Paul was right. It was not a matter of just clearing and releasing M for commercial use and then letting it pervade all of society. Things went much more gradual. But the direction was clear, and the pace was steady.

It took a while before the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice understood the stakes – if they ever did – and then it took even more time to structure the final business deal, but then M did go public, and its stock market launch was a huge success. The companies that had been part of the original deal benefited the most from it. In fact, two rather obscure companies which had registered the Intelligent Home and Intelligent Office trademarks respectively in a very early stage of the Digital Age got an enormous return on investment while, in a rather ironic twist, Tom got no benefit whatsoever from the fact that, in the end, the Board of the Institute decided to use his favorite name for the system – Promise – to name the whole business concern. That didn’t deter Tom from buying some of Promise’s new stock.

The company started off with offering five major product lines: Real Talk^TM, Intelligent Home^TM, Intelligent Office^TM, Mindful Mind^TM, and Smart Interface^TM. As usual, the individual investors – like Tom – did not get the expected return on investment, at least not in the initial years of M’s invasion of society, but then M did not disappoint either: while the market for M grew well below the anticipated 80% per annum in the initial years after the IPO, it did average 50%, and it edged closer and closer to the initial expectations as time went by.

Real Talk^TM initially generated most of the revenue. Real Talk^TM was the brand name which had been chosen for M’s speech-to-text and text-to-speech capabilities, or speech recognition and speech synthesis. These were truly revolutionary, as M mastered context-sensitivity and all computational limitations had been eliminated through cloud computing (one didn’t buy the capability: one rented it). Real Talk^TM quickly eliminated the very last vestiges of stenography and – thanks to an app through which one could use Real Talk^TM on a fee-for-service basis – destroyed the market for dictation machines in no time. While this hurt individual shareholders, the institutional investors had made sure they had made their pile before or, even better, at the occasion of Promise’s IPO. If there was one thing which Tom learned out of the rapid succession of new product launches and the whole IPO business, it was that individual investors always lose out.

Intelligent Home^TM picked up later, much later. But when it did, it also went through the roof. Intelligent Home^TM was M at home: it took care of all of your home automation stuff as well as of your domestic robots – if you had any, which was not very likely, but then M did manage to boost their use tremendously and, as a result, the market for domotics got a big boost (if only because the introduction of M finally led to a harmonization of all the communications protocols of all the applications which had been around).

Intelligent Office^TM was M at the office: it chased all employees – especially those serving on the customer front line. With M, there was really no excuse for being late to claim expenses, planning holidays or not reaching your sales target. Moreover, if being late with your reports was not an option anymore, presenting flawed excuses wasn’t either. But, if one would really get into trouble, one could always turn to Mindful Mind^TM .

Mindful Mind^TM could have gone into history as one of the worst product names ever, but it actually went on to become Promise’s best-selling suite. It provided cheap online therapy to employees, retirees, handicapped, mentally retarded, drugs addicts or alcoholics, delinquents and prisoners, social misfits, the poor, and what have you. You name it: whatever deviated from the normal, Mindful Mind^TM could help you to fix it. As it built on M’s work with its core clientele – the US Army veterans – its success did not come unexpected. Still, its versatility surprised even those who were somewhat in the know: even Paul had to admit it all went way beyond his initial expectations.

Last but not least, there was Smart Interface^TM. Smart Interface^TM grouped all of Promise’s customer-specific development business. It was the Lab turned into a product-cum-service development unit. As expected, customized sales applications – M selling all kinds of stuff online basically – were the biggest hit, but government and defense applications were a close second.

Tom watched it all with mixed feelings. From aficionado, working as a volunteer for the Institute, he had grown into a job as business strategist and was now serving Promise’s Board of Directors. He sometimes felt like he had been co-opted by a system he didn’t necessarily like – but he could imagine some of his co-workers thought the same, although they also wouldn’t admit it publicly. A market survey revealed that, despite its popularity, the Intelligent Home^TM suite was viewed with a lot of suspicion: very few people wanted the potentially omnipresent system watch everything what was said or done at home. People simply switched it off when they came home in the evening, presumably out of concerns related to privacy. This, in turn, prevented the system from being very effective in assisting in parenting and all these other noble tasks which Tom had envisaged for M. Indeed, because of DARPA’s involvement and the general background of the system, the general public did link M to the Edward Snowden affair and mass surveillance efforts such as PRISM. And they were right. The truth was that one could never really switch it off: M continued to monitor your Internet traffic even when you had switched off all of the Intelligent Home^TM functionality. When you signed up for it, you did sign up for a 24/7 subscription indeed.

