Save Tomorrow With A Smiley
by James Bloomer

Save the World Again

No one can remember the exact day that the smileys became sentient. No one ever dreamt that a smiley would save us all. No one now can imagine a world without them. I tried. I tried to leave it all behind but I kept getting sucked back in. Unwillingly. The last time started like a normal day. I was sitting in my garden drinking tea and reading a paper, enjoying the early morning sun, when the doorbell rang. I opened the door to find two men in military uniforms. I had to fight hard the temptation to slam the door on them, I’d served my time and enough was enough.

"Good morning Doctor," said the first man, "I’m General Kash and this is Captain Padelente, we’re with the SASD. Can we come in?" It was as I feared, not just any military men but members of the Special Action Smiley Division.

"Certainly, gentlemen," I replied grimly, holding a smile. "Come in. Cup of tea?"

"No, thank you, Doctor, we’ll get right down to business if you don’t mind. We need you back."

"I’m sorry, General, but I tired from all that a long time ago. I haven’t had any smiley contact for five years."

"Pardon to disagree, sir," piped up the man introduced as the Captain, "but we have reason to believe that you are still in possession of a grade one standard smiley. You do have smiley contact. Sir!" I let a real smile pass my lips. Well, at least they’d done their research properly.

"Oh, you mean Arthur. Yes, I still have him, in fact he’s over there in that frame." I motioned to a picture frame on the wall containing a news cutting. "He’s very old now and of little harm." I could see both men tense as I told them about Arthur and the Captain edged cautiously towards the picture frame.

"They’re Alive! The story of the man who found the smileys," read the Captain as he turned to look at me. "A clipping about you, Doctor? Very nice but I don’t see a smiley in there."

"Well, yes, Captain, please don’t forget that he is a grade one and not some damn amateur."

"Yes, well, Doctor I…" the Captain turned back to the frame and the sight that greeted him almost made him fall backwards. The title now read "They’re Alive! The story of the man who found the smileys :-)".

"Please, gentlemen, don’t worry, he’s behind glass and on paper. He can’t escape, we’re all very safe."

"Very well, Doctor," said the General, "we’ll take your word on this. Captain, come away." The Captain edged cautiously backward, eyes still on the frame, until he came level with the General. "Can we get down to business, Doctor?" continued the General.

"Yes, yes, General, come outside, sit down and say what you have to, then you can get back to your superiors and tell them I said no." We all sat down on my garden furniture.

"I’m afraid, Doctor, that I can’t take no for an answer this time." The General’s face was stern.

"Well, I seem to remember you lot saying things like that before, but to be honest I think you’re all paranoid as hell."

"Doctor, this is no politically driven project like the Ghadaffi Affair…"

"Please don’t mention that! I almost died because of you bastards and your little schemes in a desert in Libya. Twenty-five of my top smileys never made it back, General. How do you explain that? How do you explain me having to watch good smileys splattered to pixels all over the network? A man doesn’t forget those things, General."

"I know the Ghadaffi Affair was rough on you, Doctor, but I believe you saved this country. You not only discredited a nasty dictator but you also completely ruined their calculations for an atomic bomb."

"Or so you say, General. Some of my smileys said it was just a model of a hydro plant."

"That’s nonsense!" blurted the Captain.

"Captain, are you calling my smileys liars?" I glared at him.

"No sir. I…. No sir."

"Listen, Doctor," said the General, "you’re the only one who has the experience we need, you’re the only one who can pull this off."

"And pray tell, General, what do you want me to do?"

"We need you and a team of smileys to save the world, Doctor." I checked the Generals face, he was serious. They wanted me to save the world. Again.

#

 

 

The Beginning

I got where I am today by chance. I was writing up my doctorate thesis when the news arrived. I’d never entertained the thought that I’d carry on in High Energy Physics, I was off to get a job in the city as a risk manager or a software developer. Elementary particle physics just didn’t interest me anymore, the spark was gone. Yet if I hadn’t been at CERN for a meeting that week I would have missed the beginning.

