Crescendo Of Fire

by Marc Stiegler

  Dash responded, “You are probably right. Though I suspect the risk is greater than you might guess. Regardless, the problem is that our chips supply fewer teraflops on a per-kilo basis than the newest chips. That could be a problem for you.” She sighed, pulled out her tablet, and started doing some calculations. “Fortunately, our new titanium boosters are a little bit lighter than the old aluminum ones. I had thought that would be a pleasant surprise for you at the end, but I guess we could use the surplus weight budget for more chips to achieve the needed compute power.”

  Matt groaned. “So I’ll need more chips. Let me guess. It’s going to cost me more.”

  Dash laughed. “In fact, our chips, being of older designs, are easier to produce and cost less. You will be able to save some money on this.” She paused then qualified her statement. “A little bit, anyway.”

  Matt whooped. “At last. It probably won’t happen again, but it’s a nice feeling while it lasts.”

  Gary listened as his friends checked in.

  “No guards on the east fence.”

  “No guards on the north fence.”

  “Two guards on the main gate.”

  Everything looked to be about as Gary had expected. The governor may have locked the factory up, but his forces were hardly ready to stand up against any serious assault. Or any serious skullduggery, for that matter.

  No guards could see what was about to happen. Gary spoke to the driver of the lead truck. “Bring up the lights.” As Gary covered his eyes against the glare of the lead truck’s headlights as he waved them forward. “Brandi, make a hole.”

  A woman in coveralls that hid her curves jumped to the chain link fence and started cutting. Two additional partners in crime went to help. Very quickly indeed they made a hole. The trucks, short-range haulers with electric motors, silently rolled over the metal plates they’d dropped on the gully-ridden dirt and into the east parking lot. As Brandi and the others set to work patching the fence back together, the trucks rolled up to a loading dock while another participant with the keys opened the adjacent door, entered, and started rolling the loading dock door up into the ceiling.

  Word came from over the phone. “Stop a minute. The guards can hear you.”

  They stopped, and moments later the voice announced, “Ok, keep going. But quietly.”

  Brandi and her companions rejoined the main force. “Ok, everyone, you’re all assigned specific pieces of equipment. Let’s do this.” The factory workers, now in the legally ambiguous state of burglars stealing their own equipment for the company that owned the gear, sped through the building to reach their specified targets. Equipment started to flow back to the dock, into the trucks.

  Brandi snapped her chewing gum. “You know, boss, there’s a really important piece of equipment we didn’t put on the list.”

  Gary looked at her in puzzlement. She waved for him to follow her, across the factory floor, into the offices, out to the reception area. She pointed at the piece of critical gear.

  Gary inhaled sharply. “Oh, yes. We must take this. Even if we have to leave something else behind.”

  They brought back some of the crew who’d finished early and moved the gear ever so carefully out to the trucks. Everyone complimented Brandi on remembering the most important item in the factory.

  They finished loading the trucks. Brandi stuck her gum to the dock, then stripped off her coveralls to reveal a black business pantsuit with an ivory shirt and a blue scarf. As they rolled up to the guards, she swung down from the passenger side of the first truck’s cab. “Gentlemen,” she called out, “Let us through.”

  One guard strolled over, peering at her suspiciously. “What the hell are you doing here? Nobody in, nobody out, by order of the governor.”

  Brandi, using the expression she usually used to fend off jerks with crude pickup lines, quite similar to the expression she’d used when giving commands as an Air Force Lieutenant, waved her hands around at the trucks and the gate. “Yet, as you can see, we already came in. I’m just following orders, just like you. It took us longer to load this stuff than expected.” She shrugged. “Sorry.”

  The second guard came over. “What’s going on?”

  Brandi jumped in before the first guard could answer. “Moving some key items to more secure storage. Trust me when I tell you the boss wants this stuff as secure as possible. Relax boys, it’s not like we could pack the whole factory into two trucks.” She pulled out some paperwork. “Look, I’ve got a shipping manifest here, the stuff we’re taking. I’ll sign it and give it to you as a receipt.” She wrote her name on the top sheet with a flourish and handed it to them. “Now, can we go? We’ve got a long night ahead of us.”

