The advertising plinth cycled through its rented regime. Impossibly attractive individuals, dressed in impeccable clothing masqueraded on the screen as ordinary people. Since people had stopped watching TV, and stopped watching the streaming video services, this was the only place advertising could really be forced into people’s eyes. The public domain. Times Square was a horror show for an adblock plug in of the early 2020s, now she had to deal with this constant bombardment.
For a limited time only.
Time is running out.
First time offer!
New customers get...
Stupid advertising. Stupid advertisers. Time was, in a strict sense, limited - but not via their campaigns. Human biology was the cause of the unending broadcast of fomo - the fear of missing out - be it on a discount, a special flavour (which was generally a botched production run, saved by dim-witted bean counters) and Sienna couldn’t stand any of it. She wondered if she could hack her sunglasses, using the augmented reality screens to replace the ads that permeated the corridors of transit. Instead of an ad, she'd much prefer the serene scene of a forest in the mist of dawn.
There were not many of those left. The advertising faded away for a brief moment to show, as though reading her thoughts - that The Amazon had contracted vastly due to ongoing fires that never seemed to be seasonal anymore, and further to the North, Canadian wildfires raged in their summer. She grimaced and kept walking. The screens on the corridors changed as she progressed.
Sienna was on her way to a job that didn’t give her enough hours. It also didn’t give her enough money. Strange that she exchanged her time it all the same, which got her things that gave her more time. More life via more food. She could stop it all at any moment, but she wasn't suicidal or ready to simply give up and wither away into a convulsing, starving husk.
Personal finance, nutrition and medication made up a finely balanced triangle of codepedence. If any dipped into the red, all other elements suffered in turn. She didn't want to suffer, so she kept walking. She grimaced again, the pain within spiking for a brief moment. She breathed in a gulp of air to steady herself as she continued after a brief pause.
She wasn’t the only one that was sick. Not sick of the structure which society had devolved to, but ill.
An age of abundance and medical research penetrated the universal hurt that humanity seemed to carry. With the provision of processing power, and funds for the raw materials, almost any, essentially perfect medicine could stave off the death of bodily function. But to conduct full blown gene therapy and cure all elements of the disorders, welll, that was a suffering and a price beyond the reach of most.
Sienna didn’t have such long financial limbs.
She had a thin hand that reached out from her jacket like a rake to collect leaves in the autumn, only it reached for an elevator button. Instead, it would collect her, and take her to an unmarked, unermarkable office where she would toil away at the errors.
Even with the immense processing power available to humanity, errors in logic, and errors in systemically integrating things were prevalent. It took less than a short decade of people not knowing what they were really doing. Incompetence and blissful unawareness started to peck away at the resilience of infrastructure, making it less and less efficient.
The only problem was that no one had a holistic view of the strings of integration. Instead, all they saw was dense, incomprehensible spaghetti code and hastily set up networks of systems to facilitate the greatest business efficiencies.
But there was no foresight. If you press the button to summon the elevator, it arrives, or it doesn't. The mechanical aparatus governing its function allow only the requisite states of its operation, and as a highly refined system, its complexity defied the simple operation. The mechanics of trade, industry, business and other virtualised economic functions had much more nuance than the elevator.
The elevator arrived, the doors opening in a smooth, rapid manner, and Sienna stepped in. She caught a glimpse of her tired face in the polished steel, distored by the angle of the light. She turned her thought to her upcoming day, and the mounting edge cases.
They had become too broad and too prevalent, and were a weight dragging down the essential services of society. The elevator still worked. It was simple tech, and took her up toward the awaiting tasks of disentangling the business abstraction that powered the material world.
They were idiots, but they had money. And they wanted more. It began in 2022. The businesses of the world thought AI would be a cure for the inefficiencies of their industries. They walked stafff out their doors in numbers, entrusting their futures to the digital agents that they poorly understood and trained even more poorly.
It had gotten as good as it would get. Eventually, there'd only be the board, wondering why no one could afford the services, and unable to comprehend the tangled nets left behind by the patchwork of human and machine effort. How did the business function?
That was when Sienna found her niche. She loved puzzles, and the tangled webs of logic, code, API integrations and poorly implementation automatons were different everywhere she went, but there was always patterns of inefficiency and dysfunction.
She became an untangler. Some would petition businesses to start from scratch, and work their way back from the ground up - but they would be using artificial intelligence too, and that road lead back upon to itself like an oroborous. She stripped back the digital fat, making things smoother and more efficient.
So she went from company to company, industry to industry, and tried to comprehend. She needed more hours to do the work, and she needed more hours to be paid to her. Untanglers were like contemporary, transient crisis recovery teams, only this crisis was ongoing and worsening daily, with many turning to the same tools that created the mess as an exit strategy. They were doomed. Eventually, they'd need the untangler, or it would fail under the weight of their incresed processing fees. Information, afterall, was a liability. It was a cost. The more they had, the more they needed to pay for processing power. An untangler was cheap.
They got paid upfront, preferentially, but … they rarely got paid, owing to the tangled nets of code and software as a service infrastructure that caused the corporations to go broke before the problem was fixed. A business was only sustainable as the profit margins continued to exceed the inefficiencies.The moment that delta was crossed on the chart, things went downhill fast.
They all used enormous amounts of processing power. Stupendous amounts of processing power, with some of the compute sitting up above the atmosphere in low Earth orbit. That had its own problems, micrometeoroid showers taking out infrastructure, and with absolutely no service level agreement on stuff sitting up in space, the providers had no liability or inclination to fix the problem. Even worse, when competing company’s constellations would knock each other’s stuff out of orbit due to the lack of coordination across the physical space of orbit.
If Earth was a mess, the space around it was an impenetrable field of junk and rapidly decaying electronics.
Sienna sighed. She had a long day ahead of her. She had some processes to decouple, simplify, and roll back. Some of it would be new, but none of it would be a guarantee of operational longevity. It was like gardening in a way. Pull out the weeds and deritrius of decaying branches, and leave only the healthy to flourish. Those, too, would slowly decay and lead their way to new updates, patches, and things that wouldn’t be sustainable long term.
Her schedule was packed. So too was her sense of disgust and hatred as the elevator doors opened. She plastered on a stern, thin smile, and stepped out into the hallway.
