Crescendo Of Fire

by Marc Stiegler

  Jam added, “And, let’s not forget, Ciara’s mother.”

  Lenora raised an eyebrow. “Yes, by all means, let us not forget that.”

  Capt. Ainsworth left them, muttering that he had to get some real work done and he’d already had the lecture. Lenora led them through the passages rendered with lush forests to a conference room, a conference room unlike any on the original BrainTrust. On the BrainTrust, the decorative deck themes ended when you entered the rooms, but in this conference room, the Lothlorien theme extended everywhere.

  Except that whereas the passages were all at Lothlorien ground-level, the conference room was painted as if it were a treehouse. The floor appeared to be composed of living tree limbs, with uncovered patches that looked far down to the ground. Ping gasped in delight and started hopping from tree limb to tree limb around the table before she sat down. Jam put one foot tentatively on a patch of the floor that looked like air. Once she was convinced a solid floor lay beneath her, she thumped determinedly to another seat.

  Lenora waved her hand at one of the rough wooden walls and it turned into a wallscreen presenting an old, worn book in the middle of a flat white background. It was a hardback book with a red binding and an olive-drab cover, a small sailing ship in black and white in the center and the title McGuffey’s First Eclectic Reader. “The field of education has hardly evolved since McGuffey published this volume two centuries ago. Children still come to school too early in the morning, before their brains are really awake. They read their books, listen to their teachers repeat the same things the teachers have said every year for the previous decade, and take the same test as all the other students in the same class at the same time. They work at the same pace in the same groove as everyone else. For our archipelagos to succeed, we must do radically better.”

  Ping stared in open-mouthed astonishment. Jam blinked, then commented, “I feel as if we’ve stepped into the middle of a conversation. What does replacing the McGuffey readers have to do with the success of the archipelagos?”

  A head with sea green hair poked into the room. Ciara looked at the book on the wallscreen. “Let me guess. Mom jumped to the ‘radically better’ part of the presentation without mentioning the immense hurdle we have to overcome.”

  Jam looked appreciatively at Ciara. “Precisely.”

  Ciara hopped into a chair, her left hand waving in the air, a thick white bandage wrapped around the palm. Someone had wiped the blood from her arm, though a spot of it still graced her elbow. “Mom, let me explain this part.” She looked back at Jam and Ping. “The BrainTrust, as you know, exploited the opportunity afforded by Deportation Phase II to take on board a high-density collection of brilliant, creative people already highly educated, extremely well trained, and proven to be determined in the pursuit of new and valuable technologies. They already knew what to do, they already had the tools to do it, they just needed a home where they could pursue their goals without interference.”

  Ciara’s mother stepped in. “But now we’ve been there and done that. Now we have to dig deeper.”

  Ciara glared at her mother. “Shush.” She looked back once again at Jam and Ping. “As Mom said, we’re going to have to work harder. The people we want are the ones who have the characteristics to achieve great success but who don’t have the opportunity because of poverty, culture, and political oppression.”

  Ping jumped from her chair. “No hukou!” She pounded her fist on the table, making Lenora’s tablet jump momentarily. She hunched her shoulders sheepishly, as if, contrary to her nature, she was embarrassed by her outburst.

  Ciara gave Ping a fist pump. “Got it in one.”

  Jam looked at both of them as if they had gone crazy.

  Ping laughed. “Hukou is the system of mass human registration used by the Chinese government to maintain control. A specific and particularly vile aspect of the system is that it splits the people of China into two castes: urban residents who have many privileges and opportunities and rural peasants who’re expected to remain rural peasants and work on the farms and die in the mines for the benefit of the urban caste. It’s all hereditary. The only way you can get urban papers is to show direct lineage back to an urban dweller at the time Mao Zedong set it all up.”

  Ciara continued excitedly, “With over a billion people in the country, there are literally millions of people who would be classified as geniuses, trapped on farms plowing the fields, and in the mines inhaling toxic dust. Mom is going to fill the Fuxing with the best and brightest of them.” She looked more soberly at Ping. “You and I are going to try to do approximately the same thing off the coast of Africa, which will be even harder because the disease levels are so much higher and the education levels are even lower.”

  Lenora stepped in as if on cue. “And that is why a radical advance in education is necessary. We must accelerate the education of the people we bring on board so they can become contributors to the pool of BrainTrust tech—engineers and innovators and creators of whole new businesses and industries—as quickly as humanly possible.” She pointed back at the McGuffey reader on the display. “The McGuffey reader was revolutionary in its day. But the time for the next revolution has come.” She went to a corner table where a small stack of tablets sat. “Jam, Ping, it’s easier to experience than to explain.” She synced one tablet to the left half of the wallscreen and the other to the right half. “You are about to work through a sample module from our Accel Educational Framework.” She handed the tablets to the two new students.

