Braintrust- Requiem

by Marc Stiegler

  The third thought—more an automated gesture of politeness than a thought—made him reach out automatically to take the cup of tea from the beautiful damsel who might kill him.

  Finally, at long last, higher cortical functions came into play and did facial recognition. He gasped. “Tascha!” He gaped foolishly at her for a moment. “I mean, Trixie.”

  She laughed and slid close, deep into his personal space. “’Tricia.’” She turned serious. “Really. I’m Tricia. Don’t think of me by any other name.”

  “Tricia.” He closed his eyes to focus on burning the name into his memory. When he opened his eyes again, her eyes had moved even closer to him. “I thought you died.” More bits of information connected. “I presume the Premier doesn’t know?”

  She stepped suddenly away, leaving a place empty of warmth before him. “You have remarkable powers of deduction.”

  Dmitri took a sip of the tea. The honey added a nice touch. “Does your sister Pascha know?”

  Tricia took a deep breath. “I haven’t yet had the chance to tell her if that’s what you mean.” She smiled mischievously. “We do have a message handoff system, however. I’m sure when I’m able to contact her, she won’t be surprised. Though, of course, when she’s with the Premier, she’s currently borderline hysterical over my death.”

  Dmitri nodded. His survival instinct once again grabbed his thoughts. “You’re not here to kill me for the Premier, then?”

  She chuckled. “You know my training.” Meaning, if she’d wanted him dead, he already would be. True enough.

  Still… “How did you get in? What did you do with Yuri?” He frowned. “If you’ve hurt him—”

  Tricia laughed. “After I hacked the door computers and came in, he tried to stop me.”

  Dmitri’s anger churned.

  Tricia noticed. “Relax, lover boy. He’s taking a nap.” She wrinkled her far-too-cute nose. “Maybe with a slight concussion, but nothing serious.”

  Finally, his normal forms of paranoia and suspicion caught up with his situation. “What do you want, anyway?”

  Tricia sipped her tea. “I was hoping I could stay with you for a while.” She wriggled once more into his personal space. “I’d like to negotiate a deal.”

  Dmitri, fighting every yearning cell in his body, took a step back. “You don’t have to negotiate for a place…Tricia. You can stay as long as you like.” His eyes turned dark. “I objected strenuously to what he did to you, you know.”

  Her eyes turned warm. “So he complained at the time.” She shrugged. “It’s all in the past, Dmitri. For better and worse, it’s made me the person I am today.” She took his hand. “Come with me into the bedroom. It’s all set up for negotiation. I promise you’ll enjoy it.”

  Sheldon Collins, CEO of VBC, had a dilemma. One of the things his company necessarily did in the course of its operations was measure the pulse on all things social media.

  He’d found a new player in the system. Well, it was not really a new player. It was an old player who had not played the game for years. This player’s new initiative in opinion correction was starkly terrifying.

  After stewing about it for an entire day, Sheldon finally made the call he should have made when his folks first brought him the data. “Lenora, I need to talk to you.”

  Lenora sighed. “Sheldon. Dare I ask, what’s the emergency? Have I blocked you from hacking minds even more successfully than I thought?”

  Sheldon brightened. “As it happens, we’re working on a new idea to enable persuasion for your kids.” He frowned. “We’re not really hacking minds, you know. What we do is entirely ethical.”

  Lenora laughed. “You are one remarkable piece of work, Sheldon Collins.”

  He thought about not telling her what he knew, but the situation was bad enough that he rose above his momentary irritation. “There are fifty thousand bots and trolls on the American network running a coordinated campaign.”

  “Someone other than you? Feeling the heat?”

  Sheldon clenched his stomach, then went on. “No! They’re after you, Lenora. You and the BrainTrust.”

  Lenora stayed silent for a long moment. “Tell me.”

