Rhapsody For The Tempest (The Braintrust Book 3)

by Marc Stiegler

  2

  In Deep

  Write an addictive app using at least five of the gratification-inducing techniques discussed earlier. The top three apps will be presented to Wilson Ventures for startup funding consideration.

  —Accel. Topic: Mind Manipulation. Module: User Interface Final Project.

  Fortress, prison, boot camp. The web-addiction rehabilitation facility looked like all three rolled into one. Well, on the bright side, at least the guards weren’t carrying machine guns. The concertina wire along the tops of the walls did not look inviting, however.

  Jam could hear a drill sergeant’s voice booming from the inside yard as she and Song entered the reception area. Visits by parents were encouraged, Song told her, as long as they weren’t too often or too long. Bad for discipline, he explained with a sanguine acceptance of the claims of the experts.

  Song’s son Tai came in, wearing a gray uniform far too big around the waist but clearly too tight in the shoulders. It made her old burkas look stylish and form-fitting.

  Another man, taller, with a round face, came in with him. “Good afternoon, Song. As you can see, Tai is doing just fine.”

  Song introduced them. “Headmaster, this is… Jam.” He looked at his son. “She wants me to go with her to the BrainTrust.”

  Tai’s eyes lit up. “That’s awesome, Dad.” He looked away and stuttered, “I’ll be okay here.”

  Tai was thinner than his father, but he did not look unhealthy. Indeed, you could just begin to see the development of some much-needed muscle across his chest.

  However ridiculous the concept of web addiction might be, Jam thought the experience of being here had not been entirely a waste for Song’s son. Jam reached into her pocket. “I’m hoping you can go with him. I have a little test I’d like you to take, to see what kinds of talents you have.” She pulled out her tablet.

  The headmaster barked, “Stop!”

  Jam froze in astonishment. “What?”

  The headmaster sneered. “Electronic devices are strictly forbidden here.” He drew himself to his full height and glowered at Jam as if he were her commanding officer. “If you cannot be civilized, you’ll have to leave.”

  Jam had noticed that the headmaster had gotten angry the moment Song suggested that Tai might be leaving. The headmaster could have been either a very caring man or a very greedy one who hated letting his profits go. Jam didn’t care.

  The secret truth was that, even if Tai did poorly on the test, she was going to accept him onto the BrainTrust. Bringing family members was a routine part of onboarding new members. Jam had mostly been curious whether, as she suspected, web addiction might be caused in the imaginative mind—a BrainTrust quality mind—by desperation. In retrospect, Jam realized she probably should have saved the testing till they had gotten him out of this place.

  But the headmaster’s next words suggested it would not have made any difference. “Your son can’t leave at this time, Song. He’s in a delicate state.”

  Jam raised her eyebrows. Tai didn’t look at all delicate to her. Thin, yes, but he had a steady gaze. He reminded her a little bit of Ping. It made her want to rescue him even more. When she realized that she was thinking of it explicitly in terms of a rescue operation, her determination hardened.

  The headmaster continued to speak. “Even if I would consider releasing him, which I will not, you’ve paid to the end of the semester. Don’t expect a refund.”

  Song looked back and forth between the headmaster and Jam nervously. “I don’t care about the money if it’s really okay for him to go with me.” He looked at his son. “How are you feeling, Tai? Would it hurt you to take this little test? It’s short, I promise. Jam already gave it to me.”

  Before Tai could answer, the headmaster reiterated his stance. “No! Absolutely not.”

  Jam pursed her lips. Such a tiresome fellow. She glided around the table to stand next to the headmaster, very close. She reached out and took his hand. Then shifting her body to obscure her actions she twisted his hand in a thumb lock. She whispered, “Let me give him this test, and let him go, or you will be explaining at the nearest hospital how the little foreign girl accidentally broke your thumb.”

