First order of business as Superintendent of Varkas Reflex was to figure out
what it meant to be the Superintendent of Varkas Reflex. Hokusai knew she
needed help, and the best place to get it was from someone with experience.
Even better than that one person with experience was an entire council of
them. Several people had held the position on Earth, while each of the
colony planets only had one, with the exception of Sujo. Its first
superintendent couldn’t handle the responsibility, and fled into the void
with a stolen interstellar vessel, never to be heard from again. Of course,
that wasn’t much help, because Hokusai would not be able to communicate with
him, which was sad, because understanding what went wrong could have
resulted in invaluable advice. Not everyone agreed to become part of
Hokusai’s council, which was fine. She wasn’t looking to run a survey about
them with a large sample size, but gain insight and guidance. There were
eleven of them, ready to help in any way they could.
Hokusai built quantum surrogate substrates for the visitors, so they could
arrive much faster. The former superintendent of Teagarden was unable to use
one, since she never installed the necessary transhumanistic upgrades to
accomplish this, so she appeared as a hologram. Hokusai wasn’t sure what she
was expecting out of these people. Were they going to be helpful and
supportive, or balk at her inexperience and naivety. They had all dedicated
their lives to public service, and were presently serving in other ways. She
was just a scientist, living on a planet that elected her because she was
cool, and there wasn’t anyone else. Would the council believe that was
enough? As it turned out, some did, while others were not so convinced. They
weren’t nasty or pretentious about it, though. They applauded her for having
the wisdom to form the council in the first place, and recognized that
Varkas was unlike any of the planets they had dealt with themselves. Their
formal approach wasn’t going to work well in this case, and they would all
have to tap into their creative side in order to make this work.
After months of discussions, they decided that they had come up with
something reasonable, and appropriate for this world. Hokusai realized on
her own that she was never the only superintendent at all. By forming the
council, she had outsourced a lot of the decisions. It went swimmingly, and
if it could work for this, it could work with the actual government. So
there would be no congress, no delegators, no advisors, and no
administrators. This world’s government was going to be a council democracy.
Councils would be formed as needed, and disbanded when the problem they were
trying to solve was over, which could potentially mean never. If the council
wasn’t trying to solve anything, but was there to maintain harmony, then
that council would simply continue on. The question then was how to form any
given council in the first place.
Would they be elected? Selected? Earned? Completely open? Yes, all of those
things. Hokusai decided that the people had the right to decide how any new
council was formed—making the entire populace one gigantic council in its
own right—and they didn’t have to do it in the same way previous councils
were done. Some councils may require particular expertise, and would only be
available to certain people, who exemplified certain criteria. Others could
impact the entire population, and didn’t necessitate specific competencies,
so anyone who wanted to could join. If this resulted in an unmanageably
large council, then it could be broken apart into smaller subcouncils. This
flexibility made things really complex, but it also prevented the system
from getting bogged down by its own procedural regulations. The technocracy
that the majority of the stellar neighborhood used was great. Everyone had a
role, and the only people allowed to make decisions were those that knew
what the hell they were talking about. But it was also a slow process—often
slower than the highly bureaucratic democratic republics that dominated
Earth in the 20th and 21st centuries. Councils got things done, and they did
it efficiently, as long as they were supervised by someone who could make
sure the councilors weren’t getting sidetracked, or wasting time. This was
the problem that Hokusai needed to solve now, and Pribadium thought she had
the solution.
“Here me out,” Pribadium said, “we upload your mind to multiple substrates.”
“Why would we do that?” Hokusai asked.
“You say these councils need leaders. In fact, you say that each council
needs one leader. This crowdsourcing is good and all, but it won’t work if
they spend so long discussing the possibilities, that they can’t ever come
to a conclusion. Someone needs to protect them from themselves, and who
better than you?”
“First of all,” Hokusai began, “lots of people. Secondly, why would we have
to upload anyone’s mind to multiple bodies? All you’re asking for is a
singular entity that oversees the proceedings.”
“Eh, no one has time to be in more than one place at once.”
“Right, but why can’t each council just have its own leader.”
“Because the profusion of leaders is just going to lead to the same problem.
I’m not sure if you’ve thought this all the way through. You think councils
can be fast-acting, but they could be slower than republics. At least the
technocracy is efficient. Most consequences to any action are predicted at
some point down the assembly line. With a council, everyone might have some
great idea, but they won’t say anything, because no one else is, so they may
think it’s actually not that good.”
“What are you saying, that this should be a monarchy?”