CERN, Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire, famous for it’s massive particle accelerators and for being the birthplace of the World Wide Web. Unbeknownst to me, whilst I was studying tau lepton decays, research had started into the smileys. That week in between meetings about tau branching ratios, I managed to catch a seminar intriguingly titled "A Plague On Your Web". The talk was presented by Tim Berners-Lee, one of the inventors of the World Wide Web, and focused on the alarming trend of smiley population increase. On the CERN intranet itself the population growth had tripled in the last month and it was suspected that something was "up". The seminar was serious in tone but with very little conclusion, and it was treated frivolously by all who attended, a little light relief before some statistical analysis, or some relativistic quantum mechanics. I can’t say why, but the topic struck a chord with me and I talked to Tim after the seminar finished. He suggested that I help him in my spare time.

I was soon devoting more time to the smileys than to my tau studies. I carried out many experiments before I came to the conclusion that we all take for granted. Just how did that smiley escape from the joke on my home page and creep into my results on a separate web page? What did they know about what they were doing? Was it instinct? I just couldn’t accept that the smiley chose its placement on my results page by accident: "B1 = (84.59 +- 0.10)%, B3 = (15.25 +- 0.09)%, B5 = (0.164 +- 0.026)%, the results seem to be as expected within the limits of the Standard Model ;-)" Did it know that I’d fiddled that last error? Was I paranoid? Finally after many weeks of experiments I published my now famous paper, "They’re alive! A study of smileys and their conscious abilities", in which I concluded that the smileys were alive and sentient. Many people guffawed at my theories, why couldn’t they reproduce my experimental results at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre then? Undeniably however, the smiley population was running riot on the CERN intranet. My theory was that somehow we had created a mutant strain of smiley that was as yet contained on our network. I knew it wouldn’t be long before they broke out; all it takes is one misplaced email. In the meantime all papers published by CERN were halted due to the lack of respect from the international scientific community. "We conclude that we have evidence of SUSY =:o" and "The parameter Rb is within the Standard Model expectations ;-)" were just two examples of the smileys making a mockery of CERN’s papers.

It wasn’t long before the Proton Synchrotron was converted to carry brackets, dashes and semicolons. They were smashed together at velocities close to the speed of light, but any resulting smileys were short-lived and unstable, decaying immediately into its constituents. A whole team dedicated itself to exotic smiley production, another team was certain that pixel study was the answer and before long the biologists were trying to map the smileys pixels onto a double helix. While all that was happening I quietly carried on with my research, learning more and developing increasing respect for these smileys. Well, it was quiet for a while…

#

Back into the Fray

"Welcome to Konamo Base, Doctor. My name is General Haxis." The uniformed man reached out to shake my hand as I climbed out of the Range Rover.

"Aren’t we supposed to salute or something, General?"

"Well, my research said you never actually joined the military, Doctor, but if you have something to tell me?" The General raised his eyebrows and smiled. I returned the smile but only because I found it amusing how the General had discounted my time in the Intelligence Community as military service, even though I’d put my life on the line for my country. I glanced around at the base. It was a bustle of activity, jets in the distance being readied, jeeps driving here and there, troops marching to the beat of an invisible, silent drummer.

"If you’d like to follow me, Doctor, we’ll head down to the control room." I followed him into a bunker and down a lift, how many floors I was unsure, and emerged into the control room. The room was filled with monitors and people sitting at computers. On the far wall there were three huge screens filled with graphs, readouts and pictures. It reminded me of mission control in Houston. I was lead into a meeting room off the side of the main control room. Inside, around an oval table, sat two men.

"Please, Doctor," said the General, "sit down and I’ll make the introductions." I pulled out a chair and sat down, noticing the screen at the end of the room, which was blank at the moment. "This is Gerald Tomba," said the General, gesturing to the man sitting opposite me. "He’s our government representative. We need his clearance before we can do anything," we exchanged nods, "and this is our smiley expert, Sam Pought."

