Chapter Four: The Presidential Interdisciplinary Scrum Team
Public support of the President was mostly positive. There was, after all, a Capitol to rebuild and ratings soared. Yet as the months wore on, and emails turned into orders, which became truck-drivers, which became trucks, then workers picking up rubble, and at last empty lots, the press grew bored. Melvin Sninkle had proven to be bizarrely sexless, suspiciously unassuming, and boringly… boring.
It became alarmingly difficult to take him out of context as he had begun a Presidential Podcast -only a few hundreds of thousands of people listened to this at first, but it lasted a minimum of four hours every day and detailed at length his efforts to rebuild the Capitol and often included conference calls where he made decisions in real-time. Several episodes had been entirely about concrete. Often he would spend fifteen silent minutes in thought during which the podcast had no filler content- Worst of all, sales of breakfast cereal and laundry detergent were underperforming by almost nine-percent.
The prospect of WWIII and its accompanying ad revenues still lingered in the minds of media executives and many reporters made efforts to connect the meteor strike to a revitalized political theory that had lost popularity after the Cold War. This theory posited that anytime anything bad happened, anywhere in the United States, no matter what it was or how obviously at fault an American politician appeared to be, Russia was somehow secretly to blame. In fact, the media’s vaunted well-eyebrowed representative of the military industrial complex, Chastity Anderson, was also the world’s chief expert on Russia’s total dominion over all of time and space. She spent six hours a day on any program that would host her almost but not quite demanding Moscow be annihilated and its people atomized in the name of love, freedom, and mutual understanding. During her earnest campaign to initiate a nuclear holocaust that would end in the death of everything that didn’t live at the bottom of the ocean, partly out of boredom, she also successfully destroyed the careers of half a dozen competing journalists who thought this might be short-sighted when records were uncovered of them privately communicating that the bathroom debate was a waste of time. In Pre-Forum society, xenocide was a socially acceptable political proposal, but discussion of proportionality was forbidden.
Unable to stir him into a war with no justification, the Press at last turned on Melvin Sninkle with malicious if incompetent enthusiasm.
Articles appeared with headlines such as: “The Multi-Racial Whiteness and Agender Misogyny Hidden in Melvin Sninkle’s Seemingly Multi-Ethnic, Multi-Gender Staff.”
The Forum Index of this article reveals that the writer was very much against people being able to do their jobs and that this point was consistent across their entire body of work.
Or:
“Is the President Too Autistic to Even Care about how People Go to the Bathroom?”
The Forum Indexing of this article reveals that it made no specific claims whatsoever.
Quietly, to almost no fanfare, Scott Gibbeck was appointed Vice President of the United States. On a special six hour edition of the Presidential Podcast it was also stated that in addition to traditional duties of Vice President, Scott Gibbeck would serve as Scrum Master for a new Presidential Interdisciplinary Scrum Team (PIST) to execute certain software products and engineering projects at the direction of Melvin Sninkle. The two men briefly discussed the application process for PIST. Conspiracy theorists were the only ones to report on this. The only others who noticed were the middle school essay contest winners, the gold-medal fencing team, the President of the Alliance of Left-Handed Lesbians’ Poetry-Slam team, and various other members of various groups who no longer had their awards ceremonies overseen by senior government officials. Scott Gibbeck had taken the phrase “in addition to the traditional duties of Vice President,” as meaning “to the exclusion of the traditional duties of Vice President,” as in his own words most of these duties were, “a bunch of horseshit.”
What to say of Scott Gibbeck, the eventual architect of the Forum? His temper was both mercurial and legendary in Silicon Valley. He had been fired twice, in his youth, and was reported to have taken the news without comment or emotion and each time found another job before the end of the day. “Just business,” he’d say but historians note the companies at which he found new roles eventually devoured the companies that had fired him. Colleagues say he was impervious to any personal insult or set-back and seemed incapable of understanding how these could impact other people. Yet he had never hesitated to raise his voice to the CEO of any company when “mindless corporate horseshit” began to intrude into his products and took delays as seriously as a death in the family. He was extremely paternal and those who worked under him, from fresh college graduate to seventy year old nearing retirement, said they had not ever felt so protected even when they were children with their own fathers. Anyone who worked for him, regardless of gender, felt as though they were his son and had passed some kind of important test in being hired by him. Anyone not working for him, who looked at him in the eyes, shrunk away in terror, for his eyes simmered with quiet rage and he looked to be always on the edge of jumping into the middle of whatever someone else was doing, if only to relieve himself of the burden of having to witness their incompetence. He had risen to prominence not through any political shrewdness, but simply because he was almost always proven verifiably correct after the passage of time.
