Braintrust- Requiem

by Marc Stiegler

  Sheldon barely hesitated. “You’ve come to the right place. We’ll be happy to help you.”

  The President sounded surprised. “You’re good with this? You always seemed a little too much, well—”

  “Too much like the BrainTrust people to be angry with them? What difference would that make? Correcting voter behavior is my business, Mr. President. Of course we’ll fulfill your needs.” He paused. “It will be a little expensive. On the one hand, there are many fruitful avenues of attack—I mean, of enlightenment—we can exploit. But on the other hand, the BrainTrust is pretty popular. They did save the whole nation from the plagues, after all.”

  The President’s anger surged. “You know, the Chief Advisor never believed that, and on this one thing, I’m inclined to agree with him.”

  “It hardly matters what you or I believe, Mr. President. It’s the people’s belief that must be overcome.” Sheldon let his voice fill with a cheeriness he did not feel. “It makes no difference. We’ve got this covered for you. Let me make a few calls, get things in motion.”

  After the President hung up, Sheldon made exactly one phone call. “Lenora, it’s me again.”

  “Sheldon. What can I do for you? Or are you calling with another warning? Because we’ve already started to act on your previous alert. I don’t know if you’ve noticed—or if anyone has noticed—but Amanda, the Chairman of the Board for the BrainTrust Consortium, has moved the main fleet from the fifty-mile reef out to the two-hundred-mile reef, into indisputable international waters. We’ve done some other things as well, I’m told, although Amanda was pretty cagey about what else they’ve done.”

  Sheldon suspected Amanda had told Lenora exactly what they were doing, but that Lenora was being cagey with him. It didn’t matter. His real purpose in this call lay elsewhere. “First of all, I wanted to inform you that the President just called. He wants me to run a hate campaign against you.”

  Lenora laughed. “Of course he did. You are, after all, the go-to guy for voter behavior correction.” Her voice turned dark. “Did you take the contract?”

  “Of course I did.”

  Her voice grew darker. “Well, I suppose it doesn’t make any difference anyway.”

  Sheldon laughed. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m going to take his money, but I’m not going to run a campaign.”

  Lenora paused. “That’s even more unethical than I expected from you.”

  “Is it? Would it be more ethical to run the campaign? Or to let the President take his money to someone who would run the campaign?” He sighed. “As you said, it makes no difference. The Premier’s campaign is coming along quite efficiently. When I call the President in a few days with preliminary results, he’s going to be delighted.” He chuckled. “I’m going to get the most praise and the most profit I’ve ever made, and I’m going to get it for doing nothing.”

  Lenora was by this time stone-cold. “Is that the end of it?”

  Sheldon turned darkly serious. “That’s not even the beginning. I was wondering…can I license the Accel software?”

  Lenora sounded startled. “License it? To you?”

  “This kind of abuse of voter behavior correction has to be stopped. The only way I know to stop it is with Accel.”

  Lenora continued carefully, “You understand this would destroy your business?”

  Sheldon shrugged. “If I have enough sites using Accel to ruin my business, I’ll be making more than enough profit off the Accel installations to make up for it.”

  Lenora paused for a long moment before laughing once more. “Let me talk to my co-founders, my husband and Jim Caplan. One way or the other, though, we’ll do this deal.”

  Sheldon coughed. “Just to be clear, there is still one little hiccup in this plan. The whole American educational system is utterly hostile to this kind of radical innovation.”

  This time Lenora suffered a laughter meltdown before she spluttered, “You’re kidding, right? You’re the world’s master of social manipulation, and you can’t even take control of a community PTA meeting?”

  Fan dropped her copter just beyond the last building on the town’s street. Normally she had Julissa pilot, but today Fan had someone else to bring along—someone who did not pilot or drive or transport herself in any way except by walking.

  Nuan stepped carefully out of the copter. “Awful contraption,” she muttered.

  Fan said impatiently, “Really? You flew in an experimental rocketship, for heaven's sake.”

