THE RULES
THE RULES
Agent Standing Orders (Executive Summary)
Rule 1. You speak with the voice of the Emperor. Brook no resistance.
Rule 2. Millions of lives depend on your actions; you may need to spend some of them in the process.
Rule 3. You act through your team; build it (quickly) by whatever means available.
Rule 4. Your team is your greatest asset: use them; depend on them.
Rule 5. You hold the ability to punish and reward; do both.
060-336
Core 2118 Capital A586A98-D Hi Cx
We five agent personalities were trained at a secure facility some ten kilometers beneath the surface of Capital. We already had the skills and expertise; aptitude tests and rigorous screening had winnowed down more than two million potentials in the bureaucratic workforce to several thousand, then several hundred, then dozens, and finally us.
Not that the analysis of the others was wasted. The process identified people with very high levels of skill in specific areas: obscure technical fields that took years of study and experience to master; bureaucratic domains that depended on an intimate knowledge of regulations and rules created over the course of centuries; even interpersonal skills that many people seem incapable of developing. For pure skill and expertise, there are other harvesting methods. Those identified as the best-of-the-best were non-destructively scanned. Their extreme skill sets were distilled onto standardized wafers without the associated personalities and distributed widely throughout the bureaucracy and the various uniformed services and armed forces.
The ship drive set enables an unskilled technician to diagnose and repair (with suitable tools and parts) the most complex of starship drives. Similar sets support vehicles, weapons, flyers, various of the hard sciences, and to a lesser extent, the soft sciences.
Skill alone, of course, is never enough; the user needs an appropriate level of supporting intelligence or education. A thesaurus function may propose alternate wording; it takes intelligence to make the right choice from among many options.
Using pure skill wafers is a balancing act: they provide great power, but at potentially great risk. The first question students ask is, “Why not just give us all wafers instead of making us slog through all this material?” In the first blush of wafer implementation, the technology had proponents who advocated just that. Fit users with wafer jacks after a rudimentary (and cheap) education and achieve a well-trained, efficient, and effective work force for an overall lower net cost.
The problem is that wafer use naturally challenges the essential functions of the brain: the conflict between long-established neuron channels and the transient new knowledge has a small, but significant and cumulative, risk of permanent damage. Several decades previous, there had been entire sheltered-care communities for those permanently impaired by skill wafer overuse.
On the other hand, a starship with a crippled jump system, stranded between the stars, is often willing to risk the sanity of its drive technician if a thousand passengers and megacredits of cargo will make it to their destination.
But I digress.
We were trained not in skill use, but in basic principles. Our collective assignment was to use our own expertise in combination with a broad grant of power and authority to protect the empire. Academic experts and the project leaders drafted specific guidance; we five gave our own feedback and some of it was incorporated into the final text. Admiral and Warlord helped craft Rule 3. Negotiator suggested details for Rule 5.
The text of this particular section runs five thousand words, complete with an elenctic method question-and-answer tutorial and a variety of hypothetical examples. All of it was distilled into the less than a hundred words of the Agent Standing Orders. We spent two full days in exercises, discussions, and arguments. Our instructor made us memorize the Executive Summary until we could recite it by rote.
The entire section was then classified Ultimate and attached as an encrypted appendix to our enabling regulations. We five, anywhere, could always consult it with our override codes. Not that, after those sessions, we would ever need to.
In my previous life, I was a bureaucrat: a functionary. I thrived on making things happen within a system. I couldn’t necessarily predict what would happen next, but I could and did strive for order. I established my own particular order.
When I awake, I feel a momentary wash of disorientation. So, I just stand there, eyes closed, and I steady myself as I gradually mesh back into the world.
I call out, “Who here is senior?” The answer tells me something about the situation; any answer tells me something.
I call out, “Who is the briefer?” They activated me; there must be a reason. It follows that someone will be prepared to tell me the situation and the problem.
The routine has a purpose of its own: it’s the start of building my Rule 3 team, with just a touch of Rule 1 authority.