He had met Melvin Sninkle at an AI conference when they had both been in their twenties and the two had struck an immediate understanding. They were not quite friends, but they understood one another and agreed on what was important, and that was perhaps as close as either of them had ever come to friendship. The fact that Scott Gibbeck was trans likewise went unnoticed by everyone but Conspiracy Theorists for almost six months, the press having lost the ability to independently gather information without it being given to them by the government, or even the will to investigate evidence if it was provided by those they deemed unseemly. In fact, as the Conspiracy Theorists gathered ever more compelling evidence that Scott Gibbeck had once been Stephanie Gibbeck the more this evidence was seen as invalid in the eyes of the mainstream press. As the matter was also of no particular interest to Scott Gibbeck or Melvin Sninkle compared to the cryptographic security protocols which would underlay the software products produced by PIST, which they wove into every interview question they answered no matter its relevance, they simply forgot to mention it. Surely, the press concluded, if Scott Gibbeck were truly trans someone would have officially mentioned it for this would have brought their warm regard. They took it as an axiom that all people wished for their warm regard and could no more understand that a person might consider them to be irrelevant than a goldfish could prove the fundamental Theorem of Calculus.
The fact that Scott Gibbeck was black was met with cries of racism for various strange reasons -the most reasonable, but still senseless, claim was that having already had a black male President it was a sign of regression to have a black male Vice President- which are difficult to explain, but involved colleges allowing people to get degrees in fields that did not meaningfully increase predictive ability or even provide useful risk mitigation strategies.
And what of those who answered the President’s call and struck out to join PIST? They came from all over the nation, from every level of society. Some crawled out of their mother’s basement for the first time in their adult lives, others left jobs at the tops of skyscrapers that paid millions, all of them to serve their nation in its hour of need. The Presidential Podcast, which almost no one listened to, was a podcast which these patriots had never missed. An idea, so beautiful it had stung like cold water on a hot iron skillet before it soothed, had begun to take shape in their minds. It was an idea touched upon in the long meandering interviews of Scott Gibbeck, promising a tamper-proof, end-to-end encrypted, centralized hub which would allow Citizens to petition the government in real-time. But the idea was deeper than that, deeper than any singular innovation. Those who had abandoned their nation in pursuit of profit, or retreated from even trying, believing the government no longer had the ability to improve the lives of its citizens as much as free enterprise, or indeed given up on the idea that lives could be improved at all, began to revise their opinion. They, the shrewd, the wise, the cunning, began to believe in something too boring to even be noticed by the common person. They began to believe, as they had not believed since they were children, in the ideals of a nation worthy of their personal sacrifice.
Apart from occurring behind keyboards, the selection process to join PIST was the emotional and spiritual equivalent of Special Forces training. No degree was required to be considered, no recommendation, no third-party blessing of any kind. It was as though an ancient kingdom had put out a call for dragon-slayers and the only acceptable credential was the body of a dead dragon. The government job page for PIST was a programming problem, whose answer was a password to an entrant form. The entrant form only required a name and a social security number and provided an address and a time for an interview. The ensuing interview process was brutal. Great minds despaired and broke under the demands of the merciless Scott Gibbeck, who having stood in front of both his parents and told them God had made a mistake assigning him a female biology at birth, had no compunction against telling hopeful candidates who had given everything in hopes of serving their nation that their code was “not up to standard.” Those who remained, sanctified by the mental anguish of their would-be peers, would have hacked their way into the private servers of Hell and stolen data from the Devil if Scott Gibbeck had but given the word.
No one noticed except the Conspiracy Theorists who were greatly troubled by the unparalleled meritocracy and transparency of this process and the fact that it was being performed by the Federal Government. So ignorant was the populace, so unable to apply proportionality to their attention, that the efforts of PIST met total mainstream media blackout. News Sellers at the time were more concerned with convincing the public to begin a world-killing war with Russia or providing the names of ten-thousand products in competition against their sponsors that they claimed were linked to childhood cancers. PIST was only mentioned once a day, at the beginning of every Presidential Podcast, during a daily stand-up call, which by then had just over one million total listeners. It is hard to imagine now, but this was once a nation that had given up believing in heroes. Indeed, it was a nation that had almost given up on the notion that problems could even be solved.
There are statues of them all now, of course, lining the causeway that was built outside the marble offices of PIST, more beautiful than any European Cathedral, although Notre Dame comes close. Their names are known to every grade school child learning their first programming language, whispered like holy words as each student dreams that they could one day be the next Slow-Fast Lorris Purrakhan, hunting and pecking keys and yet making no mistakes when it came time to compile her code, or Run-Time Eddie Wu racing up to a whiteboard to unify the vision of the team and ensure system responses were within agreed upon norms. The dozens of movies that have sought to memorialize their exploits could not hold a candle to the unedited footage of their coding. There is nothing more patriotic than watching Microservice Mike Dugan refuse to leave his computer for eighteen uninterrupted hours a day, every day, for nine months, without a single bathroom break, sustained only by energy drinks and teriyaki beef jerky sticks. They built and coded with desperation, fearful that at any moment some spark of the old order would try to stop them. Knowing their window was brief, that Melvin Sninkle was a fluke of history, they coded faster than enemies could have feared or friends dare hope.
Given the criticality of security, every second of training and work was preserved and made public on PISTs own social media pages in real-time. Only a single room in the PIST offices were unmonitored, code-named the “No-Room,” where sensitive cryptographic work was performed. At times, Melvin Sninkle himself arrived at the offices of PIST to assist in these efforts. There were necessary secrets even here, but the fact of the secrets was public.
Four months went by in this way, a clock ticking down to product launch. All of it relying on perhaps the only political move Melvin Sninkle ever had to make as President before accidentally upheaving the entire system.