The "briefing room" was a slightly wider portion of hallway with two chairs and a wreath on a charging podium. It was still technically considered a room because there were doors on either end and small cabinets built into the walls.
Somehow, despite everything he'd seen so far, Jonathan had something more grand in mind.
Rex's avatar appeared in one seat — dirty sweatpants, a torn wifebeater, and what looked like an Oculus headset from Earth. He was making suggestive thrusting motions with his hips.
As soon as the door closed, he snapped to attention.
"Oh good, you're here!"
He switched to a much more snappy looking middle manager outfit — khaki trousers pulled up just a little too high, a dress shirt complete with name badge and pocket protector, coke bottle glasses, wispy moustache, and prominent bald spot.
Jonathan half-chuckled. He had a guilty pleasure for dumb jokes, and it seemed like Rex was aware of this — using them to endear himself to his new crew.
"Take a seat. We've already paid for the Earth overview — why don't you take a look and tell us how good our intel was?"
Rex gestured to the wreath.
"I'm confused. Is this the same wreath from the orientation? Why have a specific room for briefing when all the information is tied to the device and not the room?"
"There are chairs here." Craig responded matter-of-factly.
"Oh. I guess that makes sense."
"Someday in the future we hope there's a little more to it than that, but yeah."
Jonathan put the headset on and the briefing user interface appeared.
The menu was, again, extremely intuitive. Tabs of data created and opened themselves neatly as Jonathan thought of what he wanted to know. The first page was the overview — almost entirely statistics. Any statistic he could think of had at least an estimate. Total population of humans, ratio of human to chicken…
One problem was quickly noted: if his mind strayed, he found himself pulling up estimates that were entirely pointless — such as average sneezes per day per age bracket.
At first, Jonathan was suitably impressed.
"Wow, how did they get all this information?"
"We don't know the full story, but we think that when a planet is predicted to come to an end, the brokers somehow spray the entire thing with extremely small sensors. These sensors are pretty useful for general knowledge such as climate, dominant species, and technology levels — but can get some of the more nuanced information wrong."
A bunch of "fun stats" started pulling themselves up, courtesy of the cesspits of the Earth internet.
Percentage of population that believes birds are government drones — disturbingly high. "Mid" ratio — nearly everything is "mid", statistically confirmed. W/L ratio of the human species — currently tracking deeply negative. And of course, extremely slanted statistics about crimes committed by minorities.
There were also a great deal of seemingly unconnected probabilities — the chance that Terry Milligan of Des Moines, IA would wet the bed tonight (a near certainty despite being dry for three days), probability that sunlight reflected off the Walkie-Talkie building in London sets something on fire today (6%, due to cloud coverage), odds of a specific pothole on I-95 blowing out at least one tire this week (94%), odds that Terry Milligan of Des Moines, IA would call his parents to pick him up from the sleepover…
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Jonathan thought it weird that Terry came up twice.
Some "Suggested Searches" came up related to things impacted by the upcoming doom: "Dodged a Bullet", "Cosmically Unfair", "Probably Better Off", and "Miracles CAN happen!"
The top items for those were as follows:
- Jason Chen was just about to be discovered having a very messy affair involving illicit substances, wherein his lawyer would have to argue age of consent laws across state borders.
- Marcus Webber was about to turn his life completely around "in a real and meaningful way" just before the news station he works at catches on to what's about to happen.
- Terry again. High school kids can be so cruel.
- Odds that the upcoming apocalypse is somehow averted… There was a zero, a decimal point, and a lot more zeroes after that. But the number at the end was steadily increasing.
Huh.
"Is this live data?"
"There's a bit of a delay — probably accurate to within the week. But our subscription will be running out very soon. The data won't be useful for much longer anyway, because… well, you know."
Jonathan tried to search for information about his family. They were alive, but he couldn't really think of any stats, facts, or probabilities that'd make him feel any better. He avoided looking up too much — he knew there was literally nothing he could do at this point to fix anything he found anyway.
Or was there?
"Is there any sort of video, or way to communicate with someone?"
"I'm afraid not. If there was, we'd probably lose a lot of work — so good news, they're probably working on a way to do it."
Jonathan sighed and went back to browsing.
It was nice to distract himself for a while, looking up silly statistics. Times his neighbor cooked with either fish or cabbage in a given week, number of times his boss used filler words in a given work day… He tried to look up how long a specific stoplight outside his apartment spent red versus green, but the stats apparently didn't get that granular.
He felt bad when he started thinking more seriously about this wealth of information. He cursed his lack of imagination. What could he have actually solved with so much data?
He decided to try applying his personal knowledge and skillset to better guide him through what an adversary would want to know.
He started with security posture — looking into several stats regarding tech level, weaponry, and general outlook to compare against his own experiences and look for differences.
Overall, the technology posture of the planet seemed accurate. But anything related to human civilization itself ranged from not quite right to downright offensive generalizing.
First, the population was listed as "moderately dangerous" — misleading at best. Had he been in charge, he would've made sure to clarify the fact that there were pockets of "fairly safe" and "extremely dangerous." Averaging it out like that could lead somebody to get the wrong idea.
Digging deeper, he noted that it clearly borrowed stats from the internet — such as "average firearms per household" — to justify its rating. Jonathan knew guns weren't exactly evenly distributed.
There were also a bunch of weird polls from various sources about perceived levels of safety. Jonathan was confused by this one. He knew the average suburb wasn't that dangerous, but he also knew that the average person from said suburb had a wildly different idea of danger from those living elsewhere.
He assumed that despite not polling the average wartime refugee — who likely didn't stop to fill out the post-evacuation survey — the rating was still high due to the 24-hour news cycle.
Next, it stated that the overall government had a corruption rating of 5.3 out of a possible 10, citing dubious democratic systems, moderate income inequality, and currency spent toward political favors, indoctrination, and misinformation.
Jonathan thought this rating was far too low — but realized the average might be skewed by a handful of politicians in towns he'd never heard of that were actually good people.
"Hey, what is an example of a civilization with a corruption rating of 10 out of 10?"
"If one exists, I haven't heard of it. We're not in a financial position to buy stats on any given planet, and not all planets have this kind of coverage. If one does exist, maybe they somehow bribed the sensors to keep it covered up."
Jonathan wondered how much of that was a joke.
He took the wreath off for a second and rubbed his temples.
Try as he might, he couldn't think of that one question that would have made a difference in somebody's life. An ocean of data and yet he couldn't see the forest for the trees. Maybe he should ask for a total count of mixed metaphors in use.
He put the wreath back on, knowing full well it was a dumb thing to ask.
Not a single hit for anything involving metaphors, much less mixed ones.
He kept coming back every so often to check probabilities as he thought up new ones to search for. He caught himself pulling up the "Miracles CAN happen!" list a few times. He saw a few other unlikely events — and noticed that the count upward for "The upcoming doomsday event is somehow averted" had gone up significantly.
It was almost nearing .001%, which was leaps and bounds over where it had started. Wouldn't it get lower and lower the closer it got to doomsday?
"Hey Rex — why is this number going up? Does this mean the chances are getting better for Earth?"
"Huh. That IS odd…"