Braintrust- Requiem

by Marc Stiegler

  Even as the battle with Khalid and Sky Rubola reached its conclusion, however, a minor press release was issued by the White House. The President for Life had a mild flu from which he was rapidly recovering, and he was canceling his monthly State of the Union address. This led to speculation that he had actually—finally—after more than ninety years of life, died.

  When the White House canceled a second speech a month later, the Blues started demanding elections, and the Reds, who feared the President had been taken hostage by the deep state, demanded his appearance to once again give his monthly address.

  And this was the state of the world as crowds started forming outside the gates of the Presidential residence and forces around the world started gathering that would shape the final confrontation to decide the future of civilization.

  1

  Crashing Down

  Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

  —H.L.Mencken

  Two expansive storms of immense power swirled outside the gates of the White House. Above, fluffy white flat-bottomed cumulonimbus clouds grew ever more dense and taller as they darkened into thunderheads. The cold front squall line driving their formation crawled eastward, unstoppable in its power, preparing to engulf the entire Eastern Seaboard.

  Below this gale, an enormous crowd of people, far grimmer and angrier than the thunderheads, also grew to a density that surged with impending violence. The squall line here was complex and transient, forming every time a cluster of Red party members and a cluster of Blue or Green party members found themselves in juxtaposition, then dissolving as they backed away.

  Backing away from one’s enemies soon lost effectiveness. The crowd congealed into an immobile mass stretching from the sidewalk in front of the White House’s north lawn across Pennsylvania Avenue, then across the entirety of Lafayette Park, all the way to H Street.

  People of diverse affiliations had climbed onto the statue of Andrew Jackson, a depiction of him while he sat astride his horse as it reared on its back legs at the Battle of New Orleans. This had been the first equestrian statue in the world to be balanced solely on the horse’s hind legs; the artist who had created the statue had, in a fashion embodying the essence of the early American psyche, created it in this presumably impossible way simply because no one had told him it could not be done. The statue disregarded the indignity of the new occupants climbing over it, and at the end of the day, it emerged from the ordeal mostly unscathed.

  One of the cannons flanking Jackson had been occupied by Reds, balancing precariously on the barrel while waving placards demanding President! President! and Speech! Speech!

  Another cannon had been conquered by the Blues, waving their own signs offering, He’s Dead! He’s Dead! and Elections! Elections!

  Jonathan Kuffman, tall and lean with a slight stoop from decades of hard physical labor, stood halfway between the cannons. Beside him stood his much shorter wife and his very short seven-year-old son. While he was a good and true Red voter, he had brought no placard. He was not particularly interested in politics. He would not have come at all, except his wife had made it very clear that she would come with or without him. His dark suspicion that this outing would not see a peaceful conclusion compelled him to accompany her from their home in northern Arizona.

  He’d also tried to leave their son at home with his mother. He’d lost that battle as well.

  Now he stood on his toes, his eyes scanning every direction with increasing urgency for an escape route. His wife, a true Blue, had brought an Elections Now placard, but when she realized her husband was right that they were standing in the hot zone of an impending riot, she reluctantly accepted his forceful request and dropped the sign on the ground. As they moved away, a pair of Reds saw the discarded poster and vented a small amount of their rage destroying it.

  To Jonathan’s left, a Blue swung his sign at a Red. The intended victim dodged, and the placard came round with hideous force, on course to strike his wife in the neck. Jonathan was out of position to do anything except watch in horror.

  Then a huge bear of a man with the short, clipped haircut of a Marine stepped sideways and took the improvised weapon in his gut. Without even wincing, he grabbed the sign and tore it into pieces, breaking the pole into lengths too small to offer even a short club before he grabbed the attacker by the neck and lifted him gently off his feet. “Please go,” the stranger suggested politely.

  The once-furious assailant saw something in the stranger’s eyes, shuddered, and achieved a semblance of calm. Placed once more on his feet, he backed slowly away, pushing through the crowd, even as the crowd pushed back.

  Jonathan stepped up to his family’s savior. He used a word he had found increasingly less useful in recent times. “Thanks.” Another person might have gushed in their sincerity, but Jonathan never gushed. “’Preciate it.”

  The stranger smiled. “No problem.” He stuck out his hand. “My name is Wolf, by the way. Wolf Griffin.”

  The Arizonan smiled. “Jonathan,” he offered. “Thoughts about how to get out? Drinks on me after.”

  Wolf’s smile turned grim. “If we get out, I’ll settle for a lemonade.”

  A ripple moved through the crowd. A two-story-tall scaffold, hastily erected on the White House’s north lawn, lit up under the glare of powerful floodlights as the sky continued to darken. A tall man, straight and proud, climbed the steps to the small podium at the top.

  A chant arose among the excited Reds. “The President! The President!”

  Colin Wheeler looked at the standing-room-only crowd in the largest auditorium on the isle ship BrainTrust University. He nudged the elegant young woman standing stiffly beside him. With barely controlled mirth, he replied to her earlier concerns. “And you thought nobody would be interested?”

