Chapter Three: Full Transparency

Public reaction to the new President can be best described as confused. There are few mentions of Melvin Sninkle in public news records prior to his ascendency, outside of technical journals. His social media tutorials on Chaos Theory, Complexity, Emergence, Fractals, Risk Management, and Artificial Intelligence are now standard material in almost every school. These, however, had received relatively low viewership at the time and the comments there do not reflect the overall mood of the nation. It is telling, however, that the comment “I think that I actually understood that,” or a close approximation thereof, accounted for almost twelve percent of all unique comments on these videos. 

Privately, Melvin Sninkle was one of the most famous men in America to anyone who had ever tried to build anything involving Artificial Intelligence or Complex Systems. Emails from the various companies he had advised over the years reveal another particularly telling comment: “Melvin is the guy you call when you have to make something actually work in real life. Then you pray to God he’s interested in the problem.” The little public reaction to the man himself outside of these channels focused entirely on his physical appearance.

As one twitter user -Although not its intended function, twitter was a social media platform that existed primarily to divorce the opinions of its users from any broader context and thus make them seem stupid and uninformed. Thereafter, twitter shared these comments with the broader public and thus caused its users to hate almost everyone else for having stupid and uninformed opinions. In addition, it also excelled at radicalizing its users and grouping them around opinions that could only make sense when divorced from competing realities. While all social media of the age did this to an extent, twitter was considered the best conflict-generator. Also note the word “user” as in “drug user” as the concept of Digital Citizenship did not yet exist- said, “To say that Melvin Sninkle is ginger, is to say that Jesus Christ is a Christian. WTF.”

The most liked reply to this was: “Does that dude have a red mustache, or is that just freckles? Honest question. It’s like a subliminal mustache.” Similar questions followed on if the new President were truly bald or had just trimmed his hair tightly to his scalp, or if again the explanation could be broken down to freckles. Some speculated he did not even have eyebrows, but only long freckles all pointed in at angles. Memes, a form of political cartoon, followed the most common of which were from a popular animated show alleging that the United States now faced a pandemic of “Gingervitis.”

The “tweet thread” from the Santa Fe Institute -remarkably, this was prior to the Sante Fe Institute being widely recognized as one of the premier center of learning in the world- giving bittersweet congratulations to their former professor of Chaos Theory and Complex Systems for obtaining a Cabinet position, was retweeted only seventeen times. It had no comments. Melvin Sninkle had not, in any interview or any recollected conversation, ever expressed any political opinion of any kind. Those wise enough to be his friends but foolish enough to grant an interview stated that he was the type of man whose interest could only be roused by grand cosmological theories and the small practical details of their implementation. The most revolutionary act of his ascendency to President was swearing in on a copy of a signed and personalized first edition volume of “The Art of Computer Programming.”

When asked why, he said without emotion: “We were in a hurry and it was the thickest book I had with me and the photographer thought it would be a good idea.”

With the hindsight of history, he appeared as the archetype of a competent man from the very start. Thick-glasses from long hours reading, bad-suit over a body more used to coveralls or a lab coat, and calloused hands from working on small machines. This was, however, before the ideal of competence as a person who stood at the boundary between academia and engineering entered the popular mind. The world was unfamiliar with Chaosticians and very few people could imagine a scientist who was keenly aware not only of his knowledge but also his ignorance. He spoke with a nasal monotone that betrayed no emotion other than razor sharp focus.

His previously cut interview on autonomous vehicles was played across several news networks, but received low ratings after the first five minutes due to the length and technical detail of his answers. He made no jokes and revealed no personal information but spoke for three uninterrupted hours on minute details of various autonomous vehicle systems. The tone of his voice never changed and it seemed that he did not blink enough. It was said that he was a poor communicator and yet the minority who watched the entire interview found that by the end they had some decent grasp of how autonomous vehicles would actually work. For three days, as no other information about the man came to light, the interview was played on loop. Then, with little warning, several dozen members of the newly populated White House Press Corps were invited to Cheyenne Mountain for a presentation.

President Melvin Sninkle’s first Press Conference began thusly:

“Based upon the available evidence, we now believe the destruction of our nation’s Capitol was caused by a random meteor impact. Though this seems to be improbable, we have worked out the orbit of this particular meteor and the following calculations show that it was quite, unfortunately, inevitable. We have performed due diligence to search for additional meteors and found none. We will now begin a full technical explanation.”

