Robert Ludlum's The Utopia Experiment - By Kyle Mills Page 0,73
slower.”
“I agree,” Mandrake said, obviously wanting his new position to become permanent. “Soldiers worldwide are adopting at about the same rate as civilians and they’re largely being permitted to use the units at work. Going into combat without the Merge’s commercial vision and audio enhancement just isn’t going to be practical for much longer. And as other apps like language translation and communications are released, the consumer version will become even more advantageous.”
“So all good news,” Dresner said.
“Not entirely,” Mandrake admitted. “We’re still getting bad press over some aspects of LayerCake’s judgment system. With regard to products and services it’s enormously popular, but judgment of people is getting a fair amount of pushback. No one’s really complaining about its accuracy, but we’re adding an entirely new privacy issue to the hundreds out there already.”
“I’m concerned about this,” someone at the table said. “LayerCake is already causing us problems and we’re only running it at about fifty percent of its true capability. Not to mention the fact that we’ve set it to lean toward the positive, right?”
“Correct,” Mandrake said. “It’s obviously still in beta and until we have enough data on individual Merge users to tailor the system to their particular values, we have Javier running essentially a light version.”
“And when we do turn the thing on full-guns? Is this something people really want or is the system going to be providing us a little too much information for our own good? And that’s leaving aside our legal vulnerability.”
Dresner nodded thoughtfully, but it was really just for show. In truth, the public system was running at a far smaller fraction of its actual capability than the board knew—probably closer to twenty percent. Thanks to the brilliant former hacker Javier de Galdiano, LayerCake’s heavily firewalled core had almost limitless access to social networking sites, financial information, websites visited, and products purchased—among a host of other critical data points. De Galdiano considered it nothing more than a control—something to compare the results of their public system to in order to create an algorithm that could mimic the less ethical—indeed illegal—central system. In reality, it was the foundation for everything Dresner had spent so many years planning.
“I think this is something we’re just going to have to allow to unfold,” Dresner said. “We’re about to begin a new marketing campaign revolving around people who have been harmed by misinformation on the Internet—people who have been confused with others with the same name, victims of identity theft, people who have been unfairly attacked through social media and other means. The message is that the information is already out there and that LayerCake will make it much more difficult to game or misuse. Let’s not forget that we’re only three months into this. Considering the revolutionary nature of the technology, it’s going surprisingly smoothly.”
Mandrake nodded his agreement. “We’ve had an extremely positive reaction from the focus groups who’ve seen the ads. I think the momentum is with us and it’s just going to get more powerful. Now let’s move on to finance, where the news gets even better. The surprise retirement of some of our debt yesterday has driven our stock prices up past four hundred dollars a share for the first time.”
The life-sized images of the people in front of him glazed over with greed, causing Dresner’s interest in the meeting to fade. It had been Whitfield’s money, of course, and based on the speed with which he was able to deliver, he had almost certainly anticipated the request. Once again, he’d demonstrated a level of cleverness that would undoubtedly become dangerous in the future. But not yet. At this point, he was still useful.
“I must leave you,” Dresner said. “I think we have every reason to be proud of the Merge’s success and to continue to expect great things.”
He shut down his feed and replaced it with a set of projections from the marketing department. Graphs rose more than three meters high in front of him and he leaned back in the soft leather chair to study them.
Sales projections had been increased to thirty-three million units worldwide by the end of the first twelve months and eighty-four million at the end of the two-year window he was interested in.
Dresner switched views to a set of bar graphs showing Merge units broken down by country. The United States had the best penetration, followed by Western Europe. Sales were also substantial in China, primarily due to the sheer size of the market. Russia was lagging, though