Ensemble [Book 1: SEKTOR V Trilogy]

Chapter 31: Giving it a Rest

Chapter 31: Giving it a Rest

Dr. Amita Narain was extremely busy these days. With Dial's final, crazy Jump to the targeted outlier timeline analyzed and successfully verified, she could finally begin the nudging process. As she studied output from the last coupled modeling run, she knew her time had come. All the simulations and associated comparisons with actual, real Jump data were finally over. The multi-faceted model, which was an incredibly complex system that took decades to assemble, test and validate was now ready for its biggest test yet...practical application in the real world.

As the Institute's lead scientist in the area of numerical model development, Narita felt enormous pressure. Would it work? Could it work? It was one thing to see how simulations of the future compared with short-term Jumps, weeks or a few months into the real world, but it would be another thing to see if it was possible to use fine-scale details from their model simulations to consistently alter or "nudge" a real timeline towards a desired pathway that was otherwise moving in a decidedly different direction. Even if they were successful, what would be the unintended side effects of their actions? She had no answers to any of these questions, but she and her colleagues, as well as the rest of humanity who was unwittingly along for the ride, would soon find out together.

Despite the pressure at work, Amita was glad she had nothing to do with the day-to-day logistics of the "nudging operation". It was a Herculean effort that would involve over two-thirds of the Institute staff. Given the extremely aggressive and highly coordinated global training program required, such a level of support wasn't surprising. As part of the planned three-week effort, the Institute would be crawling with thousands of Underground operatives from all over the world. Some of the training could be conducted remotely but that option was limited due to various security concerns and other technical restrictions. For the most part, the training had to be conducted on-site.

Amita had no delusions about what they were about to embark on. It was a high-risk, high-reward gargantuan endeavor. To have any chance of altering the highly manipulated path the Ministry had set humanity on for over three decades, their plan had to be executed to near-perfection.

She marveled at the complexity of it all. How seemingly small effects could lead to much larger changes when events were set into motion in a particular sequence. This was precisely why they needed the intricacies of the model simulations on very fine time scales. After conducting countless simulations, her team had finally identified the specific Ensemble member that was most likely to lead to the desired level of social, political, and economic instability. Amita and her team had just completed the largest and most complex socio-economic/physical-environment forecast in the history of mankind: a 365-day, one-minute time-step, global-scale, 20,000-Ensemble member numerical simulation.

To most it was overkill, but not to Amita. She knew that the level of complexity and detail they were after required such a run. Selecting the best possible target reality was critical, and conducting a multi-thousand member simulation allowed her team to sort through the myriad of options. Since the real universe contained an infinite number of alternate realities, this exercise, as complex as it was, still only incorporated an infinitesimal fraction of the total number of timelines that actually existed. When she brought this point up to her colleagues who were toiling to get the 20,000 Ensemble member simulation completed, they rolled their eyes at her. This was a lot of work for a lot of people, a fact Amita was keenly aware of.

The target timeline they'd ultimately decided upon was predicted to become economically unstable four weeks into the nudging process, with political and social unrest following soon thereafter. This "forecast" assumed that the required adjustments they needed to make within their "real-world timeline" would be executed perfectly, or as close to perfect as humanly possible. The perturbations they'd create ranged from very subtle changes at a specific place and time to larger, more coordinated efforts requiring multiple people at various locations. The complexity and frequency of the variations required to move their reality towards the path of the targeted timeline were highly interdependent.