  Erika Everest, a lovely pale redhead with a soft Irish burr, shook her head, dumbfounded. “But, what I’m going to talk about is so geeky and mathematically abstruse, how could there be more than a half-dozen people anywhere who could listen without falling asleep?”

  Colin chuckled. “You still don’t understand the BrainTrust, do you? Erika, these are the one-percenters of engineering and math. In the world as a whole, with almost ten billion people, there are thousands who would go into raptures over your math, and many of them are right here.” He waved his hand over the crowd. “Showtime.”

  He stepped onto the stage. “Welcome to our quarterly Visiting Scholar’s Presentation. This year we have Dr. Erika Everest.” He paused to let the applause die down. “I know many of you think that degrees in anything other than chemical, nuclear, computer, or aeronautical engineering are a waste of time. Erika used to complain when she worked as a statistician that she had acquired two degrees in economics that she’d never use.”

  This got a round of quiet laughter before Colin continued. “But then she met a group of computer geeks and economists in Silicon Valley working on the cryptocurrency that would one day be known as SmartCoin, and our world changed.” He paused. “So, let us welcome the lady now known as The Conqueror of the Boom/Bust, Dr. Erika Everest, as she presents a short intro to her groundbreaking work, A Game Theoretic Analysis of Incentives to Address the Oracle Problem.”

  A huge round of applause arose as Erika appeared. She started off a little shaky but grew stronger as she absorbed the enthusiasm of the crowd.

  As her first action, she popped a small window in the corner of the presentation’s wall screen displaying 1.0000SC in bold gold letters. The display pulsed, first fading out, then returning with the same number. She licked her lips. “As it happens, according to Moody’s projections, there’s a better than fifty-fifty chance that we’ll see an adjustment in the SmartCoin currency while we’re talking, so I thought it would be fun to watch. I’ve asked the audio-visual people to give me a connection to the outside world just big enough to drive this screen since as you’ve already noticed, other than that, both
the cell network and wifi have been turned off for this lecture. Anyway, if one of you sees our SmartCoin in the corner change, please shout out.”

  The crowd murmured agreement.

  With that, Erika waved a finger at the screen and criteria began appearing. “Let’s begin with a list of requirements that must be addressed to minimize the currency volatilities leading to John Maynard Keynes’s boom/bust cycle and all its horrors.”

  Wolf muttered to Jonathan as the President for Life climbed the steps, “Let’s try to sidle over in that direction.” He pointed toward the eastern edge of the field, where a line of Marines stood at parade rest, although their weapons were clearly ready and in immaculate condition. “The major in charge over there is a friend of mine. If we can get to him, we’ll be in the clear.” Wolf led the way, Jonathan’s wife behind him, their son behind her, and Jonathan bringing up the tail. Jonathan’s hand rose and fell behind his back, brushing the pistol he had brought just in case, tucked under his denim jacket.

  The going was slow, even with Wolf in the lead, pressing through crowds of Blues, Reds, and confused bystanders.

  Major Drew Moreno paced behind the line of Marines he found himself commanding here on the eastern side of Lafayette Park. He continued to puzzle over his presence.

  Until recently, he’d been with the Border Patrol, keeping illegals out of the country when they penetrated the defenses. They sometimes cut through the slats in the Wall, or hopped over using traditional vertical-crack climbing techniques. Occasionally, they simply flew over it in a cheap hang-glider.

  That job had fallen into irrelevance after the Border Patrol, under his direction, blew up half the Wall to allow trucks with Black Rubola vaccine into the country. Now, without the Wall, more people were coming in—though still not very many since the desert was a dangerous expanse of land to cross, so most people continued to cross at the official entry points—but no one seemed to care much. Since over half the truck drivers who’d saved America from extermination were Mexicans, even Drew felt more gratitude than anger. He’d been considering retiring, possibly to a remote country in case the authorities ever figured out the key role he had personally played in the Wall’s destruction.

  But instead of being jailed for treason, he’d been recalled to active duty and given a platoon to protect the President for Life. The closest anyone came to explaining why he of all people had been assigned to this duty was his commanding officer’s dry observation that Drew had some of the highest loyalty ratings he’d ever seen.

  Drew had not mentioned that his loyalty had deteriorated considerably during the Black Rubola plague, when the politicians had sat with their thumbs up their asses while his family members died and the BrainTrust saved the country.

  Despite that, Drew was happy to serve.

  His happiness depended, however, on who received his service. Like all current Marines, he’d sworn a personal loyalty oath to the President. That oath did not cover the Chief Advisor, who’d been running day-to-day operations for years, however.

  Indeed, Drew had concluded, after the plagues struck and no effective action had been issued from the White House, that the Chief Advisor had to go.

  If it were true that the President had died and the Advisor was the sole power, all those loyalty oaths had expired. Drew had met with each of his men one-on-one to make sure they understood this as well as he did, and to make sure they understood that if the major concluded that the Advisor was engaged in some sort of a coup, they would have to follow him as he ordered them to defend the nation and the Constitution. Since every one of his men knew someone who’d died in the plagues, they agreed readily.

