Trends

Trends

When I left the house, I headed straight for the City Carrier. As I climbed into the car, I scanned my ID ? no charge for citizens. The City Carrier circles the entire city and its efficient traffic routing means there's almost never any wait for a car. Of course, since they only seat two, they're no good for big groups, but they get the job done most other times.

The car was already moving as I sat down to enter my destination into the console. The store I was headed to is right on the boundary between this district and District B, which meant a bit of a walk from the nearest City Carrier drop point, but for the time being, I had some time to kill.

I doubt there's a better time or place to get some real reading done than a quiet ride like that, so I whipped out my Tabspot and got to it. Truth is, the store isn't so far away that I couldn't have just walked there (which would have gotten Alice off my back about how little I had been exercising), but on that day, I wasn't interested in wasting any time that could have been spent gathering valuable information. My health wouldn't matter one bit if I didn't have the cash to put food on the table.

I glanced out the window as my Tabspot loaded the articles I had queued for review. The shops and houses of the city sprawled out before me in a seemingly unchanging tableau. Thinking about it, nobody feels the Earth move either, but we're hurtling through space at an incredible speed nonetheless. The only reason we don't feel it is because we're rushing into the future along with it. I wondered if the city out there was the same ? changing faster than we realize because we're changing right along with it...

Hanging just to the side of the window was a single, awkwardly positioned emergency handle. It had most likely never been used for anything other than maintenance tests. The system was perfect ? a completely autonomous autopilot system. No traffic jams. No accidents. It has never even been the target of hackers attempting sabotage.

At some point, terrorist acts began to shift from physical warfare to cyber warfare, but even that was effectively extinguished more than half a century ago. In any day and age, there are always unseen entities positioned to make a nice profit by supporting terrorist groups who act based on their own sense of religion and justice. Without funding from wealthy outside groups, nobody has the resources to carry out acts of terrorism any more. Even sovereign nations have to get approval from their government before wartime funds are allocated to armed forces. Fanaticism and the pursuit of justice may still be the engine that drives people to war, but without the fuel of money, it just won't run.

"I think it's about time to pour some more gas into my system too," I thought aloud as I swiped to the next page of text on my Tabspot.

Alice had collected more than 500 news articles for me. This was going to take a while. The filter usually wouldn't let through more than a couple hundred. Must have been more than double the usual buzz working its way around the net that day. It was time to cash in.

I had the news that makes it past my filter sorted into two basic categories, the first of which was fundamentals. This is the big stuff ? economic indicators, currency shifts in key nations, incidents that are likely to affect the bottom lines of multinational corporations. Turns out this kind of stuff isn't just for the big guys: if you're going to make any kind of money playing the market, this stuff is the landscape you've got to navigate.

The other category is trending topics, including the gossip news. Even if people say they hate it, if they can't stop talking about it, it's worth taking a look at. My job is to find the needle in the filthy haystack; I have to find the best ones and dissect them. So many events get classified as too minor or too local that even a skilled government analyst could spend three lifetimes sifting data and not see them all.

As information, neither one is more important than the other. If one is the ruler by which we compare it to other information, than the other might be the puzzle frame we use to define it. Sometimes you need one piece of information in order to regulate, process, reinforce, and then finally reassemble the overall image. It's important to be able to see how the pieces fit together, rather than just stacking them into their separate types.

People argue all the time ? microeconomics this, macroeconomics that, and if they can make enough to get by, good for them. For a trader like me, though, the harsh reality is that everything depends on whether or not you can turn a profit.

"Alice, do any of the stories relating to Olive this news cycle stand out as strangely artificial?" I asked my Tabspot. As I did, a tiny illustrated version of Alice appeared in the corner of the screen.

Alice will disable her more human-like functions to free up processing power for scanning and parsing news on the net, but that doesn't stop her from receiving and executing voice commands.

"Yes, Master," came Alice's answer. "There are five stories this news cycle which deviate heavily from the rest of the widely circulated information regarding Olive Industries. All five have a deviation value that is holding steady over 80."

"Are you saying they are showing no signs of natural attenuation?" I asked.

"That is correct, The flat line generated by their data points is quite aesthetically pleasing."

For a moment, I wondered if Alice was truly capable of understanding pleasant or unpleasant aesthetics, but I had more important things on my mind. These stories reeked of profit. I knew where I needed to focus my attention before I let myself get distracted by anything else.

