Crescendo Of Fire

by Marc Stiegler

  More complexity? And he was so close to finishing this session. He sighed. “Yes, Dash?”

  “In addition to the financial compensation that I am sure you will judge wisely, I have another demand of Dmitri I hope you will enforce for me.”

  Ah! Could this be the innovative punishment he’d sought? “I would be delighted to consider your proposal.”

  Dash squared her shoulders. “I require that Dmitri refurbish the medical compartment on board his yacht to my specifications. Honestly, for a ship with gold plated faucets, his facilities to deal with accidents, injuries, and infections are an embarrassment. They must be improved upon.”

  Well, not quite as punishing as he had hoped for, but Joshua was happy to enforce this request. “As you wish.”

  Joshua looked down at his tablet. “To wrap up, here are the sums to be paid to Dash and Chance in compensation for the egregious violation of their persons.” He named an amount.

  Chance leapt into the air with a whoop, then fell to the ground, laughing, “I’m rich! I’m rich!” She sucked in a lungful of air. “I can’t wait to tell my mom!”

  Dash looked down at Chance rolling on the floor. Granted, Joshua’s compensation was generous. But it was hardly worth having a fit over. Then she thought about her former patients on Bali. Desperately poor, many of them, considering themselves lucky if they had a motor scooter to hoist all three children aboard to drive to the market. Such a sight they made swerving down the winding roads! So dangerous, yet so happy.

  She visualized them receiving such riches. She saw them, whole extended families, dazed, struck dumb by their good fortune. She put her hand to her mouth again, this time in embarrassment. “Oh, my.” Living on the BrainTrust had severely damaged her concept of what it meant to be wealthy.

  HOW TO BUILD A ROCKET AT HOME

  If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment, so people working on this must be really unethical.

  --Casual comment overheard in Berkeley, spoken in the tone of self-evident truth

  Dash juggled the last of four large boxes into the back of an arvee. As she straightened, she saw Chance approach. "Chance!" She cried. "You are just in time to come with me to celebrate!" Dash hopped into one of the front seats and patted the other chair. "Come on."

  Chance, quite mystified by this eagerly excited version of her boss, climbed into the seat next to her. "What are we celebrating?"

  Dash just laughed. "you will know in just a couple of minutes."

  As the car surged over the gangway to the Elysian Fields, Chance tried to guess where they were going. "Are we going to Dmitri's? Surely we’re not getting on his yacht again."

  Even this reference to their too recent kidnapping was unable to break Dash’s mood. "Lords, no. We are not going that far. We have a party on the Dreams Come True."

  "Cool! Who's throwing the party?"

  Dash giggled. "We are."

  Their little arvee rolled into the nearest elevator once they were on the Dreams, then rolled out onto a Battlestar-themed deck. Here and there they passed Cylon warriors, the clunky metal ones from the first TV series, and federation officers engaging them in various forms of combat. In one scene, a tall Cylon played chess with a captain, while in another place a pair of Cylons were clearly fleecing a number of lieutenants in a game of poker. The arvee stopped in front of a side corridor with a small black sign etched in gold that read, Dark Alpha Corporation.

  Chance now had a pretty good idea what they were celebrating. "So how were the results with our new set of patients?"

  Dash gave a little leap in the air as she got out of the arvee. "You take the two boxes on your side, I'll take the two boxes on my side." Grabbing her boxes, Dash scurried into Dark Alphas offices.

  As Chance entered, she saw the receptionist frown as Dash rushed past her, disregarding polite protocol. Dash shouted, "everybody! We have cake! Strawberry cake, lemon cake, and angel food. And chocolate! Come and get it!"

  Chance muttered apologetically to the receptionist, "she just saved a lot of people's lives, using your AI," she explained. "Why don't you come have a piece of cake?"

  The receptionist gave her a forgiving smile. "Well then, I guess I better find a knife and some paper plates," she offered brightly.

