His tune was simpler than the launch plan intended by SpaceR. Under the Advisor’s control, the rocket would lift off, tilt quickly to its side, roar over the BrainTrust archipelago, and transform into a fireball.
As the devastation swept over the BrainTrust, the Advisor’s Navy ships, humbly standing by just outside the archipelago’s reef in case of emergency, would move in to render aid. One team would have special instructions, to render aid to the isle ship Chiron, regardless of how much or how little damage she’d taken. They would sweep through the vessel to seek out and render aid specifically to Dr. Dash. In an emergency like this, Dash would surely be in the hospital emergency trauma area helping victims. The Advisor’s team would scoop her up and, amidst the confusion, transport her with all due haste to America.
The Advisor was only slightly concerned that Dash would be killed in the rocket blast. Some of the newer isle ships, he’d heard, were built primarily with magnesium, and could easily wind up turning into fiery immolations of their own. But the Chiron was an older ship made with tough, reliable steel. She’d survive, and he would have her.
He savored the moment, contemplating idly which ships he’d send for the event. The cruiser Vella Gulf was already tasked with shadowing the BrainTrust ships. He’d send the Harper’s Ferry, which was designed for docking, relief, and rescue operations. Everyone would be surprised if he didn’t send an actual support vessel, and they might suspect that his motives were not honorable.
And he’d send the Zumwalt. The Zumwalt had been intended to be the first of thirty-two ships of a new, advanced class of guided missile destroyer. Fabulous cost overruns had reduced the scope of development to just three ships. Since the Zumwalt’s guns had been designed to fire a very advanced artillery shell, which also had to be canceled because of its own cost overruns, the Navy was constantly seeking missions for the ship to prove it had not been a waste of money.
Designed to support shore and landing operations in addition to deep water combat, the Zumwalt could actually perform well in the Advisor’s new mission… as long as they didn’t wind up in a firefight with the Russian or Chinese ships annoyingly hanging around in the same area.
Yes, the Zumwalt, the Harper’s Ferry, and the Vella Gulf would do nicely.
It was good to have a simple, reliable plan in place at last.
Fleet Captain Jack Ainsworth stood on the bridge listening to Lenora Thornhill, looking out the window at the yacht cradled against the side of their isle ship. He was not impressed by her words. "You want me to do what?"
Lenora repeated herself. "I want you to be the scientist in the first test we put these princelings through." She touched him on the shoulder. "It won't be very hard. I'll feed you your lines through an earbud. Just simple things like 'turn the voltage up to fifty,' and 'you must do this for me and for science.' Oh, and you have to act very authoritatively. Which is to say, you just have to act like yourself. You are the captain, after all. And you are very good at looking very authoritative." She smirked at his look of frustration. "But you’ll have to put on that posh upper RP accent of yours. Fan and Guang were at Cambridge. To sound authoritative to them, best if you sound authoritatively British.”
Jack’s eyes glowed with mischief. He started to speak, but Lenora knew what was coming.
She waved an accusatory finger at him. “And don’t try laying it on thick, Mister Fleet Captain. You were born in Durham, not a brewery—the same place Tony Blair grew up, for heaven’s sake.” She shook her head. “Honestly, I don’t understand why we ever let men run anything. Children.”
Her glare turned into a smirk. “And you'll also have to look very grave, ever so scholarly, and deeply analytical. Which may challenge you a bit more."
Jam interceded as the captain looked like smoke might come from his ears. "I'm quite sure the captain can pull it off. He did an excellent job of looking very cold and analytical the first time I met him." Jam had wondered why Lenora wanted her to come along for this conversation. Now she understood. Lenora obviously knew she had history with the captain. Jack had first met her after his bosun had found her hiding as a stowaway on his ferry.
Foolishly, Jack refused to surrender to the two women without more fight. "I still don't see why you can't do this yourself. You have all the characteristics you just described, Lenora. And to top it off, you really are a scientist."
