EMPIRE: Renewal

by Richard F. Weyand

  Critical to the acceptance and success of Denny’s group had been the presence of two Imperial Engineers of outstanding reputation, Robert Stewart and Ilia Sobol.

  After the Sintar-Democracy of Planets war, Sintar Specialty Services had contracted to one of Otto Stauss’s companies. They had done more and more work for various Stauss companies until they had been essentially a captive firm of Stauss Interstellar Holdings.

  Jared Denny had been born in 26 BGE, Before the Galactic Era, and died in 66 GE, two years after Trajan died. He had retired a wealthy man in 44 GE at the age of seventy.

  Ardmore programmed everything he knew about Jared Denny, including his school performance and his estimated intelligence, into a set of search parameters, set an age bracket of twenty-two to thirty-five, and ran them against the Imperial database.

  With over two and a half quadrillion records to check, that was going to take a while.

  In the meantime, he considered the education problem. Much of it, he realized, had been cleaned up by the Emperor restoring the Law of Ilithyia II. There were no more banned books, no more history about which one dared not speak. That had all gone by the wayside.

  The sector filters on the educational curricula available was another issue. Each sector governor selected the curricula that would be available to students in his sector. Looking into it, Ardmore discovered the sector filters were actually implemented in the Imperial Education department. Absent the filtering mechanism, the Imperial curriculum database would serve any curriculum to any student over the Imperial communication network.

  The Imperial communications network had not been corrupted by the sector governors, despite multiple efforts, because of resistance by the business community to filtering or monitoring of their communications. The filters were an add-on, an impediment in the way the Education department’s servers were designed to work. There was a whole group – a large group – within the Imperial Education department to maintain and monitor those filters.

  Well, that was an easy fix.

  The scholarship program was another problem. Once people had qualified for university, they should be selected on merit alone. Instead, the Education department applied all kinds of favoritism to the award of scholarships, from who got them to which university the student received a scholarship to. The sector governors had input here, too. The result was that scholarships in general, and scholarships to the plum universities in particular, went to the children of the politically connected and the economically privileged.

  Once again, the Education department maintained a huge staff to administer all the exceptions. While the award of scholarships had been largely automated as far back as the reign of Ilithyia I, and completely automated under Trajan the Great, now it was a huge and expensive operation to process and weigh all the exceptions, and to choose which apolitical and economically disadvantaged people would not receive scholarships to make way for the chosen ones.

  The initial cut, though, was made by the earlier automated mechanism. That looked like another easy fix.

  Ardmore’s search results came back. Millions of hits. He took a look at them. Ah, he had not specified a field of study. He had not wanted to make the original search criteria too tight, because to loosen them he would have to do the whole search again. To tighten them, though, he could just search against the first set of results.

  Ardmore specified engineering, in all its flavors, as the field of study, and tightened the age bracket to twenty-five to thirty, then used that to search against the first set of results. He also added a query against the resulting search hits for current employment, then sorted them by intelligence and school performance, but only in their chosen field.

  Ardmore got back tens of thousands of hits. He scanned down the list and started seeing a pattern. He had the computer add a column for the top-level parent company of the current employer, and confirmed his suspicions.

  Having learned the lesson of Jared Denny and his team long ago, Galactic Holdings, the former Stauss Interstellar, had a policy of gobbling up all the best young engineers in the Empire and forming them into small internal consulting groups.

  That evening at supper, Ardmore shared his results with Burke and Drake.

  “I was running some big database searches today, and, while those were running, I started looking into the education issues,” Ardmore said.

  “What did you find out, Jimmy?” Drake asked.

  “It’s really amazing how much money you spend on nonsense, Jonah. The Education department servers can serve any one of hundreds of curricula, depending on which one the student selects. Those servers are written to do that. But between the student and the servers has grown this great bureaucracy, filtering access to the curricula at the behest of the sector governors.”

  “Filtering them, Jimmy?” Burke asked.

  “Yes. This sector governor only wants these curricula available to students in his sector, this one wants these others. Keeping track of which students are in which sector, and which curricula are to be available in each sector – even filtering individual courses – takes a huge amount of work. There are tens of millions of people involved.”

  “Tens of millions of people? To limit the availability of curricula that would be dished out automatically at effectively zero cost otherwise?”

  “Yes, Jonah. And you’re paying for it all. And that’s not all.”

  “How can it get any worse, Jimmy?”

  “Once the student graduates from high school – fulfills the academic requirements, since the curricula are, or used to be, self-paced – they qualify for Imperial scholarships. The Education department has a scholarship analysis computer program that determines the most deserving students automatically. It used to just give out the scholarships at that point completely on the basis of merit.”

  “And it doesn’t now?”

  “No, Gail. Another great bureaucracy, even bigger than the curriculum bureaucracy, takes requests from the politically connected and economically privileged, and gives their children scholarships, deserving or not. And puts them in the best universities.”

  “Which pushes others off the list,” Drake said with anger.