  Chance found Dash cutting slices of cake with a scalpel. Chance sighed. "I guess you can take the surgeon out of the hospital, but you can't take the hospital out of the surgeon."

  Fortunately, the receptionist arrived in time with the plates, knives, and forks. As they started passing cake around, a short man with feverish eyes and a stubbled chin suggesting he had worked in the office all night entered the conference room. Everyone turned to look at him, and Chance surmised he was the boss. His eyes widened. "Dash. What are you doing here?"

  Dash handed him a piece of chocolate cake. "Everyone's alive. I have ten patients, one of them is showing no effect from the therapy, and the other nine are all showing signs of rejuvenation. No one is going to die."

  The boss pumped his fist in the air. "Yes!" He turned to the receptionist. "Emily, don't we have some champagne around here someplace?" With that, the celebration turned into an all afternoon affair.

  After all the champagne and most of the cake had been consumed, and every person there had congratulated every other person in the room on the key role they had played in this victory, Chance and Dash took another arvee back to their lab. As the vehicle rolled along, Chance pulled out her tablet. "Time to pick more patients. So I guess I want to submit this next list to Dark Alpha 42?"

  "Not necessary." Dash took the tablet from her. She read through the medical records of all the fresh candidates and checked off the acceptance boxes for ten of them. By this time they had reached their lab. Chance sat patiently in the arvee until Dash finished.

  Finally, Dash handed the tablet back and climbed out of the vehicle. "There you go. Those should be fine patients for our next run."

  Chance stood stock still as she studied the list. "Are you telling me that you’ve figured out how the AI selects new patients?"

  Dash's eyes gleamed with mischievous laughter. "When I saw Dark Alpha 42's level of confidence in its own predictions, I pulled a random sample of a couple of thousand patients from all over the Chiron, and had the AI assess them. I then took all of those examples, along with our historical patients, and studied them for more hours than I can count. Finally, I pulled another hundred patients from the database, and confirmed that I made the same selections as Dark Alpha."

  Chance laughed, then looked eagerly into Dash's eyes. "That's great! So now that you know, tell me. How do we distinguish the viable candidates from the ones who would die?"

  Dash opened her mouth to answer, then closed her mouth again. Finally, she confessed, "I still do not know. I know how to pick them myself, but I cannot really express it in words." She twitched her nose. "Very disturbing."

  Chance just shook her head. "Dash, I think someone slipped some nonhuman algorithms into your genetic coding."

  Dash pursed her lips as they continued walking. "Very unlikely. Very unlikely indeed."

  One of the nice things about horseback riding was the opportunity to contemplate irritating problems without distraction, and without feeling the irritation. Green grass stretched out before the Premier for kilometers, with only the occasional tree acting as an accent in the smooth perfection. This was a part of one of the Premier’s private ranches, maintained just for his amusement.

  He zipped his leather jacket against the nip in the air and took Thunder out at a trot. Thunder, true to form, sidled just a bit to the right as they started across the plain, hoping to reach the tree near the barn with the low hanging branch that would sweep the Premier from the saddle. The Premier let Thunder play his little game for a few moments before correcting him. Beyond the tree, the Premier let Thunder speed up as the Premier turned his mental energy to his current problem and concomitant opportunity.

  Yesterday the proble
m that he had taken horseback riding had still been getting his hands on the rejuvenation therapy. He had reluctantly concluded that, since Dmitri had blown the best chance, his next step was to sit back and wait, counting on the Chief Advisor to get the girl and share the cure with his friends. It was unsatisfying to be reduced to the role of spectator, but he admitted a certain relief at having made the decision.

  Today’s irritation still resided with the BrainTrust, but the target had changed. His next problem was SpaceR.

  SpaceR had been annoying him for a long time now. Once upon a time, the Russian space program had been an enormously profitable undertaking. Nobody had rockets that could lift as much payload as the Russian Proton heavy lifter. She had been the queen of the skies.

