Rhapsody For The Tempest (The Braintrust Book 3)

by Marc Stiegler

  Ciara started chatting with Diric ever so casually. When he relaxed, she pulled a pair of chocolates from her pocket. “Here,” she said, sliding one over to him, “have one.”

  He took a small bite of the chocolate, ever so skeptically, then his eyes lit up and he swallowed the rest of it almost without chewing. You never would have guessed he’d been getting the fullest meals of his life for the last few days here on Mount Parnassus.

  Ciara finished chewing hers, clearly relishing it. She pulled out another chocolate, slid it halfway over to him, then made a big fuss searching her pockets for another one. “I seem to be out of chocolates.” She tapped the chocolate on the table. “If you can wait for me to get back before eating this one, I’ll bring you another.”

  Moments later Ciara joined Ping in the observation room. They both stared at Diric, staring at the lone chocolate, desperate desire imprinted on his mournful face.

  Ping shook her head. “You and your mother have the strangest ways of testing people.”

  Ciara chuckled. “This is called ‘The Two Chocolate Test.’ At the very beginning of the century, researchers discovered that children who can delay gratification and wait for the second chocolate are more likely to lead successful adult lives.” She looked at Ping. “If he passes the test, he’s yours.” She shrugged. “And mine too. They’re all mine, I guess, on the Prometheus.”

  Ping watched tensely as Diric stared at the chocolate. He wiped his brow. Ping wiped her brow as well.

  Again Ciara laughed. “Perhaps you should turn away. I think the test is stressing you more than Diric.”

  Even as she spoke, Diric turned away from his chocolate to stare at the wall. After a moment, he closed his eyes. His nostrils flared as if he could still smell his own personal nemesis. Finally, he visibly relaxed.

  Ciara clapped. “And that’s it, folks.” She put her hand on Ping’s shoulder. “Anyone who can turn away from the chocolate and think about something else can wait forever. He’s golden, Ping, good to go.” She reached into her pocket and gave Ping a chocolate. “Why don’t you take him his reward, and welcome him to the BrainTrust?”

  Ping stared at the candy in her hand. “Wait. Don’t I get a chocolate too?”

  Ciara glared and pointed imperiously to the door.

  Fan swept into the brig, demanding to see Guang. The guard looked at her with bemusement, since he’d already received orders to release the prisoner. Fan went to his cell and yanked the door open.

  Guang had been dozing on his bunk. He opened his eyes and smiled in a way that was almost sincere. “You finally got me out of this place? Good girl.” He winced as he joined her. His broken rib had mostly healed, but still complained when he shifted the wrong way. “I can’t believe they locked me up like an animal and wouldn’t even let me talk to anybody. When I tell my father, he’s going to blow this place sky high.”

  Fan suppressed the urge to point out that that was exactly the reason Lenora hadn’t allowed him to talk to anyone. She and Lenora had strategized on how to get him back to China without causing any fatal incidents. Fan thought the plan they’d concocted was pretty good, though from Fan’s perspective it was a very irritating plan. Her boyfriend was such a child. An irredeemable child, she had realized of late. “As a personal thing, I would appreciate it if you would avoid blowing this ship up, at least while I’m still on it. I think Chen’s mother might object as well.”

  “Of course, of course, we’ll have to evacuate Chen first.” Guang waved the objection away, then gasped as the motion drove a flare of pain through his chest.

  Fan held to her poker face. She thought about how interesting it would be to punch her boyfriend in the ribs, to see how much reaction she could get. But this was no time for daydreams. “Come on. I have a copter waiting to take us back to the mainland.”

  “Excellent. The sooner we’re home, the sooner we can get justice.”

  Fan had taken the copter into the air and pushed it to its fastest cruising speed before Guang returned to his topic of the day, namely, revenge. “What happened to that little bitch that assaulted me?”

  “The one that put you in the hospital?” Damn, she had not intended to egg him on like that. She had to keep better control of her reactions.

