Yojin Suru
Qidan mulled over his new messages. His personal agent-for-culling had categorized them, then
spread them in queues around his hemispherical holoscreen, using flower-shaped glyphs in varying
shades of yellow — in an effort to make this twice-daily task more interesting, as Qidan had
instructed it.
As part of his job as chief of Yeibichai's Yojin Suru, Qidan read his messages carefully. Not that
he'd miss something urgent if he didn't — his culling-agent sounded alarms when such messages
arrived — but he liked keeping the weeds of the planet chopped down as far as possible. After
all, the Yeibichai Association of Anshinkan had hired his combine to plug the gaps in their
coverage. It was best for all concerned, customer and combine and Global Collective, that the
Yojin Suru performed their job thoroughly. If they didn't catch something, no one else would.
Qidan thrust his head into the holographic field and peered at each queue. He squinted at the
caption on one glyph, then another. Small font must be part of the culling-agent's nuance for the
day. He bent and twisted to check out a few more.
Not at my age. He could see the words fine, but his back and neck didn't like the work or the
positions.
The agent would be listening for his reaction. "Magnify," he said. The bowl-like screen
twitched. Glyphs and captions swelled and crowded together. "Magnify." The display adjusted
again, spreading until it half-surrounded Qidan with yellow flowers. "That's fine." He'd never
see words that small again.
Comfortable, he scanned the captions on his queues.
Some of the gaps he filled came from their scope, far beyond the direvnya who funded Anshinkan. So
the Association let contracts to tend them: Global Transportation, Global Communications, Global
Climate and Weather, and Unwonted Natural Disasters.
Some of the gaps arose because people were people, and they exploited, or fell prey to, the voids
between jurisdictions. Direvnya Collectives were wise enough to pay for coverage in these areas:
World Health, Intercontinental Gambling, and Contraband.
He also had to mind his own shop: Yojin Suru Tactical Operations and Anshinkan Training &
Conventions.
The final queue was a favorite corner — or bugaboo — of his. He had constructed special
agents-for-culling to mine the Mirnaya Direvnya and send him messages about oddities.
Oddities — the kind he was interested in — arose from the edges of the human condition, where one
activity overlapped another in unexpected interaction. These boundary conditions occurred for many
reasons: people weren't paying attention, or they didn't care, or they didn't have enough energy
or talent or skill to see that far. Many times, boundary conditions didn't matter, but other
times, they hinted at serious problems he wouldn't have seen before it was too late.
His eyes narrowed as the most recent situation surfaced from memory. His automated agents had
noted a spike in the losses of mokele-mbembe calves to gwira packs; Popovich's nature-trust combine
attributed them to corrections in the balance of prey and predator. Later, his agents also
reported a new plateau in di-hua sales, folk medicines based on homeostasis. So he sent the
rangers back, not to the carcasses, long since scavenged naturally, but to the Beobachtung data.
And there, supposedly hidden by the deepest dark in the disjunction of all the moons, yet recorded
by the ubiquitous satellites, were poachers slaughtering babies for their gall-bladders and luring
gwira to cover their tracks, all because some people sought sexual rejuvenation in magical
potions. Further investigation identified the entire ring and led to their conviction and Exile.
Today, the Boundary-Conditions queue was empty.
Ah, well, time to go to work — after one last exercise in vigilance. He pulled his head back,
literally, to shrink the overall pattern of queues — this spyglass with which he viewed the world
— down so he could view it all at once. Just to reinforce that perspective. And see if anything
were missing.
Once in a while, he did receive messages that fit nowhere in his scheme. Sometimes, local
conditions exceeded local resources and a Chief of Anshinkan called for help. By definition, these
situations were emergencies, unplanned, unforeseen, unfunded except for insurance payments that
trickled in from some, but not all, Anshinkan combines. Qidan's agents could not funnel these
messages to existing queues because they were unpredictable in form and content. They hung like
gnats on the periphery of his holoscreen.
Nothing like that today.
Otherwise, how Anshinkan handled life in their direvnya was literally not part of his business.
Back to that business. Now that he could actually see the glyphs, he noticed red flags hanging off
three of the queues. He poked a finger at Contraband.
The glyph unfolded into two subqueues, "Weapons" in saffron with a red flag, and "Substances" in
goldenrod. He poked again.
The flag-generating message unfolded automatically. Framed by a red boundary, it read simply:
"Illegal arms cache AC-2031. Nominal count = 2500. Today's count = 2499. Suggest local
investigation."
Off to the side, the Weapons subqueue showed another twelve messages of normal priority.
With an impatient flip and snick of his finger, Qidan cross-referenced the cache identifier to the
nearest Prime Direvnya: Wausau, Region Hunan, Continent Popovich. And the combine responsible for
Anshinkan there, with a chief by the name of Hann Ulrich Klintzich.
Qidan glanced at that chief's image — the huge, sagging mustachios were familiar, probably from
the semi-annual Anshinkan conventions — then forwarded the alarm message and set himself a tickler
for follow-up.
Then he tended to the other red flags.
