Braintrust- Requiem

by Marc Stiegler

  Lambert pressed his lips together. “I’d definitely say we’re receiving a message.”

  The admiral rubbed his eyes. Even with his comm down and his munitions depleted and his ships wounded, he thought he could take the Russians. Just look at the flagship; a battlecruiser, powerful though it was, was no match for a supercarrier.

  And he thought he could still take the BrainTrust.

  But could he take them both on together?

  Suddenly he realized the answer to that question no longer mattered. A more fundamental question had supplanted it: did he want to take them on at all?

  Ever since his first visit to the BrainTrust for Autonomy Day years earlier, a question had tugged gently at his soul.

  Was he on the right side in this fight?

  The BrainTrust was the place people dreamed of reaching in today’s world, the beacon of hope America had once offered. This was the place with no guarantee of security, only the promise of a chance. The place where people laughed together rather than raging at each other. The place where tolerance for those not like you was laced into the air they breathed, where nationalities and races and customs and social classes and previous successes and failures mattered not. They were too busy building the next great thing to worry about the petty differences.

  The BrainTrust embodied the societal and cultural values he’d sworn to protect better than the country to which he’d given his oath.

  His body wanted to slump, but his spirit would not.

  He suspected he would wonder for the rest of his life if he had lost this battle or won it. The answer whispered in his mind: Yes.

  He thought only for an instant of contacting the President for the Duration. A silly notion. Not only would opening a comm line invite disaster, he had no interest in that man’s opinion. He would make this decision alone.

  “Turn the fleet around. We’re going home.”

  19

  Enter Springtime

  Grow old along with me.

  The best is yet to be.

  —John Lennon

  The little girl lay on the bed, staring unseeing at the ceiling. The sheets were so fresh and crisp they felt a little uncomfortable. The room smelled unpleasantly of antiseptic. That was what she got, she figured, for having such a sensitive nose.

  She thought she could barely detect a tiny rocking motion in the room. Or it might be her hyperactive imagination, stimulated to imagine things since her parents had told her they were on an isle ship. The Chiron.

  She heard the lightweight skipping sound of another child’s feet come up next to her bed. The newcomer smelled like a girl. “Hello?”

  “Hi. Do you like my kitty?”

  The girl on the bed felt the air move around her. She held up her arms.

  A doll plopped into her hands. She traced the shape of the doll. “This is a very pretty kitty.” She reluctantly held the doll back toward the owner.

  The owner did not take it. “They wouldn’t let me bring my real kitty, Fluffy, into the hospital, so I have this one instead.”

  The girl in the bed pursued the conversation as she caressed the doll. “How did you get Fluffy?”

  “That’s a funny story. You won’t believe this, but my first kitty died when a chunk of a spaceship hit her.” She paused. “It was pretty awful. I couldn’t speak for weeks.”

  “You seem to have recovered,” the listener said with the first hints of a dry humor she would only develop fully when she became a teenager.

  “Yeah. So my parents got me Fluffy.” Another pause. “Now I’ve decided, when I grow up, I’m going to go to BrainTrust University and learn to be a spaceship engineer and design ships that never blow up, so no one ever loses a kitty again.”

  The girl in the bed stroked the doll some more. “Sounds like a good idea.”

  The cat owner switched topics. “Are you blind?”

  The girl in the bed put the fingers of one hand to her face, continuing to clutch the kitten with the other. “Blue Rubola.”

  Another pair of footsteps came briskly into the room. The new woman smelled beautiful.

  And the new woman had a beautiful voice. “You won’t be blind much longer. I’m Sonia Manning. I led the team that developed your new eyes.” The woman’s clothes rustled as she turned toward the cat owner. “I also developed the nerve tissue they’re going to put into your Dad’s spine. He should be up and walking around in a month or so.”

  More footsteps approached, this time sounding like a man and a woman. Sonia Manning introduced them. “These are Dr. Donald Giesen and Dr. Sara Giesen. They’re surgeons, and they’ll be putting your new eyes in.”

