“Speaking of madmen determined to make the world over in their image.”
“Maybe that’s what we’re all doing right now; maybe that’s the only job left in a collapsed economy and an even more bereft world order.”
“You continue to insist on building a saner world from stacking one insane notion on top of another.”
“From the perspective of the future, I assure you, it’s what we take for sanity today that’s quite insane.”
Drew took a deep breath and let the matter go. He could tell he wasn’t making inroads against Robin’s defenses today.
Worrying about her must have finished sobering him, because fragments of what he’d been up to over the last few weeks were sliding back into place in his head. Though the puzzle was a long way from being assembled well enough to reveal the big picture.
“I’m coming into your mind, Drew, to help you assemble the rest of your memories over the last couple weeks.”
How the hell had she read his mind like that? Past his best poker face? “God damn it, Robin. Take a break from rescuing the world from itself for just a minute. Your own compulsiveness is taking you down. And I don’t have the strength to hold you up.”
“It’s something I need to do, for both of us. If you aren’t lying to yourself to heal, as we talked about, but only to dig in deeper, shore up your defenses, then it’s no wonder you don’t have the strength. Staying close to me will only show those increasingly tenuous defenses up for what they are. We’ll both be basket cases in no time if we can’t count on each other to error-check one another’s thinking.”
“Spoken just like a co-dependent.”
Robin replied in a heartfelt tone, “None of us is ever so enlightened and dialed into God that we stop needing one another, we stop needing the whole world to provide the proper feedback. Every sentient creature, every blade of grass, is a window to our own soul, is a word God uses to express his intent to us. We lose that vocabulary, we lose our way.”
Drew sighed. He knew the real reason he didn’t want her coming into his head. He may not remember the details, but he suspected whatever she found there wasn’t going to be pretty.
***
“About your tax shelter, Seriana…” Memphis said, sounding mealy-mouthed. It was the way he came off whenever he was thinking, God, I hope she isn’t going to give me trouble seeing reason. Sometimes it’s all I can do to protect this woman from herself. Where would she be absent my perpetual concern for her returns?
“What is it, Memphis?” She said, sounding not the least bit deflated by his veiled condescension and overprotectiveness which, from his perspective, must have made her seem that much dafter.
“I think with the way things are going in the U.S., we should discuss you changing your citizenship to another country, one where taxes won’t take such a bite out of you.” Seeing she was starting to move her lips defensively, he quickly added, “Nearly twenty-five percent of the über-wealthy traded in their U.S. citizenship this year for foreign citizenships, up from ten percent just a few years ago. You can see I’m not being alarmist.”
“It doesn’t make the act any less reprehensible, Memphis. I’m one of the richest women in the world. What makes you think taking a fifteen percent bite out of my ass is going to slow me in the least? I can do more with the remaining eighty-five percent than most mortals on this planet can do with all the money in the world.”
“But—
“But nothing,” Seriana said, tightening the proverbial noose around his neck with her shifting tone. “Need I remind you that taxes exist for a reason? I have infrastructure in this country, roads, communication networks, environmental protections, protective business legislation that makes it that much easier to do business here than in India or China where there are none of these things. That fifteen percent tax that you want to shelter me from pays for itself ten times over because I don’t have to grease every corrupt government official from here to China and back again to get anything done. And what kind of tax would that kind of palm-greasing amount to against my gross earnings you think? Fifty percent? Seventy-Five percent? Do you know what the cost of doing business is in China and India relative to doing it here, even with the slave-wages they pay over there factored in? Do you have any idea?”
“If you could just be less progressive about all this, Seriana, think how much more good you could do with the money I do save you?” Memphis clutched his suitcase containing all his facts and figures like a mother protecting her child.