  The headmaster did not wince though Jam knew the pain was considerable. His eyes bulged ever so slightly, however, in testament to silent suffering. The two of them stood in tableau for a moment; in the end he relented. “Go ahead.”

  Jam squeezed his shoulder as if he were her new best friend, and smiled. “Thank you.” She returned to Tai and handed him the tablet. She gave him the same truncated version of the test she had given Song in the rice paddy; ten minutes later it was over. Jam smiled as she looked at the results. Tai might not be quite as brilliant as his dad, but he would have made a fine addition to the community even without his father. “Excellent. If you want to come with us, you’re more than welcome.”

  Tai smiled, but a worried look clung to him. “What about my addiction?”

  The headmaster opened his mouth to speak; Jam glared; he stayed silent.

  Jam answered. “I think you’ll find that on the BrainTrust these addictions rapidly pass away.” She decided it would be too much information if she told him that in the near future he would probably be spending twelve hours a day, not six, hunched over his computer. Fortunately, Accel forced the students to take breaks, get some exercise, and socialize. And if Jam had anything to say about it, Tai would continue the serious physical training he’d been getting in rehab. She suspected it had done him some good, however ridiculous the local beliefs that put him here. Something to remember to mention to Lenora.

  She looked back at Song. “Let’s go.”

  As they walked through the gate to their car, Jam breathed the free air gratefully. Time to pursue her other thought. “Tai, do you think any of the other kids in rehab here have the qualifications to join the BrainTrust?”

  Tai pondered for a moment. “I think so.” He shrugged. “I’d like to test them first.”

  Song offered, “I know at least some of the parents. Understand, this rehabilitation center draws people from all over the province.”

  Jam halted for a moment as a blaze of insight blinded her. She remembered her last conversation with Lenora: “Really, Lenora? You want to send me into the middle of a million square miles of desolation to look personally for applicants? You already made the app available to everyone with a cell phone so they could test themselves. Why not just let them prove their grit by making their way out here on their own?”

  Lenora had looked down her nose at her. “We have no way of knowing what forces can prevent the app from being available, or being used, or being believed. We have little understanding of the obstacles they will face making the journey, though we do know that those obstacles will vary wildly from person to person. It’s true you’re searching for candidates, and doing validation of the results for people who passed the test on their own. And you’ll fund their journey to get here because it may take a lot more grit to get here than is appropriate for the testing. But those are only the visible parts of your mission. What you’re really looking for is the information that will make our quest a success. Improve the app, improve the process. We face too many unknown unknowns for my taste. I’m counting on you to make the unknowns known.”

  These rehabilitation centers represented just the sort of unknowns Lenora sought. The kids inside couldn’t take the test, even though these “web addicts” might be a lot more likely than the general populace to qualify as BrainTrust material. She realized that, all unwittingly, people like the headmaster were concentrating some of the best and brightest into high-density targets for Lenora’s project. Jam could just imagine Lenora doing quick sharp raids on all these “rehabilitation” centers, recruiting the community for her archipelago far faster than expected.

  Jam smiled. “Well, let’s see how many parents we can find, and how many of the prisoners we can help escape.”

  Tai objected. “It’s
not a prison. It’s just a place to help people overcome their problems.”

  Jam decided not to argue. “Of course. We’ll assess how many …addicts… are qualified for the BrainTrust. We’ll go from there.”

  Jun Laquan had always dreamed of the sea. He did not know why. He did not question it. He’d never seen the sea before his parents brought him here to the Fuxing archipelago.

  But he had read about the sea on the web for years. In the evening, after washing the dishes, he would study pictures and videos of scuba divers. They looked so free.

  Then he would get up in the morning and help his parents work in the fields of hard red winter wheat, or clean the latrine next to the dirt road, hoping to find that a passerby had peed or pooped, leaving human waste that would serve in the fields as valuable fertilizer. Dreaming as he did so of the sea.