  Guang clenched his fist. “That one. She needs to be executed.”

  “No need. She’s been expelled from the Fuxing.” The peacekeeper, Ping, Fan remembered the name, was presumably Chinese though no one seemed sure. Fan saw no need to tell Guang that Ping’s “expulsion” was a simple matter of continuing her original mission.

  He brightened. “No kidding?”

  “No kidding. She’s been sent off with the Prometheus archipelago. They’re going around Africa. She’ll probably wind up fighting pirates.” Fan had not met Ping, but everyone talked about how she yearned to fight pirates.

  Guang’s eyes glinted with malice. “Hopefully they’ll give her what she deserves.”

  Fan took a breath. “I have every confidence they’ll give her what she deserves.” At least she could agree with that easily.

  A companionable silence followed but quickly ended. Guang patted his pockets in growing frustration. “Damn. We left without getting my cell phone back. I wanted to call ahead and get Xiu Bao’s parents arrested. I wanted to have them in custody by the time we landed.”

  Fat chance of that. Fan had been there when Lenora got word that the parents were safely in Vietnam, headed to the Fuxing. That phone call had triggered the release of Guang from the brig.

  Guang was still speaking. “I don’t suppose I could use your phone?”

  “Even if I gave it to you, it wouldn’t do you any good.” She pointed out the cockpit canopy in all directions; around them was nothing but empty ocean and clear sky as far as the eye could see. “We’re way outside cell phone coverage, Guang. Nobody can hear us now.”

  Guang’s eyes focused on the control panel. “What about using the copter radio?”

  Fan shook her head. “Lenora would never let me fly the copter again if I used it for anything other than flight operations.”

  Guang tapped his fingernails against his armrest. He brightened as a thought came to him. “We have a cruiser just a few kilometers away from the Fuxing, right? We could radio them to start the assault on the archipelago. That would surely qualify as flight operations. I’m sure the captain would take orders from me.”

  Fan found this a bit naïve. Once upon a time, she would have found it charmingly so. How cute. Now it just made her impatient. She explained the problem from a different angle. Again. “Chen Ying.”

  Guang nodded. “Right. Forgot.” He sat for a time, just studying her face as the copter hummed along. “Are you angry at me? What could you be angry at me for?”

  Fan did not scream. “Yes, Guang, I’m very angry with you.”

  He looked completely baffled. “Surely you’re not angry at me about that little peasant girl. It’s not like she was the first one.” Another thought struck him. “Were you afraid I might damage one of your assets?”

  Fan waved the question away. “No, no. Chinese peasant girls are sturdy. She would’ve been fine.” Fan had been trying to figure out how to explain the problem for days but had failed to figure out any way of explaining it that Guang might understand. She just blurted it out. “It’s just that we had this place wired. They needed us so much.” Specifically, Fan had thought that the BrainTrusters needed them so much they would have had to allow Guang to graduate no matter how much he screwed up. Though after working with Lenora for a while she realized her original expectations for bulldozing the BrainTrusters had probably been over-optimistic. “But you managed to find the way to make them kick you out anyway. You knew this place was run by squeamish Westerners. You should’ve known they would never let this go. How could you have been such an idiot?”

  This left Guang speechless for a satisfying length of time. Finally, the Chinese coast rose on the horizon.

  Guang lifted an
eyebrow. “Hong Kong? I expected we’d go to Shanghai. I don’t like Hong Kong.”

  Of course, he didn’t. The people in Hong Kong did not kneel to his every whim. They constantly forgot they were just a part of the Chinese empire. Fan even sympathized with the periodic motions in the Politburo to conduct a proper purge of the city, to bring the people of Hong Kong the discipline they lacked. She sighed. Irrelevant. “We’re going inland a bit. Foshan.”

  “Foshan?”

  Fan smiled grimly. He would understand, sort of, soon enough.

