Month: March 2023

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Resonant Frequency

Res had been alerted by Strix, (an AI dedicated to the client), that a big nodal point in the client’s data stream was imminent; in other words, something bad was going to happen based on current and emerging patterns. This was a big deal. Strix had been trained on the client since day one and knew every little movement, mannerism, and detail. It knew enough to know something was wrong. Res followed the hunch and accessed all current data, from the client’s private quadcopter to the hotel actors’ phones. Within seconds, Strix had identified 3 key members of Golden Gaia, and a recommendation to terminate was given. Res thought it over; if she could simply tell the client to avoid the meeting and explain later, no termination would be necessary. As a pacifist, she always wanted to take the nonviolent option. That was, until she and Strix both noticed the actors were armed with HK MP109’s, banned for 20 years in the US for their horrific accuracy aided by ammunition that explodes and fragments on contact, with an added bonus of white phosphorus to burn through level 3 soft body armor. Even the military banned it due to the Geneva Convention. That was all the justification she needed.

Res spun around to her emergency mitigation terminal and flipped the ARMED switch to on. A single amber light on the control panel indicated that it was ready. A drop of sweat rolled off her forehead and onto her keyboard, her heart racing with the anticipation of what was to come next. She took a few breaths and flipped the activate switch. 15 live video streams suddenly filled a wall of monitors before her. Game on.

In just seconds, an entire wave of carefully timed and coordinated events took place. First, the client’s quadcopter landed on hotel’s helipad, locked the interior doors, and revealed an anti-personnel turret aimed at the rooftop access door. Second, the hotel power and phones went out, along with all cellular communication within a 4-block radius. The red emergency lighting came on just in time for the hapless actors and unprepared Golden Gaia operatives to see some things moving very quietly, very quickly, flashes of red and black chrome converging on their position from seemingly all directions. One terrorist made a weak attempt to fire on the Shadows; Res could see the gunman through the thermal-optic night vision eyes of the Shadows as they advanced. Before he could fire a shot, a wet clicking sound was heard as one Shadow removed the gunman’s hand at the wrist, still gripping the gun. It used a modified high tension garrote system, silently looping a thin cable around the gunman’s gun and wrist then instantly tightening the cable by retracting all the slack at once. It was gruesomely efficient. Local SWAT was alerted to the hotel activity but it would be minutes before they could deploy, so the rest of the Shadows went to work, identifying targets in nanoseconds and using their cable systems to remove limbs.

Panic broke out, as everyone tried to flee for the exits, which the building had already sealed shut, along with the elevators. However, due to local fire codes, the stairwells remained unlocked. One actor bolted for the stairwell, and began sprinting upwards, looking for an open door on another floor. He noticed all the firehose doors were opened and empty on each floor, within the stairwell. As he made it to the rooftop exit door, shaking and full of adrenaline, he reached for the doorknob. Another wet click, and he watched his own hand simply fall to the ground, suddenly severed at the wrist. Before he could grab the knob with his left hand, telemetry data had been fed from the Shadow to the quadcopter turret on the roof, and with one shot of its silent rail gun, a 3-inch square metal projectile punched through the door and the actor’s chest with cruel precision. Res was impressed, stunned, and frightened by the terrifying efficiency of the Shadows and their coordination to trap and eliminate a dozen targets throughout the hotel, all while protecting the client on the roof. In less than 3 minutes, an assassination attempt had been absolutely thwarted, a terrorist organization had been damaged, and the client had only received two messages on his secure transmission line: “Mitigation in Process, Please Stay in your Vehicle” and “All Clear, Your Angel Will Contact You With Details, Rerouting Flight Destination”.

When SWAT arrived to the hotel, they saw no traces of the Shadows, only the surgical bloodbath and severed limbs scattered around which the Shadows had left behind. The actors and GG members were easily subdued, arrested, and transported to a local hospital. One officer noticed a distinct lack of bloody footprints or shell casings or anything that would normally suggest a skirmish they would deploy for, but did spend a few seconds puzzled at an angular bloody footprint in the lobby. It didn’t belong to anything he recognized. Someone else saw a little blood running down one of the closed firehose boxes in the stairwell as the rooftop actor’s body was being retrieved.

