by Ken Pence
"What's in the bag?" Susan asked, as was her prerogative.
Brad opened the bag and briefly touched its contents. He started laughing and gave the bag to Andrew, not Susan. "This is for you," he said.
Andrew took the bag and opened it, and started laughing too. Before the others could get mad, he pulled out a handful of necklaces...fourteen Ullumff dung necklaces to be exact. They all started laughing and started looking in the boxes and bags.
There were manuals that defied description and maps and rolls of that plastic-metallic film. There was electric comm equipment. All kinds of gadgets and gizmos...it looked like they had stripped the ship of everything not essential to them making it back okay. It will take weeks before we get an inventory on all that stuff Brad thought as he kicked back and poured himself two fingers of Jack Black. Wonder how long 'til we get our next trader, Brad wondered.
McGregor came in a bit later with some information that proved amusing about the visit also. It looks like the Ullumff also took all the towels with them when they left. Brad snorted a laugh in a very Ullumff way and took another sip.
Captain UmBllatt was nibbling on a nacho and thinking about how to divide the wealth from the journey. It would be difficult but not impossible to keep this planet's location a secret. There shouldn't be undo competition until the planet was developed. Yes. The navigator is the only one who knows the planet's exact location and he's loyal to my family.
The navigator was nibbling an apple and correctly guessing what the captain was thinking. The captain was thinking that he should keep this little planet's location all to himself. As an undercover investigator for the Uoott Culture Guide, like the captain gave the humans, the navigator expected next year's edition of the manual would have many interesting entries about Earth. He savored the apple. Yes. The only way to get a steady supply of these... is to let everyone know about this great place. Let's see:
Profitable trade goods -
(especially marvelous electric devices)
Galactic class instrumentation and navigational control
Excellent trade conditions
(regulations exactly like manuals! Better!)
Friendly natives with four stomp accommodations (from any world)
Four stomp food, drinks and entertainment in room (your needs met – gravity, environment – must be seen to be believed)
Unprejusticed, friendly natives
Natives understand Trade (and many other languages).
Quarantine station on single moon
Self patrolled by powerful fleet. Don't even think about it.
New facilities with excellent service.
Facilities better than anything in the manuals!
Located:
(Yes. I ought to make assistant editor over this one!)
RETT WRITES COLLEAGUES
I am soon to join CaptainandrewWilliams on a trip to Glim, Rett thought. They call it Bellatrix. The female, Susan, wanted to go there first and they acceded to her wishes over my more pressing need to return to my home planet. A female making decisions instead of sharing names! My oculars roll at the thought. Hopefully, my voyage will return me to you, my colleagues, so I can continue my researches among my own kind. I have gone to great lengths to train CaptainandrewWilliams but it still bares it teeth to show he likes you. They call it smiling. Weird I know, but they do it.
This planet has a large moon base where these humans have set up a trading base. One Ullumff trader has already visited and I hope to return before these humans give away all their knowledge. They will make my stay here fruitless if they continue. The last ship traded for human-built solar powered hand calculators. Think. A calculator that is light enough to carry and will divide and multiply. These humans must be insane. They gave away five thousand of these marvelous devices for an old star chart of the empire and surrounding nebulae. See what I mean?
About the Author
Ken R. Pence, PhD is an engineering professor at Vanderbilt University, a pilot, and an active martial artist, a 5th degree blackbelt in Tae Kwon Do. He is a retired captain from the Metro Nashville Police Department where he served 31 years (16 on SWAT) and has taught police and military in the US, and Europe (England, Germany, France, and Northern Ireland) in confrontation management skills.
He researches advanced sniper location systems for DARPA and is currently investigating inexpensive magnetic levitation.
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PATENTLY OBVIOUS
© 2011 by Ken R. Pence
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without email permission of the author.
978-0615513300
Printed in US
PROLOGUE
This book represents how uneven progress will be when we can perform interstellar trade, and why intellectual property will be the most valuable trade cargo because it takes little space and makes the most profit... but rare metals, minerals and spices will always have some value.
The fact that cephalopods on Earth have blood that is based on copper instead of iron is interesting – all the technologies discussed are feasible. BTW – the ultraviolet laser stun guns described were actually patented in 1997 - 2005 and I was under a non-disclosure from 1999 (keywords for a web search use tetanizing ultraviolet) – so don’t dismiss most of the tech here as impossible – nano-meta invisibility has already been used on tanks. Just don’t expect patents and non-disclosure forms on Earth to be applicable off planet...
