CELESTIAL OUTCOMES

     It had been a rough start to the year at Celestial Outcomes. Firstly, there were no floods in southern Egypt, where, if truth be told, there had been near zero precipitation for each of the past thirty years.  Then there was the disastrous cruise ship anomaly.

     The first was almost solely down to a skewed reading by Casmata Zypp, the shining light of Natural Disasters and one of the best paid young talents in the firm. Despite the unlikelihood of the event, Zypp’s absurdly low fail rate of 0.192 meant that the directors were willing to go with her judgement.

     The cruise ship anomaly? Well, quite frankly, no-one had seen that coming. Not even harry hindsight could have quite anticipated its effects.

     After the first private cruiser went down off the west coast of Italy, we all knew that the odds of a similar incident taking place within a narrow window were greatly reduced. We’d seen it all before – three train wrecks inside a week in Guatemala, four freak diving accidents on the Great Barrier Reef over one long weekend and the worst of all, five hot air balloon calamities across a segment of north-eastern Europe just a few thousand kilometres wide in a single month of 2019.

     Faraday, one of my more clued-up friends at Quality Reassurance, had lost four good clients, all multi-zillionaires, in the second shipping incident, when a tuna trawler bisected a cruising ketch in the Adriatic fog. But that was the business. You couldn’t take it personally, what would happen, would happen, whether you liked it or not. It was your job to try and ameliorate risk, but no-one, not for all the oil in Arabia, could eliminate it all together. It was made plain as day in the T & Cs of every contract we wrote.

    While each of our actualaries takes every care to provide reliable forecasts of future events, it is not possible for Celestial Outcomes (‘the company’) to completely guarantee the accuracy of the advice provided. The company and its officers are not responsible for loss of any kind (including injury, illness or death) arising from the provision of an inaccurate forecast etc etc...

     The third cruise vessel sinking was within reasonable parameters, albeit that it happened on the same day within one hundred and eighty nautical miles of the split ketch. Put that down to poor visibility as well. The fourth, just south of Venice on a clear vino bianco morning one week later took the toll to 643 and had everyone thinking about the Triangle. But superstition was not part of our job description. All the evidence, empirical, nautical and meteorological, said that the odds against another incident were astronomical. And that’s why Gunnar took the bet. 

    Let’s be straight about something here though – we are not a betting company. Nor are we an insurance company. Given the realm that we work in and the data at our fingertips, some of us wonder why not, but our deep-pocketed founder insists that the company was formed for the service of humanity. He took the bet because a billionaire braggart named Johnson Cullers, one of the richest venture capitalists in the nation, offered to throw ten million into Celestial           Outcomes coffers if the company’s conservative estimation that another such incident would not take place within a year was correct. If it was wrong, Gunnar would agree to pay two million dollars to a charity of his choice. Even to the obsessively risk-averse Norwegian it seemed a decent gamble at the time.

    What Gunnar, all our brilliant minds and all the modelling had failed to consider, though, was the law of compounding errors. It dictated that catastrophes sometimes happen when a series of unrelated small problems, each insufficient in themselves to cause even a mid-sized issue, collaborate to create one giant fuck-up. 

     What the accident investigation team later established was roughly the following: 

A wiring technician ran late for work because he had a night out with some ex-colleagues, a stewardess failed to notice a dead fuse because a child vomited in Seat 37b on take-off, a pilot took the wrong dose of flu medication and a violent storm unexpectedly erupted about the coast. Before you knew it the whole thing had gone down like a shot bird, right into the side of the World Discoverer sailing late out of Dubrovnik. Which duly sank with 792 souls on board. One of whom, although I did not know this yet, was my father.

     Of course, the law of compounding errors was only invented by one of our datawonks after the event to cater for future contingencies. But the silver lining was two million for the Worldwide Water Foundation. 

*

We were the valley before dotcom, Detroit before cars and no-one really knew if there was future in our futures business or not.  We weren’t a Fortune 500 entity, not even the top 2,000.

     Most of us had been recruited right out of college and I don’t mean after graduating. Gunnar believed that the earlier we were inducted the better, before our virgin minds could be deflowered by convention and cynicism. I was identified after volunteering for a psychiatric test at UCLA to earn a little pin-money and a free lunch. Cosmata, the seer, the most precocious of all, had barely exited high school when she was harvested from the top of the crop. 

     There was nothing particularly unusual about any of this, that is if you accept a bunch of high achieving millenials being paid to predict the future as being the usual. But, I mean otherwise, we were thoroughly unremarkable, you couldn’t pick us out of any crowd – we weren’t wizards, there were no secret signals and no special language. And in any case most of us still did our normal course load of honours and Ph.D work alongside our jobs at CO, which became pretty frenetic when the forecasting operation started to build. 