Any sort of trending topic is designed with a plan in mind, though. Consumerism is built on trends. Trends, like waves, must rise and fall with time. These waves of popularity are expertly controlled by stories such as these.

Once an old story grows stale, it is replaced by the next new round of news. Eventually, though, the old stories are dressed up in a new, shiny outfit and start making their rounds on the nets all over again. It's an endless cycle.

New product designs also follow this same cycle, with design changes meticulously planned to maximize hype. Nobody is looking for innovation regarding these cycles any longer. The rise and fall of new products has become as commonplace as the rising and setting of the sun each day.

As mankind continued to advance, more and more of what were once considered "hobbies" became necessities. Mankind has reached an age in which people can't survive without knowing about the latest and greatest new trend.

Of course, everyone knows these fads will eventually become obsolete and be forgotten, but they let themselves go crazy over the latest fleeting money-sink anyway. Perhaps, without these cycles, people would be more true to themselves, and the net would have become a diverse place with a small niche for anyone. Universalized trends and fads seem to have prevented that from happening.

These five stories circling Olive's new product were creating ripples in the net that were disproportionately large; they were poised to become tsunamis rather than waves, in a way nobody in today's world had seen. If this trend were to reach critical mass, it would trigger an uncontrollable consumer frenzy, creating mass hysteria that would prematurely obliterate the other popular trends in the market. It was clearly a poor move from a marketing standpoint. And five stories, all at once? Anyone foolish enough to believe this was just coincidence has no right to be an armchair detective, let alone a trader.

Somebody was planning something, that much was certain. If I could manage to get in on this as well, I'd make more than mere pocket change. Perhaps I was letting the frenzied markets sweep me up in their furor, but I couldn't help tacking a few extra zeroes onto my imaginary payout. Even if this was a bigger risk than usual, the rewards seemed worth it.

The problem was figuring out if all five of those stories were keys to the lock or if only one was real and the others were just a cover. The best place to hide a tree is in a forest. The best place to hide a story is among the news trends.

"Which one do you think it is, Alice?" I suddenly asked.

"I lack sufficient context to interpret your query or its intent," she responded.

"Thank you. That's what I expected you to say," I replied.

If an A.I. could answer that sort of question, there wouldn't be any reason for a human being to be in this business. Only a biological mind as tangled as the one behind this mess could unravel its mysteries.

As I scanned the news, I intentionally let my vision blur. The trick is not to let yourself read every single line, but instead look at the pattern. When something unnatural shows up, it will stick out like a sore thumb. The ones who set these stories up would surely have designed them so they would be noticed.

Once a story attracted this much attention, it was no different than somebody standing out in the middle of a crowded street and shouting, "Look at us! We're planning something fishy!" Their plan must have been a good one if they were still expecting to make a profit after calling this much attention to themselves.

Suddenly, an image of the new Olive device, the Neo, caught my eye. It was resting snugly on a display modelled after a human hand. Just the kind of eye-catching presentation that made Olive famous. Of course, the hand had been designed to fit the device perfectly, so that was no surprise. It was designed to look unnaturally natural.

Unnaturally natural.

I could feel the neurons in my brain begin to run wildly as I glanced over the five topics once again. They were all superbly made to attract investors. People would most definitely feel as though there was something to these. It was quite the impressive trap.

If five doors should suddenly appear in front of you, most people would begin to wonder if there may be a treasure chest hiding behind one of them. But what would happen if the treasure wasn't behind one of the doors, but instead was hidden behind a boulder lying nearby?

"Alice, I need you to do another search for me," I began. "This time, only sample from the stories in the current news cycle. You're looking for any stories with a deviation value of zero. Are there any that stand out as unnaturally natural?"

"Understood. This may take a moment-" As Alice was finishing her first sentence, she began a new one, overlapping herself. "One match found."

Alice's ability to do this was a phenomenon caused by the gap between her processing functions and her human interface functions. I didn't have time to care about things like that right then, though.

"There is one story that matches up perfectly with the ideal model of the current news cycle," Alice continued. "Its deviation value is less than one with all numbers right of the decimal matching the model perfectly."

As Alice was reporting her findings, the City Carrier came to a stop and the chime to alert passengers of arrival began to sound.