Copyright © 2016
by Martin M Schroth
No event or person in this book is real except for Zoe, my dog. Even though some may want to take credit, none is given.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my wife, Evelyn, for putting up with me. She is not a sci-fi fan and it was hard for her to read through the manuscript. She persisted and was invaluable in finding lots of errors for I am error prone.
I would also like to thank my daughter in law, Sarah West who also read through the manuscript and provided insight for my sometimes-poor grammar.
Dedication
This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandson, Reggie Bundukamara. He was an avid Spiderman fan.
Rest in Peace
Love,
Opa
Table of Contents
June 3rd, 2111
June 8th, 2111
June 9th, 2111
June 13th, 2111
November 2nd, 2111
November 9th, 2111
January 4th, 2112
January 7th, 2112
January 25th, 2112
February 1st, 2112
February 2nd, 2112
March 7th, 2112
March 14th, 2112
April 1st, 2112
April 11th, 2112
April 13th, 2112
April 15th, 2112
June 1st, 2112
July 11th, 2112 a.m.
July 11th, 2112 pm
July 13th, 2112
July 15th, 2112
July 18th, 2112
July 19th, 2112
July 25th, 2112
July 27th, 2112
July 29th, 2112
August 1st, 2112
August 12, 2112
August 16th, 2112
August 30th, 2112
September 30th, 2112
Characters by order of appearance
* - executive team
* Jake Weiss - Founder of Earth Station and emperor of Bodhi
* Mac Brown - head of security at Earth Station
* Maggie O’Reilly - head of research at Earth Station
* Charles Smith - personnel director at Earth Station
Nik Williams - Son of Mike Williams and Earth Station pilot
* Mike Williams - former CIA director – head of intelligence at Earth Station
Mabel - Mike Williams secretary
Robert Meyers - POTUS
Richard Greenleaf - former financial expert for the CIA – financial director of Earth Station
Linda Greenleaf - wife of Richard Greenleaf
Sarah Williams - wife of Mike Williams and analyst for CINCNORAD
Vlad Skrimov - Physicist
Marc Levi - Chemist
* Barry Walker - Construction manager
* John Fleming - lead engineer
* Paul Roberts - navigator SDV 1 and head of training and director of ESSC
Pat Conroy - recon specialist SDV 1
Karl Schmidt - head of Germanys satellite recon
Heinrich Bauer - ESSC head of Space Facilities
* Phil Long - Computer Ring director
ESSI - Earth Station Sentient Intelligence
Mason Baldwin - Political consultant for Bodhi
President Raul Diaz - President of Mexico
José Ramos - Lead elder of El Miguel
Mary Parker - Jake’s mother
* Dr. Harry Clay - Sickbay director
Carlos Fernandez - 1st person whose brain is downloaded
Dr. Friedrich Skinner - Earth Station psychiatrist
Marcus Lowry - militia, arm to arm combat instructor
Harry Clay, Jr. - militia, expert marksman and weapons instructor, also Dr. Clay’s son.
Lars Pinkston - militia, squad leader and expert marksman
Father Murry O’Neil - head of clergy at Bodhi
Abbreviations
CINCNORAD - Commander in Chief, North American Aerospace Defense Command
Plus, Inc. - parent company
ESSC - Earth Station Space Command
LEO - low earth orbit
MEO - medium earth orbit
HEO - high earth orbit
AGP - Anti-gravity platform
EMS - Electro magnetic spectrum
June 3rd, 2111
They call me Jake.
The Thunderbird Inn is close to two hundred years old. It’s in a small town called Florissant. It has a rustic log structure that looks like it should be in the wild west, where it is, actually. It’s my favorite place to hang out, have a beer and eat lunch. The parking area out front is not very big and I usually park my Harley right in front. It’s Wednesday today and there aren’t very many people here. On the weekends, it gets pretty crowded, with weekend bikers coming out of Colorado Springs. They stop here for lunch on their rides through the winding roads in the mountains. Today, though, it’s quiet.
As I walk in the front door, the bar is about three meters in front of me. It is a heavy wood structure. The wood is shiny and smooth as a baby’s bottom. That came from almost two hundred years of wiping the bar down several times a day. Linda, one of the bartenders, already has my Corona, with a slice of lime sticking out of its neck, sitting on the bar. “Thanks Linda.”
“You’re welcome Jake, are you going to be eating lunch?”
“Not quite yet. I’m expecting a couple of friends soon. We’ll order when they get here. I’m going to head back to my usual spot. Could you send them back there when they come?”
“You got it.”
I walked to the back of the main room, passed the pool table and out the sliding glass doors. Just outside the door, to the right, are a couple of chairs which look like they’ve been here since the place opened. They’re sturdy enough though. In between them is a small table. To my left is a stage. About once a month, during the summer, they have festivals which run all day. Bands start playing at noon and don’t end until midnight. I plopped myself down in my favorite chair which looks out across the courtyard and took a sip of my beer.