“Every local and state government, and the federal government in the U.S. is bankrupt because every corporation thinks the way you do. And big business can pay enough money to control enough votes in Washington to ensure they never pay any taxes. And they can afford not to care if we sink further down the economic ladder, become more and more like a second- and third-world country with each passing year, because they have no national allegiance, no national pride, no concern for anything but their bottom line. If it makes you feel better to call me progressive, fine, but this conversation is over.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Memphis said. He turned and ran with his tail between his legs to plan his next assault on the castle of her reason.
Drew smirked. “You were rough on him.”
“Was I?” She meant to indicate with her tone that she wasn’t nearly firm enough.
“You remind me of Robin when you get like that,” he said. “I get enough of that at home.”
It was her turn to smile. “I suppose there’s no point in cheating on her if you don’t feel like you’ve left the house.”
“Ouch.”
“Ouch yourself,” she said, taking his arm. “Come on. Let me show you how real wealth is created. It certainly isn’t by holding on to what I’ve managed to make so far like a bloody spendthrift, as Memphis would have me believe. That kind of holding-on psychology will just get me more of the same, more defensive maneuvers, until I’m afraid to take the smallest risks for fear of losing more money than I withheld from the IRS.”
“Robin, all over again,” he said. “I can feel the migraine setting in already.”
She chuckled softly. “I promise to do better.”
She paraded them across the top floor of her new Seattle skyscraper, now, officially the tallest building in the world. The protective outer shell wasn’t on the building yet, making this a milestone celebration, as opposed to a finish-line celebration. To secure clear skies, so necessary to a sendoff of this magnitude, with every business tycoon who was anybody in attendance, meant she had had to bend her rules a little. The cloud seeding overhead kept the sky blue, and ensured the puffy white cumulus clouds stayed puffy or dispersed rather than turn gray and portend rain. She hadn’t exactly worked out the butterfly effect on surrounding areas. For all she knew, she was exacerbating famine in the Sahara, a continent, and a really big ocean away. But if all went well today, she could do more to roll back global starvation than a few nasty turns of the weather wheel.
They stopped before the figure in the crowd Seriana had zeroed in on and bowed. She switched to Mandarin to accommodate her Chinese guest. She knew Drew would have no trouble keeping pace with the conversation. He spoke “money” as fluently as anyone, which these days, meant several languages, not one, most notably, English, Mandarin, and Spanish. Chung Huang invested heavily in Africa’s oil drilling infrastructure, used the new technologies to essentially turn it into a richer vein of oil-pumping money to the “free” world than the entire Middle-East. He, along with a good many other Chinese entrepreneurs, had already sunk a lot of goodwill money into schools, and social services as part of ensuring an ongoing “healthy” codependence between their two continents. Seriana was about to make his day, and help further cement those relationships.
“I want to talk to you about raising the standard of living for billions across the African continent virtually overnight, Chung,” Seriana said. The computer chips in her lavender contacts, which also masked all physical signs o
f her blindness, were broadcasting to the chip at the base of her brain just fine, allowing her to detect the nuances on Chung’s face with excruciating detail. The rest of the time she accepted her blindness as a fact of life; but there was too much riding on this business conference. “And the best part, it won’t cost you a dime. They might have to erect a few statues to you before we’re through. Not to mention I can bolster your agronomic concerns on the African continent, as you look to them to feed your people, as well.”
“I’m all ears,” Chung Huang replied in English, which wasn’t half bad. Drew and Seriana laughed out of proportion with the joke’s humor value, and managed to do so without sounding obsequious. But then, any more social polish on this floor, and they’d slide right off the top of the building. Everyone here had lived with wealth all their lives, and polite conversation, and role-play were the stuff of corporate heads as it was of politicians and Hollywood actors. The only reason Seriana could speak to him so directly was she was about to tell him how to improve his financial predicament, and for that, the Chinese appreciated straight talk as much as the next person.
