Story Stub Saturday
Hi there, and welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles. I’m your host, Paul Logan. Today is Story Stub Saturday. If you’re new around here, that means that on Saturdays we like to stub out short fiction. If the community enjoys it, we’ll circle back to expand on the world later. If not, well, you won’t have to see any more of it! Settle in, our stub today is EMPIR.
EMPIR
The State Ministry of Empiricism was a massive marble rectangle of a building, all clean straight lines and huge sloping staircases. Though thousands seemed to be swarming in and out of it, they all waited their place patiently in line. It was quite orderly;' Ratchet expected as much. When your agency controls factuality, it better well have a stately presence.
She arrived at Hall 8B, the Secondary Sporting Department; a room massive, blank and white as the building holding it. Thousands of cubicles filled the hall, sat in 26 neat rows (labeled A-Z) which spanned a length of at least two football fields. She could barely make out the end of the row as a pinprick. Nine stories of empty space loomed above it, capped by a near-blank white ceiling.
I say near-blank because the crisp white plane of every surface of the hall was marred by a phrase inked in bold letters the size of city buses:
IS THIS MEASURE EMPIRICAL?
Ratchet suspected if the room was emptied and viewed from above, the floor would match the walls and ceiling. Her suspicions were confirmed as she stalked the rows of cubes to reach 228Q, her new home. Her heels clacked on bleach-white marble flooring all the way there, but she found her cubicle (and the floor around it) all black. She looked to the ceiling to see what letter she was sat on, but realized after a second that the phrase could be flipped, rather than mirrored, on the floor. She’d begun to stalk the outlines of the floor letter when an sounded like the clicking of a blue whale’s ballpoint pen drew her back to reality. The first quarter-hour of the workday had passed. She’d sort out the grid math to determine her letter later.
The walls of her cubicle were, of course, blank white. Her desk was entirely bare, made of white-matte sheet metal that felt cool to the touch. There were three stacks of papers neatly arranged on the surface in front of a cheap office chair.
Without sitting down, Ratchet clacked over and read the top page in each stack.
The first one read:
Measure Name: Passion
Target: Dopamine
Quality: Passion
Field: Dressage
Unit: ppm/hr
The second:
Measure Name: Dodgyness
Target: Dodges
Quality: Ability to dodge
Field: Dodgeball
Unit: Dodges / Game / Season
The third:
Measure Name: Kookoburra
Target: Flip flops
Quality: Speed
Field: Kingston Park Elementary Foursquare Variant 12A
Unit: Turn Overs
She looked up over the shoulder-height cubicle wall, down another few hundred rows, to the black lettering that must have been 3 stories tall
IS THIS MEASURE EMPIRICAL?
Ratchet sighed, and slid out the large drawer under the desktop that at some point maybe held a keyboard or pens, but now contained a single unmarked matte-white rectangular tin. She picked up up and tore at the plastic wrapping with her teeth. It crinkled in resistance, but eventually tore free along some invisible perforation. She discarded the wrapping in a blocky white trash bin and flipped open the lid, whose underside hid the relief of a logo:
DECIDL™️
It was filled with similarly unmarked, matte-white rectangular tabs. Ratchet mused that maybe they, too, had a logo hidden inside. Another massive pen-click sounded to mark the passage of the second 15 minute period of the day’s work, and she found she’d been staring at the pills while her thoughts wandered. She glanced up at the wall.
IS THIS MEASURE EMPIRICAL?
Ratchet took a deep breath, as if about to dive into a deep pool. In one flurry of motion, she took a tab and placed it under her tongue, closed the tin, placed it back in the small indent in the center of the drawer, and closed the drawer with a BANG. A sound meter next to the entrance to her cubicle spiked red with the slam, and half a second later the security bracelet on her left wrist chimed with a noise chastisement. Someone in the cubicle next to her muttered something. They sounded unhappy.
Ratchet’s cheeks flushed. Not even 30 minutes into her first day and already causing trouble. In her dramas the Ministry paid close attention to black marks on social records. She flicked her tongue to the floor of her mouth, only to find the tablet had already dissolved.
Had the Decidl™️ kicked in? Ratchet glanced around the white features of her cubicle. Would she still feel like her? Or would some ghoul she carried in her emerge to act clinically in her stead? Her heart began to race as she anticipated the drug’s effects, but then calmed as suddenly as it had started. She felt her muscles relax. There was a sudden slack between her shoulders, her eyebrows, her legs. It that felt ghostly; a negative of tension. The space where tension had been.
She reached for emotion— confusion, distress, surprise— only to find they wouldn’t answer her call. It was as if her body was now as sensitive and responsive as a suit of metal armor encasing her soul. She felt she floated at the center of a pure white box, and was too far from the walls or floor to gain any purchase with which to feel. She knew, factually, that some other her might have felt lessened by that lack of feedback, but instead she just felt… steady. She glanced up at the wall at the end of the hall, and its giant message:
IS THIS MEASURE EMPIRICAL?
Mechanically, her hand moved to pull the leftmost stack of paper towards her. She glanced over its cover sheet again:
Measure Name: Passion
Target: Dopamine
Quality: Passion
Field: Dressage
Unit: ppm/hr
She brought up her hand to turn the page and found a pen in it. She hadn’t remembered deciding to get one out, but there it was. The drawer next to her was now open. It contained some basic office supplies and two large rubber stamps with green and red ink pads.
In training, they’d mentioned Decidl could have some “odd” effects on perception of time. Maybe this was what they meant? She’d only skimmed the title page. Had her hand just acted on its own?