     But it was important to keep a few irons in the fire, because there was no guaranteed long term profit in being a career prophet and, despite the gifts that brought us together, none of us had a crystal ball to see what the future held for ourselves. Gunnar’s research had it that even the brightest among us would lose our spark by the late twenties and then it would be time to move on. After five years I’d already sensed a slight trembling in the light, presaging a gathering dusk – hesitation where once was certainty, the flicker of second guesses - and even now was starting to think about the next phase. I was earning good money now, a very large amount by any normal standards, but not even Casmata the Incredible knew what would come next. 

     If you wanted security, the future wasn’t the place to be. Not yet anyway.

My work was a bit different to some of the other areas as it involved an unusual amount of face-to-face, which, in this age of virtual connection, might have been anathema to some, but was the one aspect of the business I really liked. Of course, it came with the kooks, car crashes and spin-outs, another of whom it seemed was sitting opposite me this morning staring silently into her chai. 

     “Donut?”

     She uttered no sound but blinked several times behind black-framed, pink-tinted spectacles. If it wasn’t for the lack of any visible tears I thought she could have been crying. But I could have been wrong. My role with Human Interactions danced a fleet-footed routine between the arcane arts of crystal-balling and subliminal interpretation, whereas other areas such as Political and Natural Disasters moved to a far more scientific beat. 

     But the future of this fragile compilation of emotions in front of me wasn’t something that you could plot on a chart, although if you could I already had an inkling of the trajectory. This, apparantly, was the stuff I was good at, the reason I was recruited in the first place – unusual capacity for empathetic association and projective identification said the test report. It sounded flakey to me but this, declared Gunnar in our induction meeting, was the rare connective tissue between insight and foresight that would help remove the most difficult obstacles to accurate forecasting. His tone admitted no contradiction.

      Unlike the soothsayers and entrail readers of old, however, I was only any good at making forecasts based on the actualities of previous events and the current prevailing circumstances and even then I had to have a pretty close feel for the background. 

What was the difference between us and Wall Street? It was a joke that Jono never tired of. One is a bunch of crazy coked-up con artists peddling fake fortune cookies. But the big difference was that on any given day no-one was queuing in the street with wheelbarrows of cash ready to dump at our doorstep and finance our condos on the basis of pure speculation and greed. Not yet. 

     Even though we were listed as a predictive analytics company, no-one here like liked the word prediction. Most such companies confined themselves to mundane tasks, using big data to set airline prices, forecast hotel room demand, monitor inventories, detect fraud, determine insurance premiums, automate credit checks and the like. It was a $200 billion industry and growing fast, but none of this was of interest to CO or its founder. 

     Our preferred nomenclature was derivation. We combined our hypersensitive psyches and mathematical minds with the meticulous mining and manipulation of data and trends – carried out by a whole floor of near cyberslaves - to calculate possible, probable and even likely outcomes in subjects as microscopic as the sexual behaviour of honeybees to the conundrum of major world conflicts. 

     Our clients were mainly governments and their agencies, though not one would ever admit to commissioning our services. 

     As had been proven by Cosmata’s error (though floods did destroy much of southern Egypt a year later), meteorology was among the most challenging areas of them all. The most challenging though was human beings, as no foolproof algorithms had yet been determined that could fully predict or replicate the vagaries of human behaviour. 

     And unfortunately the most vexing issues threatening our species and its celestial home had nothing to do with wind speeds, chaos theory or incidence spirals but were the product of humans themselves. That’s what Gunnar had hired me to unravel and that’s why I am sitting here now not knowing what to say to the woman who might be weeping tearlessly in front of me.      She lifted her gaze from the chai and spoke with unnerving calm.

     “Do you think he will come back?”

     I knew that he wouldn’t but now didn’t seem the time to tell her. It hadn’t taken any mysterious powers of prognostication to divine her husband’s fate. A quick consult with Political had revealed that he had been caught on the wrong corner of a three-way deal with the Syrian military, but she could never know that so I picked up the plate of sugar dusted jam-injected rings and offered it to her once more while I considered the best way to let her down easy.

     “Donut?”

*

    For a business that touted itself as revolutionary, there wasn’t much new in what we were doing. We were in the second oldest game on the planet.

    Seeking accurate predictions of future events was as much a part of everyday life in Chinese, Assyrian, Greek and Roman Empires as eating, fucking, pissing and sleeping.