  The guards looked at each other skeptically and Brandi blew out a breath in exasperation. “Let me show you what we’ve got.” She led them to the back of the truck, opened the door, and let them see the most important prize of the journey. Her voice took on a honey-coated drawl. “Does this look like it’s gonna help that SpaceR creep build more rockets? Nobody’s said so, but I presume the big boss will want to put this in his reception area. Sort of a way of giving the other guy the finger.”

  Finally, one guard muttered to the other, “She’s right, this ain’t gonna help nobody build no rocket ships.”

  The other guard shook his head. “This is the strangest assignment I’ve ever had.” He looked at the receipt Brandi had given him and waved the other man into the gatehouse. “Open it.” He turned and tipped his cap to Brandi. “You have a nice night, ma’am.”

  Brandi smiled. “You too.”

  She hopped back in the truck.

  Gary took off. He raised an eyebrow. “What was that again? ‘That creep at SpaceR’?”

  Brandi switched off the honey-coated drawl; she was once again all Air Force officer. “Can it, airman.”

  Gary sat up straighter. “Yes, ma’am!” He slumped back down. “Or should that be, ‘Aye, aye, ma’am’? We’re living on a ship, after all.”

  After spending the night driving, and the day on the ferry, and another night hauling the equipment into place in the Argus, Gary and Brandi stood with their crew in the promenade of the manufacturing ship. As Matt approached, they all beamed at him, blocking his way.

  Matt looked around at all the shining faces. “What’s up?”

  Gary answered, “Special equipment arrival, Mister CEO. Let me show you what we’ve got.” He handed Matt the manifest.

  Matt scanned through the pages at high speed, muttering an occasional, “great,” or “thank god!” He looked up in astonishment. “These are all the most critical items we couldn’t replicate here. Where’d you get all this stuff?”

  Gary looked at the ground for a moment. “We, ah, made an informal arrangement to move them from Hawthorne to more secure storage.”

  Brandi snickered. “Very informal.”

  Matt was clearly having trouble deciding whether to frown about the theft, laugh about the escapade, or commend them on their initiative.

  Brandi interrupted his musings. “The most important item isn’t on the list.”

  A mutter of agreement arose throughout the small crowd of desperadoes. Mystified, Matt followed as Brandi led them into the new reception area by the executive offices. She raised her hand. “Ta-da!”

  Matt looked up. A life-size suit of armor stood before him, slightly larger than a man. It was dark cherry red and SkyBlast yellow, with Black Widow’s autograph over the heart.

  Matt’s eyes misted over and he looked at his henchmen with unblinking respect. “By far the most important piece of equipment from the old factory,” he whispered. “Consider yourselves all put in for bonuses.” His expression turned wry. “Assuming we still have a company in four months, let’s be clear.”

  FUXING RISING

  Devise and run a Nigerian Hoax, as described in the preceding module, against your teammates and teachers. Extra merit tokens awarded for a successful hoax. Merit rewards deducted for running the hoa
x against your parents or others.

  —Accel, Topic: Mental Manipulation. Module: Nigerian Hoax Wrap-up

  The combined fleets of the Fuxing and Prometheus archipelagos came upon their destination, an empty point in the ocean equidistant from China, Taiwan, and the Philippines, as the sun peeked over the horizon. The immense bulks of the isle ships cast shadows stretching to the horizon. Caught in those shadows, a peculiar cluster of disparate boats awaited them.

  Ping stood with the other project leaders on the Taixue, near the forward gangway of the promenade deck. She shook her head as she looked down at the vessels. “Sampans! Riverboats. What kind of an idiot would bring a sampan out here? It’s a miracle they made it.”

  Jam pointed out the obvious. “I’d guess about half of them didn’t make it. See how many people are crammed on board? They must’ve rescued the people from the boats that sank.” She continued with admiration in her voice, “My kind of people.”