Major Characters
Andrew Williams –Captain of Earth’s first star ship
Tod Schroeder – a physicist because of the dead cat
Desiree Bardeen - Linguist -- Martial artist
Eugene Bradley Phillips - intelligent capitalist
Susan Kama Siriluk – Materials specialist
Ling Tanaka – psychologist/biologist
Fran Bergdal – environmental scientist
Joel Fredrickson – Mechanical Engineer – fab genius
Steve Cutcher – electronics/IT/circuits
Colonel Bradford Kyger– military muscle/brains
Rett – a Tros experimenter
Captain UmBllatt – Ullumff trader
LeiLei – Lemsla catlike female
Shiv – Vicvic female
Patents and History
Eugene Bradley Philips was furious. “What do you mean we can’t patent it? We just have to show we developed it first. No? All we have to do is show our research work...yes...our research work...from the prior art...make it up. Submit patent applications now then – stop them in court. You grab it or we’ll have to talk about your little habit...” An inarticulate sound came out of the comm. “Thought you’d agree...” Philips slapped the disconnect button on his desk comm. He was too affluent to wear a MemDex -- too plebeian. He leaned back and looked out at the landscaped grounds of Alpha Corp. The smoked glassene walls showed the strategically placed planters to prevent car bomb attacks. Verdant terracing further camouflaged banks of sensor arrays and defensive mechanisms. He chuckled, as he looked the tan drapes with their extra two meters of curled base to reduce blast damage from shrapnel. All these defensive measures, he thought, when I’m the one on the offensive.
***
I suppose I should record this. I certainly have the time. My name is Captain Andrew Williams, as Rett used to call me though he runs my name together. I have to go way back before this story makes any sense.
I was studying to be a synthesist at the University of Arizona when our team ran into a glitch. My team and I were planning to work together on something. We were getting our synthesist degrees but needed a final project...we didn’t have one. You have to understand that universities had changed in the last 50 years. They weren't like they used to be. People generally didn't learn things by rote anymore. You go to grade school and high school and then in college it all changes. There was a medical discovery for those over thirt
een, though some people try it sooner. The discovery was -- that you could take an imprint of another person’s memories. A person taking a special synthetic drug could record the synaptic connections in the brain and impart that knowledge to another person. Playback could actually train the speech centers of the brain so you could learn languages or you can learn chemistry or learn biology, whatever... You get the basic idea. Of course, you’d have to go to a class and practice. It is form of blended education, where you put what you are learning into practice but you don't have to sit for years and years memorizing grammar and tense. All have to learn is how to use the implanted knowledge you are given. Start using it and it is yours – use it or lose it.
Now as I said before, I was trying to get a synthesist degree. A synthesist degree is a like a PhD before everything changed. Now synthesist degrees are degrees given to groups. They are not for just one person; a synthesist got their PhD equivalent when they worked with a team on a team project. They, each member, had to advance an area of learning in their field, but they worked together as a team. So a person didn't become a PhD from one teeny bit of research on materials or one infinitesimal bit of research on physics theory or one miniscule bit of research on biology…it was a team effort and a synthesist team got their degree together or they didn't get it at all.
Everyone in the group had to show some large step forward. It was still a bit controversial but synthesist degrees are becoming more common – groups either made it big or spin off on their own companies – like a rock group...some make it...many fail. We made it and got our own degrees, but it took over fifteen years (physical years for us – just two years of normal time since we worked in a relative time field a lot of those two years) – our bodies aged at up to thirty times the normal rate compared to those outside the field. Too bad our pay didn’t keep up with our actual time on the job. You sure can get a lot of work done in a short time – normal time – but they did pay us at three times the normal rate when we were working in the relative time fields...I digress...sorry. We were talking about school systems...
Not only are schools different, the actions of people around the world are different. There were still regional wars and terrorists and the run-amok-disgruntled-employee every now and then. That stuff doesn’t change. Most people in the US – yes – there is still a US. Most people had access to firearms and a lot of us carry them. As Heinlein said, “An armed society is a polite society.” I’ve always believed that though I don’t always carry a weapon. Guess I ought to now. Anyway – I’m a little off track…sorry…I tend to wander when I’m dogged tired...it’s all this waiting.
The world’s population in the last few decades had turned into isolationists but when you remove one-third of the population – the youngest, weakest, oldest, poorest – it cleaned up a lot of ills. Yes – we still had environmental concerns but with cheap, non-polluting energy – you can do a lot. The US certainly isn’t sending a lot of foreign aid anywhere – no one is. I guess it was around 70 years ago…60 or 70 years ago when there was an influenza epidemic.
A virus went around the Earth and killed a large part of the human population. The influenza strain, the family of them, became known as Viral B. Now the underdeveloped countries suffered the worst and had a huge die off and, all in all, I guess the population of the world was reduced by about a third. The more sophisticated countries did fairly well if you consider one quarter of their population gone. Normally, influenza strains affect the very young and very old in a “U” pattern if you plot number of deaths against age. In this case, we also had young people, very similar to the swine flu or avian flu of 1918 where people, I guess, 17 to 32 died off and we lost... about 35% of the population in that age range. Don’t know if it was the same in 1918 but our deaths were caused by an allergic reaction, urticaria, which left huge welts all across the body as people coughed up their lungs.
