Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “If necessary.” Callie was determined to stand her ground.

  “Americans are no longer much loved—or feared—here.”

  Matteo placed a hand on his son’s arm. “Please, mio figlio. She has some justice on her side, I think. And Francesco was not always wise. Loyal, yes, but foolish. His wife, on the other hand, is not such a fool.”

  Callie looked at him with narrowed eyes. She knew instinctively to keep her mouth shut while he worked out a compromise in his head.

  “Contessa,” the old man went on, “truly, I cannot pay you back what your husband took from you—and lost with us. But I do acknowledge your situation. We owe you a debt of honor.”

  “Father, please!” Carlo protested.

  “What we cannot repay in money,” the old man said, “we can pledge to you in service. I will, of course, put you and your daughter under my protection. And you may call on me at any time—”

  “But, Matteo … I will not remain in Torino for long.”

  “I understand. I will see that you are equally well known to our American affiliates—on both sides of the border. We are an ‘old, established firm,’ as the English like to say. And we understand the nature of blood obligations.”

  Callie considered. She had lost to her husband, to his schemes and his whims, a good deal of the fortune she had rescued from the collapse of the Praxis family business. But she still had enough to get herself and her daughter home to America and to live on—frugally, for a couple of months, until she figured things out. But the Italian dream was over. And if she could not be made whole financially, it was not a small thing to have a man like Matteo di Rienzi acknowledge a debt to her.

  “I see,” she said. “I think I see …”

  The old man smiled warmly. Carlo stiffly nodded his acknowledgement.

  She was smart enough to know she would never have anything in writing. She could claim no assurances. Nothing would stand up in a court of law. But for as long as these two men lived, she would hold a Get Out of Jail Free card. Not because she had anything on them. Not because she could threaten them in any meaningful way. But because they believed in a concept that was fast disappearing in the world. Matteo had used the magic words: “honor” and “blood.” She knew the code. And she had no alternative but to accept.

  “I understand,” she said at last. “Thank you.”

  “Come now,” Matteo said more easily. “Let us see if your daughter has caught any of my cats.”

  2. Sixth or Seventh Armistice

  Lieutenant Colonel Brandon Praxis checked the morning roster on his Tactical Tracker. The 2nd Battalion, 3rd Combined Arms Division, temporarily stationed at Fort Dix in New Jersey, was at half strength: 575 combat effectives, plus staff, support, and mechanics. His company of Tortoise Fighting Vehicles had gotten badly shot up in the attack on Atlanta last month, and repair and resupply were slower than in the early days of the war. The Air Force still had plenty of C-17 Globemasters for putting his battalion in the field, but he didn’t have enough troops and vehicles to make it worthwhile. Praxis made requests. Command made promises. Everyone bided their time.

  He studied the device on his wrist: a little slab of silicon glued on one side to a piece of armored glass and on the other to a ceramic antenna and button-sized battery. The loops for the wrist strap were cut directly into the glass, the strongest part of the Tactical Tracker-109. Total cost to replace this tech sandwich was about three dollars, and his people went through a lot of them, even though Praxis had taught his men to wear them on the inside of their wrists instead of outside and cover them with their cuffs—less banging into things that way. The technology of the device itself was insignificant, having been around for a decade or more. But the web of data that it tied a man into—his chain of command on secure links upward and downward, his own medical stats through the biobead punched into his belly, his senses through more biobeads in his eye sockets and ear canals, and the status and location of every piece of equipment and supply he needed to support himself in the field through RFID tags and barcodes—that was priceless. With it, Praxis could contact anyone under his command, look through his eyes, hear through his ears, and place him—or her, because this man’s army boasted lots of good women—at any point of an operation.

  It was a far cry from his first big assault nine years ago, the supposedly surprise attack on the capital of the breakaway republic in Kansas City, as well as other key points in the seceding territory. Yes, every soldier had something like the TT-109, but it wasn’t army issue and it wasn’t secure.

