Braintrust- Requiem

by Marc Stiegler

  The empress closed her eyes and moved her lips, apparently counting to ten. “I appreciate the remarkable civility of this procedure, Rubinelle, but nonetheless, it’s time to stop.”

  “Yes, Empress.”

  Mobo slumped in relief.

  Ping watched as a collection of pickup trucks commandeered from Mobo’s forces pulled up. Gabriel, who had become Ping’s liaison with the assorted peoples of the Nigerian annex of Benin, hopped from the lead vehicle. “We’re ready to transport the common soldiers to their new homes.” He pointed at the back of his truck, where Ping could see a cluster of troops, hands tied behind their backs.

  The plan was to take each of the former grunts to a different village in Benin proper, where the village elders would be given a tithe for taking them in. The ex-troops would be given ankle bracelet trackers that would fall off after a year. Most of them probably hadn’t wanted to be pillagers in the first place. Regardless, none of them would be again in the foreseeable future.

  One of Rubinelle’s troops drove up in another truck. “All aboard,” she called.

  The leaders of the erstwhile army were poked and prodded into the truck for a trip to someplace Ciara and Oziegbe had cooked up to house the violent criminals they’d collected in Benin. They wouldn’t be causing any trouble, either.

  Finally, Ping walked over to inspect the racecars. Gleb, Rubinelle, Diric, and Marcos joined her.

  Ping pointed at the multiple clusters of bullets trapped in the windshield. “Can you even see out of that anymore?”

  Marcos shrugged. “Sort of.”

  Gleb thoughtfully pounded his fist on the polycarbonate for a moment. “How hard do you think it’ll be to strip it and put on a fresh coat of armor?”

  The Premier of the Russian Union opened his eyes slowly. He tried to get them to focus as he also tried to remember where he was.

  Pascha sat on the edge of the hospital bed next to him, holding his hand. Seeing him awake, she brushed a hand over his forehead. “Baby, are you feeling better?”

  The Premier licked his lips. Pascha snagged a cup of water with a bent straw and held it to his lips. After a sip, he asked the obvious question. “What happened?”

  Pascha gave up trying to get him to sip more water. “You had a stroke, baby.” She darted out of the room for a moment, calling for the doctor, who followed her back in.

  The doctor checked him over. The Premier had more than one moment of horror as the doc put him through exercises clearly intended to test for brain damage since he did not, in his own estimation, pass all the tests with flying colors.

  In the end, the doctor sighed with relief. “I don’t believe you have suffered permanent damage. You should make a full recovery.” He departed soon thereafter.

  Pascha carefully wriggled around the tubes stuck in him to snuggle against his side. “It’s going to be okay.”

  The Premier did not respond except to pat her with his free hand.

  It was not going to be okay. This business of getting old was completely intolerable. This whole incident was the ultimate wake-up call.

  He had to get his hands on that BrainTrust medical scientist, Dr. Dash. He could feel his heart in his throat as he thought about the next time he stroked out. Only Dash’s rejuvenation therapy could save him now.

  The world had descended into chaos and the Russian Union with it. His main source of revenue was still oil, despite his efforts. He didn’t understand how the BrainTrust, with so few people, could beat his whole country, which had so many people, resources, and oligarchs who could demand excellence.

  In any event, oil remained the backbone of the Russian Union’s economy. When the world crashed, demand for oil fell, and the price of oil, which was hyper-sensitive to demand, fell off a cliff. He’d soon face a restive population on top of everything else. What could he do to minimize the number of people he’d have to kill to maintain control? His automatic reflex was to find someone for the people to blame and savage that scapegoat in social media, but whom?

  Yet none of that mattered. He had to fix himself before he could fix the country.

  On top of everything else, he was too weak to get out of bed. The best he could do at the moment was sleep on it. He didn’t have much choice, really. He was falling asleep as he thought his last thought.

  What did he have to do to get his hands on that blasted scientist?