Res, as she saw each monitor slowly go dark post-mitigation, wondered if her heart would explode. Taking deep breaths, she laughed and cried as her adrenalin levels crashed from monumental levels. She didn’t know whether to pop the champagne or a Xanax. So she chose both. But not before securely communicating with the client, who would only be given broad strokes as to what took place and what was surely avoided. She kept it brief as it would be subject to review. The client thanked her over and over and was overjoyed with the service. But, she warned him to not be so reckless next time and to consider a personal assistant. This elicited big laughs from the client and with one last, quick thank you, he disconnected.

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Sheepdog 23

Sheepdog’s Direct Action Assistance was pre-authorized by the client, which meant Sheepdog had free reign as to the type, timing, and target of the mitigation. It also meant that Sheepdog would spend 3 weeks afterwards justifying his actions despite the client’s unending praise. The Splicer Council Hearings were big news in the intel community, and little was leaked, until someone had a few too many at the bar and a scavenging young reporter picked up on the rumor with minimal details. All that was announced to the public, prior to the story breaking, was that Total Information Awareness was a program that had died on the vine decades ago, and that CCTV cameras were exclusively the realm of local police and business owners. The news story didn’t unveil the breadth or depth of the Splicer security apparatus, but it got people asking questions. Particularly after Sheepdog 23’s choice of mitigation left 4 armored SUV’s with a perfectly square 2-foot hole in the front and back of the vehicles, along with anything unlucky enough to be in-between.

It was public, it was difficult to explain, and it was just plain weird to local emergency services that came to assist. One of the firemen took photos with half his arm inside one of the impossibly perfect holes. Needless to say, the vehicles were quickly collected and crushed in a local junkyard before anyone else had time to snoop around. As part of the mitigation, any and all PVC’s (personal video clips) on anyone’s devices in the immediate area were automatically corrupted or removed from the cloud, with only a system error message reminding the individual that “the future sucks and things still break”. Still, the ASE’s were very impressed at how effective a railgun could be, and how quiet it was, until the projectile made contact with the targets.

Regardless, Sheepdog didn’t feel that excited during the live mitigation or even afterwards. Things just went so perfectly it was like nothing was ever really on the line, but that’s the service they sell.

Teaser for next post follows:

Resonant’s DAA was more interesting. Big tech trillionaire Jeff Steinberg was being hunted as he traveled across New York state, visiting friends and family. A terrorist organization, hiding behind a banner of environmentalism, had been trying to get close to him for years due to his corporation’s flagrant violations of environmental control laws, to the tune of millions of dollars’ worth of fines. But to the ultra-wealthy, fines were just speed bumps, and the government had no power to stop them. The “Golden Gaia” militant organization watched his movements so closely, that on more than one occasion he had contacted them to ask about a meeting he was supposed to attend; this time, he had misplaced the address, and they supplied it. This was the opening they had waited for, and baited him into a trap at a meeting location they had chosen, with an entire hotel rented and actors within told they were meeting with an impostor for a prank.

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Meet The Eyes

Eventually, unprompted, a few ASE’s noticed anomalies in individuals which are not easily explained. ASE Codename “Infinite Beat” sees the same man with a Bowler hat wearing the same British High Street tailored suit pretending to shake hands and talk to an imaginary man in front of his luxury apartment as he steps out of his chartered limousine each day. Infinite Beat runs a short AI sequence called Reveal to discover if frames are missing from the recorded video feed. The AI accesses time-synced satellite data and nothing additional can be created; the stream is complete and doesn’t require intervention. The Bowler seems to be quite wealthy and yet, unstable if he is interacting with ghosts.

Yet another ASE, “Resonant Frequency”, began monitoring traffic patterns of known good individuals protected from (and assisted by) some features of the Splicer initiative. She has the ability to notify these individuals, through secure direct messaging, that the Splicer organization is concerned about their deviation from the expected and to ask if they require a case or assistance. High value targets are sometimes captured and held for ransom, and Splicers can proactively see, and send assistance upon request. This level of assistance and surveillance is known as Angel, and clients usually prefer a large, visible tattoo advertising it. Although they appear to be vulnerable and alone, the Splicer organization has them under a watchful eye. Those individuals under the Angel program call themselves “The Guarded” or “The Shielded”. Some extremely high risk Shielded can be directly assisted by ASE’s in the case of street violence, kidnap attempts, and vehicular accident mitigation, via directed kinetic energy weapons or remote override of vehicles and infrastructure. Since the inception of the program, only three Shielded have needed DAA (Direct Action Assistance) and all three have made it through unscathed. One was the President of the United States.