"I believe we’ve met before, Sam?" I was sure that I recognised the face.

 

 

"Yes, Doctor, I was one of the team in the Russian Diffusion."

"Ah, yes, I remember now."

"Except that Sam is now head of SASD," said the General.

"Really?" I raised my eyebrows. "That was a quick promotion!"

"It has been ten years," replied Sam. "It wasn’t that quick."

"Ten years?" It seemed like yesterday to me. "My how time flies when you’re having fun. Anyway gentlemen, to business. What can I do for you?" The General moved to the front of the room next to the screen and picked up a remote control.

He turned to me and said, "I’m glad you’re sitting down, Doctor. Are you prepared to be shocked?" He clicked the remote and an image filled the screen. It was a blurred photograph of an oval object.

"Sorry to disappoint you, General, but I can’t be shocked if I don’t know what I’m looking at." I tried to suppress my smile.

"This, Doctor, is an alien spacecraft." He turned to face me squarely and studied my reaction. I nodded for him to carry on. "It entered orbit forty eight hours ago. It’s a mile in diameter and there are no distinctive markings on its surface. For the last twelve hours it has been emitting white noise across a broad spectrum of frequencies. We haven’t been able to decode the static yet." Silence filled the room for a moment.

"Well. What a monumental moment, first contact with alien species. I’m privileged to be here but I’m unsure as to what you think I can add?"

"This is a clear threat to humanity," said Gerald. "If we can’t negotiate with them then we must be able to counter the threat."

"It’s good to see that our government is eager to improve foreign relations, minister. It is minister is it?"

"No, I’m not a minister," responded Gerald angrily, "but I have full authority to speak on the governments behalf. I must say, Doctor, I think you are treating this all very lightly. This could be the end of mankind."

"We’ll take your word for it," I said, trying not to laugh. "So what do you want me to do?

"We want you to destroy the ship," said the General, his face like a mask.

"Destroy it!” This time I couldn’t stop my laughter. "Very funny, General."

"I’m afraid we’re very serious, Doctor," said Sam.

"Okay, okay, you’re serious." I tried to calm down a bit, stop my hysterical laughter. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. "Perhaps I’m naive, General, but if you have your heart set on destroying this craft then wouldn’t it be easier just to nuke it?"

"We must assume, Doctor," replied the General, "that any craft capable of travelling interstellar distances is capable of defending itself from nukes."

"So why don’t you do it, Sam?" I said facing him. "You’re the head of the SASD now, you do it."

Sam looked down at the desk and shuffled his papers, then he lifted his head to look directly at me, "I’m afraid it’s beyond my experience. I don’t know how to do it and neither does anyone in my division. We were hoping that you would have some ideas."

"Well, I think you may be disappointed in me, Sam," I turned to look at the General. "What makes you think that Sam and I can destroy this craft? Perhaps I should remind you of past missions? Discrediting foreign leaders by infiltrating their mail, ruining calculations to prevent the manufacture of nuclear weapons, ruining military calculations to hinder regiments supplies… I could go on, but notice that none of these missions involved BLOWING UP SPACESHIPS!" I was standing now, angry, shouting, what had these fools got themselves into? A silence settled across the room as the other men glanced at each other nervously.

"Doctor," said Sam gently, "will you at least have a look at some of my team. It’s the best we’ve ever had, we’ve got a squad of Shockeds, a squad of Elvis and, I’m very proud of this, a squad of Spanish Waiters." I tried to hide my surprise, I’d come across Spanish Waiters before, in fact I’d been the one to name them, but they were so temperamental that I’d only ever got one at a time. My discovery of them had arisen out of my idea to use divide by zero as a weapon, however when I first thought of this I needed a Shocked and a Beret working together and it just never came off. The Spanish Waiter provided all the elements in one smiley but I had never used one successfully.