  So Sheldon described the attack, immense in its reach and brilliant in its selective targeting. “Every message is superbly personalized. If a person has lost his job, the post explains how the BrainTrust stole the business. If the person lost a friend to the Black Rubola, they explain how the BrainTrust held the cure back, refusing to release it until the President for Life agreed to their demands. If they lost a relative to the vaccine—and you know, over a million people were killed by the cure, not the virus—the campaign reminds them that the cure never should have been released until it had been perfected.”

  Lenora’s voice soured. “Of course, if we’d waited until the cure was perfected, two hundred and fifty million would have died, but nobody mentions that.”

  She sighed. “I get the idea. For every possible source of heartache and anger, our enemy has crafted a message explaining how it’s the BrainTrust’s fault.”

  “So you know how this is done.”

  Lenora’s tone turned wry. “I may know as much about Voter Behavior Correction as you do. It’s an enemy I have fought for many years.”

  Sheldon considered arguing about it, but the problem at hand was too big. “I’d suggest you hire us to counteract this attack, but—”

  “But I wouldn’t hire you because you couldn’t help us. Fomenting rage at someone outside your community and blaming them for everything wrong in your life is easy. As humans, we are in some sense wired to find reason to blame those who are labeled as ‘not us.’ The only real solution—the solution in Accel—is to drive students through scenarios where they have to work with all kinds of people to make sure no one, not even illegals or one-percenters, wind up outside the community of ‘us.’” She grunted in exasperation. “People are constantly inventing new reasons to delineate someone as an outsider. On the Taixue, we had to reshuffle all the students in all the cabins because the ones living on the high decks somehow got the idea they were superior to the kids living on the low decks. What a mess.”

  Sheldon concluded, “Anyway, attack is easy, but defense is almost impossible. At least, it’s impossible without, well, widespread and intensive Accel training.”

  Lenora pursued the obvious question. “So, who’s the attacker? Who wants America to hate us? Don’t tell me you haven’t figured it out.”

  Sheldon took a breath. “We know, all right. The evidence chain is complicated, of course, but damning nonetheless.”

  “And the culprit is?”

  “The Russian Union Premier. He wants the United States to declare war and destroy you.”

  Erika Everest glanced at the time in the corner of the main wallscreen in her minuscule office.

  She knew she shouldn’t be annoyed at the size of her office. Only her Visiting Scholar status enabled her to have an enclosed office at all. Most of the professors shared open-office arrangements. Superb-quality headphones with noise-cancellation were given to all the newly arrived professors by the University as part of the Welcome Wagon gift basket.

  Her office was the same size as a standard cruise liner cabin, which was the same size as her personal cabin, and the same size as every other cabin on the BrainTrust University.

  At least she didn’t have to share a cabin like the students did.

  None of it mattered much anymore, anyway. Her gig as Visiting Scholar would be over in about a month, and she’d be returning to Dublin. She’d enjoyed her time here tremendously, but she looked forward to being home.

  She especially looked forward to being home at this moment each day, when her official office hours ended and she had to shoo everybody out of the room.

  Ever since the Crash had made her famous beyond her small circle of fellow crypto-economists, she’d found her office packed with students whenever she was in. They had some great arguments, a few brilliant in
sights, and more than one fascinating idea for a research paper. But really, by the time her office hours ended, she was burned out. Every day.

  Erika inhaled deeply. “Okay, everybody. I’m out of here. Which means you have to get out first since there’s no way I can get past you all unless you leave.”

  That got matching chuckles from Micky and Jerry as they departed.

  Erika sat in her chair for one more quiet moment, amazed that the air still tasted fresh despite the crush of people who had been here moments earlier. The ventilation systems on these isle ships were, she had to admit, phenomenal.

  She had put her hands on her desk to rise when a middle-aged man with a square face and a dazzling smile hurried through the door. “Dr. Everest? My name is Keenan Stull. I would really love it if you could give me some help.”

