Spare Future

- 62 - The Strategist's Apprentice

Clelia's arrival at IUPITER had been a great help to Flavio. Until that point, he had been buried in demographic data to transform into statistical information. The tasks he had been assigned did not allow him to unravel the mysteries of the project much beyond what he had already intuited—namely, that there were international plans to revolutionize the way wars and conquests would be conducted. The aim was to perfect mass persuasion tactics for political and military ends, that much was clear to him, but in the tangled web of numbers, he had failed to find a clear perspective on the overall vision of the project.

With Clelia's help, things began to change rather quickly. At the beginning, it was evident that Clelia's task was to supervise the reports Flavio sent to Nasoni and Boccaccio. Then, when the IUPITER managers confirmed that the reliability of Flavio's work bordered on prodigious, they instructed the two to work together to swiftly process the never-ending flow of data.

It was then that Flavio began to discover that his suspicions about the colossal scope of the project's ambitions were spot-on. As the weeks passed, the requests from his superiors to find specific correlations in demographic studies became increasingly explicit, and Flavio quickly realized what the end goal of each of the project's initiatives was.

The Callisto Initiative, led by the Statistics department, aimed to study the possibility of creating movements and ideologies in a given population through a trigger, as if it were an attack by an avant-garde so small in numbers as to be invisible. The challenge was to use the "statistically irrelevant" to create socially inevitable and forced effects.

The Io Initiative, developed by the Psychology department, focused on refining new techniques for spreading and propagating emerging thought currents. The purpose of this propaganda and dissemination work was the natural continuation of the movements generated by the Callisto Initiative.

The Ganymede Initiative, conducted in collaboration with the departments of Political, Social, and Communication Sciences, dealt with research on the activities of a third phase, where the social and cultural results disseminated in a population through the techniques of the Io Initiative would be exploited to manipulate social and political structures according to the invader's will.

Lastly, the studies of the Europa Initiative, assigned to researchers in Medicine and Surgery, focused on developing theoretical models capable of controlling entire populations based on principles that govern individual living organisms. The application of these models would allow the previous three phases to culminate in total scientific control over the targeted population.

Those who had conceived the project were following the elegant intuition that the human community can be controlled as a superorganism, just as occurs in hives and ant colonies that are under the chemical and biological control of their queens.

A project with such ambitions was undoubtedly revolutionary and could appear terrifying, but Flavio understood that depending on how it was used, the revolution could be either wonderfully positive or horribly catastrophic. In occasional conversations he had with Cristina at work, he learned that there were many in the military who hoped to bring well-being and unity to populations, reducing violence, wars, and hunger—all thanks to the potential to apply new, peaceful methods for guiding society, new systems that would eliminate inefficiencies, corruption, and inequalities. However, it was also clear to the newcomers that there existed a faction within the project that saw IUPITER as a means to subjugate society and satisfy the selfish aims of the winners.

To Flavio, Cristina's optimistic, trusting, and peaceful outlook seemed naive, both due to the nature of the military personnel themselves and because, from the state of the research he saw, he considered IUPITER's grandiose and boastful aims to be dreadfully idealistic.