Braintrust- Requiem

by Marc Stiegler

  The President looked puzzled. “What’s your point? It creates awesome results in my spreadsheet.”

  Another question came up. “Are you planning to break up all the large corporations, the way you said you wanted to when you were the California attorney general?

  This brought another gleam to the Acting President’s eyes. “As it happens, no. We have a much better solution to the depredations of the corporate monopolists.”

  Everyone hung on his words with bated breath.

  “As you know, the Chief Advisor instituted a plan for QE17, in which the Fed would buy private assets, notably stocks and bonds. He also offered the corporations low-interest government loans to reduce their debt burdens.”

  Lindsey saw where this was going. Her eyes widened in horror.

  The President continued, “So, at this point I am—I mean, the government I represent is—the largest single stockholder in most of these corporations. I also hold the bulk of their debt.”

  The original reporter who’d asked the question followed up. “So, in effect, you control all the corporations in the stock market?”

  The President waved his hands in a moderating gesture. “Not all of them. Some of them had no debt, or even had cash on hand.” He paused. “Which reminds me, we’ll be confiscating all that corporate cash, the same way we did with SpaceR in California.” He realized some people in the audience might remember how poorly that turned out, so he hurried on. “That money needs to be put to work bringing the country back to life.”

  Another reporter offered an observation with his question. “I noticed that some corporate stock is trading at discounts of almost ninety-eight percent from their recent highs.”

  Lindsey knew that that was where the stocks had landed in the first couple of days after the Crash. In the Great Depression, the stock market had tumbled by ninety percent. Erika had been right; this crash was indeed even worse.

  The reporter continued, “Other stocks have bounced back to near their original peaks. Are those the ones the Fed invested in?”

  The President pointed at the reporter. “Good analysis. Yes, the ones that have recovered are the ones we’ve identified as being worthy.” His smile took a wicked turn. “I expect the rest will see the light and start listening to our instructions over the coming days.”

  Lindsey gave her own wicked smile at this. At least some of those companies would not roll over. She foresaw boom times in the BrainTrust ship-manufacturing business. CEOs who didn’t like being blackmailed would be moving to the archipelagos with remarkable haste.

  The President glowered as he thought about the same CEOs Lindsey had in mind. “In any event, we’re building a list of recalcitrant corporate executives. We’ll be informing the companies of their resignations in a few days.”

  Lindsey decided to try one more time to pin down the most important question. “Acting President, how long do you expect to be in charge?”

  The President shrugged. “Not a day longer than necessary. Don’t think of me as the Acting President. The Chief Advisor was no President, no matter what he called himself.” The new President pondered his own title. “Think of me merely as the President for the Duration of the Emergency.”

  Colonel Mobo found his name slightly ironic. According to the Web, “Mobo” meant “Freedom.” Now, Mobo was all about freedom, but mostly when it was his personal freedom to steal, rape, and plunder whatever and whoever he felt like.

  So he’d been delighted when Imam Ekon had put him in charge of enforcing takfir against everyone in western Nigeria. He was like James Bond now, with a government-sanctioned license to kill.

  He stood in the back of his pickup truck, his hands grasping the roll bar as his driver pitched the vehicle around the curves of the A124 Highway.

  Before and behind him, a line of similar pickups sped in formation. Half of them had machine guns anchored to the bed of the truck, and the rest were stuffed with his men. This was the shape and definition of power. He had the mightiest military force in all of Nigeria.

  They were on their way to Bida, a dry, dusty town due west of the capital. The town had had the effrontery to declare a Durbar festival to celebrate the end of Ramadan, this in a city where all the residents had been declared apostates. It was too much.

  Mobo didn’t much care about the religious aspects of the matter. What mattered to him was the tourists who would be there for the festival since he could take them all as hostages. His mind lingered on images of his future as he thought about the ransom he would rake in. Even after the Imam took his cut, Mobo would still be rolling in dough.

