11.5- The New Protocols

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 11.5: The New Protocols

We left off last time with the election of 2244, which saw a complete turnover of Omnicore's board of directors.

It was the end of an era, and no matter what, this would have been a momentous turning point in the history of the company.

Vernon Bird and his geriatric board had been in power for nearly 90 years, and now suddenly, they weren't.

So whatever happened next, Omnicore would be moving in a new direction.

But it is a really super momentous turning point in the history of Omnicore, and the history of humanity generally, because it just so happened that this new direction led directly to the Martian Revolution.

Now the first thing the new board of directors did was select a new CEO.

If you will recall from last time, after the death of Vernon Bird, the board of directors, or more precisely the aides and secretaries who were actually running the show, announced that Karen Killingsworth would replace the late Byrd on March 8th, 2244.

Her tenure as CEO wound up lasting just over nine months, because on December the 12th, 2244, the new Board of Directors convened for the first time, and their first order of business was electing a new CEO.

Maybe, I don't know, somebody under the age of like 75.

There were several contenders for the job, high-ranking Omnicore executives who commanded enough support among the new members of the board to consider themselves viable candidates.

And though obviously we know who's actually going to win, there are two names I want to throw out there because both of them will come back.

One was Jin Wong, who had risen to become head of the legal division in the late 2230s.

The other was Kamal Singh, who was head of personnel.

Both were powerful and influential executives, especially given the autonomous latitude division heads had acquired during the later Bird years.

But neither Wong nor Singh commanded as many votes on the board as young Timothy Werner.

Werner was not only the youngest candidate by far, he was still only 45 years old, but was also still technically just another executive from the finance division, not even its leader.

In age, seniority, and title, Timothy Werner sat well below both Wong and Sing.

But Werner had three big things going for him.

First, he had become the face of reform in the 2230s and early 2240s.

Second, he was popular with the shareholders.

And third, Both the Werners and his in-laws, the Cartiers, were enormously influential among the S-class elite.

And so it was that when the Board of Directors convened, they selected Timothy Werner to be the new CEO of Omnicore.

He received 34 votes, Singh received 9, Wong received 7, and two other nobodies who you don't need to worry about each got one.

So young Timothy Werner is now CEO of Omnicor.

Now just to wrap up one part of our story here, The first thing that happened was a house cleaning at the top.

With all the old board members turned out, the clique of aides and secretaries and assistants who had really been running Omnicorp for the last 50 or so years went with them.

None of them had ever technically held a title higher than personal assistant or executive aid.

Werner and the new members of the board had their own personal assistants and executive aides, and so those who had surrounded the geriatric board were simply let go or demoted or reassigned.

They went from being supremely powerful to abjectly powerless, practically overnight.

And it was real not with a bang but a whimper for that crew.

So we're going to go ahead and dump them into the dustbin of history.

But before we do, I wanted to say that if you're interested in diving deeper into them, I highly recommend The Rise and Fall of the Chamberlains by Emil Satoshi, who covers the 50-odd years when this bureaucratic clique reigned supreme, from their slow accumulation of de facto power in the 2190s through their abrupt and ignominious departure here at the end of 2244.

So Timothy Werner entered 2245 with a mandate for vigorous reform and change, and he did not plan to disappoint.

Remember from last week he had this unshakable belief that he could master any subject, and not just master, but so keenly examine and deconstruct any subject that he could then put it back together in a superior form.

Werner typically took any criticism of his results not as evidence that he was wrong, but that the critic lacked the intellectual capacity to see that Werner was actually right.

But here, Werner suffered from an illusion that lots of people convinced of their own superior intelligence suffer from.

The idea that because they are smart as an inborn personality trait, that meant whatever they thought must automatically be a smart thought.

I mean, how could it not be?

I am smart, therefore the thoughts I have must be smart.

QED.

This, paired with Werner's total faith in his own ability to reason his way from first principles to new and better conclusions, meant that he thought he knew better than any expert on any subject.

That in fact he knew better because they were experts.

Expertise to him was nothing more than a sign you were a master of outdated ways of thinking.

So like as I said last time, yes he published his thoughts on Rembrandt and beekeeping and orbital platform engineering, but most of that was met with incredulous scoffing from experts on Rembrandt, beekeeping, and orbital platform engineering.

