The soft sound of footsteps on the passageway’s deck caused him to look up. Sure enough, there was Xiu Bao shuffling with surprising speed toward her cabin, unaware of him lurking in the side passage. Guang licked his lips. Yes, he needed far more than just respect after such a long dry spell.
As Xiu Bao stepped into her cabin, Guang rushed across the passage and pushed the door back with one hand while pushing Xiu with the other. Another quick flick of the wrist and he drove the door shut behind him. She started to scream; he smacked her, mostly for the sheer pleasure of lashing out. No one yet lived in the adjacent cabins and there were no passersby, so he had not the least worry that someone might hear her. He let her scream again and smacked her once more.
Guang was correct that no humans had heard her scream, but they were not the only listeners aboard the ship. Had he, upon arrival aboard the Taixue, bothered to investigate the introductory module about isle ship features, he would have learned that the default settings for the vidcams in private cabins allowed the ship’s AI to watch but not record. The AI looked only for indications of a terrible mishap—slipping in the shower and knocking yourself out, for example.
Guang’s inattention to such detail was not matched by the AI. Xiu Bao had not modified the default settings, and the ship’s AI heard her scream. It witnessed Guang’s assault and followed its algorithms.
Ping spent much of her time on the Taixue for the simple reason that it was the only ship in the current merger of archipelagos that had a reasonable number of people on board. Well, the Archimedes, the manufacturing ship of her Prometheus fleet, had a fair number of people, all laboring furiously to complete the Zhaozhou manufacturing ship for the Fuxing fleet.
But the slow trickle of BrainTrust candidates and new members funneled onto the Taixue. Aside from the Archimedes, the rest of the ships had only skeleton crews aboard.
So Ping spent several hours every day training with her peacekeeping team on the empty Mount Parnassus, but then came over to the Taixue for lunch. This gave her the chance to hang out with Ciara, who was in turn hanging out with her mother Lenora as they worked with the new arrivals. There were certainly a satisfying number of amusing moments working with Ciara, but Ping was glad the Zhaozhou was ahead of schedule and the Prometheus fleet could soon depart for its new horizons.
Of course, Ping still had one piece of unfinished business she hoped to accomplish before they departed. When Jam had left for the Chinese mainland she had made Ping promise to watch for trouble among the newcomers, most notably from one particular Red Princeling. As if any promise were needed on that point!
So Ping was licking the remnants of lemon raspberry gelato from her ice cream cone when her earbud, along with the earbuds of all the other peacekeepers on the ship, sounded the alarm.
At last, some action! And very close at hand. Xiu Bao’s cabin was one deck away, an easy run up the ramp. Not entirely by coincidence, of course. Ping, along with half the other peacekeepers, had been watching Guang play cat and mouse with the humble peasant girl for weeks. Ping’s unfinished business looked to have come to fruition at last.
She flew up the ramp and flung herself headlong at Xiu’s cabin door, which yielded to her security badge with a brief click. Once inside, Ping forced herself to take a moment to orient and ascertain what was happening.
Xiu lay dazed on her bunk, her eyes unable to focus although she turned her head in Ping’s direction. She whispered something unintelligible. Guang had his pants unbuckled as he knelt between her legs. Seeing Ping, he stood up and turned to confront her.
Enough orientation. Ping charged at Guang screaming, a very different style of scream from what Xiu Bao had uttered earlier. Ping brought her knee up, targeting his tenderest parts, but too much adrenaline caused her to jump with excessive energy as Guang instinctively bent over to protect himself. He crouched too low; she kicked too high; Ping’s knee cracked into the bottom of his rib cage.
As Guang’s face twisted with pain, Ping slammed him against a bare wall. Xiu had arrived with pretty much nothing except the clothes on her back, and the room made Ping think of what Jam’s room would have looked like when she had first arrived on the BrainTrust, with not a single ornament or weapon display in her possession, had she not had Ping to decorate the place.