Lenora chuckled. "And for many of the student candidates, I will play my own role myself. Though just to be clear, most scientists would be horrified to hear you accuse me of being one of them. I'm just a teacher, Jack." She paused. "But to answer your question, while I can probably do a perfectly adequate job of being stern, commanding, and scientific for the many students we hope to receive from rural communities, these are princelings. And even though a couple of members of the Politburo are women, China is still a patriarchal society. We'll have to use every trick in the book to persuade these tyrants in training that we have authority over them. And for the test, that is crucial. So you, my male friend, are up to bat."
Jack grunted. "So what do I have to do?"
"It would be best for you to learn by seeing how it's done. My daughter, as it happens, is about to run the test with our first candidate from the sampans.”
Jack looked puzzled. "I thought anybody with the combination of foolishness, chutzpah, and insanity to make that horrific trip was assured a place on the ship. At least, that's the way it worked with the BrainTrust and the stowaways on my ferry." He smiled at Jam; the last stowaway he had dealt with was Jam herself.
Jam smiled back, and a flash of warm kinship passed between them. She beckoned him. "I was helping Ciara set up earlier. Shall we go see how she does?"
Matt pulled the brim of his hat lower to protect his eyes from the sun. He stood outside Port Freeport south of Houston and watched with a complicated blend of satisfaction, irritation, and sorrow as his trucks rolled up to the docks.
He felt satisfied because he knew that the rockets and rocket parts he now shipped from SpaceR’s facilities in Texas would not be intercepted by the Great State of California. He felt irritated because detouring around California (and California’s best friend, Oregon) made his life both complicated and expensive. Simply going through Mexico or Canada would entail paying a thirty-five percent tariff, imposed by those nations on US exports when the USA had imposed such tariffs on them. Aargh.
If it were summer, he’d ship the equipment through the Northwest Passage, up and around Canada. Packed solid with thick ice for thousands of years, the passage had opened in the summer of 2013, and had opened every summer since then. Decades later it was open six months of the year. But today they were in the middle of the six months for which the Passage was closed.
So he’d settled on shipping through the Panama Canal. They too had imposed a tariff on American goods, but not as big a tariff as Mexico. Good enough.
Finally, Matt felt sorrow because of the endless weeds in the cracked and broken asphalt of the parking lots where long ago thousands of cars had waited to be loaded for export. He remembered coming here once as a child, seeing those lots jammed to the edges with Ford F-Series pickup trucks. In those days the Ford pickup was the largest-selling vehicle in the world. He remembered a soft pain in his gut the first time he saw a Ford advertisement, instead of saying “Largest-selling vehicle in the world,” instead announce proudly, “Largest-selling vehicle in America.” He’d known in some visceral way that something wonderful had been lost that day.
Well, no matter. Things were looking up for Freeport. It seemed likely he’d be shipping gear back and forth with the BrainTrust through here for some time to come.
In fact, it took them a few minutes more than expected to get ready to test the first student, Jun Laquan. After a couple of minutes of conversation in the observation room, Ciara and Lenora agreed that Lenora would in fact be the scientist for this run while Ciara gave a running explanation of what was going on for the captain and Jam. Jam tried to excus
e herself, but as dirtside expedition leader, Lenora explained, she would have to understand all this stuff even though she wouldn’t be doing it. Lenora shrugged a lab coat on over her business suit and went to meet the parents and the boy who would be the true subject of the test.
Jun Laquan knew he had wide, bright eyes because his mother told him so all the time. He stood by her side while he clung to his father on the other. He trembled slightly, though he knew he should behave more manly as befits a fourteen-year-old. He tried very hard to pay close attention to the woman wearing the white lab coat, though his fear made it hard for him to concentrate. The scientist herself was the cause of part of his fear. He had never seen anyone like her. She was Western and very stern. Her name was Dr. Thornhill.