  A smart contract is an ordinary contract that has been implemented as a program. In the ideal case, the assets being offered, accepted, traded, and/or tested are digital items that the program can control. In less ideal circumstances, the program can call up police, peacekeepers, judges, and mediators to carry a dispute to resolution.

  The first smart contracting system was built in the eighties, but well into the twenty-first century, they remained rare, in part because of security concerns. The programming languages of the time actively encouraged the creation of vulnerabilities. Even the most security-astute programmers had little chance of creating a smart contract that could not be breached, yielding everything the program controlled to the attacker.

  That had started to change by the year 2020, in conjunction with the rise of crypto-currency. New languages such as SES and Jessie derived from JavaScript embodied key security principles in every line of code. Remarkably, pre-existing secure modules written in these languages could be slapped together with little fear that a breach could arise in the interstitching of the components. With the modularization of “offer safety,” a thirteen-year-old could write a smart contract safe enough for use to manage millions of dollars of goods and services.

  Over time, smart contracts swept through the backbone of the financial industry. People used such systems wholly unaware, just as they used TCP-IP packets without the least clue.

  By the time of the Crash, smart contracts routinely incorporated clauses—subroutines, really—to cover an extraordinary diversity of twists and turns in the contractual situation, many quite unlikely, some seemingly impossible.

  But the Crash was stressing the definition of “impossible.” Coverage of even more corner cases seemed necessary, especially to an expert such as Keenan Stull.

  Erika raised an eyebrow as she shook his hand. “Keenan Stull? You’re with GS, right? Dash talked about you—the man who moved several million people into SmartCoin on the day of the Crash.”

  Keenan dropped into a chair as he nodded. “I should probably start by thanking you for creating SmartCoin since it saved my butt, and my whole financial world that day.”

  Erika, seeing Keenan settle in for what looked like the long haul, sighed and sat back down. “How can I help you?”

  Keenan leaned forward. “I would very much like you to help me figure out what’s going to happen next, so we can be prepared.”

  Erika laughed. “Who wouldn’t like to know what’ll happen next?” A mischievous smile played across her lips. “Though I will confess, I’ve been giving it some thought.”

  Keenan steepled his fingers. “Aha! I knew it! So, spill. What’s next in store for us in this crisis?”

  Erika studied him for a long moment. The way both Dash and Lindsey spoke of him, he sounded like a good guy. She supposed she’d share her thoughts. Who knew? He had done a lot of good for a lot of people on the day of the Crash. Maybe he’d do something good with her latest thoughts as well. “So, there’s an obvious next step for the governments to pursue. I would expect them to go back to the basics that highly indebted governments have used ever since the creation of fiat currency.”

  Keenan raised his hand like a student. “Let me guess—run the printing presses. Full-scale hyperinflation.”

  Erika gave him a quizzical smile. “Gold star for you, Mr. Stull. You seem to be good at this. Why did you come to me?”

  He spread his hands wide. “It’s always good to have confirmation, even when you’re pretty sure you’re right. Especially when the stakes are this high. And call me Keenan.”

  Erika nodded in acknowledgment.

  Keenan continued, “So, if we offer financial instruments tied to the speed of currency creation, we can give our customers a good approximation of a dollar-denominated currency.”

  Erika shook her head. “Perhaps it’s good you came to see me after all.”

  Keenan canted his head to the side. “What am I missing?”

  “This will not be like any other currency crash, Keenan. The Weimar Republic hyperinflation that led to the rise of Adolf Hitler will seem mild in comparison.”

  He looked at her quizzically. “How could it get any worse?”

  Erika’s chuckle came from low in her chest. “Germans under the Weimar Republic had little alternative but to use the government’s paper, no matter how badly they were abused. But this time, people have a choice.”

  She looked away contemplatively. “I suppose it’s just as well. At least we have a chance of avoiding the rise of any Hitlers.” She turned back to Keenan. “But the printed money will just be the tip of the inflation iceberg.”

  Keenan sat back in satisfaction. “School me.”

