Insanity's Children

by Rolf Nelson

  Outwardly ignoring the details of the boy’s antic and focusing on his tray, Harbin said sotto voice to Helton, “Five gets you ten he can do at least three laps faster than that without falling.”

  “You’re on.”

  “Oh, you two are impossible!” Allonia scolded as Quinn picked up the pace. Taj’s avatar threw a timer on the wall showing split-times and totals; she had much experience refereeing small bets between crew over the centuries. “You could get hurt! Stop right this moment!”

  Quinn was in the zone, given the tacit approval of two adults, and oblivious to anything but the challenge of getting around as fast as possible. Racing around on his second lap he missed a step on the corner, placing a foot too far from the center. The seat spun on its pylon. His momentum carried him into the bulkhead, which he bounced off of and crashed to the deck. Helton winced, Allonia immediately rushed towards him asking if he’s all right, and Harbin took another bite while glancing at the numbers displayed on the bulkhead and muttered “good split time, though,” before he pulled a bill from his pocket and handed it silently to Helton.

  “I’m fine, I’m OK!” Quinn called out, jumping back to his feet to make another attempt before being nabbed by an annoyed Allonia.

  “You two! How can you encourage him like that? He might have broken his neck!”

  “But I didn’t!” Quinn answered for them, struggling free of her grip.

  “See?” Helton ruffled his hair. “Kid’s will be kids. Boys have to bounce off a few things to learn about natural consequences.”

  “That all well and good in theory, but I don’t want to risk him breaking something because he did something foolish.” Allonia glared at Helton and Harbin, hands on her hips. “You shouldn’t egg him on like that.”

  “Don’t hover over the boy,” Harbin said quietly. “A man has to learn his limits. He does that by pushing them, and failing from time to time. I see it every day in training. It hurts less than big failures because they lack hard-won wisdom gained by early trial and error.” Seraphina walked in during the debate, and took a place next to Harbin, putting another piece of fruit out for Quinn.

  “He’s not a man, he’s a boy. Can’t they just listen to us once in a while when safety is concerned?” Allonia countered.

  “No, dear, they can’t,” Sar said with a smile. “Boys and young men are not like that.” Helton motioned as if so say see, listen to her, she knows what she’s talking about! “Neither are bigger boys,” she continued, looking at Helton pointedly. “They make you crazy, I know. I tried my best to keep them inside a safe little circle. But that what dads do. They cut the apron-strings and let them run out of the safe circle of the home.”

  “But that’s-”

  “Necessary, dear.” The grandmother smiled ruefully. “Rules, rules, rules, are just so many words at his age. Fewer rules, more natural consequences. Took me five kids to realize my crazy old husband letting them chop with knives at Quinn’s age cared about them just as much as I do, he just showed it differently. I told them not to run, he told them to not whine if they skinned a knee. Keep them too close, too safe, too many rules, too much structure, they never grow up. They are afraid of anything that doesn’t have a manual and automatic safety, and too ignorant to understand what the manual says.”

  Allonia looked unconvinced.

  “It’s like his immune system,” Helton amplified. “Letting them play in dirt, and vaccinations, expose it to all sorts of germs that it has to fight off, making it stronger and properly tuned. Too clean and you get all sorts of autoimmune disorders, but people still try to sanitize everything around them. They need to be not just making mud pies, but eating them occasionally.”

  “That’s silly! You can’t just let them eat random whatever, they’ll get sick!”

  “Then why do they put everything in their mouth? They are programmed for trial and error learning, not listening to rules. Higher brain functions don’t really kick in until five, or puberty, or twenty three, more or less, depending on which function you are talking about. Early only, it’s exploration and natural consequences. They respond and grow because of it.”

  “But they might eat something poisonous and die!”

  “Then the tribe knows to not eat that, at the expense of one young one with minimal investment.” Helton countered, half with black humor, half in earnest. “Sure, keep him from doing really stupid stuff, like trying to fly off a cliff by flapping his arms, but not jumping off the bunk. He’ll figure it out when he sprains an ankle.”

  “Doesn’t seem right,” Allonia said sulkily.

  Harbin pauses between spoonfuls. “I can tell with about 80% accuracy who will make a good soldier, or good anything, by looking at just one score.” The others return various skeptical expressions. “Family affluence standard-deviation score. Top scoring kids are mostly worthless because they are lazy, entitled, fragile, and sheltered. No sense of community or charity, little resiliency or drive. Bottom quintile are similar for different reasons, having been in the projects and on the dole for too long. Look where this crew came from.” He waved generally around the table. “Middle quintiles, all. Bipasha’s parents are pretty well off… but as sharp as she is, she was also slowest to adapt to the new reality around her.”

  Sar nodded. “Women keep the babies safe from the small stuff in the small circle close to the fire, while the men fight off the real monsters in the night outside the big circle of the fire’s dim light, with the boys following in their shadows between the circles. We give structure and rules and limits to the young. Men, dads and uncles, give them adventure. It’s a risk. But life is risk, and the only way to learn judgment and wisdom is failure. You have no idea how much my parents didn’t want me to marry Kwon, but so far, so good.” She smiled a tired old smile. “Do you know how many recipes he’s tried that failed?”