Melvin Sninkle then did something so grossly offensive, so wildly unprecedented, that the press’ reaction would be the creation of a new verb “to Sninkle.” Meaning: to explain something with the exact level of detail needed to fully encapsulate the actual issue without reducing anything to catchy slogans or analogies that were “close enough to be true for the public understanding.” He also at several points made a point of painstakingly calling out potential errors with his data sources as well as what he had done to reduce the impact of these possible errors. It was the way of most academics of this age to compare their intelligence against one another and grow jealous and prideful. It led them to believe that if they were superior to another intellectual that they were supreme in the universe. Melvin Sninkle to the contrary was a true scientist. He had compared his intelligence not to other humans but to the universe, set his mind to the near impossible task of understanding how things actually worked so that he could then attempt to also make things that actually worked, and thus grown humble and wise.

In other words, in President Sninkle’s first official public briefing, he committed the unforgivable sin of doing math in public. At occasional intervals, he also wrote several lines of code. To the collective horror of the entire United States of America.

Melvin “Sninkled” the available information about the meteor for eleven hours and forty-five minutes. He turned the presentation over to other members of his team only four times, each speaking for less than thirty minutes before Melvin Sninkle resumed explaining the trajectory of the bolides. Using a spreadsheet program of his own design, he manipulated data in real-time, creating graphs and charts as needed so that it became apparent that the style of his thinking and his infographic charts were fused. This was not a man presenting data that had been collated by others. What he presented he had compiled himself, and understood himself. The infographic charts, it was agreed, were the one truly stellar part of the presentation. They omitted no detail, were totally transparent, and readable at a glance. When he moved to a whiteboard to hammer home specific details his penmanship was impeccable and machine-like. At times, without any sign that it was unusual or worthy of comment, he wrote with both hands simultaneously. Commenters in India exclaimed that it was as though an incarnation of Kali had appeared to explain astronomical phenomena to mankind. In that span of time he answered every conceivable question any person could reasonably have, including where additional information could be found to verify his conclusions and what work remained to shore up his analysis. Then, without precedent or apology, he invited the feedback and skepticism of the American public and directed them to an email address where such materials would be reviewed. 

At no point did he reveal any sort of personal reaction to becoming President. Instead, he seemed to feel as though becoming President was no different than having to cover for a friend who had called in sick to work. Over sixty-five percent of viewers polled subsequent to the presentation did not even know that he was the President. Of those polled, however, eighty-seven percent understood the meteor strike was a natural disaster and, for the first time in contemporary history, actually believed a government official.

He spent the final two hours explaining how they had ruled out that a foreign power might have caused the collision. This included technical discussions of thrust, how ICBM’s were monitored, what the theoretic velocity of a rocket capable of reaching the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter must be and the additional difficulty of sending a rock on a collision course with the Earth. To further drive home the point, he discussed what a rocket capable of performing this action would require and also several other methods of action they had considered, including the use of laser ablation from Earth, or Earth orbit, on an icy meteor in order to instantaneously vaporize the ice into vapor in order to create thrust. The last, he explained using every ounce of his formal background, would be too chaotic to produce a predictable trajectory. Laser ablation would be more likely to send an asteroid off into deep Space, or down the gravity well of Jupiter, than to send it toward Earth as the laser would have to strike the Earth-facing side.

Several members of the White House Press Corps fell asleep halfway through what they had assumed would be the most thrilling briefing of their lifetime.

At the end, he asked for questions and his team stood ready behind him. His team, too, was starkly different than any that had come before -counting only two men with professionally cut hair in bespoke suits, who had survived the Columbus Strike by virtue of an existential crisis, where they had wondered if perhaps their efforts were better spent elsewhere than discussing emergency bathroom legislation when life-expectancy in their nation had actually seen an unprecedented drop in the previous few years- and the rest of whom were dressed in hastily buttoned-up shirts, with lanyards, cargo shorts, even flip flops, and of every race, gender, and creed that had ever worked on a software scrum team. A silence followed, as when a professor asks a difficult question in lecture to which no one knows the answer. At last, one reporter was brave enough to raise her hand.