After Guang thudded against the wall, Ping swung to break his nose—but Guang swiveled, and once again her timing was off. She struck him in the eye, bouncing his head off the wall. “Ow,” she said, her knuckles having taken considerable damage from Guang’s cheekbone.
Guang seemed to look at her with amazement, but it was merely a vacant stare that happened to face in her direction. Guang, quite unconscious, slid to the floor.
“Damnation,” Ping muttered with a frown. Although her hands were positioned to deliver a series of exquisite blows, she paused to watch him fall. With a sigh, she let her arms fall to her sides.
Security Chief Hart had arrived moments behind her. “What’s wrong?” he asked in puzzlement. “You took him out with one blow. Pretty good, in my estimation.”
“Exactly the problem, Chief,” Ping continued mournfully. “It should have lasted longer. My focus failed, and with it my discipline.” She looked up at the chief with concern. “Could I be losing my touch?”
Hart patted her on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. We can spar tomorrow. Work out your frustrations on me.” He smiled kindly. “While I’m wearing a thickly padded vest, of course.”
Lenora, Hart, and Ping stood around Xiu Bao’s hospital bed. Lenora held Xiu’s hand. Both Ping and Hart unconsciously clenched and unclenched their fists.
Lenora spoke softly. “I am so sorry, Xiu. I was warned not to matriculate Guang in the first place, but I didn’t listen.”
Xiu smiled, a lopsided horror because the swollen half of her face stayed frozen. “The doctor tells me I’ll be fine. I understand how hard it is to say no to our princelings.”
Hart spoke. “We’ll set up a mediation right away. He’ll pay you compensation till his ears bleed SmartCoins. His father will be furious with him.”
Xiu jerked halfway out of her bed at this, but Ping was already raising her fist in the air. “Yes! We’ll get Joshua to mediate by teleconference. He loves these kinds of cases.” Her enthusiasm softened as she felt obligated to offer something closer to the truth. “Sort of.”
Xiu’s eyes glistened with tears. “Oh, no, please. You cannot do that.”
Lenora squeezed her hand. “Xiu, our mediation system is not corrupt. You’ll get a fair judgment.”
Xiu shook her head. “It’s not that. If you punish him, he’ll take it out on my parents. He’ll have them sent to a re-education camp.” Her eyes bulged. “Or have them tried for treason.”
Lenora recovered first. “I’ll call them and bring them here to the Fuxing. Heaven knows, we have plenty of room.”
“Thank you, but I don’t think you’ll be able to persuade them over the phone. They love their land and their friends and their lives.” Xiu winced. “I’ll have to go get them.”
Lenora shook her head. “You aren’t going anywhere, young lady.”
Ping offered the obvious solution. “Jam’s already dirtside. She can be pretty persuasive.”
Hart smiled. “That should work.”
Lenora nodded. “In the meantime, I’ll figure out how to break the news to Guang that he’s done here.” She smiled coldly. “I have an idea who might be pretty persuasive with him as well.”
Jam looked out the window of the Range Rover at the Cradle of Chinese Civilization. Demonstrating once again her relentless strength of character, Jam neither curled her lip in disgust nor wept in despair. Her mission, to find the best and the brightest of Chinese peasants and bring them to the BrainTrust, had brought her here precisely because it was such an impoverished place. And yet, the area never should have been reduced to this.
Here in northern China, millennia earlier, the Qin dynasty had arisen. Qin Shi Huang had int
roduced a uniform currency, which had driven an immense surge in trade and wealth throughout the region. He had standardized the written language, allowing easy communication among all members of the empire. And he had gone so far as to allow peasants to own land, a radical innovation at the time.
It did not last. Dynasties rose and fell, while the lands that had cradled civilization fell and fell. And fell.
The nutritious topsoil so necessary for agriculture was, throughout the area, so loose that the plateau had eventually been named for it—the Loess Plateau. Any serious rain washed the topsoil away, down into the basins of the North China plain, where farmers farther to the east used the bounty to grow lush crops. Efforts had been made before and after the beginning of the twenty-first century to implement conservation policies to keep this land and its inhabitants productive.