"Hmmm, impressive, Sam, but I say again, why do you need me? You have Spanish Waiters, you know why I wanted them, how I wanted to use them, why don’t you just do it?"

 

 

"The thing is Doctor, I know smileys, my division knows smileys, we can train them and breed them, we can execute bracket-adding missions, sarcastic discrediting, all standard nowadays, thanks to you. However, no one has ever executed a divide by zero and to do it you not only need coding experience but also possibly theoretical physics skills in our situation, and you, Doctor, have all these skills."

"Yes, well, Sam, that was all a long time ago, " I looked at his youthful face."I’ve probably forgotten more than you know. I’m too old for all this now."

"But you’re thinking about it, aren’t you?" Sam pressed on."I can see it in your eyes; you want to do it, don’t you?"

"It’s just not that simple though, Sam." I let out a large sigh. "We’re dealing with an alien race; first thing we need to know is if they can receive our radio signals. If no, then there’s no way we can get into their ship and this is all for nothing. Secondly, if their alphabet is significantly different from ours then our characters will mean nothing, so even if we get a smiley in there we might not be able to execute the precise strike that we want. They may not even have an alphabet."

"There’s always a saturation attack," Sam was eager now. "No matter what their alphabet, if we flood their system with enough smileys we could trash it."

"I heard you used that technique rather effectively recently, Sam, in Thailand, but this is not Thailand, it’s an alien spaceship, it could be organic, it could be anything, it could just be beyond our understanding. Anyway Sam, I’m not sure about the ethics of breeding smileys just to be sent to their destruction."

"They were only standard smileys," Sam was getting more excited by the moment, "and we retrieved fifty percent of them after their systems crashed."

"Gentlemen, we don’t have time for ethical debates," said the General. "What I want to know is can you do it?" He held my gaze as I considered the question. Suddenly, we were interrupted by a soldier bursting through the door.

"General, sir!" said the soldier. "We have contact." We all rushed outside to see text scrolling across the large screens.

"Oh my God!" cried Gerald. "We were right."

The text read, "Greetings inhabitants of this third planet we call Trusho. We once inhabited this planet three thousand sun orbits ago by our calculations. We left for a new world, for a new adventure, but now we are back. We wish to reclaim this planet. We are but a hundred million yet we are sure that you will accept our total rule. Please reply."

"Well, Doctor," said the General turning from the screen to me, "we need you. Can you do it?"

"Gentlemen," I replied, "I shall see what I can do." I was back in the fray once again.

#

You Can Never Truly Leave

As with all technological breakthroughs, it wasn’t long before the military became interested. I don’t think that they were the first people to breed the smileys, I’m sure that dubious honour goes to my arch nemesis Professor Bakula, but they were in there quick. Meanwhile I was still studying them in “the wild” and trying to contain an outbreak from the CERN network. Little was I to know that something invented at CERN, the World Wide Web, would lead to the outbreak. I’m still certain to this day that the outbreak itself wasn’t enough to cause the world-wide chaos that ensued. I’d been studying that environment, I knew roughly how many there were, what the population was, and it wasn’t that much. My theory is that the military set some free to coincide with the outbreak, adding a few mutant breeds on the way. They wanted to see what would happen, how they could use it. It took all my skill to counter the outbreak, "The Plague" as some have called it. I had to invent methods of negating smileys that I wish I’d never have known about—absorption into text, de-resing to pixels, text colour changing—I was the first to think about all these things. The military were watching. They took my techniques and turned them around; instead of absorbing the smiley into text to get rid of the smiley why not do it to change the text? And so smiley espionage was born.

The trouble with using smileys as a weapon was twofold: one supply, two training. In the early days, smiley retrieval after an operation was an unheard of thing, all missions were one way. This lead to the problem of supply, which was inelegantly solved by Bakula, now working for the military. At first, he just had standard smiley farms. After all, they were just so damn easy to breed; they kept popping up everywhere. After a while, he managed to increase the gene pool, or character pool as I had called it, and ever more diverse smileys were appearing. I refused to join in with the unethical breeding of smileys for destruction and instead studied any rare wandering species I found on the net. I refused to be drawn into the military’s game.