She shrugged, and looked back to find the page turned. The second page featured a black and white picture of a horse and its rider wearing identical helmets. They looked like colanders had been added as costume requirements. Ratchet prepared to stifle a giggle, but none came.
The next page showed a diagram of the odd helmets, including what looked like a spike of metal protruding inwards that should have made the helmet impossible to wear as shown in the picture on page 2. The spike was labeled “dopamine sensory apparatus.” Page 4 provided abstracts for two separate surgical procedures to allow a horse and rider to wear the helmets.
“Oh.” Ratchet normally would have found it quite cruel to cut into an animal’s brain against its will; today she found she had already accepted invasive surgery as a cost of doing business. She flipped back to the cover sheet again, and found it had a backside that explained the project had been funded by the Dressage Federation in a bid to qualify for as a Class A empirically-measured Olympic event.
The Olympics had been a bit boring since subjective measurement was outlawed. Ratchet found herself intrigued by the potential to definitively measure passion. What useful, delicious data.
She read through the whole report, underlining procedure and potential problems with measurement. The measurements needed to establish baseline for individuals because levels of neurotransmitters vary from person to person (and horse to horse). The procedure was expensive, risky, and had killed several horses and one rider already. But…
The Dressage Federation argued without the publicity of the Olympics and the introduction of impartial measurement, the culture of horse ballet was soon to die out. Was it not worth a few lives to continue this great tradition? Their strongest argument was that a quantitative measure of passion might allow the reintroduction of subjectivity-banned activities like spoken word poetry and art. It all starts with Dressage.
Ratchet did miss art. She knew this intellectually, even if she couldn’t feel the normal twisted rage in her stomach. She looked up again.
IS THIS MEASURE EMPIRICAL?
When she looked down, the report was sitting closed on her desk, with the word “objective” stamped on the cover in still-drying green ink.
Another thunderous pen click swept the hall. Reading the horse paper had felt like hours, not 15 minutes. She wondered if she had been too hasty in approving the paper, but the security bracelet buzzed a reward tone when she picked up the document again. There was a sound like the tick of a latch opening, and a panel on the cubicle wall next to her opened, revealing a chute marked “Objective.” Ratchet dropped the report into the chute, and the bracelet buzzed another reward.
That was it then. Easy. She grabbed the second report.
Measure Name: Dodgyness
Target: Dodges
Quality: Ability to dodge
Field: Dodgeball
Unit: Dodges / Game / Season
Flipping through, it seemed to be mostly made up of an argument about the furthest distance a player could be from a ball in flight to have their movements considered a dodge. It proposed various methodologies using high speed cameras and impartial judges.
The word judges piqued Ratchet’s interest, though she couldn’t say why. She flipped to the section on interpretation of recordings and found that it proposed an AI solution to distance measurement in video that was not yet approved by the State Ministry of Empiricism’s intelligence division. The report proposed human referees as a stopgap. The training had been clear as day about the involvement of human sensory judgement in empirical measurement.
Red ink still drying on the "Subjective” stamp, report #2 found its way into a similarly labeled chute, also hidden in Ratchet’s cubicle wall. The bracelet buzzed its pleasure.
Driven onwards, Ratchet grabbed the third report.
Measure Name: Kookoburra
Target: Flip flops
Quality: Speed
Field: Kingston Park Elementary Foursquare Variant 12A
Unit: Turn Overs
By size alone it looked anemic in comparison to its predecessors. Ratchet had no idea what the title sheet was on about, and was surprised to find that when she turned the page the rest of the report was written in crayon. It ended with a note that read:
“Miss Finley says if we don’t play foursquare objectively then we can’t play at all; or else we’ll go away forever like our old teacher and Raymond’s parents. Please say yes.”
Ratchet rejected the report out of hand, and sent it into the subjectivity chute. The bracelet buzzed, and sent shivers of ecstasy up her arm. No sooner had the chute door closed than the next Ka-Chunk swept the hall, marking the hour.
What to do now? She’d completed all of her work. Was she to just sit here? Maybe she would go trace the letter her desk was on, put that mystery to bed before she could waste any more time thinking about it.
Before she could stand from her chair, a notecard slid across her desk and stopped in front of her. She found herself unsurprised, despite not seeing any place it could have come from.
Ratchet picked it up, and read it carefully.
Ms. Park,
In recognition of your exceptional talent, demonstrably first percentile processing speed, and diligence and service to the Empir, you have been promoted to Objectocrat; 2nd Order . Report to central processing for re-assignment.
Many Thanks,
Management
Still under the influence of Decidl, Ratchet couldn’t summon joy or delight at the promotion. She turned to gather her things, and found her bag already clutched in her hands. She went to put away the pen and stamps, but they had already been returned to their drawer. She went to stand up, and found her heels already clacking away on pure white floor. She slid through the sea of cubicles, and wondered if every hall in the building was like this. Was that even possible? This place would have to be massive.
Her eyes flicked to the wall above the door she had entered through, and was now on her way to leave though. She noticed this wall’s slogan wasn’t the same as every other surface in hall 8B. If she could feel anything, this new phrase might have made her feel disquiet:
IS THIS PERSON EMPIRICAL?
Conclusion
That’s the end of Part 1 of Empir! There’s no Part 2 unless you ask me for it, so let me know what you think in the comments, or on twitter.
I would vote for a part 2!
I think anything you can add to this will ruin the impact. But I liked it.