But not only did Werner not care, he actually took it as proof that he was right.

And also, if you weren't a subject matter expert, then a lot of what Werner wrote and said and suggested sounded good and persuasive.

Visionary even.

Werner's meteoric rise up the org chart on a platform of vigorous reform only confirmed his belief that he knew best.

He entered his tenure as CEO with a vast array of ideas that he believed would improve every facet of Omnicor.

The era of sloth, dysfunction, and neglectful drift was over.

He first ordered every division to submit a full accounting of the present state of their operations, which he would personally review and then incorporate into a larger plan he was developing for the company.

A plan that would come to be called the New Protocols.

Dun-dun-dun.

Now, there were a lot of different aspects to the new protocols.

The main pillars were composed of three interlocking components, administration, technology, and personnel.

And so I want to start here by examining each of those pillars in turn.

When it came to administration, Werner's overarching goal was to reintegrate Omnicore, to once again make it a single unit by re-centralizing decision-making, logistical coordination, and operational planning.

Through a combination of corruption, neglect, and inertial decay, the company had become a collection of coexisting divisions, not operating with anything resembling a common plan, larger purpose, or vision for the future.

But this was about more than simply returning to former ways of doing things.

Werner believed that Omnicore could become even better if they leaped from being an uncoordinated jumble of sometimes redundant and sometimes contradictory divisions and became a smooth and streamlined body controlled by a single brain.

And who would be that brain?

Well, him, of course.

Convinced as he was that he could thoroughly master all aspects of company operations, the new protocols mandated nearly every decision run through Werner's office.

He was confident he would be able to quickly assess requests in the context of the whole company and issue the best possible decisions.

And how would would he know they were the best decisions?

Well, he would know because they were his decisions.

What more did you need to know?

He believed this kind of central decision-making would dramatically improve efficiency and lead to streamlined and frictionless operational coordination.

On the technological front, OmniCore was suffering from a very real problem.

Nearly all of their software and hardware was out of date.

not just by years, but by decades.

This was the result of what I was talking about when I said that anything that wasn't an immediate emergency was ignored during the later bird years.

Upgrades, replacements, advancements, overhauls, innovations, all of that had been neglected for most of the 23rd century.

So when it came to databases and processors, flex cells, spaceships, fabricators, networks, infrastructure, everywhere Timothy Werner looked, he saw an opportunity for technological advancement.

So the new protocols mandated immediate software updates and direction to the manufacturing divisions to ramp up output of state-of-the-art equipment to replace all the outdated models.

It wouldn't very well work for the new protocols to give the company a new brain if the body was a broken-down wreck.

When the new protocols were published, each section included an introduction written by Werner himself.

In this section on technology he wrote, quote, What if every part of the ship of Theseus was replaced not by the same part, but by an improved part?

What if the ship of Theseus became the starship of Theseus?

That is what we will do.

Finally, there was the matter of personnel.

Here the problem was simple.

There was too much bloat and too much redundancy.

Especially recently as various divisions became little independent fiefdoms.

The finance division didn't need a legal department.

The legal division didn't need a finance department.

Part of the reason Omnicorp was getting bogged down in the mud was because it was too heavy, weighed down by too many unnecessary people.

Werner opened this section in the new protocols with the inverted epigram, Fewer hands make for lighter work.

Some people were going to have to lose their jobs, and while that was lamentable, it was all for the greater good, because what emerged would be stronger, sleeker, and faster than ever.

And that is really what mattered.

Now though Werner was keen to roll out his new protocols company-wide, he did decide that it would be best to do it in stages.

And since the most important part of the operation was Phosph, he focussed on that first.

That meant that the new protocols would be rolled out on Mars and the shipping operations transporting FOSS5 back to Earth.

And it is very funny to read the chat logs from Werner's office talking about projected increases in productivity that predicted double-digit growth in PHS5 extraction every single year for the foreseeable future after the implementation of the new protocols, just kind of because.

To call these projections optimistic is to insufficiently convey how fantasyland they were.

But because the first thing the new protocols did was centralize decision-making around a single brain, if that brain ever became delusional, well, it's very difficult to get your brain to believe it's not delusional.