 

 

Then Bakula defected. Russia at last had a smiley man in their arsenal. It wasn’t long before our American cousins were knocking on my door begging for help (something MI5 weren’t very happy about), and before I knew it I was working in the intelligence community. Those Cold War years were dreadful. I was under pressure to conjure up ever more destructive methods, ever more ingenious operations, ever more sophisticated smileys. I cultivated an elite group of smileys, capable of performing a mission, achieving its objective and getting out again. At first, I used to keep a line open back to my network for my returning team, however one mission resulted in a foreign agent smiley infiltrating our firewall. It caused havoc and devastated my set-up. After that I always set up a "safe-house" website for them to return to, ever-changing and hard to track down. From a distance, I could check the site and team were clean and then pull them back home.

I spent many years coordinating the team of smileys. I was responsible for founding the SASD. I guess I justified it by telling myself that it was for defence. I was defending our country and innocent people. I also told myself that the smileys would be taken advantage of if I weren’t around to care for them. I needed to ensure that they were treated fairly, not just as tools for our games of espionage. Eventually it became too much for me; perhaps I grew up, or just saw too much that no man should ever have to see. The operation in the Middle East was the final straw. We achieved our target but at what cost? So, after twenty-five years of working with smileys, I retired to the wilderness, with much harassment and boohaa from MI5, I should add. But I’d done my time, I’d brought down the Russian Smiley Empire, I’d discredited more dictators than I could remember, I’d done my share. It was time to stop. Nothing could bring me back. Yet there I was, asked to save the world. I guess it’s true what they say, you can never truly leave the SASD.

#

We Didn’t Save the World

"Doctor, how are we doing?" The General approached my terminal in the command and control room.

“My recon team should be arriving back in this next message, which is hopefully due soon," I replied, looking up at the general.

"Yes," he stroked his chin, “I’m eager to see their response to our welcome and peace offering. I’m just nervous about how hidden your smileys were. What if they spot them? We may not get another message, just blast into oblivion."

"You don’t have to worry about it, General, they were a good team, all credit to Sam." Our conversation was halted by a klaxon blare and a flashing message of "Incoming" on the command screens. For a moment, I thought it meant incoming enemy fire and I was almost sick until the general spoke to me.

“It’s an incoming message, Doctor, let’s go to work."

The digital message used ASCII like the first message from them; they must have picked up the standard from observing us. I downloaded the message onto my terminal and fed it into one of my debriefing tools. Over the years I had developed many tools to help with "smiley management" as it was now called. I didn’t think of it as management; I wasn’t managing these smileys, I was talking to them. I prefer the term "smiley communication", and in fact many of the tools use STP, Smiley Talk Protocol, a protocol I had developed specifically for talking to the smileys.

The message read, "Humans. We hear your welcome and request for peace. We decline this offer and repeat our demand to reclaim this planet. Relocation will commence shortly :-( ." So only one of my team had made it back. I hoped that the others were lying low to help any further operations teams. They were all trained in guerrilla warfare, they could hang around for a long time, causing maximum disruption with minimum risk to themselves.

"So, what do you think?" said the General, returning to my side after a short spell of gathering reports from his team.

"Well, one of the team made it back so I’ll have to see what he says."

"Okay, we’ll meet in half an hour for a briefing." The General turned and walked away. After running the smiley through my tools I discovered what we had all hoped. The spaceship did have a central network and it was digital. Furthermore their alphabet was remarkably like ours, maybe I thought, because they had taught it us so long ago? As I walked into the meeting room the same faces greeted me, Sam, Gerald and the General. I sat down and looked at each one of them in turn.

"Well, I have to say, people, that it’s probably the best case scenario we could have hoped for."