But a perfect storm of woes had descended upon the land. Desertification swept in from the west. The conservation efforts provided mixed results. And worst of all, the farmers of the North China plain started to notice that the annual delivery of topsoil gifted to them from the plateau was decreasing. Being both richer and far better politically connected, the farmers of the North China plain had urged the government to constrain the conservation efforts on the plateau.
In Beijing political expediency intertwined with climatological reality in wondrous accord. Political support, educational efforts, and money for saving the plateau vanished along with the rain. Poverty and despair swept the land in tandem with the dust from relentless windstorms.
Looking on the bright side, the lands they had passed through for the last several days afforded, on a clear day, a kind of austere beauty that reminded Jam of her home a lifetime ago in Waziristan, although substantial differences remained. The most striking was probably the numerous terraced hillsides. The lessons of conservation had not been entirely lost.
Fortunately for travelers tired of staring at the parched landscape, Jam and her translator/native-guide/BrainTrust college student Julissa were descending into a half-hidden valley. The vegetation grew greener as they descended. When they reached the bottom, they found themselves passing—of all things—a long series of rice paddies.
A small group of men in the traditional short pants of rice farmers sat beneath an awning laughing. Periodically they pointed at an elderly gentleman standing out in the field, mud up to his calves, intensely working a pair of joysticks on a handheld box. A machine that Jam supposed to be some sort of rice paddy tiller coughed and hiccupped across the field, apparently controlled by the joysticks. The man, the tiller, and the joysticks all looked like they had come out of different centuries.
Julissa interrupted Jam’s assessment. “We should find the fellow who got the exceptional Accel testing score in the village about a kilometer from here.” The Accel testing app was the reason Jam and Julissa were out here in the middle of nowhere. Anyone with a cell phone could take the test to get a preliminary read on whether they qualified to become members of the BrainTrust. Those who could not make the trip to the Fuxing archipelago could wait and hope that Jam’s traveling salesman algorithm would bring her to them.
Jam continued to watch the man in the field. “Stop the car.”
“What?” Julissa asked even as she brought the car to the side of the road.
“This may only take a moment.” Jam stepped from the car. “Or maybe a little longer.”
Jam trudged out into the field, clutching her cell phone. The men under the awning stopped laughing and gaped at her. The old man with the joysticks, apparently disturbed by the sudden absence of people jeering at him, turned and watched as she approached. The tiller sputtered to a stop.
Jam forced a bright smile on her face as the mud soaked into her pants and squelched in her shoes. She had to laugh at herself. How easy it had been to adjust to the clean comfort of the BrainTrust. How difficult it was to accept this miserable mud. But she had been far more uncomfortable and miserable at times in the past. She endured.
And she offered a chipper greeting to the old gentleman. She hoped the chipperness made it through the translator app. “Good morning.” She pointed at the joysticks, then at the tiller. “It looks like you’re building a mighty fine robot there.”
The farmer smiled. “The mayor’s son broke his toy copter drone and I rescued it from the dumpster, thinking I might be able to use its parts to control my machine.” He shrugged. “It’s not yet clear if I will succeed, but I had to try. It would be so nice to sit on the side and let the tiller do the work without me.”
Jam held up her cell phone, displaying the screening app. “Your bot here might be helping you in ways you could not anticipate. Could you go through this app and answer a few questions? It’ll take about fifteen minutes, and I think it will be worth your time.”
Twelve minutes later he handed the phone back. She studied the results; he more than qualified. “This is your lucky day. My name is Jam, by the way.”
He looked at her in puzzlement. “Are you here to lift up the poor?”
Julissa had explained this phrase to her, the usual rhetoric used by Chinese bureaucrats in poor farmlands, where the residents understood that in the government lexicon, being poor also meant being backward, of low quality, and uncivilized. The implication was that the government would bring them into civilization…just as long as they remembered their place in the hukou system and continued as backward, low-quality peasant farmers.