Mac and Maggie are friends I grew up with. I invited them up here to help me start something which may change the world.
Sitting here waiting for them, my mind wanders to how it all got to this point.
I didn’t even know my mother. They took me away from her when I was born. It seems she was not fit to raise me so they put me in one of the orphanages. I was told she died from a drug overdose, soon after I came here. You’ve have to understand that it wasn’t like the old days, after all it was 2083 not 1953. The orphanages were called “Houses”. The Houses were great. They were run like communal families – there was fair discipline, good food, great facilities, but the best part was the education. School was mandatory and you got out of it what you put in. Not only were there AI teachers but also real blood and guts teachers. The House I belonged to was the Weiss House.
I zipped through my classes – they were easy. Some of the B&G teachers noticed and they began challenging me with much harder stuff. That was easy too. So, to make a long story short, they labeled me “a genius”. When I finally finished my education, I was fifteen not eighteen, so I had to hang out another three years before I was on my own. All the teachers, counselors, and house parents wanted me to go to college but I wasn’t interested.
I started to learn stuff on my own. Our library was stocked with every book ever published, hell, all the books fit on my tab with lots of room to spare. So, off I went on a learning adventure.
One of the first things I learned is that you need money. You can be the nicest guy in the world, but without money, that’s all you are, a nice guy that couldn’t do a whole lot for anyone
.
I also have several “gifts”. I can tell what someone is going to do by just observing them and the environment. I guess my brain can take lots of “clues”, process them and come up with an accurate prediction. This has some interesting consequences. For instance, I can walk across a room and not be seen by anyone. I can predict where they are going to be looking, and then simply avoid that spot as I move. If I were a dishonest person, I could walk into a bank, steal a bunch of money and walk out of the place without being seen. But then again, I don’t seem to be that kind of person so getting money that way is out.
I also can remember everything, and I do mean everything. That comes in real handy in a lot of situations. School for instance, was easy because I remembered everything I read and everything the teacher said. Also, now that I am learning on my own, I pick a topic and become an expert fairly quickly by doing my research – and not forgetting anything.
Last of the “gifts”, that I am aware of, is the ability to tell if someone is telling the truth or not. People have lots of “tells” when they talk that let me know – for certain – if they are lying.
One of the first things I did was take my meager savings – one hundred seventy-five credits -, online and bet on athletic contests after studying the participants using my gifts. I could win about 80% of the time which eventually led me to a nest egg of about two hundred and fifty thousand credits by the time I was sixteen. That’s a lot of credits but really nothing to write home about, hell, it cost half that amount for a decent vehicle to get around in.
So instead of buying stuff, I got back to my tab and read everything I could about the stock market – not only in the American Sector, but also the Euro, Chinese, Russian, and Japanese Sectors. Even though each country has its own currency, all the stock markets deal in credits. This came about because of the Japanese Stock Market fiasco back in the early ‘50s. Currency conversion programs were hacked and the currency conversion, only a little bit off, none the less, made a mess of the market in Japan, and by extension all the other markets in the world. It was then decided that all the stock markets would use the same currency which were called credits. An individual could then convert the credits to local currency if they needed to.
Once I had a handle on the workings of the stock markets, I read up on current events and using all the “clues”, my brain was able to come up with some pretty good predictions for stocks. I bought a bunch and within a short period of time, I turned that two hundred and fifty thousand credits into a whopping one billion credits. It didn’t take long to grow that into a much larger amount.
Now I had a problem, I was starting to get noticed. What to do? I decided that I needed a staff – not a real one but a made up one with history and everything. Back to the tab to learn about identities and how to go about creating some “real” fake people. By the time I was finished, I had a corporation – PLUS, Inc. – that had a board of directors with eight members. All the members looked really good on paper and had great identities with solid backgrounds even the Security Forces (SF) wouldn’t find suspicious. I wasn’t one of the directors or even the CEO. After all, they were all really me anyway.
This began a long process of creating different entities to handle my money in a way that would not raise eyebrows or point in any way toward me. By the time I was eighteen, I had seventeen entities which consisted of eleven corporations, four financial groups and two charities. My net worth by that time was well over two hundred twenty-five billion credits which put me in the top one hundred wealthiest people. PLUS, Inc. was the parent company of all these entities but even an exhaustive search would not find the link between them all. I had created a system which included hundreds of servers around the world including a group of private servers which convoluted all the ties between entities to a point that it would take years to unravel and then only the most casual of connects would be revealed.
During my education, I had two friends. Mac and Maggie. Mac was the House athlete. He was good at everything athletic but just average as a student. He came to me for help with his studies and we became good friends. Being somewhat of a geek, I was occasionally harassed by the House goons. After befriending Mac, that never happened again.
