A public figure. Tier two.
Usually the easy ones.
Tier ones are always a pain. Politicians, sport stars, founders, system architects. When they die there are protocols. Escalations, continuity meetings, public mourning, myth creation.
Tier threes are hard to even document beyond the event of death itself.
Private lives. Sealed files. Clean, but of no interest.
Tier two…that’s manageable.
Known shape. Known geometry. You can pull it together quickly: citations and footnotes, broadcast transcripts, appointments, conferences. Visible relevance, but quick to catalogue, simple to collate.
Capturing limited authority in a data column.
She reviewed the file while her coffee cooled.
Senior academic. Business studies and marketing. Sport as infrastructure, sport as social adhesive, sport as economic impact. Several books, a couple still circulate.
After a couple of seconds his face resolved into vague recognition. Old videos, a fairly familiar voice on the radio.
The model assigned a legacy confidence score: 0.81.
Pretty high. Clean. Easy auto summary.
She confirmed the provisional register.
Second part: impact resolution.
This gets more complicated, quickly.
Easy and conventional to start. Institutions with outward ripples. Some board appointments and funding bodies. Easy to model. Research centers with newly appointed chairs. Names on letterheads. Contractual obligations. Local newspapers making appointment announcements.
But then the shape changed.
Usually these things narrow. Here, for some reason, the map widens.
Lines extend. Not just in places professionally relevant. Not limited. Individuals appear, multiple, with no shared employer, or overlapping project. People with no immediate justification for inclusion, yet somehow connected in the records.
An Iranian student, now managing an academic department.
A woman in Vietnam who chose to invest in building adaptive classrooms.
A journalist who pivoted into labor dispute arbitration.
A retired civil servant in Kuala Lumpur who lists the name, in a benefits application, as “professional influence”.
The system highlights these as low-weight. Anecdotal noise, below the importance threshold.
But there are a hell of a lot of them.
So she doesn’t remove them. She keeps reading.
There are dozens.
Then hundreds.
His name is cited on scholarship forms. Visa sponsorship statements. A licensing dispute. Academic applications. A court sentencing. So many character references.
He’s in the footnotes of hundreds of lives that you wouldn’t think would reach him.
The quotes are multiple, too. Repeating, but not standardized. No language optimization here.
Fragments from older data regimes. Transcripts, or fuzzy audio.
He told me to apply when I thought it was ridiculous.
It didn’t sound brave when he said it. Just normal.
Everyone wanted to know what I was good at. He asked what I wanted.
He stayed and kept talking after everyone else left.
The system doesn’t know how to classify all this. It stalls, and makes an attempt.
Mentorship cluster. Motivational architect. Positive sentiment.
Not particularly helpful when it comes to evaluation.
The analyst leaned back.
She’s seen some patterns like this before. Not usually in a public figure like this. Usually smaller. A teacher who never published. Administrators who disappear into buildings. Smaller scale, compact distributions.
It doesn’t happen in people with profiles. Even tier two.
She filtered chronologically.
The early period is easy to understand. Tight. Vertical. Here are academic appointments, increasingly elite. Defined authority, institutional prestige. Expected curve, even if an acceleration from class origin.
Then there’s increasing distortion.
A leadership post, but the metadata is confusing. Contradictory.
Short duration. Abnormal meeting structures and schedule. Limitation and then elimination of authority.
This is when you’d expect the curve to collapse.
It doesn’t.
It spreads.
The system doesn’t know how to name this. It tries:
Loss of executive centrality
The analyst looks at it. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not that it needs correction, just an alternative.
She thinks of another word, “redistribution”.
Connections and dependencies spread out from the center. Traveling outward, varying in strength. And multiplying. The influence is replicated, extended, diffused.
This biography is turning into a physics problem. None of the things she’d expect are happening.
No demographic clustering.
No geographic or racial loyalty.
But one clear, consistent, factor in the projections. Proximity to beginning.
These people encountered him early. Not necessarily in their lives, but in their evolution as people.
Before safety.
Before permission.
Before struggle.
Before anyone else said they were correct.
She decided to open the event logs.
Simple screen. Simple data.
Timestamps, location tags, a fragmentary transcription. Unresolved calendar conflicts from two decades ago.
There was a specific anomaly. She tried to override the records, it pushed back. Demanded an authorization code for further detail.
No other information other than timestamps. The event overran predicted length by thirty-seven minutes.
There is a minor note attached to the record. An addendum to someone’s funding application.
It was the first time I saw authority refuse to leave the room.
The analyst closed the log. This conclusion felt heavier than the others, she didn’t know why.
The system is still requesting a priority check. It wants to close the file. A simple summary.
Public impact score: High
Projected structural disruption: Moderate
There’s an optional field, too. Notes.
She opens the notes. Tries to think of something to write.
Subject functioned as an influencer and amplifier. Not a node.
The system pushes back…
Not valid categorization.
She deletes her notes.
Tries typing:
Authority condensed, then returned.
Deleted it.
It’s too interpretative.
Finally, types an alternative.
He made other people larger.
The cursor blinks.
The system won’t accept it.
She has to remove it before she submits the report.
The file closes. Life complete.
On the way home, the analyst lets someone merge ahead of her without measuring the cost. She answers a junior colleague’s message with more care than simple efficiency would require. She recommends a name in a meeting, later, without attaching a reason or expecting a return.
None of this is recorded.
They system has no mechanism to measure secondary kindness.
No model to capture confidence transferred.
There is no instrument that detects the joy that propagates through strangers.
The system captures lives that fit neatly. Tall, narrow, and legible.
Others dissolve into too many people.
Too distributed to name.
They change the conditions around them quietly, until the world they touch behaves differently.
Even when they’re gone.
This is for my dad.
A story from the Static Drift universe.
Article cover image by Alex Shuper on Unsplash