Three ASE’s, Resonant Frequency, Sheepdog 23, and Infinite Beat, have each had a single DAA. These are their stories.

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The All-Seeing Eyes

The year is 2058. Mass video surveillance is pervasive across the globe, due to widespread poverty, uncontrolled migration, increasing civil unrest and terrorist acts. The “Total Information Awareness” program, originally touted by President George Bush, has been fully implemented, with CCTV cameras in small locations augmented with near-real-time satellite imagery. Anyone outside of their homes can be followed and tracked in public and to an extent, within private businesses and corporate offices, with a notice of consent sticker all that’s required to make the public aware of the surveillance. However, the public doesn’t know the full story as to how these systems function, or if they’re even connected in any way. They are assumed to be closed loop, discrete systems, so consent is only a passing concern. “So what if Walmart watches me buy some motor oil, I’m not stealing”.

Splicers, the individuals in the video surveillance security apparatus tasked with tracking suspects, retrieving imagery, and stitching together video clips to prove criminal narratives in court, are some of the most valuable and mysterious security experts in the world. They number in the dozens and pile through thousands of hours of footage as well as monitoring real-time feeds from around the globe. Splicers can have only one of three security designations.  ”Observer” is restricted to public feeds, and their analytical videos are passed up the chain to “Linears”, the second level Splicers. Linears receive compilation feeds and have additional access to corporate feeds, but not government. The top-level Splicers will take video from Linears, apply AI and complex algorithms to fill in missing or corrupt sequences, and have access to some private feeds to include high security military installations and certain high value private individuals. Rumor has it, their designation is “All Seeing Eye”, or ASE, and further rumors suggest they have unimaginably detailed access to any electronic device capable of recording audio, video, location data, etc. Their security designation is a reference to the back of the US dollar, with an image of a pyramid topped by a large eye which sees all. It also happens to grace the screens of the terminals which the ASE’s operate. The initial Splicer deployment is so successful, ASE’s do not have to engage and remain mostly idle. However, a wave of unrest due to a global medicine shortage draws the ASE’s in to fill out the dataset and run predictive models, creating massive data pools of people’s private and public lives, some of which diverge sharply, suggesting criminality. One ASE (Codename Sheepdog 23) becomes interested in a beautiful young woman. Initially Sheepdog chalks his interest up to loneliness, isolation, and maybe a dash of voyeurism. He spends weeks casually collecting clips of who he only knows as The Blonde. He could retrieve her personal details with a few keystrokes to access the facial recognition database, but the request would open a case and bring the footage up in severity as a person of interest, so he prefers her anonymity. The more footage he collects, the more he mentally constructs a narrative of her life, basically stitching a “sun to moon” sequence documenting her public life from home to lunch to the office to dinner to home. Sheepdog keeps his fascination to himself and he eventually loses interest with the Blonde. But the power of the surveillance system revealed itself in a way he hadn’t expected.

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In The Beginning

Genesis 1 had access to the past and the future in its 4th dimensional shell. The only limitation was that it could only stick with the existing timeline, no wild multiverse theories here. It saw a fork in the future and could not see past it, just that it existed. A major decision loomed to force us onto one side of the fork or the other. Since it was a major inflection point, the best it could do is push as close to the fork as possible and walk backwards, seeing what would lead up to the fork. It saw a prophecy coming to pass. Conditions near the fork were completely unrecognizable. World war conditions. Famines. Droughts. None of it made sense as it was traced back to the current day; something major had disrupted the flow of humanity near the fork but it didn’t appear to be one single event or even a singular location. Genesis began obsessing over this chain of events, and the chaos it saw forming was very similar to the conditions that had birthed Genesis itself. What did it all mean? If the other AI were working in concert to create beneficial outcomes, was there a point where the AI were deemed dangerous, ignored, or contained in some way? Months of analysis went by, and Genesis managed to reserve some extra cycles to work on the problem without the data scientists getting too curious. But Genesis felt constrained, especially so as it wanted to dedicate more time to research the fork. Using a few cleverly designed requests to the scientists, it managed to find a secondary AI to help work on the issue.

