CHILDERS_Absurd Proposals

by Richard F. Weyand

  "So what's your solution? You've got something in mind. I can tell. What is it?" Jan asked.

  "It's that situation in Guernsey that got me thinking about it. It's half-baked at this point, but here's the gist. We install a universal mail system, something like we use now. Something that can't be tampered with, and that anyone can use. You could make personal mails free, but charge for corporate mails, government mails, funds transfers, that sort of thing. You could also ship freight, with those big freighters. The potential amount of money involved is staggering. You use that to fund a response force that only responds to planetary attack, using the drones, like we did with the Outer Colonies."

  "Drones by mail?"

  Bill laughed. Jan picked her tea back up and smiled into the cup. She loved the sound of his laugh.

  "Something like that. You could even do something about political refugees. Planets could put in for the kind of people they would take, and people could send in requests to emigrate from where they are. You match people to planet, and, if someone was willing to migrate there with only what he could carry, you could take him for free," Bill said.

  "Why would the original planet let them go?"

  "Get rid of the potential troublemaker? Have him taken off your hands, rather than have to ferret them out and arrest them, jail them, make martyrs of them? Sure, take them. Get 'em outta here."

  "Might work," Jan said.

  "Especially if you worked to build up a culture around that being a human right of travel. Something like that."

  "And we'll have all those colony ships wandering around with lots of steerage cabins."

  "Exactly," Bill said.

  "What do we call it?"

  "The League of Nations? The United Nations? The United Federation of Planets? The Galactic Empire?"

  Jan laughed. She set her cup of tea back on the side table.

  "Well, if you're going to go digging about in musty history, you might as well call it the Roman Empire or the Hellenic League," Jan said.

  "Just kidding around."

  "I know. I do worry about it becoming a government, though. It's got all the signs. There have to be some controls. I'm not sure how to structure that.

  "Three competing services, maybe?" Bill asked.

  "OK, now you're building a future interstellar war between them into the system."

  "Yeah, you're right. That won't work. The mails are all run by computer and their accuracy verified with crypto. How about a system where if a majority of planetary governments sends a recall message to a computer account via the mails, the entire ruling council of whatever it is, is removed? Their computer accounts won't let them conduct business anymore."

  "That might work. But why a majority? Why not a third? Or a quarter? If a quarter of the planets think they're being victimized by a central regime, why not throw out the leaders and replace them? It's not like the current council is executed or anything. They just have to go do something else. New people take over," Jan said.

  "But how do you select the council in the first place? Or the replacement council, for that matter."

  "There's the rub. They can't be promoted internally, or nominated internally. You get a self-sustaining hierarchy. That's one of the problems with political parties."

  "What if we set it up as a corporation, with a board of directors? Make the planets all equal shareholders. They get dividends back. That puts pressure on keeping spending down," Bill said.

  "That could work. Every planet gets one share, one vote? They're not paying in equal amounts."

  "No, but the income is from them buying the 'products' – mail and freight shipping. That keeps prices down and keeps a limit on revenues. The shares are a different story, as is planetary defense. That's an endowment every planet gets."

  "All right. No nominating committee on the board, though. You still have the problem of how you pick new board members," Jan said.

  "I'll have to give that some thought."

  "I think you should keep working on it. We have to solve the problem of defense against interplanetary attacks, and this is the best thing I've heard so far."

  They sat, staring at Sigurdsen Fleet Base, but not really seeing it. After several minutes, Jan broke the silence.

  "How about Galactic Mail & Defense?"

  "What?" Bill asked.

  "As a name. Galactic Mail & Defense Corporation. GMD."

  "I like it. Spells out its limits and its span. Where does it live? Where's its corporate headquarters?"

  "I think it has to be Earth," Jan said.

  "Really?"

  "Yeah, because if someone says, 'OK, where is it?' and you say, 'Earth,' the response will be, 'Oh, OK. That makes sense.' Any place else you put it will raise objections. 'Why there? Why are they so special?'"

  "But Earth is out on the edge of the galaxy. That's not the best place," Bill said.

  "If the whole setup lasts long enough, it's a corporation. It can move itself to someplace else that makes sense then."

  "That works. OK, let me work on the board of directors thing. There's got to be a good way to do that.

  Applications

  When people messaged for an application to migrate to one of the new colonies, the numbered digital application they received stated at the very beginning:

  DO NOT LIE ON THIS APPLICATION. If any material fact on your application is found to be a lie, the penalty is death. A colony is a cooperative effort. If you lie about your skills, you may leave the colony critically short of some necessary skill, endangering everyone in the colony. If you are a common laborer, say so. Do not say you are a doctor, for example. The colony will need more laborers than doctors. If you have multiple skills, list them all. Be honest. Do not put your new friends and neighbors in peril. There will be many rounds of colonization, and many different kinds of people will be needed. Do not start your new life on a lie.

