A colossal one.
That being said, Daniel was more than
confident that few iterations of this scenario in
the simulator would result in him coming out
of it alive.
The client was required to alleviate spending
somewhere high up in the country’s
administration, and had tasked the simulator
with finding the most efficient way to do so.
Reading over her notes, Daniel tapped out a
couple of coded nudges to specify what the
client was and wasn’t comfortable doing; the
more data that can be put into the simulation,
the more accurate and less lengthy the process
becomes. The client had very clearly – in some
cases switching to bright red pen in her
handwritten instructions – identified the
figures that the spending decrease was not
allowed to displease, as well as groups and
members of the public who could trace blame
and affect her future approval ratings. Daniel
carefully instructed the simulator to steer clear
of upsetting them, even of coming to their
attention where possible. The pre-simulation
log started to take a clear shape of which kinds
of routes to avoid. Saving the data, Daniel put
the first booklet of notes through the shredder
under his desk, and turned to the second – a
ranked list of the things the politician would be
happy to forfeit on the country’s behalf. This
one, if anything, was more of an indictment.
Hand writing the notes may help avoid
discovery by hacking, but anyone who might
recognise the client’s poorly disguised
penmanship could make the link. Among
smarter clients, the typewriter had come back
into fashion.
Daniel watched with mild interest as the
simulation began, and the universe blinked into
existence. The vast computer hummed, the
temperature cooled another cruel degree, and
cities, homes, families started to take shape in
the zeroes and ones scrolling across the flashing
screens. Daniel absentmindedly followed a
young woman who was wending her way
through the code. The first iteration realised
the client’s preferred option; a cut to healthcare
allowances that removed publicly funded
treatment for those in lower pay brackets. The
young woman appeared to be a university
student, studying something to do with words
and stories, but as the numbers zipped by
Daniel saw her fall ill (an undiagnosed case of
lupus), miss enough classes over the period of a
year to be forced to drop out of college and
move to a more impoverished suburb. The
population there had grown so quickly in the
year since the funding cut (as contraception
prices had been hiked along with the rest), that
the girl eventually began a job in early childcare,
moving from centre to centre until she settled
three years later at a state-run orphanage. It was
one of hundreds that had cropped up across the
country as a result of the marked increase in
families with large numbers of children having
their breadwinners die around middle age. Her
following twelve years – the client required a
fifteen year action plan – were bleak. Daniel
wondered who she was. As he watched the girl
whittle her youth away promising herself she’d
return to university the following year, he was
uncomfortably struck by the fact that she was
more than just a simulation. This virtual girl
had a genuine equivalent; she was a real person
somewhere out here in the world.
Some powerful simulator clients were able to
supplement the astronomical cost of
commercially running a simulation – especially
a big one, like this – with information. The girl,
and everyone else living in this brief reality,
were fully complex, essentially conscious
replicas of existing people, coded in almost
perfect detail from the extensive access the
simulator company had to resident, medical,
political and other records, often obtained
through personal relationships with people in