  “We’ve already discussed the way new goods are moving into the SmartCoin network even faster than buyers.”

  Keenan nodded. “Sellers want to get paid in a stable currency even more than buyers want to buy in a stable currency, so they can tell whether they’re making a profit or not. After all, if you get paid fifty percent more but the currency is worth half as much, you’ve just had the shirt stolen off your back.”

  Erika clapped. “Another gold star. But now consider the flip side of all those goods moving into the SmartCoin system.”

  Keenan looked puzzled.

  Erika gave him a mock frown. “Ooops. You get an F.” She paused, relishing the moment. “The goods that become, in effect, SmartCoin-denominated assets are no longer a part of the dollar-denominated market system. Even as the government prints more money, there will be fewer goods available for sale using dollars.”

  Keenan sat bolt upright. “So the ever-growing numbers of dollars are chasing an ever-shrinking number of goods.” He squinted. “The shrinkage in buyable products will accelerate inflation like a rocket. I can’t even figure out the curve it will follow. Will inflation grow linearly, exponentially, or will it go hyper-exponential?”

  Erika shrugged. “What difference does it make?”

  Keenan peered at the wall, thinking. “And it won’t even help if they realize the mistake they’ve made and stop printing money.”

  Erika followed his gaze into infinity. “Just so. Goods and services will continue to flow out of the dollar-denominated network, forcing inflation higher, even if the amount of currency remains constant. That new inflation will of course force more goods and services out. The process will become self-accelerating. I can’t even imagine a mechanism to stop it once it starts.”

  Keenan departed after thanking her effusively. Erika started to rise from her desk once more.

  Another tall, lanky man entered her office, this one with an easy smile and a permanent twinkle in his eye.

  Erika sighed. “Yes?”

  The man leaned over her desk and offered his hand. “Dr. Everest? I’m Dr. Jim Caplan. You might have heard of me.”

  Erika squinted. “One of the founders of Accel, right?”

  Jim’s smile widened. “I’m here hoping to sign you up to do a module on economics for Accel. Maybe about crypto-currency. Or maybe not. I’d be interested in your thoughts.”

  They talked at some length about modules Erika could write. By the end, they’d identified enou
gh modules that, if written out on paper, they would comprise a book. Erika found herself thinking about getting her grad students involved and wondering how many she could oversee and get done in her remaining time on the BrainTrust.

  After they tied things up and wrote things down, Jim changed the topic. “I’m sorry, but I have to say…I know everybody in the fleet is talking about how you’ve saved the world.”

  Erika winced. “Not hardly.”

  Jim nodded. “I can’t help noting, as important as it is to fix the world’s economy, it’s even more important to fix the world’s educational systems.”

  Erika was about to acknowledge that when she suffered a moment of perverse humor. “Perhaps. Though you realize, if the world’s economy tanks, lots of people can’t even afford that education.”

  Jim’s eyes gleamed with delight. Erika could see him preparing a counter-argument.

  But not today. Erika rose decisively from her chair, no longer willing to be deterred. “Another day, Jim. For today, shoo! I have other places to be.”

  Reluctantly, Jim allowed himself to be shooed.

  As Keenan left Erika’s office, he brushed past a fellow as tall as himself going into her office.

  Keenan paused a few steps down the passageway. Erika’s office was on the Socrates deck of the BrainTrust University.

  In Socrates’ view, all of Athens was a classroom. He had wandered about the city, asking questions of all he met, seeking insight into political and ethical truths. He never lectured.

  He just asked questions.

  Here on this deck, you could find numerous portrayals of Socrates in the open air of his classroom, a short and stocky man of renowned fortitude and fearlessness. Here outside Erika’s office, with the Acropolis looming in the distance, Socrates could be seen staring up at a member of the Athenian elite, quietly driving the haughty patrician through an interrogative process. That process would ultimately compel the man to contradict his own unwavering beliefs, witnessed by a crowd of thoroughly entertained students, commoners, and slaves.