The Abacus Equation

by Peter Stremus

  Chapter 10

  Ian Summerton turned away from the silently rushing cars on the Palisades Parkway and looked at the wide glass case in his spacious office. Doubtless he was one of the people on earth able to appreciate fully the value of the displayed manuscripts and incunables. They did not appear to be very special. They were not even well conserved. Just a pile of old brittle paper in a peeling gaunt leather jacket. During a summer clean-up the papers would stand little chance of survival. As a child he had already been fascinated by old books and in the library he could sit silently for hours just reading the worn, in gold foil imprinted, titles. Later his lasting interest had been kindled by the renaissance. Not so much for the art like most of his posh colleagues, but for the political and religious new wave thinking called humanism. Or how since the middle of the fifteenth century, in the wake of the Hundred Year War, the then Western world left the dark middle ages. And humans went exploring outside their self inflicted boundaries. In the centuries to come, the ratio or logical thinking would be of prime importance. It would be a time of bold exploration, new economic models, the start of scientific research. A period of unprecedented growth and trust in rational thinking to escape from the religious yoke that had for centuries kidnapped the free will.

  He was proud of his unique private collection. Now, if Bill Gates was allowed to keep one of Da Vinci's codices, than surely he was allowed to own some of the unknown works of Thomas Moore. As a true detective he had discovered that particularly the last writings of Morus had disappeared from history. Finally he had found that in an external storage hangar, rented by the University of Cambridge, still hundreds of unopened boxes and chests were stored containing unstudied and unlisted books, letters, sermons and manuscripts. As always, universities had to deal with tight budgets and tried to economize wherever possible. There was no money to pay a team to once and for all catalogue the contents of the hangar. Let alone to find some students interested to comb through the dusty papers, many of them moist and covered in mould. A retired housekeeper had given him access to the hangar in exchange of a couple of bottles of good red wine. A copy of a typewritten inventory list had been his only guide to find his way between the racks filled with half rotten boxes. One line on the list had drawn his attention during his research.

  Parish Church Chelsea, 1632. Three Chests.

  Although the date was more than a century after Moore's beheading, it would seem more than reasonable that his family, and specifically his daughter Margaret, had brought the private collection of books and letters to a safe place. Certainly since the family property had been granted to William Paulet. Morus never had a good relation with the smooth Paulet who survived the reign of several kings by echoing whatever had to be echoed. Ian suspected that Margaret, probably even without the knowledge of her husband William Roper, had brought the most controversial writings to the cellars of the nearby parish church where they would be safe. The chest would disappear, without too much care, among the rest of the parish archives to reappear again after a century. After some flooding, it was decided to clean out the cellars of the church and the, unopened, chests were moved to a local library. Also at that time there was a continuous lack of funds, so the content remained undetected. When the library had to make place for the new ring road around London, a couple of containers were sent direction Cambridge. The central library of the university estimated their back-log to study the many donations, private collections, patrimonies and clean-ups at around fifty years. So the dusty crates from a forgotten parish church were adjoined in the old hangar, a single line on a list as the only reference. Waiting for better times which would never come. Till Ian broke the lid with a crowbar and paved his way patiently through the thousands of coagulated papers. Most of them were the old archives of the church with records of marriages, deaths, births, bills and boring sermons.

  But one evening he finally bumped into what he was looking for.

  The lost correspondence between Morus and his eldest daughter, while he was spending his last weeks locked up in the Tower of London.

  For years he had studied the large collection of tightly written sheets and had finally achieved to recreate a logical order in the apparent confusing texts. Ian did not doubt for a moment that both Morus and his daughter had done this on purpose to divert both the political and religious leaders of the time. Not at least the always suspicious Paulet and Cromwell in protection of Margaret.

  He had been able to reconstruct the last thoughts and ideas of a disillusioned and angry Morus. And he was the only one in the world who knew them.

  For now.

  Iveta Ferelli, his assistant, opened, after one distinct knock, the door and closed it again immediately behind her. Ian did not leave his contemplation. He was not even startled. After all they were the only people on this floor and, with the exception of a limited security staff, probably the only ones in the building. It was one of the back-up buildings, a mirror of the headquarters in Manhattan. Part of the business continuity plan in case a disaster would make the HQ inoperable. At any given moment of day and night, this building could take over all of the functions without losing one bit of data or productivity.

