Braintrust- Requiem

by Marc Stiegler

Keenan shook his head. “Can’t short them all. The government can’t let all those companies die.”

  The CEO groaned. “Of course.” He cursed. “How do we tell which ones the government will save? The ones with the most employees, which is to say, the most voters?”

  Keenan laughed. “Good God, that would be logical. No, I think the analysis will be a little more personal, a little more passion-based.”

  He hung up and studied the list. Which ones would the Chief Advisor save?

  The Chief Advisor—no, the Acting President, he reminded himself—watched as the Fed Chairman flipped on the immense display in the Oval Office. The display wasn’t a normal wallscreen since you couldn’t really use an oval wall that way, but it served adequately.

  The Fed boss brought up several huge tables of data.

  The Chief Advisor’s eyes glazed over. He looked away, toward the window. “Just tell me the highlights, please.”

  The chairman pursed his lips. “These are the highlights.”

  The Advisor continued to stare stubbornly out the window. Numbers always gave him a headache. “Give me something more highlight-y. Talk me through it without pointing at anything.”

  The chairman took a shuddering breath. “We’re about to start QE17.” Quantitative Easings 1, 2, and 3 had been performed during the Great Recession decades earlier. In these undertakings, the government printed trillions of dollars and bought big financial assets from big banks to prop up the economy.

  Additional QEs had been undertaken over the succeeding years as the economy stumbled in various ways. The original noble plan of paying off the QEs had, over time, died a quiet death. It seemed the country always needed just one more QE to keep running smoothly.

  The Advisor shrugged at the news they’d do another QE. He’d assumed it. “So what?”

  “We’ve run out of traditional assets to buy. Nobody really needs Treasury bonds anymore.” Actually, no one wanted Treasuries at the moment since everybody figured the government would pay them off with corrupted currency—an annoyingly correct assessment. “And there aren’t enough mortgage-backed securities.” Of course the Fed Chair didn’t really want mortgage-backed securities either since they were all going to default. What was the point?

  The Advisor put his fingertips together in an arch. “And the solution?”

  The chairman took a deep breath, preparing to face the Advisor’s wrath for taking a new approach. He didn’t understand that the Advisor’s terse tone came not from anger but from disinterest. “We’ll have to follow the Japanese example from the Lost Decade and start buying private equity. Corporate stocks and bonds.”

  The Advisor turned from the window and gazed at the chairman. “So, you’ll be intervening directly in the stock market, propping up prices?”

  The chairman nodded.

  The Advisor pounded his desk so hard the chairman jumped. “Fantastic! We’ll set new records for the market!”

  The chairman’s silent failure to endorse this statement eventually interrupted the Advisor’s reverie. “We will set new records, right?”

  The chairman sighed. “A lot of these large corporations are going to go bankrupt in the next couple of days, regardless of their stock price.”

  That brought the Advisor’s reverie to a full stop. “Which ones?”

  The chairman wiped the screen clean, removing a source of pain from the Advisor’s world. A much simpler list appeared with the names of corporations.

  The Advisor looked at the list with a sinking feeling. “All of them?”

  “Probably.” The chairman exhaled hard. “We could print enough cash to bail them all out, of course.”

  The Advisor nodded. “Excellent.” His eyes gleamed as he had another thought. “So I can go through the list and pick which ones survive and which ones disappear?”

  In another era, another Fed Chairman would have insisted that those decisions be reserved for the Fed. The Fed had, for a long time, been an independent entity, largely free of the petty passions of politicians, able to engage in fiscal policy using the best technical analysis they could determine. But this too had been fixed years before. The chairman now served at the pleasure of the Advisor. “I’d be happy to make those decisions for you if you desire.”

  The Advisor rose from his chair. “Nonsense.” He rubbed his hands together. “GM?” He stared in puzzlement. “Why are they going bankrupt? I thought the companies going down were ones with badly structured debt.”