  So when he arrived on the Fuxing, the first thing he did was learn to swim. Other new arrivals, his parents included, took the mandatory swimming instruction with reluctance and grumbling. But he jumped into the pool and laughed and spun in the water and soon qualified to teach the swimming classes.

  Next, he’d learned to snorkel, and plunged into the water in the protected patch of water formed within the rectangle of anchored isle ships. Of course, there was little to see in this water, but he dived as deep as he could. The diver’s watch Ms. Lenora had given him showed he’d reached ten meters, a nice depth for his next adventure, since he planned to learn to scuba dive.

  And here his driving ambition had met the immovable object of adult supervision. “Jun,” Lenora explained gently, “you’re too young to be scuba diving just yet. Your lungs—your whole body— is still maturing, still forming. We can’t let you be subjected to the high-pressure forces of scuba for a couple years. Wait till you’re sixteen. The ocean will still be there.”

  Well, there was more than one way to dive into the ocean.

  Jam’s next hurdle arrived with dinner in the town’s wooden shack of a restaurant. As she picked up a steaming bun molded in the shape of a piglet, Jam explained her plan for Song and Tai. First, she handed Song a debit card. “I want the two of you to get to the Fuxing archipelago ASAP. Your first job will be to help Lenora Thornhill, our Mission Commander, put together a strategy for testing candidate members who have been swept up into web addiction rehabilitation centers.”

  She paused for a moment to chew a mouthful of bun. “In the morning, we’ll drive you to the nearest train station, which can take you to an airport, to get you to Shanghai or Hong Kong.” She handed a spare cell phone to Tai. “Use this phone to contact the BrainTrust. Lenora’s phone number is on speed dial; she’ll direct you to whoever is going to handle the last part of your journey—getting you onto a ferry out to the archipelago.”

  Jam leaned forward to emphasize her next point. “Use this phone only. Your own phones may be blocked at any time for various reasons.” Particularly if the headmaster wanted to make a stink, Jam thought. There were no back doors on her phone to allow the Chinese government or friends of government to eavesdrop, and though they could follow the message traffic, they had no way of knowing this phone belonged to Tai now. The ubiquitous surveillance in China could still find them, but it would take a little more juice and better political connections.

  Song was shaking his head. “I can’t take the train. Or any airplane in China.”

  Jam stared at him for a moment.

  Julissa recognized the problem. “I see. ’Once untrustworthy, always restricted,’ correct?” When Song nodded, Julissa turned to Jam. “Song here has bad social credit according to the government’s calculations.” She turned back to Song. “What did you do?”

  Song looked away sheepishly. “When I was nineteen, I joined a protest against the provincial governor’s plan to take half our village’s land for a factory.” He shrugged. “We would’ve been happy enough to sell him the land, but to just take it? Anyway, everybody in the protest got permanent social credit downgrades.”

  Jam rolled her eyes. Then the phone in her pocket rang. She recognized the ring, School’s out for Summer. “Lenora, how can I help you?” Jam listened as Lenora explained about Guang’s attempted rape. A smile tugged at Jam’s lips as she visualized Ping bursting into the cabin, giving him the opportunity to experience an assault firsthand from the victim’s point of view. She couldn’t resist asking, “Is Guang in the brig or the hospital?”

  Lenora hesitated. “He’ll be in the brig shortly. His injuries turned out to be not as severe as they seemed at first.”

  So, hold on a moment. Ping restrained herself? Against a rapist? Jam would have to call the girl to find out what really happened.

  Her pleasure at the thought of talking with Ping faded as Lenora explained what she wanted Jam to do. Jam tried to object. “You want me to go where? You want me to do what?” Jam pulled out her tablet and looked at the map. “Do you have any idea how far it is from here to get to Xiu Bao’s parents?”