Dr. Thornhill explained that she was going to give him some tests in a little while, but first, she needed his help in conducting an experiment for someone else. The experiment would have no impact on his acceptance on the Fuxing, but she needed him to follow instructions. He nodded gravely, wondering why she needed his help. Unbidden, she explained the plan. In the experiment, they would use electricity to enhance learning. He should not worry, she reiterated. All he had to do was follow directions, and all would be well.
Sitting in the observation room with Jam and Ciara, watching Lenora and Jun on multiple vidcams, Jack shook his head and growled, “This is already a screwup. There is no way the boy will believe that his performance during this experiment will not impact his acceptance."
Ciara sighed. "How right you are," she said gloomily. "It's a serious problem. We haven't figured out how to fix it. The good news is that the final outcome of this test is not the main measurement. In fact, it's the least of the indicators." She pointed at screens around their observation room. "We depend more upon these than the final conclusion of the experiment."
Jack only recognized a couple of the readouts. One looked to be a heartbeat that was racing. "It occurs to me that this room looks more like a surgeon's operating room than a simple observation station."
Ciara chirped, "more than you know. We have Jun Laquan hooked up on sensors so exotic you'd never find them in surgery. 3D EEG, micro-expressions, pupil dilations, toe twitches, stomach contractions as well as the usual blood pressure, heartbeat, and galvanic skin response. It all feeds into our evaluation process."
Back in the experimental room, Jun listened as the scientist explained more about his duties. Jun would sit at the control panel and ask the experimental subject a series of questions. The subject was a man in an adjacent room separated from the control room by a big glass window. When the subject gave the right answer Jun would simply go on to the next question. But if the subject got the answer wrong, Jun would raise the voltage with the dial on the panel, and press the button that would give the subject an electric shock. Again, the scientist explained, the boy had nothing to fear because she would be standing right there supervising at all times. This did nothing to calm Jun's fear.
As Jun sat down at the panel with the voltage dial and the stimulator button, he looked through the window at the subject, who sat in a chair with his back to Jun's window. Jun could see that the man's arms were strapped to the chair. Jun wondered briefly why he and the man were not allowed to see each other's faces. But the scientist seemed uninterested in answering questions, so Jun swallowed the desire to ask.
Jun also wondered why, at the halfway point, the dial face changed from white to red. He wanted to ask about that too, but he was pretty sure he knew the answer. These voltages were dangerous. They could not only hurt the man but probably kill him.
At first, everything went well. Jun would ask a question, and the subject would give him the right answer. But as time went on, and the questions got harder, the man started making mistakes. Jun had to turn up the voltage again and again. Soon, the man started crying out in pain every time Jun touched him with electricity. Jun started trembling. He asked the scientist if she could get someone else to do this. But her voice, while it remained calm and gentle, also remained stern and insistent.
Jun started to think that he should stop anyway. He remembered that the scientist had assured him that his performance helping her would not impact his admission. But he had a terrible suspicion that if he stopped he would be rejected, and the long, terrible trip his parents had taken to bring him here, the trip that had cost them everything, would be wasted.
Ainsworth paced back and forth. "We have to put a stop to this."
Jam stood and peered at one of the displays. “What about the man being electrocuted? Someone really volunteered for that? Tell me what’s really going on here, or I’m going to break him out now.”
Ciara made a placating gesture. “No! There’s no electricity involved. Jun’s control panel is a dummy. The fellow in the electric chair is an actor. He’s just following his script. He’ll introduce himself to Jun when the test is over, show him no harm was done.”
The captain stopped pacing. “Still, what it’s doing to Jun…” He pointed a finger at Ciara. "And you go along with this? You're going to do this to children on your ships as well?"
Ciara slumped into a defensive position. “For what it’s worth, there’s an automatic shutoff for the test if the sensors indicate the subject may reach a state of severe overstress.”
Ainsworth bellowed, “Then why isn’t it shutting down?”