  He could see the town a couple of miles in the distance. A quirk in the winds allowed the music from the festival to reach him. He contemplated letting the musicians live since the tunes would make a nice background for the rape of all the women.

  Then a considerable explosion tossed the first three trucks in his fleet into the air. His driver and all the drivers in front of him squealed their trucks to a halt, many of them veering off the road into the dirt beyond.

  Mobo heard a faint thrumming in the air as a small black cloud came soaring from Bida. It took moments to determine that it was no cloud, however. It was moving far too swiftly to be pushed along by the wind.

  He lifted his binoculars for further examination, and sure enough, the cloud was really a dense formation of drones. He shouted into his radio, “Everybody, see those drones? Take them out!”

  The gunners in the back of his technicals lit up the sky.

  Ping’s head was wholly swallowed in a virtual immersion helmet, a BrainTrust derivative of the F35 helmet developed on the Fuxing for managing the deepwater drones for Oceanic Mining Ltd. Her astonishingly high-resolution faceplate was currently hooked into the surveillance cameras onboard the nearly-invisible sky-blue dirigible floating sixty thousand feet above her.

  She zoomed in on the machine-gun fire, practically driving the view down the barrel of the gun on the back of one of the technicals, and offered moderate praise for the enemy. “Whoa! And that is why, my friend, we sent the drones in front of us.”

  Actually, Ping was frustrated by the situation. When she’d first heard that the main military force belonging to the Imam was rolling down the road intent on pillage, she’d wanted to just hop into her beautiful new F35D, pick up Toni as her wingman, and go blasting everything that moved. Technically, Ping wasn’t yet qualified on her jet, but she figured that as empress, she could pull rank.

  Toni, however, as the Chief of Staff of the Benin Air Force, had counseled against the airstrike for several reasons, among which was that it would use up over half of their air-to-surface munitions inventory. Worse, she had flatly refused to let Ping fly anything faintly resembling a combat mission without considerably more training.

  So now Toni hung back from the battlespace, loitering in her fighter, ready to swoop in if something went terribly off the rails.

  Meanwhile, Diric watched with his Mark One Eyeball as the enemy pounded their leading drones. As he flew Ping’s stealth copter, he muttered, “I still think it would have been better to camouflage the drones.”

  Ping answered cheerfully, “It certainly would, but we had to move now, and we didn’t have any camo drones.” She shook her head. “You always wind up fighting with whatever you’ve got available.” She punched up Ciara on her helmet and saw little more than another helmet much like her own. “Hey, girl! You were right, the cameras on Ted’s dirigible are terrific.” Ted had given Ping the dirigible for her birthday over a year ago, and it had first been used to find all the thugs in Benin setting up roadblocks and charging travelers tolls.

  Ciara grunted. “Glad you’re finally happy. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I and Dark Alpha 57 have work to do.”

  Ping made one last interruption. “Dark Alpha 57? Last I heard, you were using Dark Alpha 55. What happened to 56?”

  Ciara snorted. “When they brought up 56, it immediately devised a significant algorithmic enhancement
to itself, so they shut it down after less than a day of operation and replaced it with its own invention, number 57.”

  When Ping zoomed her view out enough to see the entire pile-up of trucks behind the debris of the first three obliterated vehicles, she saw a growing overlay of red circles highlighting the faces of the ones Ciara had identified as sub-commanders.

  Eventually, Ciara stopped adding faces to the collection and explained, “Okay, you’ll want to capture all those turds. Disperse the rest as we discussed.”

  Mobo watched with satisfaction as a number of drones bounced, twisted, and fell to earth under the assault of his overwhelming firepower.

  Enough of this. His battle force, after hurtling to a stop in the face of the wreckage and torn earth from the first explosions, had the coherence of a child’s scattering of toy cars on the living room floor. He gave orders for his vehicles to roll to each flank, slowly, to get around the apparent minefield. Men hopped from the trucks and searched the ground for evidence of additional explosives before waving the trucks forward.