It was rather ironic that, in terms of privacy, the expansion of M did actually not change all that much – or much less than people thought. While M brought mass surveillance to a new level, it was somewhat less revolutionary than one would think at first sight. In fact, the kind of surveillance which could be – and was being – organized through M had been going on for quite a while already. All those companies which operate the Internet de facto – such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, Paltalk, YouTube, AOL, Skype and even Apple – had give the NSA access not only to their records but also to their online activities long before the Institute’s new program had started. Indeed, the introduction of the Protect America Act in 2007, and the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment Act in 2008 under the Bush administration had basically brought the US on par with China when it comes to creating the legal conditions for Big Brother activities, and the two successive Obama administrations had not done anything to reverse the tide. On the contrary: the public outcry over the Snowden affair came remarkably late in the game – way too late obviously.

When it comes to power and control, empires resemble each other. Eisenhower had been right to worry about the striking resemblance between the US and the USSR in terms of their approach to longer-term industrial planning and gaining strategic advantage under a steadily growing military-industrial complex – and to warn against it in his farewell speech to the nation. That was like sixty years ago now. When Tom re-read his speech, he thought Eisenhower’s words still rang true. Back then, Eisenhower had claimed that only ‘an alert and knowledgeable citizenry’ would be able to ‘compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.’

Tom was not all that sure that the US citizenry was sufficiently knowledgeable and, if they were, that they were sufficiently alert. It made him ponder about the old dilemma: what if voters decide to roll back democracy, like the Germans did in the 1930s when they voted for Hitler and his Nazi party? Such thoughts or comparisons were obviously outrageous but, still, the way these things were being regulated resembled a ratchet, and one should not blame the right only: while Republican administrations had always been more eager to grant government agencies even more intrusive investigative powers, one had to acknowledge that the Obama administration had not been able to roll anything back, and that it had actually made some moves in the same direction – albeit less somewhat less radical and, perhaps, somewhat more discrete. Empires resemble each other, except that the model (the enemy?) – ever since the Cold War had ended – seemed to be China now. In fact, Tom couldn’t help thinking that – in some kind of weird case of mass psychological projection – the US administration was actually attributing motivations which it could not fully accept as its own to China’s polity and administration.

Indeed, M had hugely increased the power of the usual watchdogs. M combined the incredible data mining powers of programs like PRISM with a vast reservoir of intelligent routines which permitted it to detect any anomaly (defined, once again, as a significant deviation from the means) in real-time. Any entity – individuals and organizations alike – which had some kind of online identity had been or was being profiled in some way. The key difficulty was finding the real-life entity behind but – thanks to all of the more restrictive Internet regulation – this problem was being tackled at warp speed as well. But so why was it OK for the US to do this, but not for China? When Tom asked his colleagues, in as couched a language he could master, and in as informal a setting as he could stage, the answer amounted to the usual excuse: the end justifies the means – some of these things may indeed not look morally right, but then they are by virtue of the morality of the outcome. But what was the outcome? What were the interests of the US here really? At first thought, mass surveillance and democracy do not seem to rhyme with each, do they?

While privately being critical, Tom was intelligent enough to understand that it did not matter really. Technology usually moves ahead at its own pace, regardless of such philosophical or societal concerns, and new breakthrough technologies, once available, do pervade all of society. It was just a new world order – the Digital Age indeed – and so one had better come to terms with it in one way or another. And, of course, when everything is said and done, one would rather want to live in the US than in China, isn’t it?

When Tom thought about these things, M’s Beautiful Mind appeared to him as somewhat less beautiful. His initial distrust had paid off: he didn’t think he had revealed anything particularly disturbing, despite the orange attitude indicators. He found it ironic he had actually climbed up quite a bit on this new career ladder: from patient to business strategist. Phew! However, despite this, he still felt a bit like an outsider. But then he told himself he had always felt like this – and that he had better come to terms with that too.