  The tablets had the same starting position. Each was situated at the beginning of a module about supply and demand under the heading of economics. Lenora explained, “In this version of the supply and demand module, we open with a short scenario, a game if you will, for the students to play. As it happens, this one is derived from a true life story from early in the century, when the Russians attempted to corner the market in uranium. In our scenario, they actually manage to buy all of the existing uranium mines. Needless to say, when they first got control they raised their prices. But then…“

  Ping and Jam were already working the problem. Jam started creating new uranium mines to exploit the new price, which caused the supply to rise, which caused the price to fall, stabilizing at a point somewhat lower than the price had been at the beginning due to the presence of a significant surplus.

  Ciara watched with amusement. “As you are already discovering, the Accel modules are loaded with addictive reinforcement features from gameplaying apps, to ensure they keep the student’s attention. When children ‘go to school’ using Accel, they don’t have to be dragged off to their rooms to do their homework. Rather, they have to be dragged out of their rooms to have something to eat.”

  Lenora corrected her daughter. “Actually, the software forces the students to take a break from time to time. The software can detect when the student is tiring and becoming less capable of retaining their lessons. So the student maximizes his time at maximum capability. And the instructional scaffolding built by the modules moderates the cognitive load so that that maximum capability, but no more, is continuously engaged.”

  Ping was barely listening. Instead of building more uranium mines like Jam, she had invested in engineering to develop a new line of nuclear reactors that used thorium rather than uranium. On the plot on her screen, the price of uranium started to fall and continued to fall. A new module appeared on her tablet describing the economic principle of substitution, when an overpriced commodity is replaced by new technology in the face of rising prices.

  Lenora pointed at the differences between Jam’s and Ping’s screens. “Each student is able to learn in their own way, at their own pace. So you don’t have a classroom forced to move at the speed of the slowest or most average child in the class. A precocious student can work through years of education in months, held back only by their own abilities.”

  Jam tore her eyes away from her tablet. “It must’ve cost a fortune to develop all these modules.”
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  Lenora waved her hand. “In one sense it’s worse than you think. If a student has trouble with a module, the software redirects the student into another module that covers the same material but in a different learning style. Simple examples are top-down learning and bottom-up learning, although our factor analysis has identified many different optimal learning strategies for different students on different topics. So the total number of modules incorporated in Accel is vastly larger than any one student will ever see. But we didn’t have to pay for them.”

  Ping finally looked up from having crushed the uranium monopolists in her scenario. “Free labor?” She sounded skeptical.

  Lenora smiled. “Royalties.”

  Ciara explained. “Accel is not actually an educational tool. Rather, it’s a framework for incorporating educational tools, mostly modules, and paying royalties to the authors based on the frequency with which those modules successfully teach students the specified material.” Ciara eyed her mother. “Mom’s a teacher, she designed Accel, but dad’s a software engineer. He and Dr. James Caplan, the third founder of the company, implemented the first version of the framework and the first versions of the tools used to create and integrate new modules.” She shook her head sadly. “Talk about a victim of your own success. Dad loved developing software. But now he’s trapped on the BrainTrust, running the Accel corporation, managing a bunch of former computer game developers and subject matter experts who get to do all the fun stuff.”

  Jam looked thoughtfully between the mother and the daughter. “So Accel has been a big success? It seems like it should be. After all, it frees the teachers to focus on helping the students who have problems, and lets some of the best teachers make money writing modules.”

  Ciara looked downcast.

  Lenora pursed her lips. “Before coming to the BrainTrust, we had some limited success with homeschooling parents. But for school system adoption we ran into the usual problems with textbook publishers, teachers unions, and government certifying boards, each of whom would lose out if we shifted to a system that empowered each individual child to self-actualize at their own maximum speed.”

  Lenora raised her arms to the skies of Lothlorien. “We’ve known since the beginning of the century that children learn more, better, faster if they start school later in the day. The research evidence has been overwhelming for decades. And still the vast majority of schools require their students to assemble and sit in their chairs and start listening to lectures at eight in the morning. For a society with school systems so rigid they can't even embrace a reasonable start time, what chance does a true revolution have?”

  Ping’s eyes gleamed. “So you’re going to accelerate impoverished children from the backwaters of China through an educational experience that will make them better faster, and you’re going to stick your success in their eyes.”

  Lenora hesitated, clearly wanting a more tactful description of the plan.

  Ciara’s eyes gleamed back. “You got it in one.”

  Meanwhile, Lenora flicked the display to a map of China with thousands of bright little dots. “We developed and deployed a testing module—psychological tests and measurements, really—available free for download. It does a first-pass screening for people with the intelligence, drive, etc., etc., to become high-productivity BrainTrust members. Each dot represents someone who passed the tests. As you can see, they come literally from all over the map. We are going to make Mao’s adage, “Let a hundred flowers blossom’ into a reality the likes of which he could not have imagined.” Her smile turned wicked. “And of which I suspect he would have mightily disapproved.”

  Jam heard the subtext. “He’s not the only one who’ll disapprove. There’s a whole government bureaucracy—”

  Ciara augmented this description. “—the biggest, most cumbersome and corrupt bureaucracy on earth, in the country that first perfected bureaucracy thousands of years ago—”

  Jam continued. “—dedicated to ensuring no one steps out of line or upsets the status quo.”

  Ciara leaned forward. “Backed by billions of surveillance cameras.”