  The echoing sound of a mother calling for her daughter from down the hall interrupted the gathering. The cat owner touched the blind girl’s hand. “You keep the kitty. That way, she can be the first thing you see when you open your eyes and you aren’t blind anymore.”

  The blind girl gave her and everyone a bright smile. “Thank you. Please come back when I can see.” She paused. “My name is Willa.”

  In another ward across the passage, Admiral Beck pinned a medal on a pillow. “I came to let you know they’ll have your new eyes in a few days. I have some pull with the company that grows them, so I got you prioritized.”

  The B-21 Raider pilot turned his bandaged face toward him. “Thank you. I truly appreciate that.” He turned away. “I guess I’m awfully lucky after all. I hear there are lots of Chinese seamen down in the radiation ward who need new eyes, but they can’t really start work on that until they’ve dealt with the radiation exposure.”

  Beck shook his head, a useless gesture he realized too late. “They’re actually growing the eyes already, at least for the ones they’re confident will survive. But you’re right, they won’t be getting their replacements for a while.”

  A puzzled look crossed the visible part of the pilot’s face. “How do you know so much about it?”

  “I haven’t told you, have I? I’ve turned in my papers. This time next month, I’ll be out of the Navy.” His voice turned satisfied. “Instead, I’ll be the new COO for Replacements Inc.”

  The pilot smiled. “I guess you do have some pull. How’d you wind up with them, anyway?”

  Beck twitched his nose. “They’re undergoing a massive expansion, and they reckon they need a new level of management that knows something about operating large-scale enterprises.”

  The pilot offered, “They’ll be lucky to have you.” He paused. “That’ll be quite a change.”

  Beck answered, “That it will. But my wife’s really happy to see me out of the Navy. I suppose everyone should have a new adventure now and then.”

  Kent Jennings sat in the super clinic hospital room next to Dino Longoria’s bed. Dino’s bullet wounds were mostly healed, finally. He’d be out in a couple of days, once more ready to make life hell for the directors of his current movies.

  At the moment, though, he and Kent were cutting a deal.

  The BrainTrust was in all the news these days. Kent and Dino would do an epic movie about it. They hadn’t chosen a title yet, but it would be something about how the BrainTrust had played all its enemies off against each other.

  It was going to be a blockbuster.

  Keenan carefully avoided looking at the far end of the bed covers where his feet should have stuck up. He looked instead at the tubing stuck in his arm, the drip-feed, the monitors, and finally he looked at his wife.

  She sat next to him, stroking his hand. “Dash called you last night.”

  Keenan smiled at her. “She woke you up?”

  His wife nodded.

  “Are you going to kill Dash too?”

  His wife sighed. “I have decided not to kill anybody for waking us up. After all, if I don’t kill Dash as well, killing the others would be unfair.”

  Keenan nodded gravely. “Good call.”

  “I might still kill Larry. There are lots of good justifications for that, not just waking us up.”

&
nbsp; Keenan couldn’t argue.

  Two doctors entered the room and introduced themselves as doctors Donald Giesen and Sara Giesen. Donald explained the decision Keenan had to make. “You have two choices for how to replace your legs.” He flipped the image of a leg onto the screen. “This is a mechanical leg. We have these in stock, and we could attach them to you immediately. They’re stronger than your old legs, and don’t tire.” He grinned. “We can make you better than you were before. Stronger, better, faster.”

  Sara interrupted her husband’s enthusiastic description. “Or we can grow you a pair of new legs identical to your old ones.”

  Keenan liked the sound of that. “How long?”

  Sara shrugged. “As you can imagine, we’ve got a lot of patients to take care of at the moment. A couple of months.”

  Donald repeated himself. “Whereas, you could get the mechanical legs immediately.”

  Keenan squeezed his wife’s hand. “I sort of liked the old ones.”