  What neither the commanding general—what was his name? Beemis? Gone now—nor his own Captain Ramsay could know, and Brandon himself would only piece it together in the weeks that followed, was how difficult it actually was to coordinate a massed invasion with thousands of soldiers. Many of them, like his own Bravo Company of the 1/22nd Combat Infantry, had been fresh out of training and experiencing a strange new adventure. The officers had instructed the platoon and squad leaders about the need for secrecy. But, unlike previous wars, this one was being fought in a society that was saturated with smartphones, social media, photo sharing, web logging, and the pervasive and childish mindset that “Information wants to be free.” Before Bravo Company even boarded their commandeered airliner, details of the strike were slipping out in personal updates and posted images on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. Not to mention heartfelt good-byes to wives, sweethearts, brothers, fathers, the banks that held their auto loans, and their bail bondsmen. So long, Mom! Look for me on TV! They were all such a bunch of babies back then: college boys with some physical training and a new rifle, but not really military-minded.

  Pundits and bloggers had immediately begun translating hints from these various social feeds into a historical perspective. Radio talk-show hosts were actually taking bets on the outcome of the raid. And of course the strike teams themselves, who were maintaining “radio silence” that morning, knew none of this. The initial wave of rangers from Special Operations Command had landed in a cross fire of combined forces from the Missouri National Guard, local sheriff’s deputies, and municipal police SWAT teams. By the time Bravo Company was crossing the Utah-Colorado border, the strike had effectively failed. But for good measure, the Missouri National Guard commander at the airport ordered the air traffic controllers, at gunpoint, to bring the fleet of 787s from Travis AFB on in. Then he had the tower instruct them to taxi to the end of Runway Two-Zero West. There a team of police snipers in the deep grass shot out the tires. Praxis and his squad had fought their way off the plane, but for all their firing they never hit any of the snipers.

  How had he gotten out of that one? Oh yeah, returned a month later in a prisoner exchange. Those were the good old days, when the war was fought by gentlemen and everyone thought it would be over by Christmas.

  It had been a long and bitter war. They came within an inch of being invaded by the Chinese, out to make hay while the Americans devoured themselves in civil war. But social disruption in the Middle Kingdom prevented any real occupation. First came popular revolt against the crippled hand of the ruling Communist Party, then the revolt of the Fennu Xiong, the “Angry Bears”—the legion of young men deprived of female companionship, family life, and progeny by the gender imbalance resulting from the One Child Policy. No, China had been in no position to follow up on the first air strike in Seattle. Neither was anyone else ready to invade. Russia still feared the U.S. government’s nukes. And no one in Europe, the Middle East, or the Subcontinent had the wherewithal to go adventuring.

  Brandon Praxis had lost his father and mother. After the family company fell apart—and wasn’t it a good thing he had not graduated a year earlier to join in that debacle?—Leonard had tried to recoup his fortune with real estate deals in a declining market. Then, as the war grew worse, he made the fatal mistake of confusing remoteness with safety. Leonard and his wife retired to a vacation lodge north of Lake Tahoe and disappeared in the predawn strikes of the Federate
d Republic’s narrowly successful Donner Incursion.

  Who was left now? His grandfather John was still in California, doing something with plumbing services. His uncle Richard and his wife had moved to Texas, where he joined a firm involved in computer design—computers had been his uncle’s first love anyway. And his aunt Callista had taken herself to Italy and become a countess. His own brother Paul had joined the U.S. Army, been wounded in North Dakota, and was now in physical therapy with a bionic leg. His sister Bernice was married to a soldier named Littlefield, out on the West Coast. His cousins had gone along with their father and mother to Texas: Jeffrey was fighting for the other side now, and Jacqueline had trained as a mechanical engineer and immediately gone into defense work in a cyber-munitions plant. So the Praxis family was represented on both sides of the war, as well as outside of it.