  Lenora’s first sip of tea burned her mouth. She looked at the room full of children and smiled.

  Normally the kids worked in small groups, some building machines on their 3D printers, some playing games on the displays built into the tables.

  But today they were working as a large team. They were building a life-size blue whale with duct tape and plastic bags. Once it was ready, they’d carry it down to the largest auditorium on the ship, blow it up, and walk through it. The project never failed to be a hit with both the children and the parents.

  No one seemed to need her help at the moment. Indeed, no one seemed to be aware she was even there, which was just as it should be. She slipped into her office.

  A man shorter than her, wearing a blue suit, stood frowning at the titles in her bookcase. He had his hands clasped behind his back as he rocked back and forth on his heels. He turned as she entered and pointed his finger. “You!”

  Lenora raised an eyebrow. “Let us assume that I am me and go on from there.”

  He strode to her and offered his hand. “Sheldon Collins. CEO of VBC. You have caused me considerable heartburn.” A look of distaste crossed his face. “Not the least of which was taking a spaceship to China from California.”

  Lenora smiled. “Really? Because I confess, I still enjoy the trip. Weightlessness and all.”

  Sheldon tilted his head back and forth, more or less conceding the point. “I suppose.” He glared at her again. “You’re messing with my business. I’m here to see if you can help me fix it.”

  Before responding, Lenora slid around her desk to sit in her chair. “VBC? The company built by Ryan Morgan?” She was vaguely familiar with Morgan. He had been one of the first patients for Dr. Dash’s rejuvenation. For better or for worse, depending on how you felt about the industry he’d created, he had not survived. “So, you’re in charge of the world’s foremost corporate developer of Voter Behavior Correction?”

  Collins watched her calmly sip her tea and decided he couldn’t overawe her standing there. He took a seat as well. “Exactly. And you, you—”

  Lenora spluttered as she laughed into her cup. “Let me guess. Children who grow up under the tutelage of Accel do not respond properly to correction.”

  The irate CEO pounded the arm of his chair and sprang back to his feet. “Exactly!” He explained as he paced. “A lot of people, probably including you, think that Voter Behavior Correction is about manipulating people to switch their votes, but it’s really not. It’s about identifying how people feel deep inside and ensuring that they vote their truest values.”

  Lenora studied her cup, wondering if the tea was still hot enough to scald the CEO if she threw it at him.

  She was familiar with the history of Voter Behavior Correction. Though the industry did not get named until much later, it had started early in the century when a foreign cyberpower targeted the enthusiastic supporters of a candidate who’d lost his primary election. The trolls and bots focused on persuading his supporters to demonstrate their loyalty to their fallen hero by refusing to vote in the general election. In this way, so the bots and trolls explained, they could follow their truest values to the final conclusion. The result, of course, was that the winner of the general election was someone from the opposing party, someone born of their most terrifying nightmares.

  But there were even worse problems with following one’s “truest values,” as Lenora proceeded to point out. “People who vote their truest values tend to vote for whichever idiot makes the most ridiculous promises with respect to those values.” She leaned back in her chair. “A person who va
lued the feeling of flying when jumping from a tall building would vote for the fool who promised to repeal the law of gravity.”

  Sheldon slashed his hand sideways in vigorous dismissal. “An exaggeration, and you know it.” He swung back to her. “The problem is, your Accel children, when they reach adulthood, seem immune to all forms of persuasion.” He threw up his hands. “How can I put people in touch with their beliefs if they cannot be reached persuasively?”

  Lenora spun her chair away for a moment so she didn’t laugh in his face. “My Accel children, as you call them, are trained to detect cherry-picking, false dichotomy, association fallacies, straw men, and dozens of other assaults on their critical thinking faculties. They can sift through defective claims and spot manipulation on an instinctive level, almost like breathing. They can certainly change their minds, and they can certainly be persuaded—more easily than non-Accel people, actually—but only with more coherent sets of facts and analysis.”