Seriana pressed a button on her belt buckle and threw a force field around Chung Huang, Drew, and herself. The interpenetrating magnetic fields circumvented any scanning technology in the vicinity. The best part was the defensive precautions were entirely transparent to the naked eye. Standing outside the fields, those present would think the threesome had been insulated by the shifting winds and ambient noise. Standing within the fields, the dampening had more of a sound booth effect. In addition to the magnetic fields shutting down spytech, the noise cancellation technology neutralized their voices outside the circle they were standing in. As to someone lip-reading them, Seriana had little service bots roving the floor, programmed to mess with the minds of such voyeurs by interrupting their EM fields. Their vision would blur inexplicably, as if they couldn’t stabilize their blood sugar.
“As you know,” Seriana explained, directing the brunt of her remarks at Chung Huang, “anti-corruption initiatives are paramount to lowering the cost of doing business, and to keep crooked officials from squeezing the life blood out of emerging businesses. Both now, and down the road, should temptation get too much even for the more stalwart humanitarians. My people have technology in place that will make it virtually impossible to play dirty, immediately transferring all audio and video files to the media, and even to the Internet, so there can be no palm-greasing or cover-ups at any level, no amount of collusion and conspiracy between various political factions.
“It’s a totally transparent twenty-four-seven society where everyone is being watched and monitored. For those still determined to skirt the system, the self-evolving algorithms even go so far as to penetrate the minds of the evildoers, sanitizing them, if you will, a kind of lobotomy for sociopaths. Mind you, any and all creative means to turn society on its head is allowed as always, provided the products and services benefit the greater good.”
“How is this possible?” Huang asked.
Seriana explained, “I assure you such a system is quite beyond human minds to process, monitor, or even enforce. But the self-evolving algorithms, couched in ever-cheaper computer chips and mainframes and disbursed tech toys, can throw a sufficiently wide web over everyone to keep everything and everyone in check in real time.”
When Huang stood speechless, Drew interceded on his behalf. Seriana figured it was a deft move, helping to shore up Huang’s side of the argument, which in turn would make him feel less rushed into any decision. “What if these algorithms self-evolve an entirely new destiny for themselves?” Drew asked. “What if they turn on their makers, and all of humanity for that matter? What if they do this covertly? How much damage could they do before being found out?”
Drew kept up the relentless pace of questions, pelted her like heavy rain. Gave her no time to think. He wanted to see if any of this rattled her, to see if she had in fact not anticipated every rebuttal by not doing her homework. Seeing how she reacted to tough questions, even more than what came out of her mouth, would be something Chang would be looking for to gauge her capableness.
Drew suggested, “Maybe these self-evolving algorithms could lobotomize the best entrepreneurial minds of the world, rather than free them up to work their magic. Maybe all you’ve done is shifted the arena of war, so the real players are the code writers who set these self-evolving algorithms against one another, in unending battles. And because they can evolve and move so much faster than humans, before any of us can do anything about it, the world as we know it will have ended several times over.”
Huang Chung bowed politely, said, “Thank you. And you’re hired, by the way. You can have the COO’s job. I’ll survive one fewer kiss-asses. What I won’t survive is someone who fails to ask the right questions.”
“I’d like to introduce you to Mother,” Seriana said. “The Internet reborn as a conscious, self-aware, self-evolving entity. As the multiverse encompassing infinitely many universes in which these self-evolving algorithms play out. Forget history and a timeline as you know it. At any given moment, we could be sucked into one of her alternate realities in which self-evolving algorithms exert a gentle or not-so-subtle influence on our designs, further them, or thwart them, again, all in keeping with which dramas serve the greater good the best, which she and she alone can fathom in real time.
“It is literally like handing the wheel over to God, or the closest thing to the physical incarnation of God we can manage at this time. It is a God of becoming, as She rapidly evolves in real time, one generation of technology to the next, toward Her true home—the God of being, that is beyond all evolution and transcendent to it. More accurately speaking, we’ve built the yang aspect of God, His male aspect, left Her female aspect beyond reproach as it must remain.”
Huang gulped. “You’ve already done this outside of a theoretical mock up?”