  The Fed Chair shook his head. “There are lots of different reasons for companies to fail with the economy frozen the way it is. GM has negative sales for the month.”

  The Advisor stared. “Negative sales? What does that mean?”

  “It means more people have canceled auto purchases than have signed for new ones. There is no more appetite for new cars at the moment than there is for real estate. Everyone’s afraid of big-ticket purchases. Nobody’s buying anything they can’t pay for with cash on hand.”

  The Advisor grimaced. “GM has lots of strong union voters there. Save them.”

  The Fed Chair made a notation.

  As the Advisor studied the list, his eyes alighted on a special name. He laughed with hearty malice. “Amazon? Let them die.”

  The chairman gulped. “They have an enormous workforce. If they go down, the rise in unemployment from both direct and secondary effects will be…horrific.”

  The Advisor waved it away. “I’ve been trying to figure out a way to kill that company for years.” He laughed again. “Now all I have to do is sit back and watch them self-destruct.”

  When the common people around the world saw what was happening with the Crash and grasped the contrast with what was happening with SmartCoin, they consumed massive amounts of bandwidth downloading SmartCoin apps to their various devices. As those folks proceeded to move out of government-controlled currencies, different governments reacted with varying levels of hostility.

  All of the governments were angry, of course—no power structure likes watching their control evaporate in competition with a fully decentralized non-jurisdictional system over which they no longer had the slightest hint of authority—but the intensity of the rage varied.

  China, in its spiritual embodiment through the person of its President for Life, fell at the low end of the range of anger. Sure, the President was angry about SmartCoin, but he was much more angry that the number two member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo would not listen to reason and come home so he could remind her that she was not only Number Two, she was also his girlfriend.

  Liu Fan Hui sat in her office on board the Taixue isle ship of the BrainTrust Fuxing fleet/archipelago. She stared impassively at the wallscreen where her ex-boyfriend, the recently inaugurated President For Life of the People’s Republic of China, droned on the same way his father had droned pre-plague. Really, the resemblance was as uncanny as it was annoying.

  As Guang Jian’s list of reasons for her to return to Beijing drifted into the nonsensical, her mind drifted into a disbelieving memory of how they’d wound up here.

  5

  Fan's Path to Adulthood, a Year or So Earlier

  Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

  —William Shakespeare

  Fan had been working her way through an economics module of the Accel educational framework on her tablet, trying to catch up on her schoolwork. Being a Board member of Oceanic Mining Unlimited, she was discovering, really ate into her learning time. The news of Sky Rubola arrived in the form of Lenora rushing into her office without knocking. “You need to come with me to the Command Information Center.”

  Fan’s first reaction was to refuse the demand. She was, after all, a daughter of the Politburo—born to make demands, not acquiesce to them.

  But Lenora’s urgency bordered on panic, and besides, she’d almost never invited Fan into the CIC before. Fan had from time to time considered demanding a full-access authorizat
ion for the CIC, but had learned a vital leadership lesson here on the BrainTrust: never give an order you know will be disobeyed.

  So instead of arguing, Fan jumped to her feet. As they hustled to the elevators, she asked, “What’s wrong?”

  At that moment, the ringtone Come Sail Away rolled from her phone. She was quite certain that Lenora’s arrival and this phone call were related. “Captain Chunlan. Why are you calling?” The captain of the Renhai, the Chinese cruiser assigned as combination escort and surveillance station for the Fuxing fleet, had never called her before, except to arrange their monthly liaison dinners.

  “China is under missile attack.”

  Lenora accelerated into a run, dragging her along. “Let’s get the captain onto a conference screen in the CIC.”

  Moments later, Fleet Captain Graysen Ainsworth, already in the CIC, had Chunlan hooked in. Ainsworth greeted him. “Captain, welcome to our nightmare.”

  Fan demanded of Chunlan, “Who’s shooting at us?”

  Chunlan shook his head. “We don’t know. It’s very confusing. One fleet of missiles seems to be coming from within China, targeting our cities.” He paused. “The others are coming from orbital platforms of unknown origin.”

