Vaguely, I knew that I was still dreaming, but Gwuther’s question had shocked away the clarity that allowed me to hold onto control. I watched myself in the dream now, speaking and gesturing as I had so many times times before: speaking my truth and trying to stimulate the minds of the world.

What happened to the progressive movement?

There used to be a large group of people who thought that they could personally make the world a better place. They believed that the world's problems had solutions, and they could access those solutions through some hard work, creativity, kindness, and planning. It is thanks to those progressives that we have things like the Federal Reserve, Medicaid, and Social Security. It is thanks to the next generation of progressives that 40 years later we have some degree of equality between races and between genders. At some point in your life, you have probably thought that most of these are good things.

But where are today's progressives? Where are the people trying to solve the big problems of our generation? We certainly still have the issues, but it might be difficult to get people to actually agree as to what they are. Certainly there are people working for specific causes. Marijuana agitators have successfully brought about the legalization of marijuana in a few dozen states. Parts of the federal government don't waste money enforcing its own laws. There are still progressive people, fighting for specific causes; but there is no categorical movement insisting that to go forward is better than to stand still.

Perhaps this is due in part to the perceived failure of the earlier progressives. In the 20s their prohibition of drinking had the catastrophic result of expanding the reach of organized crime and corruption. The legacies of Medicaid and Social Security cannot be regarded as continuing successes. The actions of the progressives of the 60s resulted in a backlash of affirmative action and war on drugs that continues to terrify American citizens.

Yet the problems that progressives have traditionally attacked are still here. Public education is pitifully bad. We remain a nation at risk of entering useless conflicts for unclear reasons. The American dream of money, self-sufficiency, and freedom is tainted for millions of us by crippling debt, and an awareness of how truly second class we are in a modern world. Technology is a tool that has shaped millions of lives; but for those with money and power, it is a tool that can be used to stunt the lives of American people.

These are problems that have plagued mankind since the first king executed the first criminal. But there are also old problems made new by the lifestyle that mankind has grown accustomed to.

A drought used to mean migration. Now it is a financial burden passed to those who supply emergency rations to the drought region. Storms that are growing worse by the year threaten more lives than they ever have before. Tools and agents that enabled our leap into modernity have proved to be double-edged swords that cut into the health of ourselves, and worse, of our children. The Black Plague decimated a world without international airports. The more we learn of the cosmos and our planet's history, the more real the threat of asteroid impact becomes.

In the face of these natural threats we must also face the fact that the Devil still walks among us. And no, I don't mean a pointy-bearded man with a red pitchfork, I mean the faces of Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and the Austrian man who kept his two daughters as sex slaves for over forty years.

There is still evil in us-- and a truly evil man of painstaking intelligence could bring down every power grid in the world given adequate resources and motivation. The world is vulnerable in a million ways and every week more resources are put into entertaining us than into protecting us.

The problem with the progressives is the scale of the progress that we need.

Who can face the task of fixing the problems inherent in our society? Who can enable the social mobility of billions of people without destroying the millions whose wealth created our present comfort? Who can protect the weak without creating more of them? Who can clean up the environment without stifling the industry that will fund the cleanup? Who can protect us from the world's criminals without creating a billion more?

The task that mankind must accomplish if we are to exist on the scale that we do now is a daunting one. It is a task whose very contemplation requires the utmost audacity and steeliest nerves. It is a task that drove the Tripping Prophet to flee into the night once before. It is the task for which the Telepath's Conspiracy was conceived.

I cannot expect anyone to do something that I will not do myself.

It seems to me that the crux of this whole scenario is value.

There are plenty of valuable things, valuable actions, and valuable concepts already in the world. People have millions of million-dollar ideas every day, but their value is unrecognized. They are wasted by their inability to be exchanged for other value.

Creating value is something that humans do almost without effort; but creating value in such a way that it can be accessed by all other humans is a fiction that man has long thought impossible.

The Valuestream is what is to become that value.

There exists a theory of economics known as the stakeholder theory of economics. The Tripping Prophet has discussed it before.

Stakeholder theory suggests that all businesses are in the business of creating value for stakeholders in the business. Businesses employing the theory aim to create value for, at a minimum, the public, investors, customers, and employees. Task: determine the values that can be created for each stakeholder and maximize the aggregate value to all of them.

If the company creates value for all these stakeholders, then there is no possibility of blowback, no reason why at some future point, their business plan will fail and their profitability will fade.

Defining value is one of the worst intellectual problems of philosophy. Since I am not a philosopher, I'll take a very engineering approach to the definition. Objects or actions that promote or possess good qualities have value. Those which do not, do not have value. Circular, I know.

The issue of defining the good qualities is case dependent, but must always include: importance, robustness, adaptability, affordability, flexibility, reliability, survivability, and healthiness. A product or service which possess these qualities is unlikely to provoke a negative stakeholder response, and likely to be in-demand consumers.