Know that with the population loss -- there was a real propensity not to travel. Most didn't want to travel. Most didn't want to go outside their city. Many didn’t want go off to school. People essentially didn't want to do anything but survive. It was a bad time. People really stopped showing concern for other people outside of their immediate area -- countries did the same thing. You can only watch so much death before you just tuned out – it was mind numbing. People were inured at seeing bodies, mass burials, and mass cremations after a few months. The countries with the better medical technology – like I said – they did fairly well, and only lost all about a quarter of their population. Third world countries lost up to half their populations. The loss of life was due to viral mutations.
We had thought we could control it. We couldn’t. We thought we could isolate it. We couldn’t. People fled areas where there were high death rates. Media coverage was spotty after LOTS of reporters died and sections of the Net died too. Information was spotty back then. Governments tried to do like they did when they had the SARS epidemic back in the last century by thermally scanning faces. That didn't work. Too many people had access to transportation, rich people got sick and they definitely could get out of the country. There was no way to control it when it was that prolific.
Lots of specialists died. There was a push for education to rebuild. It was about this time that the discovery of memory patterning came into effect. The wealthy and the powerful, of course, got the best patterns. They could pay for very high quality imprints. You could learn a language or you can learn math, but there was enough generic copying and theft of good patterns that generally, people got a pretty good basic education…even the lower classes. Everyone got the equivalent of a high school education. Some people could take a memory pattern and never worry about anything. Some people can get pattern after pattern, and never relate the memory to real-world skills...but many people could.
Now, of course, this didn't occur in Third World current countries where the technology was non-existent. It didn't happen in areas where there was a war, drought or floods. It only occurred where the population was fairly stable, where there was enough food distribution. Everyone still had access to the Internet…it was still there but it was not the wild free-for-all of the past. If you had more money – you had better access. There were still hacks and attacks but it was much more regulated and sophisticated with protocols that cut most criminals off at the knees. Figure it was the massive financial transfers that got everyone’s notice. The powers-that-be only got off their ass when lots of the big dogs, the wealthy power brokers, had their money transferred to off-shore accounts by state sponsored thefts...quick way to balance a nation’s books.
Therefore – there was a push for education and more education. You only went to high school – you must be slow... Colleges of today might seem pretty much the same as they were a hundred years ago but that wasn’t the case. You got imprints for different subjects – from the university faculty – yep – you picked colleges for the imprint quality of the faculty.
Oh, plus the facilities, and amenities, that were available. Graduate degrees meant more esoteric topics/imprints and blending outside. You got an imprint for tensor calculus and then you learned to apply it. Now all this imprinting did make you a little weird – way weird. You got side memories in spite of so called filtering and quality checks. There had been a LOT of issues to clear up – lots of personality defects to eliminate.
Anyone trying to get a synthesist degree had to be extremely stable mentally. Learning physical skills by imprint hadn’t really worked out until pretty recently. You could learn the rules of a game but you didn’t get the skeletal structure or musculature from an imprint. You could imprint from a runner but you’d have a heart attack if you tried to run like that athlete. Same with the deep subjects – you could put rocket fuel in a scooter but it still wouldn’t break the sound barrier or get musculature from an imprint.
They were just recently getting some measure of physical skills by imprint. Getting off track again...groan...anyway – synthesists worked in a group toward
a specific goal that had to advance a number of areas of research. People could still get a PhD at schools that avoided imprinting – but they were falling behind so fast – they wouldn’t be any around in the modern world in another twenty years. The old, lecture-you-to-death method didn't work anyway. All research shows that students really learn outside of class – at home. They learn when they're doing lessons, after they read the text, which is after the lecture. You got years ahead of the rote learners by not spending your time listening to lectures or just reading. You learned to master the known theories in college. In graduate level education, you learned to question those theories and you had enough information from enough divergent sources that you could see the inconsistencies between fields of research. Oh, there was still real research going on but it made research of the early 20th -- 21st centuries, look like a science fair – interesting and quaint.
This method of research stepped into many gray areas of intellectual property. Whose idea was it anyway – was it from a leak on an imprint from a specialist? Lots of court cases – lots of changing law – that’s why I’m here.
It comes down to this...the majority of the world lost a lot of its more depraved, anti-social, aggressive, risk-taking members. Of course, there were people who would take advantage of the chaos, plus the people who traveled about tended to end up either killed by viral infection mutations or from chaotic populations of citizens.
