The Braintrust

by Marc Stiegler

  Amanda started reading. At first she was puzzled, but then her eyes widened. “She’s…she’s reinventing my own gene splicer.”

  Colin laughed. “Yes! And that is why I want her here.” He paused. “Polymaths—there are so few of them, Amanda. Anybody with a top-range intellect dirtside gets browbeaten into a specialty. You know that, you’ve seen it even with our first investors. It’s hardly better on the BrainTrust, right here in your own research complex. Heck, you just admitted you’re part of the problem.”

  Amanda drew herself up. “Colin, I don’t drive anyone to be a one-trick pony. I just want them to focus on one thing long enough to get their degree. Once their degree is done, if they stop expanding their horizons and just continue to do what they’ve been doing, that’s their choice. Don’t blame me for this.”

  Colin waved his hand. “Ancient battles, with people who aren’t even alive any more. Sorry I got sidetracked.”

  “Don’t try to fool me on this. If you want her here just because she’s a polymath, bring her in to work on our reactors. But not telomeres, Colin! If you let her work on telomeres, she’ll become the nexus of the crisis—the crisis we’ve been dodging for sixteen years now—very successfully I might add, and all because of you, if I can say that without swelling your idiot head beyond recognition. Why are you dead-set on kicking off the crisis now? We still aren’t strong enough to fight them all.”

  Colin’s gaze went to the window and he looked into the clear, unbound sky. “I won’t deny I wouldn’t mind waiting another ten years while they got weaker and we got stronger, but… Amanda, Dyah is going to bring on the crisis whether we help her or not. She’s going to pursue her goal, and she’s going to succeed. If she’s here, we have a better chance of bringing everyone safely through. And by ‘everyone,’ I mean everyone including Dyah herself. Her research will get her killed, though I doubt she understands that.” He shook his head. “The balance is about to shift. That’s not a question any longer. When it shifts, we need to be able to choose the direction we’ll leap as we fall.” He smiled. “Besides, I have a plan.”

  Amanda growled, “We aren’t your puppets, Colin.”

  Colin’s smile turned sour. “You think I don’t know that? Does anyone ever let me forget it for even one minute?”

  ***

  Amanda shook her head, returning to the present. Apparently reminiscing had not taken too long, because Dash was not looking at her like she was having a seizure just yet. “Have you given any thought to who your first patients will be?”

  Dash nodded. “A little. Obviously they will be quite old, preferably with no special ailments. And since the therapy will be quite expensive at first, I expect they will be wealthy.”

  “Will they be powerful?”

  Dash looked at her in puzzlement.

  Amanda reached over and touched her hand. “The world’s aging and decrepit dictators will be first in line, my dear unpolitical friend. Some of them will not take no for an answer.”

  Dash shook her head emphatically. “It’s still experimental. In the first trials it will be at least as likely to kill them as increase the ability of their aging cells to divide and create fresh replacements.”

  “Those who are near death anyway will not care.”

  Dash frowned. “Then they are fools. This is not the Fountain of Youth—it’s just telomeres.”

  ***

  He sat in the big chair with his feet on the desk. It was always calming for him to sit here, looking around the curves of the room and seeing the bright powerful seal on the floor. When you thought about it, the room was impractical. You couldn’t really use the space in an oval room efficiently. Where did you put the stuff that should have gone in the corners?

  But the room and its symbols of power were not sufficiently calming today. As he listened to the disagreeable voice at the other end of the phone, he lifted his legs off the desk and slammed his feet down on the floor. It was a futile gesture. The plush carpet silently soaked up the impact.

  How could he, the most powerful man on earth, be denied?

  The Chief Advisor gripped his cell phone like he was about to throw it across the room and repeated his main point. "I'm making this request on behalf of the President-for-Life of the most important country in the world! This is an opportunity to receive your doctor as an honored guest and allow her to perform her therapy on the President himself! I should be met with a 'Yes, sir, thank you, sir!' I should not be greeted with a traitorous 'No!' You're still a United States citizen, let me remind you, and this is treason!"

  The voice on the phone seemed quite unaffected by his rant. It was as if the speaker were himself so formidable that he could talk down to the most powerful man in the world...which, the Advisor had to acknowledge, was not as crazy as it sounded. Sure, the guy was stuck on a defenseless slug of a ship, but despite being defenseless, the speaker controlled a significant asset. Very significant—at least as significant as owning a country. And that asset was the one thing, as it happened, that the Advisor needed rather desperately.

  The voice spoke. "You're accusing me of treason? Isn't that the black hole calling the kettle dark?" The Advisor spluttered as the voice continued, "But let us not get sidetracked. I'm perfectly happy to let you talk to her and let her make up her own mind."

  The Advisor smiled. It lasted only a moment before the voice spoke again. "Before she commits, however, I am optimistic that she will let me highlight a few points for her."

  The Advisor closed his eyes.

  "Let me be certain I understand the honor being bestowed here. She is to be flown to the Capital secretly, she is to set up her facility in a secret wing of Walter Reed Hospital, she is to rejuvenate the President-for-Life in secret, and then, if everything goes as hoped, she will be flown back to us here on the BrainTrust, again secretly. Correct?"