After all, your brain is saying, hey, I'm okay, they're the ones who are crazy, and that pretty much settles that.

So just six months after becoming CEO, Werner was ready to roll out the new protocols for Mars.

The present director of Mars Division, an S-Class executive named Apollo Tanaka, who had been on Mars for about three years, knew that Werner was working on some kind of company reform project.

After all, he too had delivered a full accounting of Martian operations as commanded at the beginning of the year.

In July 2245, Tanaka was tipped off by friends at headquarters that Mars would be the first division to have these new protocols implemented, whatever they were.

But as late as July 25th, he had no idea when they would take effect nor what they would entail.

But the very next day, he was formally notified that a new set of protocols would take effect on August 1st.

What was in these new protocols?

He still did not know.

He would not know until July 28th, when headquarters finally sent him a draft.

What he saw made his eyes go wide as dinner plates.

Now remember, one of the main effects of the geriatric drift had been increasing the operational independence of Mars.

The colonial authorities right there in the prime dome of Olympus had been the ultimate decision-maker for years.

Not every decision was was right, and plenty of choices made by the Mars Division authorities caused stress and resentment inside the population, but there was at least a basic understanding of how things ran, who did what, and why they were doing it.

They had institutional awareness of how many people were needed to do this or that job, what was a priority and what wasn't.

And perhaps most importantly, when a decision needed to be made, it was made quickly right there on Mars.

As corrupt as the black market key log system had been, at least decisions were being made.

But now it appeared like every single decision, practically no matter how insignificant, was going to be routed through Timothy Werner's office?

Tanaka in fact realized that under this system his role as head of Mars division was about to be reduced to simply forwarding mail.

But there was nothing to be done about it, and practically no time to react or prepare.

Because on August the 1st, 2245, the new protocols took effect on Mars.

The impact was disruptively abrupt.

In the first first week, the colonial authorities simply scrambled to keep track of who needed what and who wasn't getting what.

Because as routine operational demands cropped up, budget changes, supply requests, shipping schedule updates, maintenance orders, they all had to be forwarded to Earth headquarters, where Werner would read them one by one, approving, denying, or amending whatever came across his desk.

When Tanaka and the colonial authorities tried to respond to one of Werner's denials or amendments by saying, but that's the way it's always been done, well, that only made things worse.

Werner's whole thing was that he needed to take a fresh look at everything.

Any request that carried even a whiff of, that's the way it's always been done, meant that request needed extra scrutiny, so a new and better way could be decreed.

It did not take long for the Martians to start receiving responses that altered operational routines in ways no sane person on the ground would have ever recommended.

And a sinking feeling started to settle in.

Meanwhile, the new protocols also mandated technological changes that exacerbated this problem.

Though new hardware was of course not ready to be shipped or swapped out, the new protocols demanded immediate software updates to all computer systems on Mars.

Of particular importance were firmware updates meant to improve the efficiency of existing hardware.

Werner himself loved the firmware updates, as he had helped draft some of the code personally in order to get it just right.

But it wasn't just right.

At all.

In fact, it was hastily compiled, insufficiently tested, and did not at all consider the actual lived realities on Mars.

But out they went.

Mars Division was ordered to hand control their networks over to Earth Headquarters, and then Earth Headquarters started pressing the update button.

Update, update, update.

All that was left for them to do was sit back and bask in the efficiency of it all.

10% increased production every year in perpetuity just at the push of a button.

God, this was easy.

But we would not be here talking about a revolution on Mars if things were that easy.

As soon as the software updates rolled out, glitches, errors, malfunctions, and outright failures swept Mars like a plague of digital locusts.

This plague affected every aspect of Martian existence from critical operations to just run-of-the-mill quotidian life.

For example, when drone bots at the FOSS5 extraction sites malfunctioned, which they often did, they were plugged into diagnostic machines for evaluation and repair.

But after the new protocols took effect, the diagnostic machines couldn't talk to the drone bots at least half the time.

This tied up crews who had to do repairs manually, slowed down production as the number of functional drone bots steadily eroded.

The impact on productivity was immediate, and it was not good.

