“You can’t accuse her of not facing facts, can you?” A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle, p. 27.
* * *
“You can’t accuse her of not facing facts, can you? It’s what she does, after all.”
“Sure. But facts and inferences drawn from facts are different.”
James looked up from his microscope. “So what are you saying?”
At the next workstation Joe screwed two halves of a plastic petri dish together, affixed it with a label, and slid it into an empty slot in a large gridded tray. “I’m saying, James, that FALDA is results–driven.” He articulated the last two words carefully, but quietly, Stressing their significance.
James thought about this for a moment, then began typing figures into the wireless keyboard he used with his tablet, which never left his side, in or out of the lab.
They all had one. It was Compact protocol. Keep your data with you. Upload it at the end of the day to a secure server. Researchers could not access each other’s data, could not even access their own data, except through the official weekly and monthly reports, which were notoriously cryptic.
The idea behind FALDA (the Fibril Analytics-Led Data Assemblage) had been a simple one. Let the computers decide the course of the research. Scientists had been looking for a cure for cancer for decades with–in Joe’s view–only modest success. The problem was that experiments going on in different labs around the world, with different sources of funding, testing the various hypotheses of ego-driven researchers, were uncoordinated, full of redundancies and inefficiencies.
With FALDA, the strands of data were fed through a uniform series of algorithms. Researchers around the world were suddenly working together, waking up each morning to slightly altered or sometimes completely new instructions, based on FALDA’s high-powered processing of the previous day’s global data dump. No researcher directed the course of the experiments. And only a select few on the Review Council had access to FALDA’s decision-making process.
James stopped typing and swiveled his chair around to face Joe. “What you’re suggesting is not possible,” he said, so quietly he could almost not be heard.
Joe nodded. “I know. Listen, if you don’t believe me, fine. But just let me show you this one thing.”