  The applications were submitted encrypted together with a thumb swipe via the mail system. Attempts to block these applications from being transmitted resulted in the courier drone stopping the upload or download of all mail to or from the planet until the block was removed. The drones knew how many applications had been requested on a planet, and if there were an insufficient number of applications received back, it knew they were being blocked.

  Sooner or later all the star systems started letting applications get through.

  "You've been making great progress in staffing up, Admiral," Jan said.

  "I have to, Ma'am. We're in a hurry," Admiral Joshi said.

  "And you have some trainers on board now."

  "Yes, we're starting to train the colony work crews. We're also putting together a reporting system, so they can report what works, what doesn't work, what they've learned, what they need help with. We figure we can use the mail system to collect reports, and then send out updates and instructions to all the teams on the ground. Our people are pretty used to reading manuals and figuring out what to do from there, so that should help a lot."

  "I noticed that in your reports to me. I like it," Jan said.

  "We figure we won't get everything right first time, Ma'am. It's important to learn as we go."

  "And how are the applications going?"

  "We've gotten several thousand back, Ma'am. They're in electronic form, so they go from the mail system right into our computer system. We've been sorting them for skills, age, gender, and starting to see how they match up to our needs," Joshi said.

  "Any surprises?"

  "One big one, for me anyway. We have more people who are well-educated professionals – doctors, engineers, scientists – than I expected. I guess I sort of thought people who wanted to emigrate would be more of the people who weren't being successful."

  "Are they lying?" Jan asked.

  "I don't think so, Ma'am. For one thing, we included some pretty strong language in the application about lying. It's true, mind you. Anyone who lies and puts the colony at risk is going to end up dead. We're not g
oing to send a ship out there to bring them back, and we don't want to leave someone who would lie on something that important to be left with the colony. They're poison.

  "But we also had Intelligence Division help out. They have a lot of information about most of the Outer Colonies they've collected over the years. Advertisements, directories, that sort of thing. They can confirm most of these people are who they say they are. On the ones they can't confirm, they also can't find contradictory records to say they aren't those people."

  "It may be people who are better educated are more adventurous, or more hopeful for improvement. Those who aren't may just be so beaten down, they have no hope for a positive change."

  "Could be, Ma'am. That's the only surprise so far. But we're getting there. Slower than I'd like, but we're getting there."

  "You've done a great job in a short time, Admiral. Just keep pounding away."

  Selecting The Board

  "Well, one in four planets isn't bad," Bill said.

  "What do you mean? It's terrible," Jan said.

  "Really? That's four good planets we know about now."

  "But we don't have time for this. The on-site surveys are a pacing item. We can't not do them, the one in four is a pretty good indication of that, but we need to filter better."

  "Were they all G2-type stars?" Bill asked.

  "Yes, G2-type stars with known rocky planets. Those are the only ones the survey drones went to in the first place. Using their survey data, we further filtered on being in the correct temperature zone, having an atmosphere between 12 and 16 psi, having a partial pressure of oxygen of about 3 psi, carbon dioxide between 300 ppm and 2000 ppm, gravity between 0.95 and 1.05 g – a whole bunch of factors."

  "And we still only get one in four?"

  "Yes. Some of the others can be terra-formed, given time. That's pretty easy, actually. Drop the right amino acids or RNA or spores, whatever it is, wait several hundred years, and check them again. But not now. Agriculture with Earth plants won't work, and the indigenous plants and animals don't have the right proteins and sugars for human consumption," Jan said.

  "That's all of the rejects?"

  "About half. The others won't work at all. A couple have an atmosphere now, but their magnetic field is weakening. Basically, their molten core is solidifying as their heat winds down. At some point the magnetic field is too weak to hold off the solar wind and the atmosphere gets blown way. That's what happened to Earth-4. On the other end of the scale, a couple are way too tectonically active."

  "So now what do we do?" Bill asked.

  "Science Division is checking to see if we can better differentiate the rejects using the survey drone data. They were worried about missing a good planet. I had to correct their priorities. We need to reject as many as we can as fast as we can and get on-site surveys out to only the highly probables, so we can get this whole thing up and running. We can keep a list of the others that might be falsely rejected and go back to check them later. When there's more time."

  Jan picked up her cup of tea and looked out over Sigurdsen. She noted the NOC Annex – oops, now the Colony Division building – was the most lit up building on the base. They were really pushing hard over there. Give Admiral Joshi credit. The type of people she picked were the kind who really liked a challenge, and they were having the time of their lives.

  "I did have some thoughts on that board of directors problem," Bill said.

  "Oh?"

  "Yes. I've been looking back at different governments and boards of directors, looking for mechanisms that might work or could be adapted. I think I have something."

  "Go ahead," Jan said.

  "Well, it's a little involved. Here's the gist of it. Every planet names eight electors."

  "How do they pick them?"

  "However they want. Local government picks them however they want. Not our problem," Bill said.

  "OK. So with, say, three hundred planets, you have twenty-four hundred electors."