  Acting just like any good capitalist, the Premier had charged prices every bit as amazing as the size of the Proton's payloads. But then SpaceR had come out with the reusable Kestrel Heavy.

  Disaster. How swiftly his loyal customers had betrayed him. How swiftly his mighty Proton had fallen. The only way he'd been able to keep the Russian rocket program alive was by launching all of Russia's own satellites with them, which was enormously expensive. The Russian rockets had cost a fortune, not only because of the profits he extracted but because of their underlying exorbitant costs.

  Now the rocket business was looking up. The itty bitty computer bug he'd had planted in the chips on the Kestrel Heavy had finally caused one to explode.

  It had been a careful dance.

  When the American government had started debating yet again, after yet another minor terrorist attack, whether to force all computer chips from all manufacturers to have built-in backdoors, the Premier had been delighted. He had put all the Russian trolls and bots on all the social media to work supporting the proposal. The result had been everything he could have hoped for.

  The American government had assured the people that no one would be able to use the back door except the always honorable and ever incorruptible employees of the United States government, along with their contractors and their subcontractors. The crypto geeks had established a five-by-seven encryption system. Seven people had partial keys for the backdoor. Opening it required a subset of five of them to get together and combine their sub-keys.

  It was a sweet system, mathematically elegant enough to make his own crypto geeks swoon. As a practical matter, it was also delightfully straightforward to break. Bribe one key holder, blackmail another one, infect the computer that belonged to a third with a quiet virus, and plant a miniature vidcam in the office of a fourth. The Premier's own crypto people had broken the fifth sub-key by exploiting a weakness in the random number generator used to create it.

  The Premier could now use the back door more easily than could the president of the country that had created it in the first place. The President for Life and the Chief Advisor still had to bring five of the key holders together to break into the chips, whereas the Premier had gone the extra distance to combine all five sub-keys into the functioning super-key on his personal computer. As a consequence, the Chief Advisor tended to access the most confidential materials created by his enemies and his potential enemies only about once a week, whereas the Premier could do so on a daily basis.

  While the Premier used his access religiously to eavesdrop and spy, he was very judicious indeed in using the backdoor to insert fake news, computer bugs, and viruses. It would be terrible if people became aware that he had full power over all the computers in the world. Everybody with real secrets would switch to using the BrainTrust chips in which the backdoor circuitry had been removed.

  So when he decided to cripple SpaceR to make the Proton rocket once again a viable platform for commercial sales, he had had his programmers create a virus that inserted just the tiniest little statistical risk into the Kestrel Heavy's engine behavior. The virus introduced a barely meaningful delay into the responsiveness of the fuel valve controllers that had to ensure that all twenty-seven engines were creating exactly the same amount of thrust at exactly the same time. The premier's programmers figured that about one time in a hundred the consequent fluctuation would shake and vibrate the boosters to the extent that something catastrophic would happen.

  It had all worked just about as he had hoped.

  Honestly, he would have preferred to have had the accident occur with a capsule full of people rather than a cargo of habitat cubes. But the death of the little girl's kitty on YouTube had served very nearly as well. Perhaps even better. It looked for a while like the state of California would destroy SpaceR outright for him.

  But not quite. The new CEO, Toscano, had pulled a fast one. Nicely done; the launch from the center of the BrainTrust archipelago had been beautiful, he had to admit.

  But every move led to a counter move. California had taken a fabulously aggressive next step. Toscano had responded in kind. Moving his whole manufacturing operation to the BrainTrust seemed like an act of desperation. Customers were noticing. People with cargoes so valuable they could afford a Proton were making inquiries already, just in case they needed a backup plan. A critical moment in the history of rocketry was upon them. Just a little push and the Premier would own the future.

  So he'd go all out this time. No statistical vagaries here. His man inside SpaceR would infect the new Kestrel Titan with a guaranteed set of rocket killing viruses. The rocket would blow up seconds after leaving the pad. The whole Kestrel Titan line of boosters would be discredited and abandoned by paying customers.