  “Yes, Jonah. Those who aren’t politically connected or economically privileged get shoved off the list. The people who can’t afford to go to school don’t get scholarships, the less deserving, who can afford to go to school without a scholarship, get the money and the slot instead.”

  “That fucking pisses me off,” Burke said.

  Ardmore raised an eyebrow at her language, and she shrugged.

  “Hey, I was a Marine, remember?”

  “Well, I wasn’t a Marine, but it pisses me off, too,” Drake said. “And this bureaucracy is bigger than the other one?”

  “Yes, Jonah. Much bigger. They are dealing with individual students, after all, not sectors and planets and curricula. When you take into account the multiple layers of management, and office space, and benefits and retirement, it actually costs more than the scholarships themselves.”

  “How the hell can you spend more money administering a scholarship program than you give out in scholarships?”

  “Oh, but it’s worse than that, Jonah. The economic cost of leaving the most deserving students behind to send their less deserving peers to university not only perpetuates class divisions, it also costs the Empire by depriving us of the fruits of educating those more deserving. But at least the fix is easy.”

  “It is, Jimmy?”

  “Yes, Jonah. Turn off the filters on the curriculum computers and fire that whole department. Every single one. And then turn off the filters on the scholarship computers and let them send the scholarships to the most deserving. Fire that whole department, too. You will save untold trillions of credits a year, and you’ll get better education outcomes up and down the spectrum.”

  “By God, I’ll do just that. First thing tomorrow. Mr. Moody will have a fit.”

  “You probably want to get the
Co-Consul involved in this, Jonah. I know you’re used to working without an effective one, but he should be involved in things like this. He should be your primary implementer on policy going forward.”

  “You’re right, Gail. I’ll call them both in and do it. I’ll enjoy that a great deal.”

  “The sector governors are going to howl, Jonah.”

  “Let ‘em howl, Jimmy. This isn’t even their money. It’s being done on my budget. And I won’t stand for it any longer.”

  “So how are you doing with your search for a tech team, Jimmy?” Burke asked.

  “Well, I have good news and bad news there.”

  “Bad news first, Jimmy,” Drake said.

  “All right. So I learned everything I could about Jared Denny. Then I crafted my search terms. Now, when I did the first big search, I left the parameters a little wide so I didn’t have to do such a big search again. And I got millions and millions of hits, but now I’m only searching against that extracted data. I tightened up my search terms, and the people we want are all being hired by a giant corporation and organized into little internal consulting groups. None of them are out forming small consulting firms of their own, like Denny did. None of them are available for that sort of thing.”

  “OK, Jimmy. What’s the good news?” Drake asked.

  “They’re all being hired by Galactic Holdings. Franz Becker’s outfit. If we want some hotshot consulting groups to work on our stuff, we can just contract to his people.”

  “Outstanding,” Drake said.

  “Yes, that sounds like a really good idea, Jimmy.”

  “I thought you’d like it. Apparently, Otto Stauss learned from Jared Denny how powerful small groups of very smart people could be when managed properly, and they’ve been organizing the best and the brightest into internal consulting teams for three hundred years. So we don’t need to set up teams like that. We can just hire theirs.”

  “Well, there’s something we need them to start working on now, because it has a long lead time,” Burke said. “And I think we want at least two of those groups working on it so they know they’re in a competition. Three might be even better.”

  The next morning, Friday, Drake called Diener and Moody into his office first thing.

  “Be seated, Mr. Diener, Mr. Moody.”

  “Yes, Sire,” Diener, as the senior, said for them both.

  “Gentlemen, we have an intolerable situation within our Education department. Sector governors are filtering the curricula we make available to our students. This is not the promise of an Imperial education. Worse yet, we’re paying for this perversion of theirs. So what I want done, as soon as practically possible – and that means, if not today, then Monday – is to remove all the filters the sector governors have had us place on the curriculum servers and open them up, and then fire everybody in that part of the Education department that services those filters.”

  “Fire them, Sire?” Diener asked.

  “Furlough them, lay them off, reduction in force. I don’t care what you call it, Mr. Diener. I want them off the payroll. One month’s severance, honor whatever pension benefits that have vested, but get them off my payroll and out of my buildings.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “Believe it or not, gentlemen, we have an even bigger intolerable problem in the Education department we are also going to fix. The computers that run the Imperial scholarship program are perfectly capable of selecting the most deserving students and passing out scholarships. But we have a huge bureaucracy that intervenes in that process to substitute the children of the privileged for those who have merit. That is going to stop. So I want the scholarship computer put back in charge of the program, and then fire everybody in that part of the Education department that distorts and perverts the scholarship program. Let the computer do it.”

  “Yes, Sire. And those already with scholarships?”

  “Anybody already in the program can carry on in it. But all new scholarships are to be given out to the most deserving as determined by the computer without any bureaucratic interference. Get some computer people in there to run the software and fire all the education people.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “Now you two work together to get that done. Mr. Diener, this is really your province, but you just got that job this week. So, Mr. Moody, it’s up to you to help him out and show him where all the levers and buttons are to get this done. Does that work for both of you?”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “Why, Mr. Moody. You sound positively enthusiastic about this. I’ve gotten used to you being hesitant about these big changes.”