  Ainsworth took over the explanation. “As we now understand it, the second fleet of missiles is coming from the BrainTrust.”

  Both Fan and Chunlan stared at him. Fan demanded, “Why are you attacking my homeland?”

  Lenora shook her head. “We’re not. Please listen. We’re just barely caught up with what’s happening.” She took a breath. “Dr. Dash has tracked down the man releasing the Rubola plagues, who’s named Khalid. He has followers all over the world firing missiles at the great cities in every country.”

  Fan nodded but had not forgotten the other shoe falling. “And the BrainTrust missiles?”

  Lenora half-chuckled. “Dash anticipated Khalid would try to infect the whole world with the next virus simultaneously. I just got off the phone with Matt, the CEO of SpaceR. Under her direction, he secretly launched a fleet of cargo capsules loaded with pods to intercept and mitigate the effects of the virus. He didn’t have time to explain it all before he hung up.”

  Captain Chunlan put the pieces together. “So, this Khalid person has people shooting missiles everywhere, and the BrainTrust is intercepting them.”

  Captain Ainsworth nodded. “I’ve got an email from Chance—Dash’s partner—with instructions on how cities can minimize casualties. Like we said, the BrainTrust interceptors only mitigate the damage. The cities that are attacked need to impose strict quarantines. People must be forced to stay home, and no one leaves the city.”

  Fan felt a moment of smugness. “That probably means the Western cities will be decimated, but the Chinese people understand discipline. They should be fine.” She pondered for a moment. “Have you told the Chinese President for Life?”

  Lenora smiled. “We’re telling you. Care to let him know yourself?”

  Fan was about to agree when another call came in.

  Matt Toscano appeared on the wallscreen. “There’s been a disaster!” He rubbed his forehead. “Our cargo capsules were in very low orbits so they could launch counter-missile pods with minimal intercept times. We caught the big wave of missiles without a hitch.” He swallowed hard. “We landed the bulk of the capsules for refueling, leaving just a few in orbit in case there were any stragglers, but then Murphy’s Law intervened. As the last of the orbiting capsules burned up, before we could get any of the landed capsules refueled and relaunched, someone in China launched one more missile loaded with Sky Rubola. It just exploded over Beijing, and I don’t know what to do.”

  Fan swayed in her chair and looked at Lenora. Lenora looked as stunned as Fan felt.

  Lenora responded first. “We need to talk to Dash.”

  Matt shook his head. “She’s gone after Khalid. In the middle of nowhere. She’s got her hands full, and she’s pretty much out of touch.”

  Fan deduced the second-best plan. “Can we speak with this Dr. Chance?”

  Moments later, Matt had brought Chance into the call.

  On the wallscreen, Chance floated in midair.

  Captain Ainsley peered at her. “Where are you, exactly?”

  Chance laughed. “I’m on the world’s first orbiting hospital. Well, officially it’s a Med Bay by Dash, but it’s so well equipped it might as well be a hospital.” Her voice turned grim. “We may need it after Dash finds Khalid.”

  Fan took control of the conversation. She explained what had happened to China’s capital. “Can you land your hospital in Beijing and help?”

  Chance gave her a sorrowful look. “I could land, but there’s no vaccine yet.” She waved her hands at the circular walls that enclosed her. “There’s essentially nothing I can do to help you, and I expect Dash to need me soon.” Her voice fell to a whisper as she explained how the virus worked. She finished with the worst consequences. “And there’s more bad news. Among people who are well-nourished, we’re expecting over ninety percent casualties.”

  Lenora gasped. “There are twenty-five million people in Beijing.” Her eyes grew wide. “It won’t kill as many people as Mao did in his first years of power, but close enough.”

  Fan felt an overpowering desire to defend the actions of the Chairman, but there were much higher priorities here. She kept her focus and pounded her fist on the table. “There has to be something we can do.”