 

 

"What, being threatened with destruction by an alien race?" sneered Gerald.

I ignored him and continued. "Their alphabet is similar to ours and the team can get around. There also seems to be a reactor core that drives the spaceship, with some rather critical calculations to keep it stable."

"So, what’s your recommendation, Doctor?" asked the General.

"We have two options, General, although they both amount to the same thing. Option one: we could send a team in for a precise strike and try to overload the reactor. If that fails, then we try and flood the system, a quantity over quality strike."

"Don’t you have objections to treating smileys in that kind of way, Doctor?" smiled Sam.

"Ridiculous!" cried Gerald."Without us where would those smileys be? Eh? Several billion humans are far more important than a few smileys. They’d be in trouble without us."

"Actually, Gerald, I rather think that the smileys would do fine without us. They need us no more than the bees do, although they do enjoy the symbiotic relationship we have. Anyway, the point is that we’d have to try and plan an emergency escape route for the smileys somehow, a bounced message or something."

"Tell me, Doctor," said the General, "what was the second option?"

"Well, the second option is to do both steps at once." I glanced at Sam to see his reaction; he was smiling. "With the overload of smileys in the network the reactor failure may go unnoticed for that little bit longer."

"Opinions, Sam?" asked the General.

"Well, I think that Doctor is right and I personally think that we should go for the second option, multiple strikes at the same time. It’s not as though this is an espionage mission where we don’t want the enemy to know who did it, we just want them dead."

We left the meeting room and Sam and I got to work. We already had the team but we wanted to ask for volunteers, many of the flood team may not make it back. Not one of them backed out, they all knew what this meant but they were happy to be working for us. We decided that our escape route would be a lifeboat message. We’d used this before in Russia, we had bounced a near empty message off a communications tower and the operations team had jumped aboard to get back home. We hoped that bouncing a message of the ship would have the same effect.

"Okay, Sam, let’s do this thing." I turned from Sam to the General. "We’re ready to go."

"Okay, guys," the General saluted, "let those aliens have it."

Sam and I hit enter on our keyboards to trigger the mission code. The flood team was sent first. It was mainly standard smileys, thousands and thousands of them, but there were also Winkys, Sad smileys, Angry smileys, Cool smileys, Dogs, Cats, all of them trained in disruption. They streamed onwards out of the earth’s atmosphere towards the spaceship. Soon after that the strike team was sent, a small team of Spanish Waiters with a few Winkys for diversion. Once we had executed the mission code, the waiting began; there was nothing else that we could do.

It was a tense time. We waited anxiously looking for a sign. The General's men were monitoring every nuance of the ship, every energy emission, every slight movement, every power build up that we could trace. We just had to wait for a sign. The operation code had a five minute delay built in before the lifeboat message was activated. All the smileys knew this, they had five minutes to wreak havoc and then get out. The lifeboat message was sent and the flood team started pouring back.

"What’s happening, Doctor?" barked the General. "Why is the spaceship still there and the team is coming back? Have they given up?"

"I’m not sure yet, General," I glanced at my screen, fifty percent of the flood team was back, "I’ll have to talk to the team. I…" A flash of blinding white light interrupted me. By the time my eyes had recovered I heard the noise fed through the control rooms speakers. It wasn’t so much a bang, more a crack, like a gigantic boom of thunder. The sight that greeted my eyes was the spaceship exploding. Then the cheering started and I was on my feet.

"We did it!" cried the General. "We did it!" I let the light of the explosion wash over me, tinge me with regret at those smileys we had lost. "We saved the world, Doctor! We saved the world!"

No, General, I thought. We didn’t save the world. Those smileys saved our world. I hoped that every human on the planet would remember that. : -) )

#

 

 

The Cast

Standard smiley :-)

Wink ;-)

Sad :-(

Angry :-/

Cool B-)

Dog :>#

Cat :<*

Shocked =:0

Elvis @:)

Beret /:-)

Spanish Waiter :/0

# End #