  But Ian preferred this building because it was discreet, easy to reach, provided ample parking and it was situated less than half an hour away from the private airport of Newark. Where he had landed earlier that day, nicely on time, with the corporate jet from Heathrow after he had taken leave from Vladimir and Juergen. He would no longer have this kind of luxury during the coming months and even years. But would he miss it? No, most certainly not.

  Iveta put her hand on his shoulder and looked at the opposite side of the Hudson.

  The twisting wide verge of the Palisades parkway and the steep banks of the Hudson finally showed a bright spring green after months of dull winter grey. She loved the view and was Ian still grateful that he had taken her away as his PA from the crowded office in Milan. Although she did not at all miss the hectic life of Milan nor the uncontrolled behaviour of the Italians, she longed from time to time to the warm sunny climate and the exuberant atmosphere around the canali during the evenings. Here the winters could be treacherous. Especially since her house was situated a couple of kilometres to the north, in the Catskills. It made her trip to the office in her four by four sometimes into a real adventure.

  After a moment of silence she said: “they have all arrived. The meeting can start. Shall I bring them in?”

  Ian nodded: “yes, please do so. I am ready.”

  Iveta disappeared to come back followed by four men and one woman.

  Ian greeted them. Cordially, yet with some reservation, addressing them by their first names and invited them around the large meeting table. The subject of the gathering was not to cover lightly nor to approach it with a misplaced upbeat attitude.

  “I have been looking forward to this moment and I am sure that you also have been waiting patiently. And now we are there,” he opened the meeting.

  With a push of a button, the office was obscured by closing the curtains and dimming the small spots in the ceiling. Two wall panels disappeared silently and on a wide screen a presentation started which looked very much to what Ian had seen on Juergen's tablet the day before.

  “As you all know, a couple of years ago, three years and seven months to be precise, we launched project Abacus. The purpose of the project was with the use of the most advanced algorithms running on the most advanced super computers to solve a number of complex simulations and equations. Aim was to predict as near perfect as possible what the future would look like in fifty years. Our staff and teams have all been working on subsets, individual small pieces. Other teams correlated the results of these small pieces into larger entities. Above that was another team correlating the correlations. Until the pyramid ended in one person. One person only who had the single overview and could see the total picture. And that picture is what you can see now on the screen. The result of the most likely equation
.

  For decades the world has been a roller-coaster, a raft on white water, going from one crisis to another. We all remember the financial crisis of 2008 that kept lingering on and finally escalated into the bankruptcy of most of the European countries. The stock markets in the world have been lately more closed for business than open to avoid a total collapse of the system. All logical consequences of fanatically moving production and even services to the low cost countries. Starting in the early twentieth century in Japan, Korea, Vietnam. Making a detour for not more than a decade into the Easter European countries like Bulgaria or Slovakia. Arriving in China and India. Now voices are heard to bring it all back to the US and Europe. The big flaw in the whole concept was that the consumption stayed in the old west, Europe and North America. The west really became the land of the sunset when the buying power disappeared and with it the export market. In the meantime the producing countries had to become their own consumer market which inevitably lead to higher wages so that cheap production was no longer possible and had to be sought elsewhere. But there was no place to go anymore. The circle was round. Prices and cost of living had risen so that the gap between poor and rich was wider than ever. Riots in Bangalore and Guangzhou were the first signs of a faltering system. In panic industries tried to go back to their roots in Europe but could not get the funds to build the necessary new factories. The high unemployment in Europe and North America lead to a high degree of intolerance against minorities. Minorities that so far had enjoyed a unique status in a society that wanted to be tolerant and multi-cultural. But when people are hungry, there is no room for tolerance. Heavy riots in the streets of Rotterdam, the suburbs of Paris and Bonn, burning Milan and Stockholm. Witch hunts against everything and everyone that was different. A fertile ground for religious fanatics and we saw the appearance of Christian terrorism in the city centres where over the decades a large Muslim population had settled.

  Next to that each day another doom scenario predicted the end of the world: global warming, comets, pandemics, the millennium, 2012, earthquakes and tsunamis, solar flares, the switching of the magnetic poles. Each day we are confronted with our share of disasters that will be the beginning of the end. But the earth is still spinning and does not want to go down, despite all of the predictions of Nostradamus and his gang.

  At the end of the twentieth century there was a general consensus that within twenty to thirty years we would have gone through the world's oil reserves. What happened? New fields were discovered in the Antarctic's and in the mountains of Oman, larger than all oilfields so far combined. In the North Sea huge natural gas fields were chartered and exploited. Some large disasters with exploding oil platforms should have accelerated the adoption of alternative sources like solar energy or wind power, but these were hardly embraced as viable alternatives on a large scale.

