Dark as Day
Chapter One
GANYMEDE, YEAR
2097, SEINE-DAY
MINUS ONE
It was hard to say which was worse: waiting for Seine-Day
to arrive, or enduring the torrent of hype that preceded the
event.
Alex Ligon stared at the output that filled the two-meter
display volume of his Ganymede office. In that display the
solar system was evolving before his eyes. The year showed as
2098, ticking along a steady daily tally of status: population,
economic activity, material and energy production and use,
and transportation and information flow between worlds. Any
statistic was available for the asking. And every statistic, he
knew from past experience, was likely to be wrong. For anything
beyond a week, the predictions steadily diverged from
reality.
It was not the fault of his models, he felt sure of that. It
was simply that he was forced to run them with too-high
levels of aggregation. Otherwise, a one-day prediction would
be slower than real-time and take more than a day to run.
The Seine, once it came into operation, would cure that
completely. He would be able to model each individual human
unit, all five billion ... read full excerpt from Dark as Day ebook