  "Exactly so," the Advisor agreed.

  "Forgive me, Mr. Chief Advisor, but that doesn't sound so much like an honor as a dirty fact no one wants to acknowledge."

  "The anonymity is for her own good. I presume she doesn't want to become famous yet."

  "Hmmm... Why don't you fly out here with the President and let Dash treat him in her own facility?"

  The Advisor glared at the phone. "You know why. We can't have people thinking that America, the most creative society on earth, is dependent for key inventions on...on a little brown girl in your floating sardine can out in the middle of the ocean."

  "Ah. The honesty soars as the quality of discourse dives off a cliff. Very good. Publicly welcoming a brilliant Balinese medical research scientist from the BrainTrust to the White House would pop that bubble about American innovation, would it not?"

  "It is your duty to your country to assist her to see her way clear to help us," the Advisor ground out.

  "There are also a few problems associated with the possibility—the distinct possibility—that things might not turn out as well as projected. It seems unlikely, for example, that her therapy in its current form will shave more than a few years off the President's age. Figure ten, as a best guess. He'd still be biologically eighty years old if the therapy were to be successful."

  The Advisor thought about that for a moment. "That's fine. That's almost perfect, in fact." His voice turned humorous. "The last thing we want is for him to get so spry he wants to take back control of his Twitter account."

  "Well, it's good to know you don't want to go overboard with this rejuv business," the voice remarked with only the slightest hint of mockery. "But it gets worse. There’s a very good chance he’d die. Given the state of Dash’s therapy at this time, it’s best thought of as a high-tech form of Russian roulette. You do understand that this is a speculative undertaking, right?"

  "I'm sure you can improve the odds for the President."

  "Mr. Chief Advisor, medical outcomes are not subject to the fake news, alternative facts, or whimsical beliefs of the White House. Here's the thing: if she agrees to come to you, Dr. Ambarawat
i will be conducting a therapy that has not been certified by the FDA, using equipment that is also not certified by the FDA." The voice paused. "We had a brief conversation with an FDA representative about the equipment, as it happens. He was quite enthusiastic. He gave us seven hundred and fifty three pages of forms to fill out and told us how to spend the first hundred million on certification testing. After the results from the first hundred million came in, the FDA would then have enough information to tell us how to spend the next several hundred million. He told us to take as long as we needed. Very helpful, your FDA was."

  The Advisor just grunted. "It's not like the FDA would ever know about the operation."

  "Umm... If the President died undergoing an uncertified procedure with uncertified equipment, Dr. Ambarawati would be guilty of murder, would she not?"

  The Advisor rolled his eyes. "That's an extremely rigid legal interpretation. The legal system hasn't been allowed to be that inflexible for more than a decade.” He cheered up as he realized he finally had an opening to start negotiating. That was all he really needed: a chance to negotiate, give and take, and take and win. He started by making a first offer. “We could put together a document freeing her of responsibility—"

  "Which you would deny the moment the people found out the President-for-Life was dead. You'd be on the edge of a civil war. You'd sacrifice the good doctor to win Blue votes in a heartbeat. Heck, your own Reds would demand her head."

  "I'd still honor my promise."

  "Why would you change policies now?"

  "I'd still have control of the government, dammit!"

  "Yes, of course. Like I said, a civil war."

  The Advisor felt a headache coming on. "When you decide to do your patriotic duty, call my office. My admin will put you through." He hung up on the traitor with a stab of his finger and longed, just for a moment, for the good old days where you could slam the receiver down to vent your feelings. Possibly even throw the phone.

  Well, he had suspected he might be snubbed like this. He was tempted to just tell the captain of the cruiser Vella Gulf, currently stationed outside the BrainTrust, to lob a few Tomahawk cruise missiles into the place. Strictly as a negotiating tactic, of course. A little softening up. But the Chinese might object, since two Politburo members had children attending the university there. The Russian Union President had a niece there too, if he remembered correctly. And a Red senator and a couple Blue congressmen had kids there as well, let’s not forget. Best not to be hasty.

  Still, he had the most powerful military force on Earth, and the BrainTrust was the most defenseless target in history. He still had options. Excellent options, even. And this way, once he had the doctor, there would be no reason to give her back. He could use her himself when he needed her some years down the road.

  He was still agitated. Some release would be good. “Trixie!” he yelled, “I need you in here now!” She would help him calm down.

  ***

  Colin put his cell down. “And so the mighty send commands unto us from the heights of Olympus.” He shook his head ruefully. “I just wish he hadn’t called me from the White House. Now the Russian Union President knows about Dash too.” He sighed. “Yet another player enters the game.”

  Amanda stared at him open-mouthed. “Are you telling me the Russians have the White House bugged?”

  Colin waved his hand. “Common knowledge. Everybody but the Chief Advisor knows his admin is a Russian agent.”

  “I just thought that was Blue fake news.”

  Colin shook his head. “Not according to my contacts. I still have a few, you know. They keep begging him to replace her, but he insists she couldn’t be a Russian spy because the Russians are his friends.”