  Twilight had fallen by the time they finally descended. Fan dropped the copter into the center of a street intersection. People honked and swerved and swore; a policeman strolled over, fuming; she explained who she was; he set to work putting up roadblocks to move traffic around her impromptu-but-now-official parking space. Guang opened his door, got halfway out, then looked at her quizzically. “You coming?”

  Fan took a deep breath. “No, Guang, I’m not coming. I’m taking the copter back to the archipelago. It’s theirs, you know.” She reached under her seat and pulled out a huge roll of cash. “For you. Compensation for damages.” She refrained from mentioning it was also a partial refund of his unused tuition.

  His hands automatically took the money, but his mind was clearly not on the task. “How am I supposed to get home from here? I still don’t have my phone.” He frowned petulantly.

  “You can make a call from there.” She pointed at a large building brilliantly outlined in neon lights. “You might want to stay there tonight and start home in the morning.”

  He looked where her finger pointed. His expression softened.

  “I have to go, Guang. Catch you another day.” Fan leaned far out from the pilot’s chair to pull the passenger door closed, but Guang paid no attention. He was already in motion towards his night’s lodging. Fan watched to make sure he made it all the way into the building before spinning up her propellers.

  Foshan had been the first city under Communist rule to declare prostitution legal back in the late twentieth century. In recent years, the city had upped its game in the industry. Guang would now be comfortably ensconced in the brothel reputed to be number one in the province. In addition to the usual Vietnamese and Chinese girls, the place had recently acquired a stable of young Russian women. Guang would like that.

  Fan was quite sure he was receiving a royal reception at this moment. She and Lenora had called ahead to make sure of it. By the time he ran out of cash and remembered he needed a phone several days from now, he would have hopefully cooled off. She doubted even Guang’s father would authorize a military assault on the archipelago just because they’d kicked him out of school yet again, but best not to leave it to chance.

  As she took the copter aloft, she yelled at the building he’d entered. “Guang, you’re just too stupid to be a good boyfriend!” There. That made her feel better. As she headed home to the Fuxing, she daydreamed about hitting him in the ribs just once, just for the satisfaction of it.

  Equal Injustice for All

  —Lindsey Postrel, Cogent News

  “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time,” was once a sensible attitude to take about breaking the law. But as we have learned from Dennis Gordon (see the picture of Dennis below, near death from exposure on the open highway after being stripped of all his belongings by California State Police), you don’t have to do any real crime to be punished. But fear not, because you still don’t have to do the time—you just have to watch the State take everything else from you. And I do mean everything. Take Dennis for example…

  Lowly out of state peons like Dennis are not the only ones who lose everything to the rapacious needs of the state. Equal injustice for all has finally been achieved in California. One percenters here are now more likely, on a per capita basis, to be stripped of all their belongings with civil forfeiture than the ordinary man on the street.

  Indeed, the state’s Attorney General maintains a list of millionaires to be stripped whenever the state budget risks going into the red. Cogent has obtained a copy of this fascinating document and attached it to the bottom of the article. If you are on the list, hurry. It may already be too late.

  For those of you in my readership who have more money than the average bear, even if you’re not on the list, it is time to take heed and take this advice: get out now.

  Lenora sagged in her chair, a La-Z-Boy office chair with both the headrest and a kick-out footrest. She knew from past experience that the chair was easy to sleep in. But now, at the end of the day, she was not sleepy, merely tired.

  There was good news and bad news about being an Accel teacher. Her whole day was devoted to helping children overcome the most difficult obstacles to the next steps in their education. This led to both the good news and the bad. The good news was, it was far more gratifying than giving a rote lecture to a class where only half the students were paying attention, a quarter of them were falling asleep, and the rest were whispering, giggling, and fidgeting. The bad news was, it was exhausting in that special way that occurred when your brain was taxed to the limit.

  Lenora had just closed her eyes and taken a deep breath when she heard a knock on her door. “Come on in,” she said as heartily as she could considering how much she wanted to be left alone.