Maggie was brilliant. She was my competition when it came to our studies. She and I would constantly switch positions for intellectual top dog. The funny thing is that, me being very competitive, I always was looking for the edge which would put me ahead of her in the class. She on the other hand, didn’t seem to care and just plugged along doing her own thing, which put her neck and neck with me. After a few years of this, we finally started communicating and even bounced ideas, problems and other “intellectual stuff” off each other and in many cases, came up with new and ingenious solutions.
Maggie and I became fast friends and would rely on each other not only in intellectual matters but also social situations – like House parties, dance, etc. Even though our relationship was plutonic, we hung out together and were seen as a couple.
I heard footsteps on the hardwood floor and looked up. Mac and Maggie were headed my way with Linda bringing up the rear. She had a couple of menus in her hand.
Mac played pro ball after he left the House. He was injured, and his career was cut short after four years. He is now working for a security firm in Denver.
Maggie bounced around from one university to another, gathering doctorates along the way. I believe she has one in medicine, astrophysics, chemistry, biology and several others. She developed several medical devices which she has patented. The royalties are enough so she can pretty much do as she pleases.
“Glad you guys could make it.”
“What will you guys have to drink?” Linda asked as she placed the menus on the table.
“I’ll have what he’s having,” Mac said
“I’ll have a glass of cabernet,” Maggie added.
“I’ll have another one of these too. Thanks, Linda.”
“I’ll be back with your drinks in a few minutes, then I’ll get your order.”
“I asked you guys here today because I would like you to join me in an adventure. I have formed a corporation called PLUS 1. Its purpose is to advance mankind to a point where everyone can reach their potential without worrying about where their next meal is coming from or where they are going to sleep. My ideas are just in their infancy. I would like you guys on board and would like your input. I have the complete structure of PLUS 1 and assets in this report,” I handed them each a copy. “You don’t have to give me an answer now. Read it over, and call me if you have any questions.”
Just then, Linda returned with our drinks.
“I’ll have my usual,” I informed her. Facing the other two, “that would be a bison burger with waffle fries. It doesn’t get any better than that.”
“I’ll have the same,” Mac said.
“Me too,” Maggie added.
The rest of lunch consisted of small talk and catching up on our lives.
A couple days later, they both contacted me and told me that they were on board.
I had them set up like me, anonymous. Their names were not listed anywhere in the corporate structure. Mac was my security guy. Even though he doesn’t have much to do now, that will soon change when Earth Station gets built. Earth Station was our first idea after we got together. It’s still an idea, we are having a pow wow on this idea in a few days. Maggie is my lead scientist, for lack of a better title. Her forte in the sciences let her come up with some brilliant ideas which we will use to build Earth Station.
June 8th, 2111
In 2107 I bought a small ranch in Colorado, just outside of Florissant. It is equipped with the latest in communication and security. I also had a few fully equipped cabins built for guests. The main house was about 700 sq. m and included a large meeting room and several offices as well as a weight room and indoor swimming pool – I prefer swimming laps for exercise – it allows me to think while hearing the water rush past my ears to d
rown out the noise of living. It’s also off the grid. We generate our own electricity, have a deep well, and have a computer system which is not connected to the outside. Another system is connected to the outside but to get information from that system to our secure system requires manually transferring the data via usb drives. All the electronics are protected by faraday cages.
This will be our headquarters until we get Earth Station built. Maggie and Mac are staying in two of the cabins for now.
Maggie and Mac walked into my office and plopped themselves down in the comfortable padded chairs I had sitting opposite my desk.
“Okay guys, what is Earth Station all about?”
Maggie turned in her seat and looked us both in the eye, “I don’t want to be tied down with all the government regulations – it has gotten totally out of hand. Did you know that yesterday, that dumbass president of ours, invoked a new regulation that put a huge tax liability on new innovations and the only way to avoid that was to turn over the rights to the government? You still get to work on your project but now you are working under government scrutiny which slows the process of discovery and development to a crawl. That is not an environment that we can work under.”
“Then we can’t build Earth Station in the US,” contributed Mac. “After all, from what I understand about the idea of Earth Station is that our people will be working on a lot of different areas, computing, medical, space exploration and anything else they want to work on. We can’t have them tied down by the government bureaucracy which is only going to get worse.”
“We have a ton of money and as the old saying goes, ‘Money talks, bullshit walks’. So, where do we go?”
“I like Mexico, it’s corrupt enough to make our money work, close enough to get what we need without having to haul it halfway around the world, and there are large unpopulated areas for us to develop.”
“That’s a good idea Mac, what do you think Maggie?”
“Mexico is a good idea, now we need to find a place that can be protected from scrutiny – that’s going to be your job Mac.”
Earth Station (Station Series Book 1) Page 1