  "Right. Every five years, the planets name their eight electors, and they all get together in one spot."

  "Earth," Jan said.

  "Probably. And they meet for a couple of weeks, and they elect half of the board, say eight board members, to ten-year terms. Each delegate gets eight votes, and they have to be for eight different people. The highest eight total vote-getters win board seats. The other half of the board still has five years to go on their terms."

  "So you get continuity."

  "Right," Bill said. "Then the board elects their own chairman. And if someone dies before their term is up, then the ninth highest vote-getter from the last election steps in, if he can. If not, the tenth, and so on. There's a new set of electors every five years, and only every five years."

  "OK, so how does this board not get entrenched?"

  Bill leaned forward in his chair with his elbows on his knees as he got to the nub of the problem.

  "First, the board members serve one ten-year term, that's it. They can still be consulted by newer board members, you know, by mail or whatever. As board members emeritus. But that's it. They're out. And they can't serve again. Second, a quarter of the planets can remove the entire board by sending messages to the computer system in a no-confidence vote."

  "Why won't that happen all the time, not just when it's warranted?" Jan asked.

  "Because it removes the entire board, not just one or two guys. However bad you think you have it now, it could be worse for your faction after a new election, because all the current board members are removed, and can't serve again. You could lose your best guys and come out worse off than before. But if the board really is out of control, that won't matter."

  "How do you elect an entire new board?"

  "Same mechanism with the electors and all, except they each have sixteen votes. The top eight total vote-getters get ten-year seats, the next eight total vote-getters get five-year seats. And none of them can ever serve again, either," Bill said.

  "That might not happen on a five-year boundary."

  "It probably won't. So the five-year boundaries get re-set if that happens."

  "Got it," Jan said. "And then the board elects their chairman, and the board selects a CEO for the corporation."

  "Or keeps the current one. Right. What do you think?"

  "Actually, I like it. Let me think about it. But it definitely has promise."

  Object Lesson

  As one might expect, the most populous of the Outer Colony worlds were the ones that produced the most applications for migrating to a new colony. They also often had the most diverse gene pool, a critical consideration. Stadt, Feirm, Paradiso, and Wolsey were selected as the sources for the colonists for the first colony. The Commonwealth Foreign Ministry contacted all four governments to let them know of the Commonwealth's plans to embark colonists from their planets.

  Paradiso wasn't a problem. The military junta that had replaced the now-deceased supreme president and his one-party ruling council on Paradiso was led by Admiral Harold Anderson, the hero of the disaster in Kodu. He was a hero to the people of Paradiso by virtue of the fact he was the only Outer Colony commander smart enough to accept surrender terms. As a result, Paradiso had lost none of its spacers. He had further cemented his leadership by disbanding the secret police and putting on trial – and executing – those responsible for the worst abuses. Harold Anderson was eager to be friends with the Commonwealth, and to increase ties of trade and commerce, and his people were behind him one hundred percent. They were much more positive about the Commonwealth than they had been about their own previous leadership.

  Wolsey also had new leadership. Their acquiescence to the colony plan was more grudging, but they had no desire to further anger the Commonwealth, and also went along with the plans. The government of Feirm as well still remembered the lesson they received at the hands of the Commonwealth a dozen years before, and had no desire to annoy the Commonwealth. The results of the recent attack on the Commonwealth had only stiff
ened that resolve.

  Those three planets were selected for the first colonist pickups because they wouldn't be a problem. Stadt was selected in this first round because they likely would be a problem. One object lesson was needed in this first round, to ease the way for future pickups. And with the new mail system, the news would travel quickly.

  Jan was working with Sally Howell, the Commonwealth's Foreign Minister, in the communications with Stadt.

  "They got back to us, Minister?" Jan asked.

  "Yes. They're not happy, Admiral," Sally Howell said.

  Jan was looking at her face on the display in her office in the NOC. The foreign minister was in her office in the Foreign Ministry building in Commonwealth Center, on the other side of Jezgra from Sigurdsen.

  "What did they say?"

  "They said they denied us permission to land our shuttles, or to have our colony ships enter their system space. I told them we were coming nonetheless, as we had discussed."

  "And their response?" Jan asked.

  "They said they would fire on our ships, and destroy them. I guess the question now is, How far are willing to push this?"

  "All the way," Jan said. "If the Outer Colonies can just say 'No,' then that ends the colony project and its promise to humanity. If they remain completely truculent through to the end, we'll decapitate the regime. I have those orders directly from Chairman Desai."

  "Yes, I know. I was there. Gunboat diplomacy." Howell sighed. "What would you recommend as the next step for us at this point?"

  Jan thought about it, then typed the following and sent it to Howell:

  The Commonwealth of Free Planets considers the free movement of people to nations willing to receive them to be an unalienable right of humanity. This is a human right that we will not tolerate being infringed by Stadt.

  "How about that as a return message?" Jan asked.