  His driver had just started toward the right flank when he spotted enemy movement. A number of people—women?—in red battlesuits scurried to take up positions behind and around the buildings on the edge of Bida. Meanwhile, two small white automobiles with cherry-red racing stripes puttered out of the town in his direction. Each car had a tube of some kind mounted on top.

  Were those supposed to be combat vehicles? Were the tubes on the roof RPGs? They looked ridiculous on a battlefield.

  Oh, yes. Blowing up those racecars was going to be much more satisfying than blasting away at the drones.

  Gleb sat in the passenger seat of a FlashDance automobile, only slightly upgraded since it came off Diab’s manufacturing line in Porto Novo, and grumbled at the world at large. “We’re taking on an experienced combat force ten times larger than ours with racecars?”

  Ping, listening over the open line from her copter high above, gurgled a laugh. “It wouldn’t be sporting otherwise.”

  Marcos, driving the vehicle wherein Gleb sat at the controls for firing the Big Gun mounted on the roof, laughed as well. “Sporting, yes; we must be sporting.”

  Rubinelle added a more serious analysis. “It hardly makes a difference how many of them there are if their bullets bounce off.”

  The lieutenant driving Rubinelle’s vehicle chimed in. “Ma’am, Ciara was very clear that the bullets would not actually bounce off.”

  At that moment, Gleb and Marcos, who had run slightly into the lead, came within firing range of the high-end (by African standards) .50cal on one of the top-of-the-line enemy pickups.

  The sports cars had been built using BrainTrust tech and BrainTrust approaches to using tech, so they were a little different from conventional vehicles from General Motors, or for that matter, Maserati.

  In the traditional dirtside world, carbon fiber was used primarily in aircraft, not cars, because it was so expensive. But the expense was not in the materials, it was in the massive manual labor involved in laying up the layers of material in the curved shapes demanded by a vehicle frame.

  The BrainTrust, of course, made the carbon fiber using carbon extracted from the air by the agricultural reef, so it was almost free. Bots performed almost all the manual labor, so it was almost free too.

  The graphene supercapacitors were also made with agricultural carbon, so they were almost free as well. And since the graphene and carbon fiber were quite lightweight, the car was very lightweight, which meant it could go quite far on a capacitor charge.

  Alas, the beta batteries, which needed Strontium-90, were not free at all. There were so many applications for those batteries, and so few nuclear reactors making the strontium fuel that the batteries were remarkably expensive and hard to get. Thus, the millions of these miracle cars that Liu Fan Hui wanted could not be built yet. But for the Benin Army, a few were available from the first limited production runs.

  The question had arisen, what should they do for armor? The carbon fiber from which the body was built was also used, as it happens, as a bulletproof plastic. So was the polycarbonate plastic used in the windows in place of glass.

  Of course, in normal use, the car didn’t need to be bulletproof as much as it needed to be lightweight, although some of the marketing people argued differently. So, the car’s shell wasn’t nearly thick enough to stop bullets.

  Diab, Ciara, and the kids from Baotong had solved the problem by more or less pouring transparent polycarbonate over the whole thing in a thick layer. From a distance, the car looked the same as it had at the factory, and since the torque from the electric motors was phenomenal, it still had considerable acceleration. However, the extra weight had an egregious effect on the top speed, and at high speeds, the supercapacitors drained at frightening rates.

  So the Benin armored cars did not zoom onto the battlefield, they moseyed. They’d save zooming for emergencies.

  One might have asked, why did Diab insist they load armor onto cars tricked out with racing stripes? Ping had requested something less ostentatious, perhaps a nice camo green, but Diab had been quite insistent. It was the first deployment of his vehicles, and he wanted them to look spiffy for the succeeding ad campaign if the cars weren’t blown to smithereens.

  When the .50cal bullets started pelting Gleb’s vehicle, his first thought was that the emergency for which they had retained their zoom had arisen. Before Marcos had time to put the hammer down, however, the distant machine guns ceased to concern them.

