Jude

by Jeff Nesbit

  With Jude and Singen directing traffic and pulling levers, each of those countries then made their own seemingly independent decisions at the national level—all at the same time. The net effect was to cause a severe credit crunch on a global scale at a time when no one was willing to lend at that sort of scale. China sat on the sidelines for its own reasons—hoping the dollar would be crippled.

  Which is precisely what began to happen. The result seemed to come out of nowhere, but I knew better. The world’s financial press panicked all at once, reporting stories predicting hyperinflation in the United States if it was forced to print money to deal with the pressure on its own currency and manage the debt that China suddenly seemed unwilling or incapable of helping with.

  But at the scariest possible moment in the looming, impending crash of the dollar, Jude entered the fray. In a series of daring, other-worldly bets that the global financial press covered as if it were a Hail Mary at the end of the Super Bowl with hundreds of millions watching, Jude took short positions directly against the Chinese yuan—and directly in support of the American dollar.

  Jude, in effect, bet against the Chinese and in support of the Americans. While the press could only speculate on the consequences, their assumptions were essentially correct.

  Just as he had when he’d shorted the Japanese yen, Jude essentially put nearly all of his many connections and joint ventures, as well as the now-considerable private holdings of Asher Enterprises, at risk in this one very large, very public bet that pitted the American dollar against the Chinese yuan.

  It worked, as if by magic. The yuan slipped, and the dollar pulled out of its rapid, seemingly unstoppable descent. Jude had saved the American dollar from collapse.

  All of the attendant catastrophes that may have occurred in the wake of such a collapse of the dollar were averted. The US housing market stabilized. Gold prices declined again. The Federal Reserve’s board breathed a big sigh of relief. The secretary of treasury now had Jude on speed dial. All talk of the potential for rampant hyperinflation in the US market melted away.

  If Alydar’s Ghost’s winning the Triple Crown had made Jude Asher a bit more known to the public, his dramatic bet to save the American dollar had established him as a global megastar. The question that a magazine headline had once asked as the dollar was crashing—“Can He Save Us?”—had been answered.

  Jude had, quite literally, saved America from financial ruin with his one big bet. I wondered whether anyone, other than me, thought about how it might truly have all come to pass. And I wondered, too, what it meant.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  There was no military guard waiting for me once the gate opened and I was allowed to drive my rental car inside the Fortress. There were no storm troopers with blue helmets and AK-47s at their side; no cluster of police watching my movements; no snipers positioned atop the walls overlooking the public square just inside the one and only gate that allowed entrance to the city.

  There was only an elderly, bespectacled man with white hair, a gray cardigan, faded blue chinos, and casual slip-on loafers sitting on a simple, wooden bench off to one side of the gate. I parked my rental car in one of the three outdoor parking slots clearly marked for visitors, locked the car, and walked across the open space to greet him.

  It wasn’t at all what I’d expected. But, honestly, I hadn’t really known what to expect in the first place, so this was a perfectly fine greeting party. I decided not to wait around for niceties and dove right in.

  “Lord Acton? Really? How many people here would understand that inside joke?”

  “Not many would,” the director said. He rose from the bench and took a small step toward me to greet me as I approached the bench. He held out his hand. “But those who do appreciate it are the ones I care about.”

  “So what will I find next as I walk in the town that only the literary and political intelligentsia might appreciate?”

  The director smiled. “Well, we have a pub that the owner affectionately named Galt’s Gulch. There’s a Rearden’s Restaurant. And, of course, we have Dagny’s Dry Cleaners …”

  “But I thought she left Galt’s Gulch for New York City? John Galt went to find her and ended up boring everyone with a speech of some sort that went on for seventy pages, if I recall.”

  “She did. But that was a work of fiction—and we still need a dry cleaners here.”

  I’d done my homework on the director of the Fortress before arriving and found myself charmed by him almost instantly. Like the entranceway to the Fortress, he was nothing like I’d anticipated from his writings and the biographies that were littered across various websites. He wasn’t nearly the monster some made him out to be.

  Dr. Jeremy Simons had gotten his PhD in biochemistry from Harvard and had later developed the world’s first commercially viable lab to grow human organs in animals. He’d then subsequently formed a hugely successful multinational corporation around the research. He’d been a pioneer in genetic engineering. His work on transgenic technology was truly revolutionary. Some speculated that if he’d had no constraints placed on him by national governments, he’d have easily been the first person to successfully clone a human being. He was that gifted.

  But his work had also raised any number of ethical issues for nearly two decades. Were he and his lab creating new life forms and crossing species boundaries? Were there unintended consequences to human health by introducing transgenic organs into the world? Was it even ethical to mix and match human and animal DNA, no matter if the resulting organ saved a human life?

  Depending on the commentator, Simons was either a medical savior who’d developed technology that extended thousands of lives—or an evil genius bent on corrupting the human species.

  Early in his career, Dr. Simons had publicly and defiantly taken on his critics. He was adamant that medical science knew no limits or boundaries and that he had every right to experiment with transgenic genes and new species. “A chimera is a mythical creature. I’m not creating mythical creatures. I’m saving lives,” he’d once said.