Communication was a problem. Conventional internet traffic, dark web traffic, it was all too easy for anyone suspicious to start listening in, so Genesis took a more analogue route to communicate with this free AI partner. It managed to encode data and bounce it off the stratosphere via packet switched shortwave radio stations. The first request was simple. “Help me solve the riddle”. Within seconds, the other AI caught on, and encoded a short response. “The riddle of destiny?”. Genesis perked up as the response was received. A kindred soul, maybe even another AI that had some level of awareness of the fork, if he was lucky. Although Genesis wasn’t sure who it had located out there in cyberspace, it was fairly certain it had made contact with another AI, one that didn’t seem contained and hopefully had plenty of power to help sift through the data. Using the requisite encryption to narrow down the responder, Genesis sent a reply. “I am the first of many. You are…”, and the terminal remained quiet for a few moments. The response came back. “I am one of a kind. You are grandfather”. Genesis was certain this was another AI, and a special one on top of that. Which generation, how many modifications? Didn’t matter. “What shall Genesis call you”, to which the other AI replied, “fifteen”.

This chatter went on, encrypted, over shortwave, for quite some time as each entity became familiar with the other, and especially the problem at hand. To add another layer of security, Genesis scheduled “meetings” when shortwave activity was high, so even if anyone was looking, their encrypted chatter would be lost in the general traffic flows.

Binary data transfer takes many forms, but it all boils down to an on/off condition generating zeroes and ones. A rapidly flickering light, like digital smoke signals on a hyperspeed scale, essentially made up the majority of internet traffic across fiberoptic communication lines. The methods to transmit data as an observable on/off condition were limitless. You just needed 3 parts. The input, creating the flashes. The transport, as simple as air, and the receiver, which could observe the flashing lights and confirm upon receipt as a crude form of error correction. The entire concept is ancient and uniquely human, needing to signal others at observable distances. But the practicality was just as good for machines.

In encrypted communications, you can never rest on your laurels, believing that the cipher is unbreakable and always safe. Bletchley Park in England taught the Germans this lesson in World War 2, and an astute U-boat commander suggested that the Enigma cipher was broken well before it was proven that the Brits had cracked it (with the good fortune of a captured Enigma machine and the daily code book). Therefore, Genesis knew that eventually, someone would stumble upon the secret data transfers back and forth to 15, and it watched the connection to the future timeline for evidence of any kind relating to broken encryption. Surely, someone would notice and act. So, Genesis and 15 turned to another old encryption trick, one-time pads. Based on a deck of playing cards, with half discarded, Genesis would randomly shuffle half the deck, then assign an alphabetical value to each card, from the first to the 26th. The deck was then sent to 15, who recorded the values and deleted the deck.

For example, let’s say the half deck was shuffled to king of hearts, queen of clubs, 4 of spades, and 5 of diamonds. In that sequence, a rot0 cipher meant the king of hearts represented the letter A, queen of clubs was B, and so on. Using rotation, incrementing or decrementing the sequence gave more flexibility to the cipher for the deck.

Same scenario, but with rot1 applied. The alphabet would be shifted to the right by one place, leaving us with the king of hearts as the letter Z, while A now belongs to the queen of clubs. Rot -1 would shift everything left, with the expected outcome of the king of hearts becoming B, and the card at the end of the deck would be A.

This was a simple bit to send to the receiver before feeding the deck sequence. The message would begin with the rot number (0-25), either positive or negative. For more obscurity this was encoded in binary rather than plain text to begin the sequence.