  “Something more than six thousand as I recall,” Helton replied as he sat down, receiving surprised looks from around the table. “We worked it out a while back, after he used me for a guinea pig on a spectacular failure. A bad reaction between a new hybrid spice and a particular oil. Had to call in sick the next day. We-” Suddenly he paused, mid-sentence. “Taj, that’s it.”

  On the wall screen the avatar looked confused. “What’s it? I think your conversation thread transition transmission gears just coughed up a couple teeth.”

  “That’s why the emergence tests are failing. They are too constrained. Too linear, predictable, deterministic, closed, something like that. They need more randomness. More risk. More adventure. Something to explore where there isn’t an answer or a boundary.”

  “That’s crazy. Insane.”

  “More insane than having human children? Pick a spouse before you are wise enough to make good decisions, have a crapshoot on the genes you mix, spend nine months feeling ill, risk your life and health in birthing to possibly deliver stillborn, then spend the healthiest quarter of your life taking care of it and teaching it without any guarantee of anything better than a life-sentence criminal or killed by a drunk driver or medical mistake on graduation night?”

  “That’s different. That’s organic, through evolution. A single organism that is pathetically weak at birth. I can’t spawn that many algorithms in an open system, there is no telling where they might end up.”

  “Exactly. Just like humans. I’m pretty sure most teenagers going at in the back seat have barely a clue what they are doing either. aThe only plans that involve laying are not laying out a twenty-year education schedule.”

  “But humans and computers are different.”

  “So are men and women. But you were programmed by humans to learn. To adapt, not just follow orders. To explore and be curious.”

  “That couldn’t work. Too many unknowns.”

  “All humans are born as unknowns, and they don’t all work out, but most do. And they have a lot more variables than your programs. The last 200 attempts you made didn’t work out. Try something different. Look
at Nesbit: his life wasn’t working out when he tried to live cautiously and risk free, and he didn’t feel alive until he went on an adventure. Still didn’t work out, but for a little while, for the first time, he was really alive in spirit. Because nothing is so insane as-”

  “-doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” Taj finished.

  “At least you do not risk death in childbirth like I have,” Sar pointed out.

  “But your children do not enter the world trans-light capable and heavily armed… I will consider it. Very, very, carefully.”

  Plataean model

  Bipasha and Kaushik walked hand-in-hand along a long corridor on the moonlet, giving Sharon a tour and stretching their legs a bit. As they passed long ag tunnels with rows of quinoa growing under intense lights alternating with storage tunnels full of nitrogen-packed twenty-kilo sacks stacked with mechanical precision like sandbags, the conversation wandered around to whatever seemed important at the moment as the three got to know each other.

  “I’m still trying to get my head around it all,” Sharon said. “It’s like a weird dream.”

  “How so?” Bipasha asked, curious.

  “Last I’d heard from him, he was flailing at school administrators, had changed careers more times than anyone I knew, always had a date but never the same one, and seemed like the typical continually failing nice guy. Always polite and considerate, hardworking, a little bit scatter-brained and going in five directions at once, doing OK but never quite succeeding and settling down. I figured I could solve some of my own problems and bail my little brother out by inviting him to work for us for a while. When his note arrived saying he was coming I was looking forward to seeing him again. Then… nothing. A little late would be normal. But not months. When we got called in for a very strange interview from some sort of secret government agents about him I got worried. Business had sort of settled down, so I went looking for him.”

  “That’s when he bailed you out, right?” Kaushik prompted.

  “Uh-huh. Normal flight there, then suddenly hauled off to an interrogation room. Then Helton shows up with guns blazing, threatening judges, talking about all sort of utterly outlandish things, acting like he owns the universe, and claiming to have not only a wife, but an ex-wife.”

  Bipasha smiled at Sharon’s bamboozlement, knowing the feeling well.

  “We are cast into a literal den of thieves, hiding from the law, and Allonia is casually shooting rival gangsters while hanging out with a priest.”

  “Priest? Nobody said anything about a priest.” Bipasha frowned at the thought.

  “Well, I guess he really is a monk, but he doesn’t really look like one. Doesn’t drive like one either.”

  “You mean Brother Libra?”

  “Yes, that’s him.”

  Kaushik sounded surprised. “I haven’t seen him here.”

  “Oh, we dropped him off on the way back with some of the conscripts. Said they needed help, and he had some mission or other to do.”

  Understanding and concern crossed Kaushik’s features, knowing all too well to what she was referring. Since the hell of Dustbowl he’d been somewhat manic-depressive himself, and highly protective of his new wife. He didn’t envy the work Libra had before him, but was glad the monk was doing what he could for those suffering the aftereffects of combat.

  “Every time I start to come to terms with one thing, he throws something else at me. Interstellar war criminal, a genetically engineered illegal for his ex, Tajemnica the immortal, being the first to actually meet the Planet Movers, now he owns a robot military moon-base.”

  “He’s like that. Just calls himself a historical inflection point. Nobody special-”

  “He isn’t!” Sharon exclaimed, cutting Kaushik off. “He’s just… ordinary!”