  As Lenora argued in her methodical and relentless way for Jam to do as ordered, Jam realized there was an upside to this plan: it would get her as well as Song out of the area, far out of the area. The more she had reflected over the course of the afternoon on her encounter with the headmaster, the more she thought the headmaster might try to make things hot for her for a while. A short trip to a faraway place seemed a wise precaution. “Okay Lenora, you win. We’ll leave first thing in the morning.”

  As Jam put the phone away, she explained to her companions about the princeling and the assault and the victim’s fear for her parents. “New plan. We’re all going to drive together into the Southwest. We’ll find Xiu’s parents, persuade them to join their daughter, and send all of you to Vietnam. You’ll take this Range Rover. Somebody from the archipelago will take you from there.”

  Tai brought up the obvious problem. “What about you? You’ll be stuck without your vehicle.”

  Jam frowned. “We can buy or rent another Rover.” When she thought about the grueling journey through the Chinese backcountry, she felt exhausted. “Perhaps someone on the BrainTrust can think of something better.”

  Oligarch Dmitri Mikhailov sat behind his luxurious desk in his luxurious mansion on the luxurious isle ship Haven and glared at his phone. He’d been putting off making this call ever since Mediator Joshua first requested it. You’ll make a profit on it, Joshua had asserted. Think of it as compensation for the victims, he’d said, without ever mentioning which victims it was for. Dmitri had to confess, there were more than one.

  The phone connected and started ringing. Please, please go to voicemail, he thought.

  “Professor Thornhill speaking,” the crisp disembodied voice came back to him.

  “Ah, this is Dmitri Mikhailov. Are you the Fuxing Mission Commander?”

  “Mikhailov! About time you called. I was wondering if I was going to have to have Joshua kick you a couple of times.”

  Dmitri winced. “As you can see, no need.” His lip curled into a snarl, but she could not see it. He dropped the expression and choked out the critical words. “How can I help you?”

  Her laugh was dry, raspy. “I need an instructional module. You’re the perfect person to write it for me.” She explained about the Accel Educational Framework, and the independent authors who created all the modules. “So you see, you can work off your debt to Joshua by making a profit with me. Possibly a substantial profit.”

  Dmitri’s own voice turned dry. “Substantial? Do you understand who I am?”

  Thornhill coughed. “Right, a billionaire oligarch. Ok, forget that last. You can still make some nice pocket change. Or donate it for scholarships for those more deserving than you. Heaven knows we can use all the scholarships we can get our hands on for the students arriving here. Or better yet from your perspective might be student investments, upfront funding in return for a piece of any inventions they develop further down the line.”

  Dmitri had to admit, that almost sounded interesting. “I’ll giv
e it some thought. In the meantime, what is it I need to do? What instructional module do you want me of all people to write? I doubt it would be useful for your students to learn how to persuade the Premier of the Russian Union to give you monopoly rights on weapons exports.”

  “What I need is not unrelated to that. I need a module on ethics. Comparing and contrasting ethical uses of wealth and power to unethical uses.”

  Dmitri laughed explosively. “Me? Ethics?”

  “I know of no one who has looked at ethics from so many different directions. Consider it: After becoming a henchman in supplying weapons to mass murderers, you attempted to kidnap an innocent young doctor, and then had to beg that doctor to save you from your other henchmen. Joshua claims you now act as if you were an ethical person with high moral standards.” She paused. “Honestly, I’d be just as happy to see you tossed outside the reef as chum for the sharks, but the ethics of your victims pretty much removes that option from the table.”

  Dmitri thought Ping might be willing to do the deed. Hopefully, Ping and this professor would not share thoughts on the matter.

  “Anyway, I can’t imagine anyone as qualified as you to put together a richer, more thoughtful analysis of ethics and their practical application in the real world.” Her voice turned ever so slightly ironic. “First, of course, you should read the existing ethics modules to see how they fall short. In addition to contributing to making the modules better, you might even learn something.” She went back to emphasize an earlier point. “But it’s that practical aspect of putting ethics to use in the real world that only you can present with unique insight. Teach the students how to avoid being like you.”