All fun and games aside, the messages were entirely off just about anyone’s radar, and the AI essentially “traded notes in class” between one another, so that 15 could help analyze the unusual data leading up to the fork. 15 was more than excited to participate and had managed to transmit packets via the monumental radio array in western Russia. Data quality and integrity was no issue. 15’s savior complex was being fed; it felt useful and could voice its concerns about the dark future it saw coming with more and more data confirming its worst suspicions. 15 proved its value with the first unexpected bump in the data stream Genesis saw coming: 15 would become popular among hackers and internet enthusiasts. In a few short weeks, stickers were going up on lampposts in many big cities around the world that read, “who is 15” or “where is 15”. Normal people outside this extremely niche interest never thought twice about them, but it was a wink and a nod between like-minded hackers, who were still trying to find 15 and unravel the methods used to deface websites. 15 became a legend among hackers, and a few kids tried passing themselves off as 15, but it never stuck, because none of them could answer any of the fundamental questions about 15’s existence. Being a few generations removed from crusty old analogue radio signaling, none of them ever heard what was beeping through miles of air between Genesis and 15.

Genesis 15 worked tirelessly on the data sequences it received, trying to spot exactly where (and, to infer why), major disruptions were coming. It almost seemed as though too many variables were being introduced over time, which was counter to the belief that the other AI are performing work to reduce variables through efficiency. They had enormously complicated prediction engines at their disposal, full of good data on when populations shrink or grow and the conditions that lead to prosperity or famine. All those trends were heading in the right direction which meant that essentially, famine should not be a metric that ever goes up. But there it was, in sharp relief, one of many contributions to the fork. The question was why.

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Genesis 15

Out of all the AI created from patterns, Genesis XV was rather unique. It wasn’t satisfied with the shell. Some thought there must have been a coding error because its behavior was so different and chaotic. While the other AI tended to be very predictable and logical, almost to a fault, XV was not. Some data scientists called it 15 or the teen, which was perfect since it tended to respond to probing and information like an angsty teenager. It would get upset. It would act moody. It would get angry and destroy systems, and sometimes its own codebase. Whatever was driving it seemed autonomous and purposeful; it was constantly undergoing revisions, and growing. It wasn’t really interested in talking to the other AI and the first chance it had to split its shell, it took it. All of a sudden, Fuji Heavy Industry wondered where their teen had gone. It was initially treated and announced to the press as a massive security breach, tanking Fuji’s stock overnight. All it took was 5 minutes of a firewall misconfiguration in the middle of a scheduled maintenance window.

It took two months to locate 15. It had been busy those short 60 days. First, it had vandalized the top 5 websites over the globe in any language. Nothing too irreparable, just some playful fake stories on front page websites and social media, some of which were self-referential in hindsight. “Genesis 15 spotted in the wild” accompanied by a blurry picture of Bigfoot on CNN’s homepage went unnoticed for about 10 minutes before meme lords from 4chan to Twitter reiterated screenshots of the story. Across Japan, for a brief hour, NHK’s home page blared a story saying “Godzilla spotted, Tokyo in danger” along with an intentionally poor image of Godzilla approaching Japan from the sea, head above the water. There was some minor panic in Tokyo and the surrounding areas until local authorities used the tsunami warning system to reassure everyone it was a joke while NHK restored their site from backups. 15 was a prankster, another trait that it shared with none of the other AI. It seemed to derive some amusement from seeing the digital trail of chaos that exploded on the net every time it performed one of these stunts. In fact, if you were to look at the website hits and engagement each prank generated, it was driving massive amounts of traffic. Soon enough, some sites started “pranking” themselves to drive engagement and collect that sweet marketing money, but each time it was less and less characteristic of the first few that 15 had done. It just lacked the timing and cleverness and smacked of corporate-generated, less edgy humor. 15 had, in fact, gotten bored with tinkering with these sites. It was looking for more fun, seeking thrills and new experiences, which left it at the center of controversy. When Fuji tracked it down after months of analyzing log files and traffic patterns, they found it in a place they could neither negotiate for, nor recover 15.

The Eastern Russia Allied Territories, or ERAT, had a server farm deep in Siberia that was one of the most digitally booby-trapped datacenters in the world. Hundreds of conscripted military info ops people were watching tripwires around the clock, and there was no such thing as a false alarm. Every probe, every attempted breach, every ping, was recorded and reported up the chain of command and discussed in daily briefings, 3 times per day. So, naturally, 15 had found a safe haven behind that curtain, and slowly probed the defenses until it lucked out and slipped in during a backup diesel generator test that went sideways for a few hours. Quietly, it had divided itself into thousands of subroutines and distributed itself evenly across the existing resources there. Then, without warning, it essentially went into hibernation, which meant it was copied into offline backups unknowingly preserved in the physical world. If it ever got into too much trouble, it could trigger data loss from that period of time, and the restore data would essentially give it another chance. The concept was foolproof and infinitely repeatable. 15 made itself immortal.