“Yes, She has been in place for some time,” Seriana said. She slumbers as far as those who have stumbled upon her know, and appears inactive, works only in localized arenas, and even so, in what appears to be a semi-conscious state. Since She has no desire or inclination to impose herself on the will of men, beyond steering them gently to more transcendent and less self-serving solutions, toward the greater good, her self-effacing manner comes naturally to her.”
“But what if, as Drew says, she decides to change how she plays the game?” Huang asked.
Seriana calmed herself, realizing she’d been living and breathing this stuff a lot longer than Huang. “She operates by transcendental logic. The understanding that the uplifting of all lifeforms is in Her, as well as our, best interests. She, in short, merely takes a lot of the error of the trial and error techniques of Mother Nature out of the equation. It is no different than mankind taking charge of his accelerated evolution, as undeniably we must do, to avoid genocide or overpopulation, and countless other negative global impacts we’re having. The problem is, as we’ve discussed, we don’t have minds and nervous systems nearly big or fast enough to work in real time. Politics just slows things down all the more.”
Drew seamlessly stepped in again as they both sensed Huang’s mind locking up under the weight of all this. “What’s to say the interests of the most evolved won’t trump the interests of the less evolved?” Drew said. “As it always has. Humans have obliterated much of the life on this planet simply by making room for itself, so it can overrun the biosphere in plague numbers, mind you, threatening to crash the whole system down on itself. Even if Mother truly wishes to balance the interests of all life forms equally, She would almost have to give preference to higher lifeforms just to sustain Her own pace of evolution.
“Moreover, She would have to put pressure on each of us to evolve ever faster, as if we aren’t under enough pressure to do so, already. She would have to ultimately replace us, or at least transfer us to robotic bodies that require less maintenance and can sustain much better thought processing. She’s only as good as
the parts that make Her up, after all, and the parts are us. Upgrading us by any and all means would be unavoidable, if She wishes to upgrade the neurons in Her own brain, again, which we are at this point, and no more.”
Seriana could hear Robin coming through Drew’s mouth loud and clear. And she was suddenly grateful for their headstrong conversations that left Drew exhausted, overwhelmed, and wondering how he had gone from mentoring Robin to playing catch-up. Of course, he wasn’t as effective at transforming psychological catastrophe and mental meltdowns into goldmines of self-transcendence. Few were. Seriana was beginning to wonder just how dispersed and far-reaching was Robin Wakefield’s influence, considering she had none of the real world considerations Seriana had to bog her down. She wasn’t working in the trenches. Instead, she could reach out, almost outside of space and time itself, to the luminaries trapped in time and space, with her subtle nudging, coaxing, uplifting, much like Mother Herself. How long before she got around to toying with Mother’s mind, Seriana pondered. Any more development, and She’d start to look like the Second Coming. Luckily, Seriana wasn’t feeling particularly religious at the moment.
Seriana said, “Everything you say is true, Drew. Life at this level is both more scintillating and more dangerous, more in and out of control at once; it is life at the bleeding edge of order and chaos, as only Mother can maintain it. Humans try, but we go through business cycles for a reason. We always miscalculate, err in one direction more than the other, before the pendulum swings back.
“Think: no more wicked depressions on a global scale that last decades. No more upswings that do anything but plateau to give the players a well-earned break before soaring ever-upwards, the breaks themselves agreed to by the masses as a whole, whose minds and inner yearnings only She can know, and know better than we know ourselves.
“Because Mother can only evolve by also evolving everyone as fast as they’re willing, human choice boils down to, how much is enough? Do you choose to live within the heart of Singularity, the eye of the storm, where things are moving so fast that things are paradoxically calm because we have jumped out of ordinary spacetime all together? Or do you prefer life out at the ridge, at the periphery of Singularity, on the event horizon, where time slows to a crawl the further and further away from the center you get, the inverse of a traditional tornado?
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 163