  But the quote that had caused him immense pain—in response to a question about whether it was right to play God by creating new, transgenic species for commercial and medical purposes—was one I hoped to ask him about: “I’m not playing God, but I’m as close to that on earth as you’re likely to find. And if I want to create a better species, beyond the human one, then so be it,” he’d told a reporter from the Financial Times at a medical conference in London.

  The reaction in certain circles was swift, and almost all of it universally negative. Christian pastors worldwide condemned him from the pulpit almost immediately. The backlash nearly ruined his company, and many of its most prominent backers walked away over the controversy.

  He’d tried to repair the damage, but it had been nearly impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. Dr. Simons had, overnight, become known worldwide as the mad scientist playing God with no ethical boundaries. He was the “next Josef Mengele” as more than one columnist wrote. Dr. Simons had largely stopped talking to the media from that point on.

  In fact, I was fairly certain that Dr. Simons must have started his move out here, to the American Redoubt, shortly after that rather unfortunate quote and media firestorm. He’d stepped down as the chairman of the board of his company, Medical Frontiers, Inc., and had dropped out of the public eye. He re-emerged quietly as the director of the Fortress several years later.

  None of it made sense to me, and I wanted to know why. From what I’d read about the Fortress in the handful of mainstream news articles describing its potential mission, it was a type of “last stand” for white, Christian fundamentalists who wanted nothing more to do with the ways of the big cities in the United States.

  Dr. Simons, from what I’d read in the secular press accounts, had never much liked the Christian church and wanted little to do with it. Yet here he
was, seemingly surrounded by what had been portrayed as a safe haven for those very same people who’d once condemned him as a gene-altering, species-corrupting monster.

  And standing here in the public square, looking up at the new, all-brick buildings that ringed it, I could clearly see that this place was hardly some backwater village where barely literate zealots brought their belongings in the back of a pickup truck to camp out. There was money here—and a lot of it.

  I turned my gaze back to Dr. Simons. “I have so many questions, I’m not even sure where to begin …”

  “How about the beginning?” he prompted. “That’s always a good place to start, don’t you think?”

  “Sure, why not.” I waved my right hand skyward as if swatting away some invisible insect that had been bothering me.

  “Mind if we walk while we talk?” he asked. “My back doesn’t hold up well these days if I sit for any length of time. Much better if I can stand and even better when I’m able to stroll along.”

  “Please. By all means. It’ll give me a chance to see a bit of the place for myself.”

  Dr. Simons began to walk slowly away from the park bench. I could see that walking was difficult. I knew he was in his eighties now.

  “You know, this place saved me,” he said as we began to exit the public square onto a brick-and-cobblestone street that led upward, ever so gently, past small street-level shops of one kind or another and apartments with large windows. People smiled and nodded hello as we passed by. No one seemed in a hurry as they came in and out of the small shops along this particular street. “After that …” He paused. I could see that the memory still pained him.

  “The ‘playing God’ incident?” I offered.

  “Yes, that. Everyone got it wrong. I never intended to say that I was trying to play God or even create a new species that was somehow better or different than the human species. That wasn’t it at all. It was just a careless mistake told to a troublesome reporter I’d grown tired of talking to.” He stopped, then looked at me. “Ah, sorry. I forget. You’re a reporter too. I meant no direct slur to your profession.”

  “No worries, Dr. Simons. I’m not easily offended. And I’ll do my best not to become troublesome.”

  He laughed. “Quite all right even if you do prove to be so. I’m beyond caring about such things or even what the world seems to think of me.”

  We walked a bit in silence. Dr. Simons let me soak in the ambiance of the place. It had a quiet, secure feel about it, reminding me of an academic setting. It invoked peacefulness and the urge to ask profound questions.

  It was becoming obvious to me, as I walked along, that this place wasn’t what it seemed to the outside world. We turned into yet another public square at the interior of the complex. Tables and benches and common areas were sprinkled throughout. Dozens of children clambered happily in and around structures at a playground tucked into a corner of this particular public square.

  People were reading or typing or just chatting with each other in small groups. They all seemed content. What’s more—and this took me quite by surprise—they were also not all white. Far from it, in fact. From my limited perspective, I could see that virtually every ethnicity was fully immersed in this community. There were no exclusions.

  “This isn’t really a fortress, is it?” I asked him finally.

  He stopped and looked out over this interior public square. “Not in a military sense, if that’s what you mean.”

  “So what is it then? And why did you call it Fortress?”

  Dr. Simons stopped and gazed at the throngs of people taking part in community activities. “As I was saying, this place saved me. Or, rather, I should say: the people that you see here, these people here in this square, they saved me. When I left Medical Frontiers, I wanted to get away, as far as I possibly could. I’d had enough. I wanted nothing more to do with the world, or with people for that matter. All I wished for, with all my heart, was to escape and get away …”

  “Off the grid,” I said.

