A la Node

The little voice in the back of my head told me to sign the agreement. It didn’t feel right, but I suppose that was the whole point. After all, doing what felt right was playing right into their hands.

How did I end up here? I ask myself that quite a lot, but the answer bears repeating. Our descendants will remember this day, so let me spell it out, there is an important lesson here about Human ingenuity.
When we first met the Ubos, the human race had just barely gotten off the planet. One tiny little base on the moon, manned about three months out of every year, and that was on the brink of closure every time the deficit slipped up another billion. Well, that was enough; were were, as far as the galactic union of sentient species was concerned, a space-faring people. They welcomed us into a galaxy-wide economic and cultural community that had been developing over hundreds of thousands of years. We were very surprised to find out how naive they were.

Now the Ubos, they seemed to fill most of the administrative roles in the loose-knit confederation of races, they were the ones that handled trade, diplomacy, and coordinating the big decisions. The Ubos were the ones we mostly dealt with, they were facilitators and as close to being leaders as anyone else in the galaxy was. For all that, they were profoundly unsophisticated. Surely they must have, at one time, been aggressive, cunning and sly. You couldn’t evolve by competitive selection pressure without ending up as a sneaky devil, but somewhere along the way, they had let go of everything that had brought them so far. Thousands of years of technology and peace had emasculated them. Well, they had 3 sexes and didn’t really use any of them as males anymore, but you know what I mean.

Now humans, we’re young race. We don’t have the technical skills, the deep science foundations, but one thing we do have is drive. The Ubos haven’t needed to struggle for anything for a long time. The sentient races of the galaxy negotiate zero-sum deals, trade goods with an eye towards every party getting optimum value, and  with the Ubos’ help talk their way though any disagreements that crop up with an obliging courtesy that would make an author of children’s books nauseous. In short, they didn’t try to win.

Well, to be honest, most humans don’t either. Most people operate in the middle of the big bell curve, they do their best and don’t actively try to screw the other guy over. Most people, if asked, would share their pie rather than let someone go without. It’s the narrow end of that curve that drives the world, though, just a handful, it doesn’t take many. Those are the ones who game the system. They push, they find the clever path, and sure, they lie and betray sometimes, because sometimes that’s the clever thing to do.

The point is, all the rest of the world dances to the tune of the clever bastards, because if they don’t, the clever bastards out-compete them. It’s the ones who are out to get everything they can possibly get that make the planet spin on it’s axis. It works in business, works in government, works in life. Those bastards are the gems of humanity, they are why we got out of the ocean, then out of the trees, out into the savanna and eventually owned the whole damn planet to do with as we pleased.

So there we were, young and inexperienced, faced with a whole galaxy of highly advanced technological beings with the power to wipe us out like you’d step on a roach. The fact that they didn’t told us everything we needed to know. In a decade, we had an empire.

Oh, we started out humble. We didn’t have much to sell, not being as advanced as the rest, and in a galaxy where you can make anything you can imagine with a wave of your hand, or tentacle, or whatever, it seemed hopeless. There was a species, though, that seemed to really like apples. Well, not apples, more like the -idea- of apples, since ours were far too high in iron and didn’t have nearly the amount of gallium they preferred. The Ubos did a little bit of talking, and after a bit of work we managed to engineer a low-iron apple with just the right ratio of gallium to cyanide, and we were in business. Couple of billion apples later, we bought ourselves a few spaceships, a pile of alien technology, and the rest is history.

Of course, that apple-loving bunch didn’t need to buy apples from us. They could have made their own, cheaper, faster and easier. They also didn’t really need billions of them for what was, honestly, a niche market. That was the whole thing in a nutshell, though, that was when we really knew we had them by the balls. They did it to help us get a leg up. It wasn’t economics, there was no optimization of capital, no market strategy or future gains on their part.

We put our best lawyers, bankers and politicians on the job. The aliens didn’t seem to have any concept of fine print, any more than they did of free market economies. We wheeled and dealed that little apple seed into a financial colossus in no time. They never lied, and it never occurred to them to look for hidden meanings in our marketing materials. Hell, they didn’t have marketing. We made treaties so complicated even the machine minds couldn’t stand to sift through them, and when they took our word for it that the contents were benign we took whole planets away from them and mortgaged them back.