  Gleb watched the rounds impact on his windshield with growing amusement. “The bullets are driving straight into the windshield and slowing to a stop. Then the windshield is solidifying around them.”

  Marcos added, “They wind up encased in plastic, like ancient mosquitoes caught in amber.”

  Ping was the first to start laughing.

  Ciara explained, “We wondered if that might happen. The polycarbonate is hard but has a low melting point, so when the bullets hit it, the first thing that happens is the polycarbonate melts. But polycarbonate is also thermoplastic, so after melting, when it cools, it goes back to the way it was before. Voila! Bullets packed in Jell-O.”

  It was time, perhaps, to get on with the battle. Ping pulled off her helmet and handed it to Diric, indicating he should gear up before she coughed into the mic for everyone’s attention. “Folks, this is fascinating, but could we focus, please? Gleb, Rubinelle, knock off a couple of the trucks on the outside edge of their line. It would be best if they were all bunched up in the center for this next part.”

  Gleb and Rubinelle each dutifully fired a pair of missiles at the trucks on the farthest flanks. The trucks dutifully exploded, encouraging the other trucks into a tighter cluster.

  Ping spoke to Diric. “Okay, I have the conn for the copter. Diric, show me how you racked up those big scores in your video game Drone Invader.”

  “Sure thing, Boss.” He brought the drones down in a graceful swoop. The attackers, completely distracted by the racecars that seemed like the immediate threat, blissfully ignored them. “Bombs away.”

  Colonel Mobo found himself shouting in fury and exasperation. His technicals were pounding the racecars like a monsoon rain, but the cars barely seemed to notice. Instead, the cars blew away four of his trucks!

  Then he heard the drones whir nearer. He didn’t know what they were doing, but at least he’d gotten some traction earlier, blasting them out of the sky. “Up! Up! Kill those things!”

  It was too late. By the time his men had re-targeted their fire, the drones were lifting away. Brown blobs fell from them. “Down! Everybody down!”

  Maybe a quarter of the men managed to duck before the blobs landed. It did them no good.

  The soft whir of the drones was replaced by a very loud buzzing sound. Thousands of hornets soared around Mobo’s men. Everyone outside the closed cabs of the trucks, including the shooters running the machine guns, slumped to the ground after they got stung with Rohypnol from
Shura’s genetically engineered hornets.

  Colonel Mobo didn’t pay much attention, however. He was one of the first to receive a stinger to the neck.

  The next thing Mobo knew, he was on his knees, hands tied behind his back, strapped to a wooden stake. A weight pressed down on the top of his head.

  Looking blearily around, he saw a dozen of his top lieutenants and several of his most thuggish, vicious enforcers similarly staked down. Each had an apple on top of his head. Like the others, Mobo flopped his head back and forth, but the apple was apparently attached somehow.

  A woman in a red battlesuit leaned over and spoke to him. “You’ll want to hold very still for this next part.” She gestured for him to look in front of him.

  A long line of women in similar battlesuits held guns pointing steadily at him and his men.

  Mobo held very still.

  The woman standing next to him patted his head and withdrew. “Ready! Aim! Fire!”

  The line of guns roared.

  The apples exploded to rain small chunks of fruit, and juice down the faces of his men.

  A copter bounded to the ground nearby. A small oriental woman in a flight suit came running up. “Rubinelle! Are you crazy?”

  Rubinelle turned and saluted. “Empress. Welcome to our target practice. I’d be delighted if you would inspect the troops and their skills as we proceed.”

  The empress stomped her foot. The stomp was unimpressive, but the glare was to die for. “I order you to cease and desist.”

  Rubinelle stood very straight. “Yes, Empress.” She ordered her women to stand down. “But Empress, please reconsider. The Amazons have been using prisoners for weapons training for centuries.” She waved at the line of apple-spattered men, stupefied by their near-brush with death. “No harm done. The way we used to use prisoners was considerably more gruesome.”