  Jun Laquan came in, followed by Chen Ying…followed by Song and then by Xiu Bao. Chen had told Lenora that Jun’s team of engineers had gotten larger. “Jacques the scuba bot” had become so famous it was practically a class project. Now Jun’s team was so large it barely fit in her office.

  Jun proudly held out the 3-D goggles and haptic feedback gloves used to operate the bot. “We just reached the ocean floor,“ he crooned.

  Chen continued. “We thought you deserved to be one of the first people to check it out.”

  Everyone watched her anxiously as she pulled on the shoulder length gloves and slipped on the goggles. Before her view of the room was completely occluded by the view from the bottom of the sea, she saw that Jun had slaved her wallscreen to the goggles so everyone could see at least a 2D representation

  In her goggles, she could see a brilliantly lit circle of sea bottom surrounded by inky blackness. A couple of tiny lights winked at an indeterminate distance, presumably the bioluminescence given off by some of the denizens of the deep sea. She extended her arms as if she were going to fly, Superman-style, and the bot started briskly forward. Moving her hands back and forth, she was able to turn. When she pulled her arms back, the bot slowed to hover a few feet off the bottom.

  Lenora found that moving her head around caused the lights to track in the direction she looked. Off to her right, she saw a smooth surfaced egg-shaped rock. At least she thought it was a rock. Without conscious thought, she moved her hands towards the rock, and the bot went to the object. She grasped it, and the feedback through the gloves told her that indeed it was a rock, not a sponge or something else soft or squishy. “What is this?” she asked of her attentive audience, though she had a suspicion she knew exactly what it was.

  Xiu answered excitedly. “It’s a manganese nodule. I’ve read about them. They’re supposed to be valuable, but they’re too expensive to retrieve.”

  Lenora smiled. It was very strange, smiling for what you knew to be a room full of people when all you could see was a rock held in sturdy mechanical hands in the middle of a tiny circle of light. “So, I don’t think it would be very expensive to bring this one up to see if you’re right. Jun, how would we bring this home?”

  Jun answered excitedly, “You should be able to just hold the rock way out in front of you with both hands, tilt your arms up, and come back to the surface. Here, let me.”

  Jun did something that caused the robot to lock in position while they traded the goggles and the gloves.

  Song observed, “You’d better hurry, I don’t know that you’ve actually got enough power left to bring both Jacques and the egg back to the surface.”

  Chen answered. “Worst
case, the automatic recovery system kicks in.” He paused. “That might not be enough to bring the rock up as well, though. Jun, you should probably force the recovery system to start now.”

  Jun shifted his hands to hold the egg like a football, then twisted his free fingers in an odd little dance that presumably triggered the recovery system.

  Chen explained. “An emergency battery, just for the recovery system, is now electrolyzing the seawater and filling two internal balloons, one with hydrogen and one with oxygen.”

  Lenora, along with everyone else, could see on the wallscreen that the bot was rising at an accelerating pace.

  A commotion at the door caused Song and Xiu to move aside for someone else, catching Lenora’s attention.

  Qi Ru, the hukou peasant who had gone to Oxford, earned a fortune in high finance, and come to the Fuxing to run a venture funding brokerage, stuck his head in. “Did I hear someone say they’d found something valuable?”

  As Xiu explained about the manganese nodules that contained multiple valuable elements, Qi Ru nodded excitedly. “So, can we collect these precious eggs off the sea bottom cheaply enough to be useful?”

  Song shrugged. “Don’t see why not. Except, I guess, for the manpower we’d need to drive all those bots.”

  Chen Ying answered. “Not a problem. Give me a little time and I can develop software to find and collect the nodules.”

  Qi Ru rubbed his hands together as he looked at Lenora. “See? I told you there’d be opportunity here.”

  Lenora rolled her eyes. If she hadn’t expected a lot of opportunities here, she never would have proposed this venture to the BrainTrust Consortium in the first place.

  And then she realized that there might be yet another opportunity here besides just making the revenues that would make these archipelagos viable. Her smile brightened as she contemplated another idea she could not share with the others.