  Chance had acquired a thoughtful look. “It’s too late to do much good with an interceptor pod since that only works well if you can catch the virus cloud while it’s still a dense mass just after the missile explodes. But could we saturate the city with our anti-Rubola cocktail from near-ground level? A fleet of copters, perhaps?” Her voice firmed up, and she looked at Matt. “Then we blast the city with the UV lasers like crazy.”

  Matt nodded. “We could do that.”

  They developed a plan. Captain Chunlan would send troops to the Fuxing to fly the copters. Matt would launch a cargo pod filled with the cocktail to the Fuxing. A team of engineers led by someone Fan dimly knew, Song, would design a chemical spraying tank they could attach to the copters, and run them off on the 3D printers on the fleet’s manufacturing ships. Once loaded, they’d fly to Beijing, stopping somewhere to refuel.

  While Matt prepped a capsule and Lenora readied the copters, Fan called her father to get permission to essentially invade China with her copter-based air force.

  Her call went to voicemail.

  She did not quite scream in panic. “Captain Chunlan, can you raise anybody in the military chain of command? I’ll keep trying other Politburo members.” And other children of the Politburo, since she knew more of them.

  Eventually, Captain Chunlan tracked down a harried admiral, who described the situation from his perspective. “We’ve lost contact with the entire Politburo. Most of them made it to the Central Military Commission’s Joint Battle Command Center bunker twenty kilometers north of the capital’s center, but the bunker has ceased responding.” The admiral shook his head. “They’re two kilometers underground, underneath a special layer of extra-hard rock, in a network of caverns with enough water to supply a million people. No one has ever built a nuke powerful enough to breach the bunker.”

  Fan listened to this with exasperation. She’d visited the bunker a couple of years earlier. “Yes, yes, but if just one person infected with the virus made it to the bunker…”

  Chance interrupted. “There’s not a person among them who’s missed a meal in his life. Casualties could be total.”

  Fan leapt to her feet. Ready or not, her moment had come. “I hereby take my father’s seat in the Politburo for the duration.” She glared at the admiral. “Until we have re-established contact with higher authorities, you shall obey my commands as though they came directly from the President for Life.”

  The admiral took the cue and saluted. “Yes, ma’am. What are your orders?”

  “I’m flying
a fleet of BrainTrust copters to Beijing, where we’ll spray the city with antivirals.” She left out the complication that the antivirals were not exactly a cure. ”Find me a place to refuel my copters, and get me clearance so no one shoots at us while we’re trying to save the city.”

  The admiral saluted again. “I can find you fuel, ma’am. But you should perhaps stay where you are and let someone else lead the fleet. The city will be dangerous, and our military is in disarray. I can’t guarantee you won’t get shot at, either getting there or in the city.”

  Fan growled in a remarkable imitation of the President for Life. “Fix this, Admiral. I will be leading the fleet, and you don’t want me dying on you.”

  As the copter bounced on landing at the airfield, Fan twisted the damn helmet off her damn Level A Hazmat suit. She turned to Julissa, her pilot, who wore an identical suit. “Keep your suit on,” she ordered as Julissa started to twist her helmet as well. The helmets muffled their voices enough that they’d been talking via their headsets.

  Julissa gave her a stubborn look. “You should keep yours on too.”

  “I have people to talk to.” She popped the canopy and hopped out. “We’ll be back in the air in a minute.”

  She strode across the field toward a man in a pilot’s suit who was coming toward her.

  The man saluted. “Member Liu?”

  Fan saluted back, not knowing if it was appropriate. “Captain Gao?”

  The pilot stood rigid. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Fan’s voice turned dry. “You’re the man who shot down my space capsule full of workers, are you not?”

  Fan had learned a bit about facial microexpressions from Lenora and caught the flickering wince of embarrassment and fear before Gao erased it. The captain wisely avoided trying to explain. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Fan pursed her lips. “I’m told you’re the first person ever to shoot down a space capsule, and congratulations are in order.”