  A look of fury passed over her visage. “Frankly, if you think persuasion consists of nothing but bumper sticker sloganeering, they probably are immune.”

  Visibly forcing herself to relax, she smirked at her visitor. “Even you could learn something new, perhaps, with some Accel training.”

  She changed tacks, returning to the passion that would drive her forward throughout all the many years of her long life. “Do you have children? Don’t you think they deserve the ability to separate truth from falsehood, wisdom from folly? Can you send them here to learn how to do that?”

  Sheldon stopped pacing and stared at the bookcase with unseeing eyes. For a moment, he seemed to waver, but he shook it off. “I’d very much like to talk to you about how we can protect voter correction from your educational system.” He frowned. “Or at least get you to show me how your systems work, so I can figure out how to upgrade voter correction to compensate.” He gave her a challenging look.

  Lenora chuckled. “As you wish.” She rose and led him out of the office.

  The CEO gasped. “You’ll help me?”

  She paused at the door. “Of course. If you can find a way to manipulate the minds of my students, Accel is defective and must be repaired.” She pursed her lips. “I’ll help you figure out new attacks against my systems, so I can figure out how to defend the children against your new attacks. Point and counterpoint.”

  Sheldon’s eyes gleamed. “Let the duel begin.”

  The President for the Duration established a new national minimum wage hours after his press conference. The word went out through every form of social media. No one was spared the swift awareness that the rules had changed. Every policeman and every judge also learned that, living under martial law, they would lose their jobs instantly if they failed to enforce the new requirements with maximum ruthlessness. And since there wasn’t a decent job opening anywhere in the nation anymore, losing your job was a disaster of acute proportions.

  This afforded considerable motivation to the forces of justice to pursue recalcitrant business owners with a vigor many of them did not feel in their hearts.

  Jonathan Kuffman lived on a hundred and sixty acres of high desert just outside of Selman, Arizona. He stared in the dim light of dawn at the phone Wolf Griffin had given him, wondering if he should use it.

  But Karen Molina needed his help. He couldn’t abandon her at this juncture.

  The new minimum wage had left Jonathan in a quandary. Pegged at sixty percent of the national median, the new minimum was barely higher than what market forces compelled most business owners to pay most employees in big cities with lucrative industries, like Phoenix. In Phoenix the Walmart and Starbucks would raise their prices a little, fire a few low-performing employees, replace a few perfectly fine employees with automation, and call it good.

  Selman, Arizona, however, did not have a Walmart or a Starbucks. Except for the gas station at the exit off I-40, just about every local business was owned by a local family and employed a couple of people from a couple of other local families. The owner of the souvenir shop, Rhinestone Gypsies, barely broke even paying his employee the old minimum wage. He had already laid off the sweet sixty-year-old lady who minded the place half the time and reduced the store’s operating hours.

  Jonathan ran his own business, and while his income varied a lot depending on demand for new wells, half the time, his take-home pay was less than the new minimum wage.

  Of course, as far as the government was concerned, it was fine if the owner of a business made less than minimum wage. But it burned Jonathan somewhere in his heart, in the place where a sense of justice dwelled, that the guy who had to deal with everything—do the marketing, talk to the customers, review new regulatory requirements, maintain the budget, work out the logistics, and so on—would make less than the guy working for him who did a small set of simple, carefully defined rote tasks and couldn’t do much of anything else.

  Especially when the guy working for him was just barely worth the trouble of keeping on in the first place, like Clay McCoy.

  Clay was glaring at him, standing next to the drilling rig on Karen’s property. “You can’t do that.” He spat to the side. “You owe me the minimum wage, dammit.”

  Jonathan put the phone away. Karen needed this well, or she couldn’t stay on her property. He tried to imagine the crusty old lady in a city, in a little studio apartment, with neither fresh desert air to breathe nor a crystal-clear sky free of light pollution to allow her to gaze upon the sweeping stars of the Milky Way.