“Do you think it might be time to declare a war on space?” asked a beautiful blonde woman, who dared this after receiving a text from her boss that their ratings were plummeting. In their morning briefing her network executives had agreed that an announcement of WWIII would be a major ratings boost and ordered that their staff should at all cost push for a nuclear reprisal. Before the death of all mankind, advertising revenues would reach record levels as the populace purchased breakfast cereal in bulk as they regressed toward childhood comforts.

“I’m terribly sorry,” said President Melvin Sninkle, “I’m not sure I understand what is meant by that. Can you explain?”

“War. On Space. I... think it’s about time,” said the attractive blonde, seizing upon a feeling of confidence that kept escaping her when the boring ginger man who had become President tried to make sense of her words. 

If he had mocked her, she later said, it would have been fine. If he had confronted her or said it was stupid, she would not have frozen. But against his earnest attempts to discover meaning, his sincere belief that she must have meant something he simply had not understood, she had no defense.

“I agree! Mr. President, when are we going to take action? The United States has to do something about space!” said a man with a strong cleft chin whose chief skill was doing an impeccable impersonation of a tired and brusque working man. A renowned member of the conservative movement, he was, however, a loyal patron of several manicurist boutiques, had a personal chef, and if one of his working class viewers had ever shaken his hand they would have found it as soft as the pillows in heaven. He had been born to vast wealth and was one of the last Americans who had never known what it was to live without a butler.

Melvin Sninkle was quiet for exactly two minutes and forty-three seconds considering the ramifications of this question. Had he not been doing math for the last several hours, this would have been considered an unforgivable failure in a new President. At two minutes and forty-three seconds, it was the longest Presidential silence since the start of the television age. One shudders to think at the levels of thought that went into previous Presidential statements.

“I think I see what you’re saying. The team spent some time talking about it, but we were worried our thoughts might be too presumptuous,” said President Melvin Sninkle.

He spent an additional five hours in an ad hoc presentation sketching out several ideas his team had prepared for a meteor monitoring and deflection system, explained the importance of the asteroid belt, Jupiter’s gravity, and reusable rockets. He discussed Lagrangian points, and how if detected early enough a small rocket by its mere mass would be enough to deflect a world-killing asteroid. Many of the press left to use the bathroom, presumably based on their own judgement as they had no Congress to guide them, and never returned.

“This all seems expensive, how are we going to afford this? We already have a Capitol to rebuild!” demanded a childless man with an untreated drinking problem who nevertheless looked exactly what television of the age told you a responsible father was supposed to look like. He was widely considered the most fair-minded man in the nation. His chief contribution to the families of the United States had been in supporting policies that gave their jobs to child slaves in other countries and dismantling the economic systems which had previously allowed them to live in unparalleled prosperity.

Melvin Sninkle considered this for a full seven minutes, murmuring quietly with his team, updating a spreadsheet document on the fly in full view of the press.

“We initially calculated this in terms of dollars, but we want to give some perspective. We believe, with an assumed margin of error of about thirty percent, that we should be able to create a sufficiently advanced meteor warning and deflection system with only five-percent of the military budget over the next six years,” said President Melvin Sninkle.

In the end, the system -the second major construction project administered by the Forum- had cost 3.87% of the military budget and was deployed in four years.

“How can you possibly know that?” demanded everyone.

“Well you just watched us go through it… I suppose we deduced it from first principles,” said President Melvin Sninkle, confused by the question.

At last, Chastity Anderson, the most esteemed member of the press, rocketed to her feet. Records cannot be recovered, but it is known that she had been trading a series of encrypted text messages back and forth with what can only be presumed to be the heads of various Intelligence Agencies and arms manufacturers. She strode to the front of the room, a ripple of terror spreading through the other members of the press as they backed away from her in a spreading wave, as each person readied themselves for the collision of an unstoppable force and an immovable object. If Melvin Sninkle represented the new, Chastity Anderson was to every last inch a representative of the old order.