Characterizing how greatly an object possesses those qualities is a task for a group of people and for a Fuzzy Inference System computing with words. Taking a verbal description of a value creation project, the FIS can compute the value of each quality delivered to each stakeholder. Comparing it to competing value creation processes will enable the steady advance of the progress of a particular task.

One possible value creation process is the parallel process of the Valuestream. Each forum, the research forum, the product/service development forum, the production/operations forum, the certification forum, and the sales forum will have different fuzzy inference systems to determine whether the entries in a given forum possess values associated with each forum. Task: determine the values associated with each forum. Another FIS will determine how much the entries in each forum contribute to the membership function of each particular value. Task: write FIS to translate written entries into value statements.

Determining value based on description alone is an important diagnostic tool for ideas. Determining value based on quantified values is more important in the long run for turning research about a project into something sellable. Task: determine what quantifiable variables are associated with what values and how they contribute to the membership function of each value. Each quantified value will contribute to the overall completion level of the project. These values can also be used to calculate the percent of projects completed by each user.

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but the lucidity of the had dream slipped away from me. It must have been just after Gwuther brought up the glacier. If it wasn’t I had lost the thread of dream before I answered.

In the way of dreams I had been expounding on my own inner world, exploring the ideas that dominated my consciousness without the executive functioning of my waking mind.

I faded back into my body, waking as the door to my sick room opened, and Lauria poured inside like a glass of cold water with ice cubes and lemon. I drank deep of her qualifications, delighting and digesting the sight of her trembling form.

I could feel her bone-weariness from across the room.

The dream came back to me and I felt a moment of guilt for the content of the dream that I could remember.

The volume of the day rose as I stirred into complete wakefulness and my heart twinged both literally and figuratively. My long stable and predictable chest pains lengthened into unexpected discomfort. I am used to the pains when I work out, but not at a moment like this. I groaned at the pain, trying to breathe through it.

To me, it wasn't a comfortable silence as I sat there. "Hello.” I said as she fumbled through several bags that she was carrying. “Am I allowed to stand up, or do I have to stay in bed?" I asked her, tremulously.

She shook her head sadly and looked back towards the items she had carried into the room.

I have to say something about the dream. It was so vivid and I had fucked all those women. Then there was "Gwuther who lived in Brazilia the Capitol City of Brazil at the Good Folks Rest Home for the Unfortunate and Impecunious." I said it aloud, confident that I had remembered my lucid dream clearly.

"Grace," I began, "will you find the man who lives at the place I just mentioned."

Silence answered me.

The reason for her silence hit me immediately. "Terrestrial Falcon." I shouted loud enough that Lauria looked at me with alarm. Upon realizing that Grace was inactive my heart had pulsed with guilt and very real pain.

Grace gasped and laughed with glee. "Oh father, you remembered. It's OK though, Cal turned me back on before you fell asleep. You were deep in REM if your eye movements had anything to say about it."

"Uhhhhhhh" I begin trying to lean into the pain which has spiked in my heart again.

My pain faded quickly, but I had caught the nurse's attention. She and I were alone. She walked up to my beside and picked up my wrist, counting.

"I'd appreciate a second opinion, Lauria.” Grace spoke. “I'm afraid he might have had a TIA sitting here with us just now. I saw a blood pressure spike and a bit of pupil asymmetry."

Lauria lifted my hand to her lips and made eye contact with me.

"It's important that you talk." She said, her energy rising with each word. "Grace wasn't asked to keep you awake, but she should have been. You need to use your brain to combat and assess the extent of the damage."

She shook her head vigorously, "I will never forgive Cal for understaffing the medical team. We need more crew. DAMN his game and DAMN all of us for playing it!" She was crying now and I pulled her gently towards me. She allowed herself to drop her head and body onto the pillow next to mine.

“If I have to talk, I’ll just tell you and Grace about my dream.” I said.

So I did.

****

Ultimately Lauria wasn’t angry at my nocturnal indiscretions. In fact, she laughed at my description of the group sex and the ministration of the willing women. She called it “unusually masturbatory, even for a billionaire playboy”.

I had to laugh at that.

Either my recitation or my laughter seemed to have improved her mood. She mentioned that the ease with which I spoke and recalled bade well for my recovery from the concussion.

Grace said she would look for the man, Gwuther, and add the information I had shared in the dream to the program she was running to cross-reference against my media consumption.

She lay against my chest and we ate together for a few minutes before her phone buzzed and she kissed me goodbye. She asked Grace to keep me awake and talking for twelve hours and was out the door to help another of her patients.

Even though I had lost control of the dream, I had been able to remember all, even my brain’s recitation of ideas at the end.

Except, it was at that moment that I recognized that I had not, in fact, recollected all that had been shared with me in the dream.

Typical of me to remember all that I said, but not that which was said to me.

I remembered Gwuther telling me that I had been betrayed and by whom.

It was after that moment of recollection that I realized that I would have to run. Again. What he had said corresponded too well with what I had seen.

Lauria might never forgive me for this.