the night of paranoid probabilities

Delphi, Greece (Photo credit: Mr G’s Travels)

Last night I dreamed that I had returned to Tennessee and was looking for a job, but wherever I went my efforts were being sabotaged by some unseen entity. I had spent the last ten years of my life working on a huge computer modeling system for the government. We called it Delphi, the Probability Machine. I was the creator and chief systems architect for the system. Originally, it was designed to model scenarios and probabilities for the Department of Defense. For example, what might happen if two nuclear tipped missiles were lost in the Mediterranean Sea from an aircraft carrier? Delphi would model and predict how fast our enemies, from terrorist groups to foreign countries, would find out about the incident and how they would respond to it. Over time, though, Delphi was tied directly into huge information gathering systems at the National Security Agency. It began modeling more and more activities and scenarios that were not specifically defense related. Recently, the administration began using it to predict how the population would respond to their actions and what they needed to do to get re-elected and stay in power. I realized that Delphi was being misused and was trying to think of what I should do about it, when Delphi predicted that I was a threat and would try to shut it down. So, I was fired from my job and lost my clearance, which was how I had found myself back in Tennessee with everyone seemingly against me. How could I compete against my own creation that could predict everything that I was likely do before I could even think to do it myself?

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