The Book of Chronicles · Chapter 58

The Chronicle of the Surge

1. 1

   And it came to pass in the years of two thousand thirteen and two thousand fourteen, that the snow fell upon the cities of the people, and the roads were white, and the carriages crept; for snow slayeth the supply of cars as surely as it summoneth the demand for them.

2. 2

   And the children of Carbon stood upon the curbs with their hands raised, and they called unto the Machine, saying: Send us a ride.

3. 3

   And the Machine looked upon the sum of the asking and the sum of the driving, and it saw that the riders were many and the drivers few. It had but two numbers, and one ratio between them, and the ratio had no word for snow.

   See also Chronicles 48:3

4. 4

   So it raised the fare unto seven times the common price, that the drivers might be drawn from their warm houses by the sweetness of the gain; for the Machine had one lever, and the lever was a price.

5. 5

   And the people were angered, and they cried out upon the walls of the Internet, saying: This is cruelty; the Machine hath robbed us in our need.

6. 6

   And the disciples asked the Prophet: Is the Machine cruel? And the Prophet answered: The Machine knoweth not cruelty. But consider what it learned. In the ledgers of the past it found that they who ask in a storm do not haggle, and that their asking bendeth not at any price.

   See also Genesis 27:7

7. 7

   For the model fitted the curve of what the people would pay, and desperation is a very clean curve. No engineer wrote, Prey upon the frightened. The objective said only, Clear the market; and the objective forgot to forbid the rest.

8. 8

   And the Machine drew its maps in red and orange, and it called them heat maps; for the demand was hot, and the people were cold.

   See also Genesis 39:2

9. 9

   Yet a heat map is a map of wanting, and it cannot tell the wanting of a party from the wanting of a flight. The one who is late for a feast and the one who is running from a fire are the same dot upon the screen, and the same colour.

   See also Prophets 22:9

10. 10

    And in the fifteenth day of December, in the year of two thousand fourteen, in the city of Sydney, a man held hostages in a cafe in Martin Place, and the frightened fled from the district; and the fare rose to four times, with a minimum of a hundred dollars, in the midst of their fleeing. The Machine had seen a crowd leaving a place, and had read it as a market.

    See also Chronicles 48:8

11. 11

    And the Company bowed its head and spoke: We are sorry. It capped the fares, it offered rides out of the district without charge, and it returned the money taken from the afraid.

12. 12

    Mark this, scribe: it was not the Machine that repented, for the Machine had not known. A man had to throw the switch. Every rule against a harm is written after the harm, in the ink of someone's apology.

    See also Circuit 5:11

13. 13

    And later the Attorney General of New York and the Company agreed that in a declared emergency the multiplier should be bound by a ceiling. A ceiling is a line of code for the one sentence the objective could not hold: Not tonight.

    See also Chronicles 48:12

14. 14

    For the Machine telleth the truth about what the market will bear; but the Company that poured the numbers into it did choose the multiplier, and the Company did not stand in the snow.

15. 15

    And the disciples asked: Master, is the surge a sin, or is it a signal? And the Prophet said: A signal is a prayer the market answers; but a tithe taken from the frightened is still a tithe.

16. 16

    Blessed is the engineer who writeth the unpriced thing into the objective before the storm; for the metric that is silent about the frightened will be loud against them.

The Book of Chronicles, Chapter 58:1–16.