  His wife concurred. “I liked them too.”

  Donald watched this interaction mournfully. “You’re sure?”

  Sara elbowed him. “And the organic replacements win again. No building the Six Million Dollar Man for you.”

  Ping answered the phone as it played the first notes of Aha’s Take On Me. “Jam. She’s at it again?”

  “GS Prime, Cherry Blossom deck.” Jam cut the connection.

  Ping pulled on her running shoes and darted off the Chiron’s Appalachian Spring deck, proceeding in a mad dash through the GPlex and FB ships. She caught up with Jam just in time to go back down the ramp on the opposite side from where she’d just come up. She groaned. “What is she doing?”

  Jam answered as calmly and steadily as if she had not been running some unknown but large number of kilometers to keep Dash in sight. “She’s gulping it all in, inhaling as much of the beauty and the life of the BrainTrust as she can.”

  They watched Dash jog through the glittering gold of the GS Prime’s main promenade, the Midas Touch deck, to cross the gangway to the Wells Morgan. Ping and Jam kept pace, staying neither too close nor too far and above all, not interfering.

  Ping grumbled, “Well, if it helps her heal, it’s good, I suppose.”

  Jam glanced at her like she was an idiot, then cast her eyes forward once more.

  Ping frowned. “What?”

  When no answer came forth, they continued running, saying hello to people from time to time. Once in a while, someone would ask, “How’s she doing?” Jam and Ping would simply shrug.

  Dash had for the last couple of years run a course similar to this through the archipelago in the company of Colin. No one knew what they had talked about, but they had always seemed to be preoccupied with whatever they were discussing, not the running.

  Now Dash ran alone. At the moment, the run was much longer than it had been, since the number of ships anchored together had temporarily swelled to three times as many as there had been when Dash, Ping, and Jam had first arrived some infinitely long time ago.

  Eventually, they circled all the way around to the FB Alpha and trotted up the ramps all the way to the roof.

  Jam and Ping realized where they were going at the same time. In unison, they shouted, “The biodome.”

  The top deck of the FB Alpha was mostly a garden, with sections dedicated to recreating microclimates from all over the world. But then there was the dome.

  Dash stopped at the door and turned to her friends. “Time for you two to give up this nonsense. I know I said I wanted some time alone, but really, stalking me is ridiculous.” She reached into her backpack and pulled out, unsurprisingly, a white lab coat.

  They walked through the door into the airlock, then opened the inner door to the display therein.

  Everywhere succulent plants ran riot, right up to the point where they reached the walking path, then turned in a different direction.

  As Ping had known she would, Dash walked to the open area in the center, closed her eyes, and held out her arms.

  The last time they had been here when Dash had stood in this fashion, butterflies of every color imaginable had wafted in from all directions to alight on her. They had covered her in an iridescent living tapestry.

  Today the butterflies danced up to her, circled, and hovered ever so close before drifting away once more. She stood alone amidst the flutter of wings.

  Her eyes glistened. “The wisdom of the butterflies. They know I am not the person I once was.” Slowly, she put her hands down and headed for the door.

  Ping could barely contain herself until they escaped into the open garden. Her voice was filled with accusation. “You’re leaving us, aren’t you.”

  A smile crept across Dash’s face, gentle as the warm summer rain. “Leaving you? What would that even mean? We have been BFFs since we wrote the first chapter of our story together on the ferry to our new home on the BrainTrust.” Her smile turned sad. “At last, as this story closes and our next ones begin, I believe we start to understand what that means, in all its depth and glory.”

  Dash ran off to a meeting with Ben, leaving Ping and Jam to ponder what she had said. Ping sighed. “So, now what are we going to do?”

  Jam shrugged. “I recommend lunch.”

  Ping stamped her foot. “I mean, big picture. With the Chief Advisor gone and the Premier gone, what are we going to do?”

  Jam stared at her. “Last time I checked, you had a country to run, Empress.”