  Amanda rolled her eyes. “Great. Can’t wait to hear from the Russians next.”

  Colin frowned. “Oh, I’d love to wait. Alas, I don’t think that will be one of our choices.”

  ***

  The President of the Russian Union drummed his fingers on his dark and massive desk. Four people were required to move it, which he did often, just for the pleasure of watching his people work so hard on something so pointless.

  So, the BrainTrust had someone working on the Fountain of Youth! And making progress, enough that the Americans were very interested. Desperate, some might say. And for good reason. Unlike himself, the fools had never actually taken full control of the election process. As one of his predecessors had observed, it made no difference who voted, it only mattered who counted the votes. How could the Chief Advisor not understand a lesson that simple?

  The Chief Advisor had been a valuable piece on the Russian Union’s chess board for many years now. While giving the Advisor the tips he needed to bank the occasional billion dollars, the surveillance bugs in the White House had supplied him with the info he needed to personally make hundreds of billions from various enterprises. Even better, the Advisor had unwittingly told him just how much of Poland he could grab for the Russian Union before the Americans would get involved, which would have been messy. It had been a great relationship. It would be sad to lose it. There was significant merit to staying out of the way and letting the Chief Advisor snatch the doctor and fix the American President, to keeping things the way they were.

  On the other hand, having a doctor who could rejuvenate him personally was too big an opportunity. The Russian Union President wasn’t getting any younger. Sure, he gave people press photos of himself riding horses, playing hockey, and winning at judo, but it was getting harder. He needed rejuvenation almost as much as the American President. He certainly deserved it more.

  He would have to move fast, however. The doctor would be much harder to seize once she was locked up in DC. Extracting her from the BrainTrust should be easy.

  He really needed to give Trixie a bonus. He had broken her and trained her from a young age to do whatever it took to serve the Motherland, and she had been performing brilliantly ever since he arranged for her to meet the Chief Advisor. He chuckled to himself, thinking about her descriptions of how, after learning a sweep for bugs was coming, she would run around the White House whisking them all away, then replanting them after the sweep was finished. Great stuff. A shame they couldn’t write a book about her exploits.

  The Chief Advisor probably had her in his office right now. Thinking about that, the President rang for Pascha—Trixie’s sister, who’d had the same training—to join him on the desk.

  ***

  Dash walked through the austere passages of Deck Twelve, the Red Planet deck, wearing a new lab coat with a new stethoscope draped over it. She had to confess she was not enamored of the Red Planet theme. The passages were lined with unrelenting photorealistic red rock from horizon to horizon, except where the horizon was blocked by mountains and ridges, also riven from unrelenting red rock. Only one spot broke the sense of endless wasteland. As she came out of the passage into a wider area, the rendering granted a distant view of Falcon’s Nest, the Mars colony, ensconced in its immense transparent geodesic dome.

  She had run into Colin at the ramps that diverged between Decks Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen. Deck Eleven, she could not help noticing, was lushly green, the jungle forest of Wenara Wana. Also known as Bali’s Monkey Forest, Wenara Wana meshed with and spilled into the city of Ubud, where she had long ago practiced medicine. Half in jest, she had asked her former tour guide if there was someone she could talk to about switching the themes of Decks Eleven and Twelve. Not, she explained, just so she could feel more at home in her lab. No, she could not help believing that the greenery would be soothing for her experimental patients, and would help in their recovery. Colin had smiled and promised to see what he could do. Deck Eleven was currently empty for remodeling anyway. And he had a little pull, he explained, with some of the people in charge.

  But for now, she walked through the unyielding immensity of the Red Planet. When she arrived at her new lab she found a college-age kid with thick black hair, pale skin sprinkled with acne, and a
sincere, driven expression. He seemed awfully young to her. She had to laugh at herself, looking down from her mature twenty-seven years upon someone no more than seven years younger than she.

  Alas, “looking down” was never really an option for her. As usual, she had to look up to meet this new person’s eyes. “You Americans are all too tall,” she muttered. She smiled and held out her hand. “I’m Dash. I would bet that you are Byron Schultz.”

  He smiled, but it did not reach his serious dark eyes. “I’m here to assist you any way I can.”

  “Bu Amanda tells me you have already helped me considerably. Thank you.” To break the ice, she asked, “How did you wind up here as my intern?”

  “Grew up in Portland,” he began. Realizing a woman from Bali might not know where that was, he explained. “A bit south of the West Coast Waste.”

  “Aha. You wanted to help people with radiation poisoning.”

  He nodded. “At first I figured there might be something one could do with stem cells, so I went to Berkeley and joined the research center there. But…” He drew his hand through his hair, caught it, and pulled, “it costs almost a billion dollars to get a promising stem cell therapy through the certification process these days. Who’s going to pay for it? California, Oregon, all the Blue states have terminated most medical research to reduce costs.” He dropped his hand, letting it slap lightly against his leg. “It just isn’t practical.”

  “Very disheartening. I see why you came to the BrainTrust. But why my lab? I am not doing stem cells.”