We build financial packages and monetary bundles and hedged back-filled insurance receivership. We sold them risks and then sold them insurance on those risks, and then sold them market indexed investments to help buffer the insurance costs. We played them like violins. We turned over every rock looking for opportunity, we found every angle on every deal, we took every advantage and sought every weakness. They had all forgotten what it took to make progress, they had forgotten what it was to be driven by the thin end of the bell curve.

I suppose our main mistake was pushing too hard, too fast. It was just so easy, we forgot to even try to be subtle about it. A little slower and we would have been in the driver’s seat permanently, but we pissed off too many bug eyed aliens before we reached that critical market share where nothing would have been able to stop us.

What they did to us was almost too awful to contemplate. First, the Ubos bought out a hand full of planetary mortgages. Not so bad, we thought, though a little unusual. We took the money, it was a good deal. Then a handful of contracts with early withdraw clauses were withdrawn. The penalties for that were stiff, we made a tidy profit, but suddenly we had a bit less power over certain market segments. Then the apple trade dried up, and the several million other Earth-made products stopped selling. The big softies were trying to be hard.

We figured it was a blip. We rolled out the big guns and hit them with a massive public relations and marketing campaign. We schmoozed and and smarmed and slimed our way across the galaxy, friendly, reasonable, apologetic. Sorry guys, just us backwater hayseeds blundering around, didn’t mean any harm, sorry if we offended, here’s our attorney, talk to him and he’ll make everything right for you, promise.

It didn’t work. We put our really clever people on it, we re-negotiated, bluffed, feinted, lied. We tried everything, but somehow they saw us coming every time. No one fell for anything, no one took bait, no one gave us one last chance. We found out why, too. The Ubos had Simulated us.

I hope I didn’t give you the impression that the Ubos were stupid. Naive, trusting, deluded, credulous, all that – but not actually stupid, per se. They collected data. The analyzed the whole human race, every transaction and communication we made. They put it into a big computer somewhere, and voila, they had a simulated Humanity, running at three hundred times normal speed. It was insanely accurate. They knew our next move, and five moves after that. Everything we did they saw coming and countered, every trick we tried they already knew better than we did because of that simulation. Of all the things they could have done to us, blown up our planet, exiled us, repossessed everything we had, this was the worst.

A good old fashioned Human corporate entity has to do absolutely anything it can to make a profit. Anything legal, anything physically possible – if it doesn’t take every single advantage and put profit ahead of every other consideration (most didn’t even bother with the other considerations anymore), some other corporation would do so and put the first one out of business. It was a good system, it honed us into perfect economic machines, it was the selection pressure that drove the greatest cultural evolution ever seen. And then they just held us off like you would hold a child to prevent it from hurting itself. They didn’t destroy, repossess or even rebuke, they just stopped being vulnerable to us. Politely, which made it all the worse.

The humiliation was devastating, but in a way, good for us. It was like being a child, thinking up some clever idea you are sure no one has ever thought before, and when you go to tell your dad he just shuts you down. Rolls his eyes and doesn’t even dignify your idea with a rebuttal, just tells you to go outside and play.

When I was a kid, that just made me angry. That’s the thing about Humans, we don’t just fold up, we get angry and it drives us. We use that humiliation as fuel, and we come back swinging.

That, my friends, is the story behind the little machine voice that guides me. It is the voice of human ingenuity, and did I just detect a hint of surprise in that smooth computer-translated Ubo voice? I think I did. They didn’t expect the humans to accept so easily, their simulation got it wrong this time. It will continue to get us wrong. They are clever, I give them that, but we can look at data too. All we have to do is do what the simulation says we won’t. They have their simulation, and we have our anti-simulation.

As representative of the Human Joint Board of Commissioners, I signed the agreement. It was a silly thing, trade routes through our territory, releasing the apple genome under a free license, and a few other little things. Lousy agreement, it gains us nothing, but the Ubos asked because it helps out two other parties. The important thing is, that they didn’t predict we’d sign it.

That’s right. We’re back, and we’ve got them right where we want them.

The Thin End of the Curve by Kenneth Lett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.