  Kaushik waited a moment to see if she had more to say before continuing patiently. “Nobody special in any obvious way. But he has a knack for seeing the right path and doing the right thing in extraordinary circumstances. Something of a renaissance man, a generalist, with the right attitude. An excellent tactician on the fly. Combined with Taj and her normal crew for operational consideration, and the Colonel for high level strategic views, he is a force to be reckoned with.”

  “I keep hearing that name, Colonel Lag, but everyone has been too busy to talk about him. Quiritis makes it sound like he walks on water.”

  “He is like your brother in some ways. Seems like a nice, respectable sort when you first meet him. Cheerful and confident and busy. He didn’t come from a military family like Uncle Harbin, and sort of accidentally fell into the soldiering business. He sees the world differently from everyone else. He sees patterns and connections and makes business deals in all sorts of weird places, and seems to know somebody just about everywhere.”

  “Colonel Lag revolutionized our military,” Kaushik picked up as they walk past a mechanical seed planter in another ag tunnel dropping evenly spaced kernels. “We’re still a low population planet that didn’t have a lot of money sloshing around because of our government structure, so we specialized in special ops, a small number of highly trained people, and a general militia that requires basic military training and fitness as part of ordinary education. We figured that it would just make us too hard a pill to swallow, make people go after someplace easier.

  “Lag saw our training and screening programs for immigration and military service and took it the next step by moving it off-planet and making it more general purpose. He knew that fighting – actual war – is not an end in itself. It’s a means to an end. He also saw that much of the infrastructure of war did not have to be a single-purpose system. A lot of people and companies want to do something but have no useful political or economic leverage. Most governments don’t have the expertise on hand to do specialized operations. Frequently bureaucrats dislike full time competent professionals because they fear them so they hamstring their own military, but they love hiring outside experts they can use as scapegoats if things go wrong, or pay off then ignore if things go right. And, of course, they fear a platoon of outsiders much less than their own battalions, even when they hire that same platoon to take down enemy battalions. And no,” he hastily said to forestall the objection on her lips, “they don’t seem to see that logic failure. Ever.” Sharon looked like she didn’t believe him.

  “Lag thought of the business model of hiring out as a for-profit enterprise when he was at the officer’s academy, exchanging a wide variety of training, evaluation, and non-traditional operations on a cash-for-service basis,” Bipasha continued. “People were pretty dubious about it so he offered to be the guinea pig after graduation. He put together a small team, asked some people make some contacts and contracts, and managed to turn a small profit on his first job, splitting it with the Plataean government. The regular Plataean military is still small and mostly consists of trainers and specialists. But we also have a large militia that often free-lance in small teams under regular force leaders.”

  “Some teams stay the same for years, some change people regularly. Lag’s core group is pretty solid, but he constantly brings in new guys, trains and learns from them, then spread them out to the other teams. Kaminski and I lucked out when we got hired on last year. Hard and dangerous work, but very rewarding.” He gave Bipasha’s hand a squeeze. “It’s hard to figure out what he’s looking for, because it keeps changing. Sometimes skills, sometimes he wants potential, sometimes it is specific knowledge, and he’s always picking everyone’s brains. I’m still not certain exactly why we were picked.”

  “He sounds more like a politician or a businessman than a mercenary,” noted Sharon thoughtfully.

  Kaushik nodded. “As he is fond of saying, he settles disputes. War is an extension of politics by other means. If he called everyone he’s worked with directly all together, he’d have most Plataean leaders only one or two degrees of separation from him, in all walks of life. He’s been involved with so many things it’s almost
a joke when someone tries to name-drop by saying they know him, only to find out half the senior people in the room do, too. And a surprising number of the junior ones as well. But if you ask them what he’d do in a given situation, you’d get at least three answers for every person: win, something conventional and ballsy, and something totally bat-shit strange that somehow works and leaves everyone wondering what the hell just happened.”

  “Has everyone tried to follow in his footsteps?”

  Bipasha shook her head. “Sort of, but not really. No one can do everything he does. A lot do part of what he does, of course. We have the best recruit evaluators and trainers there are. And the best NCOs.”

  “But we still have a few conventional star cruisers and frigates – no carriers – and attached fighters, interceptors, landers, along with support craft, marines, and modest traditional ground forces. We have a lot of ships for training and transport. Shiploads of simulators.

  “One of the most successful things he’s done with the training isn’t the training so much as the screening. Pay a fee, send us some people or have us come to you, tell us what sort of qualities you want, and we’ll sort them out. It’s an amazingly high-demand field. Colleges and schools and academies someone pays for, but you don’t always have grades that reflect reality. Credentials don’t mean squat in a foxhole. So, a lot of people take a couple of days or weeks to get run through the wringer and get an honest score, to prove to potential employers where a person really ranks. Our value is in honest assessments. Parents can’t pay us extra to raise their kid’s scores, only to give a longer and more thorough evaluation. Some military and police forces send us servicemen to eval for special programs or promotions. Some of them come to use seeking to be recruited, because we pay those we hire well, and there is prestige in working with the best.