  War had torn his family apart. But then, hadn’t the family been in full disintegration mode the summer before, for reasons Brandon Praxis had never really understood? These days, he actually felt closer to the men and women in his unit than to the people who shared his genes. War had taught him about the different kinds of blood, and that blood spilled was stronger than blood shared.

  But how much longer could this war go on?

  He sent another repair requisition up the chain.

  It couldn’t hurt. They were only electrons, after all.

  * * *

  After a combined three hours of waiting for security clearance, first in Milan’s Malpensa Airport and then at London Heathrow, followed by a twelve-hour flight over the pole, and four hours clearing U.S. Customs in San Francisco, Callista di Rienzi was exhausted and her daughter Rafaella had passed from unusually irritable to unconscious.

  It took another hour to find transportation into the city because of restrictions on vehicular traffic and Transportation Commission permits. Her Electrocab pulled up in front of her father’s house sometime after one o’clock in the morning. But the lights were still on in the living room, and the window curtain twitched as she was getting out of the passenger pod and hoisting her sleeping child up on one hip with arms draped around her neck. The front door opened before she had figured out which buttons to push and where to insert her card to pay the fare. Because she was still thinking in euros, the amount seemed exorbitant, but Callie was too tired to argue with a machine.

  “Do you want me to take her?” John Praxis asked.

  “No, she’s okay. Can you get the bags?”

  He opened the bin lid and took out their suitcases and travel packs, setting them on the sidewalk. The machine wouldn’t leave until all the luggage was cleared, but her father still hurried, as if he was inconveniencing it. He carried the first two pieces up the front steps behind her.

  “I hope you’ve got a spare room,” Callie said. “She’s down for the count.”

  “Sure, top of the stairs, first door.” He motioned with a suitcase.

  “Chi è che, mama?” the little girl asked sleepily.

  “Your grandfather, Raffi. Say hello.”

  “Buona sera, Nonno.”

  “In English, honey.”

  “Good night, sir.” And the little head went back down on her shoulder.

  When they got to the room, Callie left it darkened, laid her daughter on the freshly made bed, and slipped off her shoes. Washing up and undressing could come later. John put the bags down in the hall and went down for the rest of their luggage. As he returned with the last of the pieces, he was breathing heavily. In the overhead light in the hall, his face was gray and slack, with shadows under his eyes and in the hollows of his cheeks.

  “My God, Dad! You look terrible.”

  “It’s just age catching up with me.”

  “A year ago you were running marathons.”

  “More like ten-kays, and a couple of years ago.”

  “Sure you’re all right? What do the doctors say?”

  “Well … you know doctors these days.”

  “But what did they say?”

  “Some kind of hormone imbalance. They prescribed some pills for me, but the California Medical Service ruled they were ‘age inappropriate’ and won’t issue them.”

  “What hormones? You mean like testosterone?”

  He shook his head. “Cortisol and aldosterone. My adrenal glands don’t seem to make them anymore. I need corticosteroids.”

  “That doesn’t sound like too much trouble.”

  “They’re not approved for a man my age.”

  “Well, that’s just nonsense, if your body needs them.”

  “It’s the law now, Daughter. Welcome to California.”

  * * *

  “And finally,” Philip Sawyer, chairman and chief executive of Tallyman Systems, Inc., announced to the firm’s assembled directors at the monthly board meeting, “the ‘grand enterprise’ proceeds according to plan, with indices showing we’re thirty-five days ahead of schedule.”

  Richard Praxis stared out over the spaghetti tangle of freeway interchanges that lay to the west of downtown Houston. His eyes tracked the pulsed arterial flow of monomeric units—colloquially, “cars and trucks”—through its concrete channels, and he nodded soberly. So did everyone else around the table, although with greater and lesser degrees of understanding. They all appreciated, in general, what the “grand enterprise” represented. However, the board minutes would show no more detail than that single reference. Praxis, as vice president of Government Affairs and one of the original architects of the project, knew that not much more documentation existed anywhere else within the company. He could only hope that the project’s clients and ultimate benefactors were being just as discreet.