Jam shook her head. She knew that people like Colin and Lenora had grand schemes to lift the poor far beyond any autocratic government’s worst nightmares, but here today Jam had her feet firmly planted in the mud. “I am not here to lift the poor. I am here to lift you.” She poked a finger ever so gently into his chest. “How would you like to come to the BrainTrust? Build real bots with real tools, new kinds of bots that have never been seen before.”
“I’d like nothing better.” His eyes shone. “My name is… “ He paused, clearly thinking about the name Jam had offered. “Call me Song.”
“Song. Good to meet you.”
Song’s smile faded as he thought about his situation. “Alas, I cannot come to the BrainTrust. My son is in the addict’s re-education center. I cannot leave him.”
Jam shook her head in astonishment. “An addict?” She looked at the dirt roads and the tall barren mountains. “They have drugs like heroin and cocaine here?”
Song shook his head. “No, no. He is a computer addict. He spends over six hours a day on the web.”
Jam had heard that, in China, the local mythology held that six hours was the most a person could spend on a computer without suffering an addiction with serious side effects. She had thought it was a joke. She tried to imagine Dash restricted to six hours online per day. In less than a week, Dash would be pulling out her hair and screaming for mercy. Jam had to keep herself from laughing at the vision. “Take me to see your son,” she demanded. Rehabilitation indeed! For people who spend too much time exploring the rest of the world, comparing it to the lives they have no hope of changing! Jam would show them rehabilitation, all right.
On board the Chiron, the clocks had just struck midnight. The hallway and the lab were dark, yet light glowed from the conference room.
Dash stared at a new list of patients. Chance stared at Dash. Silence reigned.
In the recent runs of Dash's rejuvenation therapy, no one had died. Candidates who would have died had been refused admission to the process.
Moving on, to try to save the rejected patients would mean more deaths by therapy. Dash had finally been pushed to step up to the challenge when one candidate had died the day after being rejected. Dash might refuse to take risks with patients, but Nature had no such qualms.
The search for solutions had become so desperate that Dash had resorted to old school methods, conducting experiments with mice until she had something that seemed likely to work…about half the time. "So," she said as much to herself as to Chance, "if things go as we hope, in this
next batch of ten patients five will rejuvenate to some extent, one will experience no change, and the other four will die."
Chance tried to cheer her up. "Just remember, they all had one foot in the grave already." Trying to distract her, Chance changed topics. "What was that last criterion you used to get down to just ten patients, anyway?"
When Dash responded, it was clear that this was not as great a change of topic as Chance had hoped. "That was the Dark Alpha forecast for how long the candidates would live without therapy. Every one of the patients we will now experiment upon has less than three months to live.”
Chance raised an eyebrow. “Dark Alpha can predict that?”
“It doesn’t even require Dark Alpha to make these forecasts. They had an AI in 2018 that could make these predictions rather reliably, but the tech more or less died out.”
Chance thought she knew why. “Let me guess. Regulatory interference?”
“Not at all. It died because no one wanted to use it. The doctors all thought that if their patients learned they had only months to live it would make them despondent, driving a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Dash gave Chance a wry smile. “I didn’t use it myself for the same reason.”
Chance guessed the next step. “But now you’ll use it because you have a better offer to make to the patients. They can die in three months, or they can roll the dice.”
Dash nodded. “Exactly.”
They finally closed up shop. As they walked back to their adjacent cabins, Dash found her thoughts wandering to her friends, Ping and Jam. She hoped Jam’s new job as dirtside Expedition Commander was turning out well, and she hoped Ping had found some action. But there were hardly any people in the new archipelagos just yet. It seemed unlikely that Ping could have found any worthy mayhem in which to indulge. Poor Ping, with nothing to do.
Rhapsody For The Tempest (The Braintrust Book 3) Page 2