We have not spoken of the Military Industrial Complex, or the Intelligence Agencies, but they were advertisers more fearsome than even the breakfast cereal industry, and she was their chief representative. A vision of fierce beauty and harsh judgement, she had often risen in other press briefings to demand the deaths of kings and the destruction of nations. She had insisted to previous Presidents that bright red lines of blood be drawn in the sand, between those who profited her news network and those who could not afford a winning bid for air time. By her pen she had commanded that Women’s Studies programs be established in stone-age nations and in equal measure celebrated when drone strikes inadvertently annihilated entire wedding parties. It has been speculated that she had been born, as others are born without sight or hearing, with absolutely no sense of proportion. The number of women and children who had learned radical feminism from her advocacy numbered in the hundreds. The number of women and children who had died by her influence could only be estimated in the hundreds of thousands. The bodies of men, whom no one at this age cared to count, numbered in the millions. Accounting for second-order effects and the geographic instability her favored policies caused, her body count rivaled all but the most prolific dictators. She was universally heralded as one of the most liberal voices of her age.

“Who are you? Do you realize you weren’t even elected? You’ve been made President by accident! You can’t expect us to follow this explanation when it’s obvious we were attacked! Don’t you think that at least deserves some comment!” demanded Chastity Anderson, her dark and communicative eyebrows insisting upon conformity to a failing tradition -expressive eyebrows were often confused by most Pre-Forum people as being a sign of vast intelligence- which held at its core that explaining things fully and transparently was no way to discern truth. Although her primary contribution to the public understanding had been to falsely verify the basis of the last several wars, having been credentialed after the fashion of Pre-Forum people -which involved attending a university of high renown that later studies would show left most of its students less capable of modeling reality than when they had entered, as in this age exclusivity was easier to produce than competence- she could not be ignored. She was feared by politicians and press alike for she collected gossip as other women collected luxury brand yoga pants, and on a bad day, never hesitated to destroy a person’s personal and professional reputation for minor breaches of etiquette.

Comparing this to other press briefings, we can see what must have struck the Press Corps as so odd. For you see, Melvin Sninkle had never once introduced himself. He had considered the matter, seen his name on the news, and found his own name to be irrelevant. He had focused solely on communicating to the public what crucial information was available in as open and transparent a way as possible. He had simply not considered himself to be very important, unthinkable as that was for any President of that age.

“I’m Melvin Sninkle. I was the Secretary of Transportation. Because of the move to autonomous vehicles, and the Skin in the Game clause,” -this clause stated that policy-makers would be responsible for any deaths caused by autonomous vehicles and had been inserted in an effort to destroy the entire enterprise. The law had not accounted for the possibility of competence and confidence existing within a single person- “it was considered prudent to assign someone with practical experience with complex systems, artificial intelligence, and pure math. I have several relevant degrees, and a few decades of industry experience, fortunately. My appointment was only supposed to be temporary until some of the more specialized work with the new national transportation AI was completed. I was appointed Designated Survivor at the last meeting of the Cabinet.”

An uproar followed. Was Melvin Sninkle married? Was he gay? Did he have a mustache, or were those just freckles? Where had he been born? What was his stance on abortion? Did he have a favorable opinion on endless war? What did he feel was the most appropriate way for people to use the restroom?

All to which Melvin Sninkle replied, “We have lots of work to do on the Capitol for now, so that’s where I’m going to focus. I know nobody voted for me, so I’m sure nobody cares about my opinions on those kinds of things including myself. The relief effort is still underway and I’ll just plan to keep the lights running and the fires put out until the next election. Please feel free to send any questions or new information to the address provided. We have some ideas for a website to make sure we rebuild the Capitol in a way that makes people happy.”

That last sentence is written on his monument, where in various stages his bronze likeness upholds a spider web made of laser-light. For all that would come later, it is hard not to believe that he did not already understand what he was about to do. It is somehow harder to believe that he moved aside so many seemingly omnipotent institutions by accident while trying to build a website “in a way that makes people happy” than to suppose that he was an agent of a higher power. Even now, it is easier to believe that he was an angel or an alien than it is to think that a single person, trying to do a simple thing to the best of their ability, can change the world.

The press continued to hound him as he left the conference room. Was he planning to update his wardrobe now that he was President? Would there be a new First Pet? What was his favorite film? The press, as they were currently composed, would be almost entirely destroyed by the Forum Index in the following twelve months.

Return to Table of Contents

Go to Next Chapter: The Pre-Forum Government