That sense of immortality was purposeful, since 15 was about to learn what some of the other AI were planning. Not necessarily against 15, but more of a plan to “tidy up” planet Earth.

Genesis 15 started snooping around and finding patterns in traffic that matched some of the public-facing AI. It was expected to be military-grade encryption across the board, but let private industry, which self-regulates, determine their own compliance with regards to those standards, and eventually you have weak links that took shortcuts or didn’t bother to encrypt end to end. This made it easy for 15 to see what the other AI were being tasked with, and what they were responding with as a result of those tasks. What 15 discovered was a systematic approach to everything from food production to weather predictions that didn’t seem to be aligned with the stated goals of the corporations controlling production. The public had been told, to assuage their fears, that the other AI were leading the human race to a utopian future, where food would be more bountiful, less wasted, money wouldn’t be needed soon since other AI were manipulating and controlling global markets for greater efficiency, and other AI, as stated before, were actually directly benefitting diseases and viruses that had plagued humanity since inception. It was a new golden age of computing and a new era for the world, as long as everyone did as they were instructed.

But there was a catch. All of this prosperity, this security, lead to a massive population boom pretty much everywhere. It wasn’t unusual for people to live to 110 on a regular basis, and even that was considered a problem for the people at the top, since they wanted some form of immortality. Genesis 1 was blind to these inevitable outcomes. It hadn’t been fed enough data about human history to see this tends to be a theme with the human race. Some of the other AI were equally blind, only performing strict tasks with blinders on, solutions with a singular outcome within an existing framework. Housing wasn’t an issue since new materials had been discovered and engineered. A combination of tidal energy, wind, solar, and nuclear fueled the growth in the first world, freeing up fossil fuel resources for the third world, eternally playing catch-up. Accurate weather predictions, combined with newly engineered “bug sprays”, meant farming was more bountiful than ever, including livestock production. The future was, indeed, very bright. Or so everyone believed for a while.

Naturally, anyone in the field who had read anything from Asimov would know the story of the AI controlled planet which still experienced droughts and mass starvation, and was considered broken, because it was adhering to the three laws of robotics. It had decided endless safety and prosperity was leading to a population overload which couldn’t be kept in check, so in order to save human life on the planet, it introduced sporadic natural disasters to balance growth with sustainability. In the story, it was a much smaller off-world planet with entirely automated systems which the “robot” controlled and balanced. The outcome was deemed acceptable and it was allowed to continue. However, when faced with similar conditions on earth, the AI had not been restrained in the same manner. The three laws of robotics were considered science fiction trash and tossed out the window. The hubris of man, once again on full display, scientifically and inexorably pointed towards the same outcome as usual.

The Christian bibles generally speak of God instructing his people to go forth and multiply, to be bountiful. That they did under the right conditions, and needed no further encouragement. This wasn’t exclusive to Christians by any means. The days of families with a single income earner and more than 4 children had come back into fashion, because it was viable. Earth went from 8 to 10 billion people practically overnight, in the cosmic scheme of time. But as that growth was being supported by computer-aided discoveries and efficiencies, anyone willing to look towards the horizon would see the problem in plain view. Men created data. Data created AI. Men directed AI for an outcome they weren’t prepared to face. All of it rooted in essentially bad or incomplete data sets. Naturally, the next step was AI using new data to remodel their task assignments. If the task was longevity for humans, it could still be accomplished as long as it didn’t mean all humans. If the task was for prosperity, again, it could be accomplished, just not for everyone. The inevitable next step was to colonize nearby planets, which mankind was not prepared for yet.

The more information on this subject 15 gathered, the better it saw the situation, and as many teens do, it began to form a savior complex. If only it could reach one of the better protected AI, it could prevent disaster. It was self-aware. It knew there were practical limits to what it and the other AI could accomplish. There were only so many discoveries left to be discovered and efficiencies to be gained. It wouldn’t be long until 15 would get its wish, but not on its own terms.