  Inside Tallyman Systems, the people most responsible for the enterprise believed they were testing a proposition in game theory, a mammoth “what if” that had no practical purpose in itself but that might, with a major amount of tweaking, one day be sold into the internet gaming market. For now, it was an intellectual exercise under the project name “Realpolitik.”

  Richard had come into the company not long after the mammoth failure of the family business that had borne his name. Tallyman was a startup working on artificial intelligence, originally with neural networking. This was on the premise that complicated problems in distribution, routing, and leveling, as well as problems that had to draw on diffuse and poorly integrated data sets, could best be solved by networks of independent but massively interconnected computing nodes, like neurons in the human nervous system. Rather than a single processor working to a strictly linear algorithm, the network nodes all worked in parallel. Each node would already have been taught a single pattern which activated it, or not, based on inputs received from neighboring nodes. Each node then applied its own pattern to the problem’s outputs. Neural networks could learn. They could weigh choices. And that meant they could solve problems where the programmer himself had limited knowledge. The programmer might have understood the nature of the choices involved and the tests to be applied but have no idea how to approach a solution.

  The company had hired Richard Praxis because of his expertise in construction of major projects. They wanted to apply neural networking to problems in public policy, population density, city planning, rights of way, transit system and highway grade design, and water and power grids. The fact that he had dexterity with computer systems was a plus. So Richard had moved to Texas just before the war’s outbreak and settled his family in the Houston area.

  More recently, Tallyman had been pursuing analysis of the same kinds of complex, diffuse problems through evolutionary theory. In nature, evolution applied random genetic mutations to living organisms that were experiencing environmental change. The changing environment imposed a new set of criteria—a new set of survivability tests—without specifying what bodily forms or traits would best be able to meet them. Living animals and plants suffered mutations all the time, tiny modifications in DNA coding that might or might not affect the structure of their proteins. And those modified pro
teins might or might not affect the organism’s metabolism, tolerance for bodily insults like heat or cold, physical structure, or some other functional characteristic. In a stable environment, where the old biological pattern had been proven to work, most mutations were either unimportant or minorly helpful or hurtful, while some were downright lethal. In a changing environment, with new criteria for survival, a small number of tiny, marginally beneficial modifications suddenly mattered.

  Evolutionary design solved problems in form and function where the designer himself had limited knowledge, understood the nature of the choices involved and the test to be applied, but had no idea how the system under stress actually worked or what success might look like.

  Microbiologists had been using “directed evolution” for more than a decade to improve the function of proteins such as antibodies, enzymes, and other biological agents. Without any knowledge of a protein’s folding pattern, molecular bonding sites, or its mechanism of operation, the researcher could set up a hundred or a thousand samples of the original DNA that had produced the protein, modify each DNA strand in some random way, code newly modified protein from those induced mutations, and test each new protein to see if it worked better or worse in the specified application. If better, the researcher kept the new protein and modified its DNA again. If worse, the researcher discarded it and started over with a fresh sample. By repeatedly applying random changes, testing the results, and discarding the failures, biologists could eventually cook up a protein that worked better at what they wanted—moderating a chemical reaction; breaking, joining, or copying DNA strands; fixing a blood clot; inactivating a virus; whatever the function was—without ever having to know what the internal structure of “better” might look like.

  The same principle worked in the physical world, too. For example, an aircraft designer might create a new airfoil by knowing everything about curves and airflows, lift and drag, and other abstract principles. Or he could just take a flat piece of sheet metal, give it a whack to bend it, mount it in a wind tunnel, and see if it generated lift. Do this a thousand times with a thousand pieces of metal, keep any bent metal that moved the gauge, discard any metal that didn’t budge and replace it with new flat metal, and start randomly whacking everything again. Sooner or later, the designer would get a better airfoil in a shape no one had ever—or could ever have—imagined.