  Lenora tapped on her phone. “Captain Ainsworth? Are you planning to dock the sampans first? If you don’t, they’ll founder. It’d be a shame if they all drowned so close to their destination.” She hung up. “I’d hoped for a turnout like this, with the desperately poor who passed the Accel assessment intro then braving all obstacles to reach us.” She bit her lip. “But it was probably a mistake sending out the app before we got here. Hope we didn’t lose anyone.”

  Ciara pointed to starboard at a mega-yacht that seemed intent on picking off as many of the sampans as it could as it hurried to dock. “Not everyone had to suffer to get here, it looks like,” she observed dryly.

  Lenora smiled. “Ah, yes. That would be the princelings. Hopefully our first paying students.”

  Ping stared at Lenora. “You were expecting them?”

  Lenora nodded. “A college student named Fan Hui sent me a message, alerted me they’d be meeting us.” Lenora waved to the mega-yacht, where two young men and one young woman stood on the top deck peering through the shadows back at them. The female saw her, waved back.

  Ping half-jumped. “Fan Hui? Are you sure?”

  Lenora looked at her, puzzled. “Quite sure. Know her?”

  Ping seemed to need a moment to regain her composure. Finally, she growled, “I don’t have to know her. Princelings. Trouble.”

  Ciara explained to her mother, “Money. Revenue.”

  Jam thought a distraction might be in order. “What about the other ship? The one with the advertisement on the side.”

  Lenora offered a guess. “Probably a charter. Someone with money.”

  Ping added, “But someone without a Daddy in the Politburo. Someone without connections. No mega-yacht for him.”

  Lenora looked at her shrewdly. “A self-made man. Excellent.”

  Adam no longer remembered his real name. He’d had so many names and identities that the original was lost to history. For now he was Adam, because his passport said so.

  Of course, here on the BrainTrust, he had to remember his current name without recourse to a passport, because you didn’t need a passport. Or a driver’s license. Or a birth certificate. The closest thing most people had to an ID was their company key badge, for getting into the locked office if you felt inspired to get some work done at midnight when no one was around. Or, in the startups where everyone was working at midnight, for getting in at noon when no one was around.

  Adam fingered his own SpaceR key badge as he opened the door into the double-decker 3D printing hall. A half-complete rocket booster for the new Kestrel Titan gleamed dully at him. He’d heard rumors they were going to soup up the outer surface, make it pretty, but today it still looked like silver-grey titanium.

  He pulled out his tricorder—really a Bluetooth hacking remote, but it looked like a tricorder—and walked slowly around the rocket, detecting and infiltrating the controller chips one by one. In a few minutes, he was done. All the controller chips had been patched with whatever code his boss had chosen to upload. Unbelievably easy.

  Since hooking up with his new boss, all his jobs had been unbelievably easy. The tricorder hacked through everything like a ninja zooming through an open window. It was as if the tricorder had the American government’s master keys to the backdoors in all the chips. After the first half dozen jobs, he’d concluded the tricorder did, in fact, have those master keys.

  Realizing he wielded the ultimate weapon for world domination, Adam had of course tried to use the tricorder and its magic to pull off several jobs of his own, but the box refused to yield its secrets or use them for any purpose other than the jobs downloaded from his boss’s web site. X-ray analysis showed the tricorder more than ready to destroy its most sensitive components if Adam attempted a physical breach. Disappointing, but thrilling in its own way. Either his boss, whoever he was, had stolen the famous seven-key code from the US government, or Adam was working more or less directly for the Chief Advisor, or even the President for Life. If so, he was a patriot even if he were also a saboteur.

  Adam verified that his device had recorded verifications on all the hacks on all the chips before departing. When he uploaded those verifications for the boss, payment would appear as if by magic in his account. He loved being a patriot, particularly when it was so profitable.