  Nuan brushed it aside. “At least that involved weightlessness. It was very relaxing for these old bones.”

  Fan thought about responding with a tart observation that it also involved over two gs of force to get to the weightlessness, and another two to get back out of it, but decided against it.

  They walked to the center of the village. Most of the people stood in the shadows of the buildings, but the mayor came forth with a confident stride.

  Fan shook his hand but backed away from him to address all the people. She projected her voice, hopefully well enough for everyone to hear. “As I said in the email, we’re about to try an experiment using BrainTrust technology to improve your lives.” She held up a tablet. “Specifically, we’re going to use something called CEREBRUM to pick your next mayor.”

  The mayor gawked at her. “But I’m the mayor.”

  Fan smiled with neither malice nor warmth. “And if you are selected via CEREBRUM, you will continue to be mayor.”

  Fan waved everyone forward and designated a couple of the huskier youths to get the boxes from the trunk of the copter and start distributing the tablets therein.

  She then let Nuan take over the explanation of what would happen: first CEREBRUM would test each member of the village to develop a personality profile, which would be used to adjust the effects of their bets in the prediction market. Then everyone would bet, using as much or as little of their meager savings as they liked, on which person would, as mayor, most improve life in a variety of areas.

  Fan was not surprised to see the level of excitement rise throughout the crowd as Nuan went around explaining the details of the plan and giving examples of how different ways of participating would yield different results.

  The mayor started the introduction in a huff, although he worked tremendously hard to hide his anger from the Number Two member of the Standing Committee. By the end, however, a satisfied expression covered his face.

  Fan did not smile. Internally, however, she relished the moment.

  According to her best information, the mayor here was as corrupt as the day was long. Supposedly communal lands were being used for his personal benefit. Even though getting a driver’s license and a car was officially simple and cheap, in practice, the mayor demanded large bribes. She had thought about letting Guang shoot him, but it was pointless. There were thousands of mayors just like this one. Guang might not understand, but Fan had done a BrainTrust-type analysis of the historical record of the Communist party: shooting people for bad behavior simply does not scale well to a billion-person population. They needed a more automated way of identifying and replacing the bad government officials.

  Fan hadn’t even tried to propose to Guang that they hold local elections for the mayors. It wasn’t socialist enough. But a prediction market for selecting mayors? Well, that smacked of high tech, and even better, it fit right in with the modern Chinese government philosophy of market socialism.

  So here they were.

  Noon came and went, and Fan made a note to herself that in the next test village, she’d have lunch brought in for everyone. But now it was time to run the market.

  Unlike normal prediction markets, in this one, all the actions by all the participants were monitored by her computer. She also had full data on income and assets for all the villagers, so she was not surprised that the mayor, by far the wealthiest member of the town, made big bets that he would produce the best results.

  However, since they had, for this experim
ent, pro-rated the impact of the forecasts based on the wealth of the individuals making the bets, his large investments made only small nudges to the outcome.

  The eventual winner was an elder who reminded Fan much of Nuan.

  The former mayor squawked, the townspeople congratulated the winner, and Fan and Nuan walked toward their copter.

  Several excited people stood near her copter. They kept their heads down but kept stealing glances in her direction.

  Fan walked up to them. “Do you have a problem?”

  Everyone shook their heads. Then one of the younger ones screwed up the courage to address her. “Member Liu Fan Hui, could you use our village for a test like this one?”

  Fan raised an eyebrow.

  Nuan stepped forward, smiling warmly as usual. “Of course! We’re looking for several towns for this experiment.”

  Everyone looked at Nuan with relief. “And our town?” asked another. “And ours?” inquired a third.

  Nuan nodded. “Of course. Let me get your names and addresses.”

  Sometime later, Fan climbed into the copter, steaming.

  Nuan grinned. “This is going to work just great.”

  Fan shook her head. “We have no idea if the new mayor of this town is going to be better than the last. Expanding the experiment at this point is foolish.”