  So the pollution of the world continued. One after the other climate summits failed. The new industrial countries would not give up their newly acquired wealth and power. Other countries could buy CO2 certificates as a kind of modern indulgences. The result? Clean technologies such as hydrogen engines did not make an entry because nobody, company or investor, was interested to put money in an enterprise that could not promise a triple return in six months. Pilots clearly showing the potential of new technologies had to be put back into the fridge because there was nobody willing to build the supporting infrastructure. The existing fuel distribution infrastructure could not be adapted: too expensive and not lucrative. Certainly not for the governments who needed the taxes imposed on fossil fuels to fund their inefficient and money gobbling administrations.

  Ladies and gentlemen, despite the gloom and doom that seems to be our everyday share, it looks like technology always comes up with an answer. But today's civilisation has been stretched to the limits and is being threatened by something new, never seen in the history of the earth.

  There is one thing that slowly but surely has a devastating influence on our existence. And what I have said so far, can all be related to this one thing,” Ian paused after this long monologue to underline the seriousness of what he was about to say.

  “The one development that creeps in our society is the unstoppable growth of the human race. Today, even with all of the local conflicts, the illnesses, the natural disasters, the world population has exceeded the ten billion individuals. And yes, technology has helped in stretching the earth's ability to sustain this number. New ways of genetic engineering, the development of high nutrition foods, the production of clean water have solved the physical inconveniences. But have proven not to give a solution to a larger issue, the psychological needs of a human being. The rat-syndrome is no longer confined to the big cities with their high rises and worn out neighbourhoods. When too many rats are placed in one small room, they eat each other. Even when there is plenty of food. Our rat cage is no longer a densely populated area, it is now our earth.

  Sociologically and economically we are steering full speed towards a total decay of our current way of living, our norms and quality of life. And that is what we have been predicting. As you can see on the dynamic chart, it is a matter of years. More riots, religious fanatics, one economic crisis after the other in rapid succession. We have been able to plot the complex links between all of these conditions and they will become more manifest, more clear. The result will be the collapse of our society and a total chaos that will put pressure on everything we have been working for. The ideal feeding ground for … anarchy.”

  Ian paused and drank from the glass of water that Iveta had put in front of him. He allowed his audience some time to look at the growing red patches. Then he resumed.

  “Anarchy is the worst that can happen to us, to you. Because it means we have no control anymore. But there is a solution and that is why you are here and why we need your help. We have the technology not only to predict all of this, but also to intervene, to step up. In the pub we have all heard people exclaiming that there should be a good war to deal with all of this issues. What you see now on the screen is a graph showing the link between periods of war and periods of economical growth. The correlation is more than obvious. After a period of war there is always a period of prosperity. When a civilisation comes out of a war, the people have a different mind-set. Vis-à-vis investments and growth there is a can-do mentality, rather than a bean counter point of view. The renaissance came after the Hundred Year War, the Golden Age after the Thirty and Eighty Year wars, the industrial revolution after the last Dutch war. The decades after the First and Second World War can be considered as periods with the highest welfare. Even the inter-bellum was a period of cultural and economical heights. Breakthroughs in medicine are almost always linked to the battlefields. Technological development gets an adrenaline shot when there is a military advantage to be obtained. Out of the box thinking comes easier when your life is in danger. Well, the population is ready for big changes. At a given moment, people are ready for war. Today we have the scientific knowledge to reverse the current situation to a solid basis on which we can build a new world. The current infrastructure and the squeezed economic model, does not allow for growth. On the contrary, it stops people, businesses and communities from growing. We must make tabula rasa. Clean ship. Back to the basics and bring a number of parameters to the normal values. Two of those parameters are in urgent need to be brought to the normal proportions: population and irrelevant structures like suffocating cities, polluting industries and inefficient communication. Today we can solve the danger of this ever growing population. Within the right framework and deploying the right technology we can demolish just enough to start again on a fresh page. The use of accurate conventional weapons will destroy the current outdated infrastructure with a clear understanding of the human casualties. The use of biological or nuclear weapons is unpredictable and misses the point of destroying the infrastructure that is in high need of being replaced and will be the engine of economical growth. We don't want nor need contaminated cit
ies or soil, useless for years to come. No, the situation must be created that that the economy will jump-start, distributed over the continents bringing a new élan to our civilisation.”

  The projection on the screen had been turning from red back to green.

  “So what you see here is the result of controlled warfare.”

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