Ciara pondered the displays. Wonderingly, she answered, “Because Jun is demonstrating exceptional resilience. Really exceptional. I think he may…well, we’ll know soon.”
She clasped her hands tightly together. "It's still terrible. When mom first explained what she wanted me to do, I told her absolutely not, no way, period end."
Jack waited for a moment for her to escape the deep funk she had fallen into, to continue. When she did not, he prompted, “And?"
Ciara grinned ruefully. "And she clapped, and congratulated me on having passed the test." Her grin turned thoughtful, then irritated. "Then she explained to me, in that calm determined way she has, why I had to do it."
Ciara rose, held out her hands, wet her lips, and rendered a beautiful imitation of her mother’s voice. "How much do you think this little expedition cost, Jack? The ships, the equipment, the immersive educations that will go on for years before they can pay off. Unless our students are creative enough, determined enough, and honorable enough to build--not to steal, but to build--at least two multi-billion-dollar businesses, this archipelago will fail. But if we succeed, more archipelagos will follow, each one cheaper than the last as our tech advances, each one able to take on more people even though they may be less exceptional, until, at last, all people can be welcomed.”
Ciara wilted for a moment, exhausted by playing her mother. Then she straightened to assume the role once more. “If we succeed, thousands of isle ships will enable millions of people to escape the corrupt, the vicious, the bigoted governments and cultures that now trap and oppress them. But if we fail, there will never be another archipelago like this. We must make sure that each and every last student has the characteristics and the tools necessary to make our mission here succeed."
The ghost of her mother left her. Exhausted but once again herself, Ciara frowned ruefully. "So here I am."
By the time Jun had turned up the electricity to the point where the dial moved into the red zone, the man was begging him to stop. And Jun knew several things. He knew his parents would be very disappointed if he were rejected from the Fuxing archipelago. He also knew that his parents would be very upset and angry if he hurt this man. And he knew, because of what his parents had taught him, that to continue would be wrong.
He knew that he was not going to press the button again. He knew that he and his parents would be shipped away, and soon they would be standing on some dock in some port in China, with no money and no place to go. He turned away from the dial and the button and wailed and cried uncontrollably. "I won't do it," he mumbled between sobs of despair.
A broad smile lit
Lenora's face. "I never would have expected such bravery from our very first student." She knelt before him and put her arms around him. "Congratulations. You have passed the most difficult test. You and your parents are guaranteed a place here." She waved to the cameras. "Lead in the parents." As the door swung open, she rose, still touching the boy on his shoulders, and spoke to the parents. "You have a marvelous son here. I expect to see him do great things with us."
The parents beamed, and the father spoke first. "I knew it. I knew he was supposed to be more than just a rural farmer." He stood somehow straighter. "My son will be a great man."
The mother, seeing the tears still streaming down Jun's face, picked him up and spoke with alarm. "Are you okay?" She turned to Lenora. "What did you do to him?"
Lenora took a deep breath. "I did not hurt him physically. But I put him under terrible mental stress. I'm very sorry. But it was necessary."
The captain bellowed, “Necessary? It was entirely unnecessary!"
Ciara touched the skipper lightly on the arm. "Remember the big picture."
The captain glared down at her, starting to speak, but then Lenora entered the room. She seemed to know what he would say just with a glance at his eyes, and she stepped on his words.
She stepped into the captain's personal space and a fire rose in her eyes. "You can help me or not, but these tests will go forward. We will select the best and the brightest, and they will succeed, and this archipelago will crush the barriers to human progress and bring light and hope to every impoverished corner of this planet."
The captain glared back, but Ciara pulled on his sleeve. "Just go with the program, Captain Ainsworth. You already passed this test earlier."
He looked down at her, astonished. "When?"
Ciara threw up her hands. "Who knows? But you’re the Fleet Captain, right? You think you could've become Fleet Captain without my mother's consent?"
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