  Nuan shook a finger at her. “Sourpuss. Of course he’ll be better.”

  Fan exclaimed, “How can you be so sure?”

  “You picked a village with a jackass for a mayor, right? Picking a person at random would probably give you a better mayor.”

  Fan inhaled sharply. The insight made her giddy. “Regression toward the mean.”

  Nuan waved it away. “Whatever you want to call it. In the meantime, I have another newsflash for you. Anybody who makes a trip to a remote village to stand up to a Politburo member to request the same experiment is surely someone with another lousy mayor. Getting someone better is a simple matter of picking just about anyone else.”

  Fan finished the thought. “So even if the prediction markets work no better than random, the result will still be an improvement.” She looked at her passenger warmly. “Nuan, you’re a genius.”

  Nuan shrugged. “I’m from Baotong.”

  Dash followed Colin off the elevator into a corridor with walls photo-realistically rendered in craggy ice. Here and there, deep fissures seemed to glow with an inner blue light, the result of refraction through the frozen sculpture of the landscape.

  Dash instantly knew where they were and easily guessed where they were going. “The Tundra deck. Are we going to see Rhett? Does he have something new on the reactor front?” Her excitement started to rise; nuclear reactor tech was one of her favorite areas of research.

  Colin nodded. “He’s been working on two projects, actually—one he invented for the Consortium, and one he invented for me.” He stopped abruptly and placed a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, but a nightmare of epic proportions is closing in on us, and we must be prepared.” As they started walking once more toward the reactor control room, he told her of the warning Lenora had forwarded to him.

  This time Dash stopped. Her gaze had lost focus. “It won’t just be the Americans attacking us, will it? The Russian Union and America in alliance?”

  Colin’s expression grew colder than the tundra around them. “Even worse than that, I fear.”

  Her eyes widened as she started putting the data together. She opened her mouth in a silent scream. “Not nuclear missiles, Colin. We can’t build nuclear missiles.”

  Colin took her gently by the arm and started to half-drag her the rest of the way.

  Dash did not struggle but did not exactly give in. “How do you do it, Pak Colin?”

  Colin stared straight ahead. “Do what?”

  “How do you keep planning, and scheming and making terrible choices? Constantly. You’ve been doing this for how long? Decades?”

  Colin stopped for a moment and took a breath that almost trembled. Tiredness entered his eyes, and for a moment, he looked every bit as old as his years. Even that craggy rock, she realized, could wear down.

  In the end, he gave her a sad smile. “I could really use a vacation. A very long vacation.” He laughed softly. “Even retirement for a while.”

  Dash reached up and touched his shoulder. “When the final climax of this terrible episode in the history of the BrainTrust ends, perhaps things will quiet down. Perhaps then you can indeed take such a vacation.”

  Colin’s voice turned rueful. “But where on earth could I go that the next round of problems would not find me?”

  He started down the hall once more, although not to the control room as Dash had expected. Rather, he took her to a nearby hatch, inside of which they found a room Dash had never seen before.

  Rhett looked the part of a TV cowboy from the last century, from the burnt leathery skin around his eyes to the silver tips of his boots. His cowboy hat, hanging on a hook near the hatch, had gotten its beaten and battered appearance when he was much younger, working as a ranch hand in the summer to support himself on his way through college to his degree in nuclear engineering.

  He gave Dash one of his signature bright, slow smiles. He invited her in, drawling as he gave her an exaggerated honorific. “Dr. Dash. Welcome to my new lab!”

  The room was immense, an amazing extravagance in the tight quarters of an early-generation isle ship.

  The partition of the room where they all stood was stuffed with computers and bot control-and-programming gear.

  But they were not standing in the big partition. On the far side of a lead-lined glass wall, bots scurried about, working on several devices.