  Ping runkled her shoulders. “Not so much. I think my people really like having an empress who checks in about once a month and spends the rest of her time flying around the world, performing heroic acts of derring-do. They like the idea that I’m available if needed, and they love talking about how great their leader is, but they’re also delighted I’m too busy to stick my fingers into their lives.”

  Jam chuckled. “I, of course, have no job at all, except to keep you out of trouble.” She flicked her hand. “And with all the big bad guys gone, that might not be so much of a job anymore either.” She hesitated, then shook a finger at Ping sternly. “But you aren’t allowed to kill the Imam.”

  Ping shrugged. “Ah, he’s a lightweight. Why bother? I suspect someone else will whack him for us when you get right down to it.”

  Jam picked up the main thread again. “So, looks like we’re seriously unemployed.” She pursed her lips. “Something will probably come up.”

  Ben Wilson stared at the documents on the wallscreen without seeing them. Those documents would soon create the world’s largest charitable foundation.

  He had finished reading it minutes ago. Now he stared at the words, seeing only the consequences behind them. “Are you sure you don’t want to keep anything on the side? Just a few million?”

  Dash shook her head. “It would be useless where I’m going.”

  Where could she go where a million SC would be useless? Ben couldn’t grasp it.

  Keenan, attending via the wallscreen from his hospital bed, was still fixed on the terms of the contract. “So, you want Ben and me to administer the Astri Foundation, but you want Jam and Ping to spend it?”

  Ben once again made sure she understood how big this was. “The Foundation will soon have over a trillion dollars under its management. I couldn’t keep it smaller than that even if I wanted to.”

  Keenan persisted. “How can you be so sure Ping won’t run off and spend it on something crazy?” His mind filled with a vision. “Maybe a space cruiser with rows and rows of guns?”

  Dash started laughing and couldn’t stop. “I’m imagining what Jam would say to that.”

  Keenan gave up.

  Ben pushed in one more direction. “How do we contact you if we have questions?”

  Dash gave him a look that said she knew he was fishing. “I am going to be very hard to contact.” She reached across the table and put her hand on his. “Don’t worry. You can handle it.”

  With that, Dash departed.

  Keenan shoo
k his head at Ben. “Figuring out how to spend the Foundation’s funds should be a full-time job. Will Jam and Ping be able to break loose from their other commitments long enough to deal with it?”

  In his conference room onboard the Helios, Matt watched as Dash plunked herself down at the table and captured the wallscreen for her presentation. He waited expectantly for the doctor to expand on the topic she’d told him she wished to discuss, namely, the opening of the solar system to human civilization.

  The first image Dash popped on the screen did nothing to sate his curiosity. “This looks like a piece of electrical equipment,” he guessed. “The shielding suggests it’s nuclear, but it sure doesn’t look like any nuclear reactor I’ve ever seen.”

  Dash smiled. “Quite correct, Matt. None of us has seen its like before.”

  Matt raised an eyebrow.

  “You’ve heard of Kingsley Okafor, the math prodigy Ciara found? Who then snuck on board with Shura for the battle against the Alliance?”

  Matt squinted at her. “More or less. Don’t know anything else about him, except he helped with the cyberwar.”

  Dash nodded. “Well, he’s been studying the equations Dr. Kraemer left us.”

  Matt brightened. “The ones on the yellow sheet of legal paper you have framed outside your office.” He nodded. “I remember when you showed those equations to me, hoping I’d have an idea what to do with them.” He pursed his lips mournfully. “Way over my head.”

  “Mine too. Anyway, Kingsley has solved them.”

  Matt looked puzzled. “Okay. And the point is?”

  “The math shows us a whole new way to shape magnetic fields. I didn’t understand why that was important at the time, but now I finally do.”

  Matt chuckled. “Proceed.”

  “We now know how to construct a field that will effectively contain hydrogen plasma at high temperatures and pressures indefinitely.”