  Beautiful as SpaceR's first launch from the BrainTrust had been, this launch would supply the better spectacle. After all, everyone loved a good explosion.

  Matt wore a pair of blue jeans, loafers, and his battered old Tilley hat used for hiking in the Sierras. He boarded the ferry to San Diego. He looked like another scruffy tourist, exhausted from the continuous party on Elysian Fields. He did not think he would be arrested if the governor and the attorney general learned he was back in California, but he was not interested in finding out.

  Meanwhile, Gina decked herself out with a white halter dress with matching purse and heels and took a copter back to San Francisco, where she hopped a plane to LAX, and grabbed a limo down to Palos Verdes. “Roberta!” she gushed as she rolled into her real estate agent’s office. “New house time!”

  Roberta looked puzzled, then smiled. “You’ve only been in your current house for what, a year? Is something wrong?”

  “Very much so!” Gina exclaimed, throwing out a hip and putting her hand on it. “Matt’s the CEO now. We need something bigger. Better for entertaining.”

  Roberta’s smile got larger. “Yes, you certainly do. I’m so glad you’re here.”

  And the two of them sat down together to work on the sale of the current home, while planning, once the sale was in place, the extended house-hunting expedition to find a suitable mansion as the replacement.

  And Gina fully planned to go house-hunting, but only because she and Roberta always had a blast together. Alas, though Roberta would make a fine commission on the sale of the current house, she would be disappointed when the buying of another house fell through. Gina just hoped she could make it up to her someday, somehow.

  But the BrainTrust was Gina’s home now. Their house on the Haven might be cramped, but it was safe from the kind of civil forfeiture procedures already underway against SpaceR.

  Civil forfeiture was much on the minds of other people as well. Tom Patterson, the boss of International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Local 1953, stood menacingly in the governor’s office. Heavy-set, he had a jovial smile that had become his signature in college after a close-up photo taken with a zoom lens caught it—he had smiled in that same way under his helmet after he had tackled a wide receiver and knocked the football from the opponent’s hands, into the hands of a teammate. The teammate had then run it back for a touchdown.

  His team had played Matt Toscano’s Notre Dame once in a playoff. Tom liked to think that he’d smashed
that bastard to the ground at least once while they were on the field together. Irritatingly, though, Notre Dame had won the game.

  The governor repeated his earlier request. “Please sit,” he said in a tone that sounded more like a command.

  Tom had not gotten where he was today by obeying commands. He continued to stand. “I still can’t believe you shut us down. No warning. No work. No paychecks.” Tom’s Local 1953 ran the union for SpaceR’s headquarters in Hawthorne. He leaned across the governor’s desk. “Get your goons off the premises. Now.” He spoke even more softly than the governor had, but he sounded even more like he was giving commands.

  The Attorney General, seated a little out of the way, complained, “Tom. No need to get your nose so out of joint. Everything’s under control.”

  The governor chimed in, “You’ll get your back pay, never fear, it’s part of the deal we’re demanding from that Toscano bastard.”

  Tom kept his eyes fixed on the governor as if the Attorney General did not exist. “We want our pay now.”

  The Attorney General, who did not like being disregarded, got out of his chair and came up beside the desk as well. “The governor said to stay cool. Your next payday is when…ten days from now?”

  Tom nodded.

  The Attorney General just smiled. “Relax, then. This will all be water under the bridge by that time. Toscano can’t afford to keep you sidelined for that long. He’ll pony up the cash, and you’ll be back on the job. The only effect on your union members is, they’ll have gotten a few days at the beach on SpaceR’s dime.”

  Tom turned his glare slowly to the Attorney General. “So far none of your plans have worked out the way you expected. Why should this plan work any better than the last one?”

  The governor answered, “Look, OK, you’re right, we overplayed our hand when we tried to take their whole nest egg. So they built a new launch pad outside our jurisdiction.” He paused.