  Dash studied the apparatus and laughed as she pointed at one item for which the central element was a spherical bowl. “It’s too small a molten-salt core to sustain a reaction unless you’re using very highly enriched uranium.” She frowned. “Are you planning to manufacture these in volume? HEU wouldn’t be cost-effective at scale, would it?” The BrainTrust currently bought small amounts of HEU extracted from retired nuclear bombs, but that supply wasn’t large enough to sustain mass production.

  Rhett chuckled. “Look more carefully at the housing.” He worked with a waldo to move one of the bots up close and used the bot’s right hand to point at the key components.

  Dash smiled once again. “You’re using our solid-state neutron generators to pump the flux density up to critical levels.” She laughed with a child’s delight. “You’ve built a subcritical reactor in which the core can’t sustain a reaction without being constantly augmented by an external stream of neutrons.”

  Rhett joined her laughter. “Hey, the idea’s been around since the start of the century. You and I have talked about implementing it off and on for years.” He turned to a lab bench and picked up a device that looked like an oversized old-style transistor. “I’m using a new, improved homebrew solid-state neutron generator that produces more neutrons more cheaply. I’m talking with the Warenhaus chip foundry people about licensing it for mass production.”

  Colin had been studying the new reactor quietly. “That’s about half-size in every dimension, right? Such a small reactor could have lots of interesting new applications.”

  Dash hugged Rhett, as Ping had taught her to do. “Congratulations. This very much looks like a breakthrough.”

  Rhett looked away, not quite blushing.

  Dash turned once more to the scene behind the lead shielding. As her gaze moved on to another piece of equipment, her expression transformed to one of horror. “What is that, Rhett?” She indicated a streamlined shape pointing toward the ceiling. “Is that a nosecone?”

  Rhett looked at Colin in shock. “You haven’t told her?”

  Dash’s finger started to shake. “Colin, is that a nosecone? Is that the housing for a…a…”

  Colin again laid his hand on her shoulder. “It is not. Not exactly, anyway.”

  Rhett looked agonized. “Dash, I�
�m not sure you need to see this.” He looked pleadingly at Colin. “She doesn’t need to know about this, does she?”

  Colin remained stoic. “She’s a voting member of the Consortium Board. They all need to know.”

  Dash had put her finger down, but now she grasped her shoulders with both hands as if to deny the world around her the right to touch her. “If it’s not what I think it is, what is it?”

  Rhett explained the science and engineering and purpose behind the device.

  Dash reacted as she knew she must, as she knew Colin had known she must. “Abomination.”

  Colin reamplified a part of Rhett’s explanation. “It can’t hurt anybody who isn’t trying to destroy us. You know that.”

  Dash shivered. “Still.”

  Colin pushed her. “You know the people involved. You know their personalities. You have enough of the data. Visualize how they all interact and where they all lead. Now project the possible outcomes and tell me, should we stop developing this? Knowing what you now know of what’s coming, should we shut down this project?”

  In a voice wracked with pain, she asked, “What do you call it?”

  Rhett smiled gently. “We call it ‘the Petard.’”

  Dash’s eyes lost focus for a moment. “Very apt.”

  Then she ran from the room.

  Tricia finished hacking the lock on the vault so delightfully concealed in Dmitri’s office. She was quite impressed. She’d missed the vault the first time she’d examined the office, and this time had had a devil of a time cracking it. Good thing they hadn’t used vaults like this in the White House to keep important secrets. They’d have been difficult to steal.

  Anyway, here they were, all Dmitri’s most valued possessions. Hmmm…

  She started tossing uninteresting things to the side of the desk. Bearer bonds denominated in Deutsch-marks, ten million or so. Boring. A bag of diamonds. She plucked one out to examine it. Not a bad stone, about fifteen carats, F color, VS2 clarity. Pretty. The bag was probably worth another ten mil SC.

  A tiny painting featuring Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and a dragon, by Elisabeth. An early piece. Whoa. Why keep this in a vault? She set it up so Dmitri could see it when he sat at his desk.