Acronyms used
The police who had been assigned to protect me slowly pushed through the buzzing crowd of press and random people hoping to get a glimpse of me, People were constantly shouting questions at me, which were nearly impossible to hear over the background of talking and shouting. Flashes constantly went off in my face as I walked along being pushed about as the policemen bumped into me, especially when rowdy crowd members tried to get at me. I could see dozens of drone cameras floating around above me trying to get a good shot and many more cameras on long pendulum arms at the edge of the crowd also trying to get a good look.
Fuck. My face must be plastered on every TV screen in the world right now. I guess I'm not going to be enjoying my strawberry flavoured food pouch tonight.
After much more pushing and shoving, and even a use of a shock gun, we made it through the line of security soldiers and robots surrounding the International Good Deeds Ranking Centre Building and as soon as we stepped inside the lobby the sound from the crowd was almost entirely dampened out and I could finally hear myself think.
Boy what a day it had been, My day had been perfectly dandy, I had just finished a somewhat decent day at work and was looking forward to mindlessly using my entertainment system at home, that was until that fateful moment when I hit (and killed) a kid who had for some reason ran out in front of me on a highway. It was over in a few seconds, not even the cars automatic evasion system could stop me in time. The car immediately locked me in and called the police, its quite a bit harder to get away with hit and runs in modern cars. It wasn't the police who showed up first however, the IGDR showed up first. Dozens of expensive looking armoured hover APC's showed up and squads of IGDR grunts in power armour got out and set up a perimeter, four or so quad copters showed up above as well, at first I figured they were there to get me, but it became obvious that their guns were pointed at the people around me, and not at me.
Quite the traffic jam formed from ground traffic, many of the people had got out of their cars and started filming, they knew that when you saw the IGDR para-military out in force that something was up, after another few moments one of the IGDR grunts walked up to me and wasted no time talking.
"Your rank has moved from position 1,757,563,143 to position number one. We are placing you under protective custody, its for your own safety"
I wasn't given time to argue, he quickly picked me up and walked me over to a APC and unceremoniously plonked me in the back before four more grunts climbed in after me and the door was slammed shut, I felt light acceleration as we started moving. I full well knew what was going on, everyone always thought about it, when you get placed in the top few hundred good deed doers you get automatic protection until your good deed rating drops again, there were to many assassinations to count before this policy became standard practice.
And that's how I had ended up here, with 5 official looking people sitting at a desk across from me looking confused and scratching their heads.
"How the hell does this make sense? The system has never applied ranking for the future effects of actions before" One said with annoyance in his voice, he looked young (Although knowing these guys they were probably all a hundred or so years old) and wore a pair of glasses. The other 4 looked over at him and nodded, they must be holding a telepathic conversation with neuron chips. Which is quite impressive in its self really, neuron chips are worth more than I'll ever earn in my life. So he'd only spoken up either out of annoyance, or to include me. I'm guessing the latter is more likely. They suddenly all looked over at me, and started firing questions at me.
"Is there any other good deeds you did in that day?" A older looking woman in the group asked.
"No, my rank only changed by a few thousand places either way like it always does every day" I responded, trying to make sure that my annoyance at not being at home enjoying the latest episode in season 205 of Game of Thrones was showing through.
"Well this is bad" another responded "Really fucking bad, do you want to know what the implications of what has happened are?"
I blinked once and looked across all of them, who seemed very intent on drilling their eyes through my skull right now.
"Sure" I said.
He wasted no time in delving into an explanation.
"Well normally the system decides ranking based on current actions, so if you give some money to a homeless guy you will gain some points for going a good deed, whereas if you steal a lolly from a child you will loose points for doing a bad deed"
Why was he explaining this? This was common knowledge.
"However now the system has given you the number one ranking based on the future repercussions prevented or caused by killing that child. This means that giving money to that homeless guy may now decrease your ranking if he goes on to do something bad or greedy with that money, where as stealing that lolly pop from the child may give you some good deeds for future changes it causes in that child's mentality. Now, this would be fine if the system decided to work like this, however there is a slight problem"
He stopped for a dramatic pause, the other four in the group still kept intently staring at me.
He took a deep breath before continuing.
"The problem is that the system is effectively predicting the future, which means that this event is having an effect on the future that will happen. This causes a somewhat bad paradox in that, because you killed the child the event the child causes will never happen, meaning you will never get the good deed points for preventing anything, because it never happened and therefore it repeats its self over and over again. We got lucky in this case that the paradox is self contained."
At this he took another pause.
"Unfortunately as we speak innumerable paradoxes are being produced by the system, we predict that in just a few days the fabric of time and space its self will rip apart under these paradoxes, the system is already starting to slow down and lag beind due to this, and we believe you are the solution"