Pribadium knew that Hokusai didn’t actually think that’s what she was
saying. “A real democracy is perfect when you have a few dozen people. It
doesn’t work in the thousands, millions, or, God forbid, billions. That’s
why most healthy governments operate under representation, to varying
degrees of success and moral honesty. People hate to think about it, but
power must be consolidated. That’s just the way it has to be. It’s
your job to make sure that consolidation is fair and reasonable. A
soviet democra—”
“Don’t call it that. It has negative historical connotations that predate
your birth.”
“Very well. A council democracy is fair, but it is not reasonable. You’re
gonna run into problems, and in order to fix them, you’re going to form more
councils, and that’s just going to add to the problem, and it will never
end. The councils need a single voice. And when I say single, I mean single;
not one each.”
“So, you are kind of promoting a monarchy.”
“All monarchs are tyrants, so no. I was using you as an example of the
voice, but perhaps that is how it should remain, as an example. This
overseer can take any number of forms. It can be elected any way you want,
and remain in control however long you want. You worried about checks and
balances? They’re built right in. Let’s say the overseer poses some
existential threat to the planet. No problem, form a council to get rid of
them. The overseer doesn’t have to run every single meeting for every single
council, but they have to have the potential to be involved in
any council, except for ones that would come with a conflict of
interest. That’s why I suggested you copy yourself—or rather, whoever we
choose for this—so each one gradually loses identity. You see, what we need
is a good leader with a good history, but that’s only necessary as a
foundation. Once that’s established, the copies can go off and start living
other lives, but at least they all came from the same place.”
Hokusai was shaking her head. “I think you’re looking at it the wrong way.
Good governments are based on diversity. Each leader should be separate, and
have always been separate. Then they can serve to check and balance each
other.”
Loa stepped into the room, having been listening from the hallway for most
of the conversation. “Why don’t you take the best of both worlds?”
“How so?” Pribadium asked.
“Mind-uploading, councils, single voice. Put them together, what do you
have?”
Neither of them answered for a while, not sure if it was a rhetorical
question, or a sincere inquiry.
“Amalgamated consciousness,” Loa answered herself.
“Where did you hear that term?” Hokusai asked her.
“My mind-brain,” Loa replied. “You want fast government, but you want the
people to have a say. So. Upload their minds into a system, but don’t just
keep them isolated, like we normally do. Merge them together. Create a new
entity. This entity won’t have to discuss how to deal with the issue.
They’ll immediately know what that council would have said about it. The
answers will just be right there. That’s how a normal brain works. If I
asked you how to keep this door from being opened, you’ll have an answer
right away. You’ll say we should install a lock on it. If I asked Pribadium,
she would say let’s drag a bookcase in front of it. Ask someone else,
they’ll say we should murder everyone who might try to open it. But if we
put these brains together, the council-entity would say we should install a
lock, plus a deadbolt, and then ask everyone who might want to open it to
not do so, so we don’t have to kill them.”
“Amalgamated consciousness,” Hokusai echoed, thinking it over. “That’s a
pretty big departure from how we decided to do it.”
Loa brushed this away. “The superintendent council is not the superintendent
of Varkas Reflex; you are. You don’t have to consult them. You were
just using them for advice, never forget that. It is still your
responsibility.”
Pribadium didn’t approve. “I’ve seen this show. This is The Borg.
You will be assimilated.”
“Assimilators in fiction are evil. We won’t do this to anyone who does not
wish for it, and we won’t be neurosponging them. These will be copies, which
leave the original contributors both independent, and intact.”
“The only reason we would do this,” Hokusai began to explain, “would be to
increase the speed of decision-making. It doesn’t actually help with proving
the sensibility of the decisions themselves.”
Loa disagreed. “No, it’s like Pribadium said. People might be afraid to
speak up. If we copy their perspective—which is really what we’re after; not
people’s episodic memories—they won’t have to worry about sounding foolish.
They will have good ideas.”
“There are a hell of a lot of ethical considerations no one thought they
would have to make. If we were to do this, we would be the only government
to do so. All eyes will be on us, and we will have to make sure we don’t
screw it up. Like, what happens to the entity we create when we amalgamated
the council? Is that a person in their own right? Do we dissolve this
creature later? Do we keep them on retainer for later decisions? Do we let
them run off to lead their own lives? Do we let them leave the planet?”
“Now you’re getting into science that you know I don’t understand,” Loa
said. “And ethics isn’t my forte either. This is an idea, which I came up
with after hearing your ideas. I can’t be expected to have it all
figured out.”
She was right. This was just the start. They spent the next year working on
the new plan. And then they instituted it.