Then, after spending all day on the job dealing with frustratingly dysfunctional equipment, the D-Class techs and their C-class supervisors would return to their respective housing allotments and face annoying little indignities.

Skin chip scanners wouldn't work unless you held your hand at a very specific angle and held it for a very specific amount of time.

Even then sometimes you couldn't even get a door to open.

Menus at food bars and drink holes got scrambled and misorders abounded.

Battery packs that ran small personal electronics no longer accepted power from their charging units, so access to entertainment was severely disrupted as screens started going black with no possibility of powering them back up.

These bugs, malfunctions, and glitches abounded through all levels of Martian society.

Up among the Sab elite, most of the chat logs used for internal communication were quote-unquote upgraded to new interfaces that were inscrutable, opaque, and thoroughly non-intuitive.

Menu functions changed, heavily used features were hidden or eliminated without explanation.

Sync links, the most basic way of sharing files, was taken away from them entirely because everyone was supposed to start using a new, better program called OneTouch.

Except OneTouch quite literally never worked because of a single missing semicolon in the code.

The SAB started referring to it as none touch, and though they tried to grimly joke their way through it, the fact was that management of Mars Division did have critical functions to perform, and they did need to communicate with each other, and they were finding it impossible to do so.

This was of course a horrible time for management to lose the ability to communicate with each other because this is happening right at a moment of cascading problems, breakdowns, and malfunctions.

The whole thing was a giant, frustrating fiasco.

Director Apollo Tanaka and the other S-Class leaders of Mars Division attempted to communicate this back to Werner and his team on Earth, but the response they got was, change can be difficult, and while we understand that being stuck in old ways and having to learn new things is hard, complaining about it is not a solution.

Okay, well, if complaining about it isn't a solution, I can promise you they're about to start trying other things.

Now to shift gears here, The other part of Omnicore's operation that was affected by the new protocols were the spaceshippers.

Now I briefly mentioned the spaceshipers in our first episode about the initial colonization of Mars, but right now is a great time to more fully introduce them because they play such a huge part in the coming revolution and the new protocols are a big reason why.

Now the spaceshipers were all of those ships traveling back and forth between the Earth and Mars.

The most important part of this was the fleet of FOSS-5 container ships running a continuous circuit back and forth.

Each ship was run by about 100 crew members, give or take, who were needed both to run the container ship and maintain and monitor the special containment systems that kept the FOSS5 viable and intact.

By the 2230s, there were roughly 350 of these container ships in operation at any given time, and they were found in one of four places.

They were either orbiting Mars for onloading from the railguns that blasted FOS5 payloads into orbit, They were en route from Mars to Earth, they were docked at Lunaport for offloading, or they were making the return trip back to Mars.

Each FOSS-5 container ship also came with a small escort of three security ships.

Each of these ships had a crew of about a dozen, and they were armed mostly with drone bombs.

So, there's about a thousand of those in service in the 2240s.

And though there had not been a space battle since the Battle of the Line back in 2154, OmniCorps was taking absolutely no chances.

Now in the insular community of the shippers that took root on the moon, the crews manning the FOSS-5 runs were the head of the pack.

Even during the most neglectful periods of the later bird years, the aides and secretaries running headquarters always prioritized the FOSS-5 ships and their crews.

When everyone else was neglected, the FOSS 5 crews were relatively pampered.

Now beyond the core FOSS-5 container fleet, there was a bunch of other ships, big and small, handling all the other shipping business.

Now Mars could mostly provide basic sustenance for itself from biomass units and had nascent fabrication and manufacturing operations, but they still depended on a huge variety of goods and equipment from Earth in order to keep the three colonial cities operating properly.

There was also naturally a host of other non-essential luxury items, the kinds of things you don't need to survive, but which make life pleasant.

And there was an old joke, what's the difference between Martian coffee and extraction lubricant?

The extraction lubricant tastes good?

In addition to goods, there was also people constantly in motion.

New colonists were traveling out, people completing their tours on Mars were coming back.

There was even at this point a nascent tourism industry.

And there was also, I should mention, another branch of the shipping lanes not between Mars and Earth, but between Mars and the asteroid belt, focused entirely on ice extraction to provide Mars with water.

This ice was drawn both from random asteroids, but also the dwarf planet Ceres, which had a permanent ice mining operation.