  “Yes, Sire. I’m always hesitant to make big changes. But all your big changes began after I showed you Dr. Ardmore’s book. So I decided to read it myself. I understand where you’re going now, and I couldn’t be happier.”

  “A convert. Well, Mr. Moody, I’m happy to have you aboard. All right, then. Off you go. And I want this done quickly.”

  “If I might have a moment of your time, Sire,” Diener said.

  “Of course, Mr. Diener. Mr. Moody, you’re excused.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  Moody got up and left through the communicating door to his office, closing the door behind him.

  “Sire, one thing I noticed in reading Dr. Ardmore’s book is it was customary for the Co-Consul and his spouse to have the Emperor and his wife for Sunday brunch. Claire and I wanted to know if you wished to continue that tradition, and if so we invite you to Sunday brunch. And I suppose Captain Burke and Dr. Ardmore as well, given the situation.”

  Drake glance over at Burke, in the corner over Diener’s left shoulder. She closed her eyes and opened them slowly. A nod.

  “Why, Mr. Diener, we would be pleased to attend. Thank you very much. And please make sure Claire understands there is no lèse majesté in using first names on the Imperial Residence floors.”

  “Yes, Sire. Of course. I believe the normal time is ten o’clock.”

  “We’ll see you then, Mr. Diener.”

  Diener left, and Drake looked over to Burke.

  “Seems like everyone is getting into the spirit of things.”

  Burke gave a short crisp nod.

  On Sunday, Ardmore, Burke, and Drake left the Emperor’s side of the Imperial Residence floor and walked across the elevator lobby to the Co-Consul’s side of the floor. Ardmore knocked on the door.

  Diener opened the door and waved them in. Imperial Guardsmen were already stationed in the hallway and down by the dining room pending the Emperor’s visit. Also standing in the hallway with Diener was his wife, Claire. She looked like she was going to vibrate out of her skin.

  “Good morning, Jonah, Jimmy, Gail. I’d like you to meet my wife, Claire.”

  “Good morning, Claire,” Drake said, shaking her hand.

  “G-g-good morning, J-j-jonah.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Claire,” Ardmore said.

  Ardmore was easier for Claire.

  “It’s good to meet you, Jimmy.”

  “Good morning, Claire.”

  “Good morning, Gail.”

  Claire seemed to be at a loss, so Diener said, “This way, everybody,” and led them to the dining room.

  The table was sized for six, with five places set. Housekeeping had put little place cards at every spot, and staff stood by to service the buffet.

  They all went to their places, but Claire was very nervous, fluttering her hands like she might fly away. Gail took her hands and held them, and Claire clenched back.

  “Claire. Claire, look at me.”

  Claire looked into those deep empathetic brown eyes, and Gail nodded.

  “Now breathe with me, Claire. Come on.”

  Gail took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. Claire, after a moment’s hesitation, did the same.

  “Again.”

  She could feel Claire’s hands relax. Gail nodded.

  “There we are,” Burke
said. “Now, why don’t we eat?”

  “Yes, everybody,” Claire said, releasing Burke’s hands. “Why don’t we eat?”

  Claire waved her guests to the buffet. Diener looked over to Burke and nodded his gratitude to her. Burke shrugged and smiled.

  This first Sunday brunch was the maiden voyage of the reconstituted tradition, so there was no business talk. It was all small talk of where you grew up and what you studied in school and that sort of thing. When they were finished eating, they took their coffee out on the balcony. About a quarter to twelve, Jonah got everybody’s attention.

  “Watch this, everybody.”

  He waved a hand to the statue of Ilithyia II. As noon approached, the statue was lit up with reflected sunlight from reflectors on the first of the buttresses on the side walls of the ancient gothic Throne Room that thrust out from the front of the Imperial Palace.

  As the cast-in-color statue of the legendary Empress was lit by the sun, it seemed to come alive.

  “Oh, my God. Look at that,” Burke said.

  “She seems alive,” Claire said.

  “That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” Ardmore said, nodding.

  “How did you do that, Jonah?” Diener asked.

  “The reflectors were installed with the statue. They were taken down a hundred years ago lest she outshine the later statues of my immediate predecessors. They were in the basement, believe it or not. I swear Housekeeping never throws anything away. So I had them reinstalled, then covered until today. This is the first time Ilithyia II stands in the light in a hundred years.

  “It’s glorious, Jonah,” Claire said. “Just glorious.”

  They sat and watched the sun play across the statue until the reflection moved on.

  “Well, I suppose we should be going,” Burke said.

  She turned to Claire.

  “Thank you so much for inviting us, Claire.”

  “It was fun, Gail. We should do this every week.”

  As that was indeed the plan, everyone chuckled and agreed. There were handshakes all around, and a hug between Claire and Burke, and then they were gone.