  Ping added, “And millions of police, soldiers, and other thugs and enforcers.”

  Jam finished. “And led by a gang of tyrants no better than Mao, in fact in many ways worse.”

  Lenora shrugged. “Exactly why we need people like you to take on the leadership of the expedition.”

  Jam just grunted.

  Ping couldn’t have cared less about the obstacles, risks, and problems. She whooped. “I’m in.” Remembering that she was going off to fight pirates, she added, “Jam’s in too.”

  Jam just grunted. Again.

  SNATCHED

  They that sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind.

  —Book of Hosea, Old Testament

  Matt sat at the desk in his home office. He had surrendered to Gina’s urging to buy Ben’s abode on the Haven when he realized just how short of space they were throughout the BrainTrust. They’d had a hard time finding him a place to put his desk, much less a private conference room, on the Argus with his team. So he’d turned part of their new home into an office. The place was still too large, in his opinion. Gina thought it a wee bit small, but she’d manage somehow.

  Dash sat beside him, explaining some opportunities for him. Somehow, opportunities always seemed like reasons to spend more money. He’d burned almost half the SpaceR cushion getting the Heinlein up and running. He’d have to be more careful in the future. Still, an opportunity was an opportunity.

  Dash finished explaining how the methane converter worked. “They’ve worked out the flaws in the prototypes they had before the launch. I think that it is now ready.”

  Matt pursed his lips. “So you think I should buy one?” He tapped on his tablet, and the wallscreen shifted views. His leased LNG tanker sat snugly at anchor beside the Hephaestus, the modified isle ship where all the dangerous, toxic, or potentially explosive manufacturing was done. Both ships were parked a kilometer away from the main archipelago. “Will I be able to get rid of the tanker?”

  Dash considered the question. “Probably not. You don’t want to store the fuel for multiple launches on the Heinlein. If something goes wrong in the fuel-handling, it would be good if the explosion did not destroy the entire ship. Keeping the bulk of the fuel in a separate ship seems prudent.”

  Matt smiled. “Yes, prudent indeed.”

  Dash continued. “However, you could considerably reduce your fuel bills with locally-manufactured methane. Over half your fuel costs are carbon taxes. If you were converting algae, those costs would go away.”

  Matt nodded. “OK, now you’re talking my language. So I buy a couple of these converters from the startup on Dreams Come True, and the savings go straight to the bottom line?”

  Dash sighed. “It is not quite that easy. The BrainTrust artificial reef does not produce enough algae for your needs, and most of it is already dedicated to other purposes anyway. We were able to handle a short emergency for your company, but it is not a long-term solution.” She sat up straight and looked him in the eye. “You would need to build your own artificial reef.”

  Matt put his hands to his face and laughed. “And how much is this going to cost me?”

  Dash did a short computation on her tablet. “You should talk with Alex yourself, but when he and I discussed it, we concluded it would cost comfortably less than a hundred million. In dollars, that is. Really, you should learn to deal with prices in SmartCoin, like the rest of the people on the archipelago.”

  Disregarding this last chastisement, Matt looked up at the ceiling as he did a rough estimate in his head. “So the payback time would be about three years.”

  “Indeed.”

  Matt sighed. “The numbers are still compelling.”

  “I thought you might consider them to be so.” Dash looked at her tablet. “I have to go. I have real work to do on my own project.” Her eyes lit up. “Though it is always a delight to help out with th
e mission to conquer space.”

  Matt smiled back. “Thank you, Dash.” He continued casually, “By the way, I thought I should mention that you are now a shareholder in SpaceR.”

  Dash shook her head in disbelief. “What?”

  “I talked with the Board. You should be receiving confirmation in the next day or two. You’re a shareholder.” He smiled wickedly. “A substantial shareholder at that. I want to tear you away from your other projects as often as I can.”

  “Goodness.” She paused thoughtfully. “Does this make me a rocket scientist?”

  “No. The work you did to earn the shares made you a rocket scientist.”

  Dash laughed briefly. “Of course. Thank you.” She looked back at her tablet. “I really have to go.”

  As she departed, Matt’s cell buzzed at him with the Darth Vader ringtone. He sighed. He had been dreading this conversation for days. He punched the answer button. “Good morning, Governor.”

  The Attorney General had been busy in the week since the governor had explained his proposal for forcing SpaceR back into line. Lining up the lawyers, the judge, and the police to enforce their newest edict, all in secret so SpaceR would have no chance to develop a defense, was exhausting. But it was done. Now he could relax and watch the wheels of Justice do their job. He listened, out of sight of the vidcam, as the governor spoke to Matthew Toscano. “I’ve been wanting to congratulate you on your successful launch.”

  “Thank you, Governor. I hope our change in launch venue does not change the excellent working relationship SpaceR has had with you.”

  The governor’s smile fixed itself in place. The Attorney General was a little surprised he could not hear the governor’s teeth grinding, but he still had control of the situation. “You owe us four billion dollars,” he stated in a matter-of-fact tone used to state the obvious.”

  “Ah. Yes. I’m not surprised to hear that’s your opinion.”