So there was a buzzing stream of spaceships plying the lines between the Earth and Mars and Mars and the asteroid belt, and they all traced traced their orbits around the Sun.

But this was not exactly a lucrative business.

Most of the shippers barely made ends meet from their official cargo loads.

Except for the FOSS-5 crews, none of them were technically employees of Omnicore, but instead independent contractors making just enough to keep their heads above water.

This only got worse in the 23rd century as pay rates stayed the same, while the cost of maintaining their ships rose due to steady contraction of available parts thanks to long-standing OmniCore neglect of basic maintenance procedures.

So the shippers turned to the option that has been available to people running trade routes for all of human history, and that is smuggling.

Omnicor naturally demanded that only Omnicore products be shipped to Mars.

But just because Omnicore was the largest corporation on Earth, that didn't mean they were the only corporation on Earth, and it certainly did not mean that their products were the best products.

CalCor handscreens, for example, were far more reliable.

T Corps boots came with heels that did not detach after a year, to say nothing of the robust trade in illegal drugs.

Stims, drags, and feels were all supposed to be tightly monitored, but found ready buyers if boxes ever just, you know, magically appeared on Mars.

By the 2240s, practically every shipper was involved in some kind of smuggling, you practically had to be.

And in the close-knit community of shippers, everyone knew that everybody else was doing it, and they were all highly adept at never talking about it.

Because squealers get spaced.

Now the reason I'm introducing the shippers here today is because of the impact of the new protocols, and it hit the shippers particularly hard.

And if we're looking for sort of second-order causes of the Martian Revolution, things that explain how and why mass discontentment on Mars actually translates into a feasible independence project, well, it's because of the discontentment of the spaceshippers.

If the shippers aren't angry, they don't side with the Martians.

And if they don't side with the Martians, there's no Martian Navy.

And no Martian Navy, well, it's pretty impossible to see how any of it would have worked without the Martian Navy.

So the new protocols aggravated the space shippers just like they aggravated the people on Mars.

Dozens of daily annoyances, there were new interfaces, shipping schedule redesigns, docking, onboarding, and offloading backlogs.

But there were really two critical impacts.

First, the long-pampered crews of the FOSS5 container shippers and their security escorts started feeling disrespected.

Their needs had always come first.

But with the blanket rollout of the new protocols, they were put on the same level as everybody else, waiting to find out what Timothy Werner had to say about what they had requested.

So for the first time, they started dealing with the dread request pending just like everyone else.

And they were frankly incensed.

The other major impact was on everyone's smuggling operations.

Now in this sense, the new protocols were, strictly speaking, wildly successful.

Several innovative inventory review processes and upgraded location tracking services intruded directly into long-standing smuggling routines, as they were meant to.

Now the shippers had long since mastered the art of circumventing, fooling, or ignoring the previous sets of rules and administrators, but these new ones disrupted all their ways of doing business.

Plus, the backlogs caused by operational delays everywhere meant that the rhythm of their operations was suddenly thrown out of whack.

They didn't have time to do all of the smuggling that they needed to do to survive.

And smuggling was critical to their way of life.

So all of this was not just annoying, it was existentially threatening.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Timothy Werner and his team were convinced that all the complaining was simply people too stuck in old mentalities to appreciate that they were involved in a triumphant story of rebirth and renewal.

That yes, there would be some growing pains, but if everyone just got on board, it wouldn't just be okay in the end, it would be way better in the end.

Werner persisted in his belief that if everyone stuck to the plan and timeline included in the appendix of the new protocols, it would be like rivers of gravy cascading down from Big Rock Candy Mountain.

But next week, Timothy Werner will be in for a rude awakening.

When the final yearly reports posted at the end of December 2245, They showed not an immediate jump in Phosph productivity, nor even that it held steady, nor even that it was a slight drop.

It showed a big drop, a precipitous drop, a downright alarming drop.

And it would convince Timothy Werner that the only way to get the Martians back on track, to get them on board with the new protocols, was to board a ship and go to Mars.

Oh, watch your step.

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Dark?

I know, right?

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Play me.

What movie is that?

I haven't pressed play yet.

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Jimmy, what have I told you about scaring our guests?

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