  Lenora briefly surveyed her domain, namely, her classroom. At the head of the room, a small circle of chairs sat on a plush carpet that covered most of the floor. Four teamwork areas occupied the rest of the room. Three of the areas held collections of apparatus like you would expect to find in a lab. One area surrounded a table with a collection of boxes of the shape and style that one might expect to hold board games. The lighting came soft and subdued from the entire ceiling. Acoustic tiles covered those sections of the walls not covered in display screens. The tiles and the carpet subdued the sound so successfully that the four teamwork areas and the circle of chairs could all be alive with people without the noise from any one group disturbing other teams. In a ship that would someday soon teem with families, where every square foot of floor space was precious, the room's spaciousness seemed extravagant.

  She sat down at the head of the circle of chairs and hunched over her tablet, and soon a bot escorted the three princelings from the mega-yacht to her. Lenora rose to greet them. The woman who led the princelings was taller in person than she had seemed when viewed across the ocean. And she wore calm confidence like armor. Lenora knew to look at her that if she cried, which she would not, her makeup would not run…if she wore makeup, which she did not.

  Fan Hui smiled as she stepped forward, though the smile did not reach her eyes. "I am Fan Hui," she said as she extended her hand in greeting.

  Lenora nodded. “Yes, the daughter of a Politburo member."

  “Just so.” Fan Hui pointed to the tall young man who was at that moment carefully studying his perfectly manicured fingernails. "This is Guang Jian, son of the third member of the Standing Committee." Guang Jian shifted his head slightly in what might have been an acknowledgment. Fan Hui pointed to the other male member of the group, a short fellow with pimply skin whose hair stuck out in ragged, unkempt patches despite obvious attempts to rein it in. "Chen Ying, another son of the Politburo."

  Lenora nodded her head. "Your message reached me that you were on your way. Welcome to the BrainTrust."

  Guang raised an eyebrow. "This is not really the BrainTrust. This is the Fuxing, correct?"

  Lenora tilted her head side to side. "Both, really. I suppose a detailed characterization would be, we are standing in the isle ship Taixue, one of two ships currently of the Fuxing archipelago, a wholly owned subsidiary of the BrainTrust Consortium. The Fuxing may be either an archipelago or a fleet, depending on whether we’re at anchor or moving."

  Fan Hui looked puzzled. “Only two ships? I saw several more than that. What are the others?”

  Lenora answered, “The other three ships belong to the Prometheus archipelago, though they’ll be staying here for a while, while we all help build a third Fuxing ship. We or
iginally had another ship, but our third ship got hijacked.” At the surprised expressions on the three students, she clarified, “No, not by pirates, by the Consortium, for the launch pad for SpaceR.”

  Chen’s eyes widened. “Cool. I watched the first launch. Will we get the chance to work with SpaceR?” Seeing impatience in the expressions of both Fan and Guang, Chen waved it away. “Whatever. We'd like to be the first students in your university.”

  Lenora brought her hands together, not quite clapping. "Excellent. We do of course have some tests you'll need to pass. I presume you can all afford the tuition, room, and board."

  Guang drew himself up to his full height. "We have to pass a test? Are you kidding? You have an empty ship with no students. You need us more than we need you."

  Fan stroked Guang's arm soothingly as she spoke to Lenora. "Of course, Ms. Thornhill. We'll be happy to pass your tests." She glared at her boyfriend. "It won't be a problem. When do we begin?"

  Lenora pondered for a moment. "Give me an hour to get set up. In the meantime, let's assume you’ll pass." As you already take for granted, she thought with amusement. Her thoughts turned sour. They would in fact almost certainly pass. She did need them as much or more than they needed her. Guang had an irritatingly sharp mind, even if, as she suspected, he were lazy, cynical, self-centered, and completely amoral.

  Hopefully, they did need her as much as she needed them. For them to have come here, they must have had few options. Princelings would not go to a university that was not already prestigious unless serious problems lurked in their histories. "I'll have a bot show you your cabins, and have your belongings delivered there."

  The soft sound of an orchestral symphony came from the Chief Advisor’s tablet, telling him he had good news. A quick glance told him the story. His viruses had been uploaded to all the controller chips in the Kestrel Titan booster. When launched, the booster would dance to his tune.