  As the major continued to scan the scene, his unhappiness grew ever greater. It became increasingly clear that in order to protect the President—if and when he showed up—Drew would have to fire into this crowd. He was prepared to do so if necessary, but he didn’t like it.

  Another thing he didn’t like was the screen of troops in front of the podium, for they were not troops. He recognized the one in the center—Darron something-or-other, the administration’s chief interrogator, normally in charge of the strict interrogation team. Drew had never liked the existence of that team, yet here they were, armed with assault rifles they clearly didn’t know how to use properly, acting as the front line of defense.

  It made him wonder whether they were there to defend the President or the man they worked for, the Chief Advisor.

  Meanwhile, on the far side of the crowd, another platoon of troops was led by another major Drew recognized, a jackass who’d never learned to do anything except kiss ass and obey the stupidest order in the stupidest way possible.

  And none of this included the possible ways a lesser disaster could be amplified into a giant catastrophe by the helicopter gunships circling overhead, loaded with Gatling guns and Rockeye bomblets that could wipe out the entire crowd in about three seconds.

  The number of ways this could devolve into a clusterfuck simply boggled the mind.

  When the floodlights came up and illuminated the President climbing the stairs to give his monthly address, Drew breathed an immense sigh of relief. Perhaps nothing disastrous would happen after all.

  But if the President’s arrival meant the situation would soon calm down, why did Darron look more anxious and worried?

  The main auditorium of the isle ship BrainTrust University resided on the Avatar deck. The passages of every deck of every isle ship were rendered with a unique theme. This one was done in the opalescent blues and greens of the long-ago movie, an endless lush forest in which, at the moment, one could see a black beast faintly similar to a saber-tooth cat hunting a creature with a colorful triceratops look to it.

  Micky Palermo was walking past the auditorium, keeping an eye on the saber-tooth despite knowing it could not enter the passage, when his best friend Jerry Rutger snagged his arm. Jerry spoke urgently as large numbers of students swept past them into the auditorium. “Aren’t you coming to the talk?”

  Micky shrugged his friend’s hand off. “A talk about the Oracle problem? I don’t even know what that is. Why would I care?”

  Jerry frowned in exasperation. “In order to prevent boom/busts, you have to adjust the currency availability in response to inflation and deflation. The ‘Oracle Problem’ is the task of measuring the inflation/deflation so you can respond to it correctly. Dr. Everest is the one who solved it.” He held up his tablet so Jerry could see the notification about the presentation.

  Micky rolled his eyes. “I just can’t…” His voice faded as his eyes wandered to the image of the speaker. “She’s a looker, isn’t she?”

  It was Jerry’s turn to roll his eyes. “Yeah, Micky. Now will you come along? You’re the math geek, not me, so you’ll probably get more out of the presentation than I will.”

  Tearing his eyes away from the screen, Micky allowed Jerry to herd him into the room.

  Micky watched Dr. Everest, mesmerized, until she started talking about the basic SmartCoin algorithm. “As many of you hopefully already know, when the servers running the blockchain detect deflation, they manufacture additional coin and disperse it to all the current holdings of currency. Some of you have probably noticed, when you’ve saved a SmartCoin for a while, your account might show an extra ten-thousandth of a coin.”

  Micky nodded and whispered, “Yeah, I’ve seen that.”

  Erika continued, “We increase the amount of currency every time we see a thousandth of a percent of deflation, so the increase is gradual enough to be unnoticed in most circumstances. The important thing about the SmartCoin deflation algorithm is, it is fair in a strict sense: the newly minted money goes to the people holding the currency.” She paused to sip some water. “This is distinct from the way wealth is redistributed by an organization like the American Fed, which takes wealth from those people trying to save money and gives it to the government.”

  Micky whispered to Jerry, “I can see how SmartCoin works for deflation,
but what about when there’s inflation? They can’t remove currency, can they? People would stop using SmartCoin if the system took money away from them.”

  Jerry whispered back, “True but not relevant. I’ll explain later.”

  Micky nodded.

  Erika had moved on. “The difficulty with these adjustments is, of course, knowing about the deflation or inflation in the first place.” She continued to explain, patiently answering a number of questions from the audience.

  After checking the crowd for additional questions, she clapped louder, her eyes gleaming. “Okay, then! Let’s dive into the math!”

  The entire riot-ready crowd held its breath as the President reached the podium. Blues watched in despair while Reds started pumping their placards in excitement while chanting, “Speech! Speech!”

  Darron craned his neck over his shoulder to watch as the speaker started to address the waiting multitudes. Darron was one of no more than a dozen people who knew the truth of what was happening here. He rubbed his forehead, although sweat had not yet broken out. He had argued with the Chief Advisor at great length about being put between the crowd and the speaker. This was not his thing, Darron had explained. The Advisor had insisted it was his thing, that Darron enjoyed violence more than anyone else he knew. Darron had agreed, but then pointed out that he only used violence on people who were tied up, and only on one person at a time. It was different.

  In the end, the Chief Advisor had explained that Darron was the only person he trusted to protect him if things went suddenly south.