  He fixed Clay with a morose stare. “Same rate as before, but in cash.” He pointed at the track of dirt they’d brought the trucks up, distinguished from the surrounding dirt only because nothing but the hardiest weeds still clung to life in the path. “Or go.”

  Clay spat again. “You can’t do this alone. You know it, I know it.”

  Jonathan continued to stare at him.

  Clay shook with anger. “Very well. But this isn’t over.”

  They went to work setting up the rig and drilling the first couple hundred feet.

  At the end of the day, they’d reached a depth where Jonathan had started to hope they would reach the water table, but they hadn’t yet.

  Clay pouted and held out his hand. “Pay up.”

  Jonathan counted out the cash.

  A siren wailed close at hand.

  Clay gave him a harsh laugh. “Sucker. Now you won’t just pay me the money I’ve earned, you’ll pay me damages.”

  The police car stopped. The sheriff, a friend of Jonathan’s (inevitable, because everyone was a friend of everyone in Selman), shook his head. “I’m so sorry, Jonathan, but the law is the law.” He cuffed Jonathan and stuffed him in the back seat.

  Clay roared with laughter as he watched them depart.

  8

  Ancient Enemies

  I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live, I am ready to worship it.

  —Alexis de Tocqueville

  Warmth radiated from the woodstove near the center of the room. With the blue ceramic tiles covering its circular exterior, it looked like R2-D2.

  Karen returned from rummaging in a room-sized closet off the main room and held out her goggles.

  Jonathan slid the night vision goggles she’d just given him over his eyes and looked around, adjusting to the greenish hue that now suffused the world. “Much obliged. Done soon.”

  Karen waved it off. “You should get a pair of NVGs of your own. With the apocalypse coming, you need to be prepared.” Karen was a hardcore prepper. Jonathan dreaded to think what kind of arsenal she had stored in the back along with the night vision goggles.

  He shrugged at her advice to get a pair of NVGs. “Yeah. But I figured, when things collapsed, I’d bring everyone here.”

  Karen barked a laugh. “You’d be welcome, too. I’ll need people to use all my guns, after all.”

  Jonathan went back to his drilling rig, still set up where he and Clay had left it a couple
of days earlier, and started programming the two bots. It was a little trickier than it should have been since he was working in the dark, with nothing but moonlight and the goggles. But eventually, he got them operational.

  The bots had started life as standard, off-the-shelf special-purpose machines, but his friend who operated the local garage had hacked them and had given them hands with opposable thumbs, making them general-purpose robots. They were much more useful now, but also utterly illegal.

  He had some sympathy with the ban. After all, if people were allowed to use GP bots, how would a guy like Clay ever get a job?

  Jonathan’s sympathy only went so far, however. Clay had used it all up.

  When they’d dragged Jonathan to court the following morning, the judge had been so lenient it endangered his job. He’d made Jonathan pay the full minimum wage for Clay’s day of work, but he hadn’t made Jonathan pay damages.

  On his way out of the courtroom, Jonathan had spotted Clay, whose face had gone red with barely contained anger that he hadn’t gotten more.

  Jonathan kept his distance lest his own anger overpower him. He looked at Clay solemnly and delivered his personal verdict. “You’re fired.” He continued out of the building, where the sheriff waited to give him a ride home.

  Now, a couple of nights later, Jonathan was out at Karen’s finishing the well. He was inexperienced with bots, so progress started slow, but it went faster as the drill bit deeper and he figured out what he was doing.

  Then he saw flashing lights in the distance and heard the wailing of sirens once more.

  Jonathan shut everything down, hopped into his truck, and then, using Karen’s NVGs rather than his headlights, raced off-road.

  He pulled out his phone and dialed Melissa while dodging around a huge rock and bouncing through a creek bed. “Bad. Get ready. Call Wolf.”