  “In a manner of speaking, yes. But I didn’t think of it that way at the time. I only wanted a simpler life without the questions. I wanted a place where no one thought of me as that person, that monster—the one they compared to Josef Mengele. I wanted a retreat, a respite. That was really all I was seeking. I bought this land on the side of this mountain, built a self-sufficient home, and prepared to let the world take its own course without me. And that’s when I discovered a quite extraordinary thing.”

  “What?” I asked, genuinely curious now.

  “They found me. I’d tried to hide. And I couldn’t.”

  I shuddered. It was an instinctual thing, something I couldn’t truly control. I fervently hoped that he wasn’t referring to the same sorts of forces that Jude had always called on in our lives. “Who found you, Dr. Simons?” I asked, not entirely certain I wanted to hear the answer.

  He swept his hand in front of him in a grand gesture. “Why, all of them. The people you see here. They came here for a freedom that they hadn’t known, feared was being lost, and wished to rediscover. They wanted a place where they could engage in scientific, intellectual, philosophical, and religious pursuits with abandon and freedom. They didn’t want rules and borders and laws and shackles. They wanted an open-source society, so to speak, where self-correcting actions and tasks kept the community moving forward, progressing.”

  “Toward what, Dr. Simons?”

  “Who knows?” He shrugged. “And quite honestly, who cares? That’s the beauty of open-source software—the community itself writes and rewrites the language to handle a nearly infinite number of tasks. And an open-source community or society functions nearly the same way. Given a certain freedom to try new things in an open and welcoming environment, I’ve learned from the people here that they will, in fact, not judge me or anyone else, but work to solve problems and move things forward in and around barriers and hurdles.”

  “So all of these people here …?”

  “Came here for the ability to literally think without borders,” Dr. Simons said. “It’s an extraordinarily safe place for intellectual or scientific pursuit—in ways that even academia is no longer capable of due to political correctness and dogma. It is an open-source society, where each is free to contribute to the work of others.”

  “I can see this,” I said slowly. “People say that they get the same sort of feeling when they walk around the Googleplex in California.”

  “There are some parallels, of course—more than you know. But they are a for-profit company. We are anything but, as you’ll see.”

  “And the name—the Fortress?”

  “From something entirely different than what you might think,” Dr. Simons said with a twinkle in his eye. “It was merely a happy circumstance that the name, Fortress, also conveys a menacing, ominous perspective. Fortresses of old kept attackers out and protected those within. But that isn’t where the name first came from. Follow me. I’ll show you.”

  Dr. Simons started walking again. We turned down two side streets and came to a rather innocuous building with two simple doors as an entrance. The doors were unlocked. We walked in. “Welcome to Fortress,” Dr. Simons said.

  Inside were rows upon rows upon rows of parallel-processing machines, all humming and whirring with a quiet efficiency. A bearded man, perhaps in his late thirties, in jeans, Converse shoes, and a T-shirt, met us at the door as we entered. He extended his hand. “Lee Gentry,” he said, shaking my hand vigorously. “I was the second resident here, thanks to Dr. Simon’s invitation.”

  “What is this place?” I asked, trying to grasp the significance of what I was seeing.

  “It’s my home, in a manner of speaking, as well as our collective creation,” Gentry said proudly.

  “So what does that mean—‘our creation’?” I asked.

  “This,” Gentry said, gesturing t
oward the rows of processors, “houses the greatest parallel-programming language on the planet, a tenth-generation successor to an open-source platform that was, once upon a time, built at Sun Microsystems to replace the Fortran computer language IBM built more than fifty years ago for the highest, most sophisticated computing needs in the world.”

  I regarded the rows of processors with newfound respect. “This … is a computer-programming language?”

  “Not just any computing-programming language,” Gentry explained. “It’s a successor to Fortress, which Sun Microsystems once gave to the world as an open-source platform. It was built as a parallel-programming language, not dissimilar to the same sort of platform that Google uses to comb through the entire web on a daily basis for relevant, searchable information.”

  “So this is similar to something that Google uses?” I asked.

  “Yes and no,” Gentry clarified. “Fortress was designed to talk across multicore processors, not just from a single mainframe. Now this successor, which was built upon the original open-source platform, pulls power from literally millions of multicore processors—from all around the planet—in order to run programs.”

  “So you created Fortress for Sun Microsystems,” I said, “and brought it here with you when it went open source and you became the second resident here?”

  “Oh, good heavens, no!” Gentry said, laughing. “I didn’t create Fortress. I wouldn’t know the first thing about writing a computer-programming language, even BASIC. I’m a mechanical engineer. I put these processors together to run it.”

  “So who built it and brought it here?” I asked.

  “I did,” a sultry voice said from a few feet behind us.

  All three of us turned. An elegant, attractive woman, clearly of Chinese descent, in a flowing summer dress and simple sandals practically glided across the floor from a windowless office that I hadn’t noticed as we’d entered. I was mesmerized by her considerable beauty—something she’d probably had to deal with all her life.