Braintrust- Requiem

by Marc Stiegler

  Matt’s jaw dropped. “So you can build a fusion reactor? The holy grail of power production?”

  Dash pointed at the device on the screen. “Not only can we build a fusion reactor, but Rhett has already done so.”

  Matt leapt up, then sat down again. “It works?”

  Dash gave him a smug look. “We used it in place of one of the Chiron’s molten salt reactors when we took it down for maintenance.”

  Matt couldn’t accept a miracle of physics without pressing. “But what about the energetic neutrons? They’re so fast and violent coming out of the fusion reaction, they ought to destroy all your machinery. How is your system holding up?”

  Dash shrugged. “The very fast neutrons are a problem, of course, but the tungsten carbide shielding seems to be adequate.” She leaned forward. “But let us move beyond the power generation possibilities. I’m delighted to see our fission reactors improved upon, but honestly, there’s a more transformational application.” She leaned back. “Let’s talk about rockets.”

  She flipped the screen to show a device that Matt figured out, after some study, was a rocket engine, despite the complete absence of bell-shaped exhaust nozzles.

  Matt sat up alertly. “An aerospike?”

  Dash chuckled. “I thought you might like that. The long linear aerospike here, which unlike standard nozzles, performs efficiently at atmospheric pressures all the way from sea level to deep space, can save forty percent of the fuel needed to escape the gravity well. You can then use that fuel to go wherever you want.” She paused. “Though honestly, the first place you want to go is probably the Moon, to reload your fuel storage with gravel.”

  Matt stared at her in disbelief. “You’re proposing using gravel as the propellant?”

  Dash laughed. “Not intuitive, is it? But with a fusion reactor, you can easily liquefy and vaporize the rock. You can then eject vaporized rock just like any other hot gas.”

  Matt considered the implications. “So, you really can go anywhere and refuel anyplace.” He stared at her. “This really does open up the whole solar system, doesn’t it?”

  Dash moved on to the next photorealistic rendering in her collection. “Especially with a new spacecraft designed specifically for fusion-powered interplanetary flight.”

  Matt stared at the ship and the CAD drawings that could drive the printers in its manufacture.

  Dash coughed, a little embarrassed. “I’ve spent a silly amount of time working on this in my spare moments for the last couple of years, just in case we figured out a power supply.”

  Matt closed his eyes. “I’ll bet you’re going to charge me a whopping license fee for all this, aren’t you?”

  “Does it matter? By the time the first couple million SpaceR ships have taken miners to the asteroids and pioneers have set up new habitats around Mars and Venus, you’ll have the biggest corporation in the solar system.” She laughed gaily. “You’ll be the third trillionaire, right after Ben and me.”

  She turned sober. “And you can offset the first year or two of fees by doing me a favor.”

  Matt clasped his hands. “Excellent. What kind of favor do you want?”

  When Dash explained what she wanted, Matt’s eyes turned troubled. “Oh, Dash, you can’t be serious.”

  Dash spoke gently. “I have never been more serious. Believe me, Matt, I need this.”

  In the end, he agreed to her request. “Before you go, I have something to show you.” He held out his arm, and she put her hand on his wrist.

  They walked down the ramp to a radically altered passage and promenade. “My favorite, the Icarus deck.”

  Dash released his arm and wandered down the hall.

  Like all the newest deck themes, this one was animated. In this one, the story began with Daedalus, crafting the wings that would fly him and his son out of the labyrinth in which King Minos had imprisoned them.

  They launched into the air and escaped. Icarus, of course, flew too close to the sun.

  But in the Helios version of the story, Daedalus had made their wings of titanium, and though Icarus suffered severe burns, he survived his crash to earth.

  For the rest of his days he could never walk without a crutch. But he could fly. So the next part of the story showed him sitting on a stool, surrounded by children, as he told of his adventures and taught them to make wings of their own.

  Next, the children grew up to make new wings, better than his, and took off to fly ever closer to the sun.

  In the last scene of the renderings, you could see them twinkling in the night sky, beyond the sun, winging their way to the stars.

  Dash touched the rendered wall and whispered, “Elisabeth.”

  Matt said nothing. It was obvious.

  Dash offered a final observation. “This pretty much tells the whole story, doesn’t it?”

  Matt agreed with her, but as she wandered off to her next appointment, he found himself disturbed. Why did he have a sneaking suspicion that when Dash said it told the whole story, she was referring to a much larger story than the one he had imagined?

  Matt’s next visitor arrived unscheduled and unannounced. He heard her sultry voice before he saw her. “Hey, lover boy.”

  Matt looked up with a warm smile. “Hey.”

  Gina swept across the office to the long-enough-for-sleeping couch he had on one wall. She beckoned him.

  He went to her, observing on the way that she seemed quiet and giggly and nervous, all at the same time. He sat beside her and took her hand. “What?”

  Gina took his hand and rubbed it over her belly. “It’s a boy.”

  Matt froze for a moment, then snuggled in while continuing to rub her tummy. He gave her a warm, soft chuckle. “Let the adventure begin.”

  Chance led Lenora Thornhill through the Tundra deck of the Chiron toward the bow. They passed one of the currently-ubiquitous signs posted by the BrainTrust University.

  Reverse Debate This Thursday!

  Which is More Important: Fixing a Broken Economic System, or Fixing a Broken Educational System?

  Dr. James Caplan, co-inventor of the Accel Educational Framework, will defend the claim, Top Priority Must Go To Fixing the Economic System.

  Dr. Erika Everest, co-inventor of SmartCoin and the recently-announced first holder of the Hanson Chair here on the BTU, will defend the claim, Top Priority Must Go To Fixing the Educational System.

  Come see the fireworks as these two powerhouses are forced to defend each other’s opposing positions!

  Chance chuckled while pointing at the sign. “How’s Jim holding up under the stress of preparing to defend SmartCoin over Accel?”

  Lenora, who had not been up to laughing about anything since the Battle of the Open Seas, almost cracked a smile. “Better than you might think. He and Erika are already trading talking points.”

  Chance shook her head. “In a reverse debate like that, how can you tell who wins?”

  Lenora turned grave once more. “The audience wins.”

  As they entered the last passage to the cryonic storage area, the air turned chill. Chance muttered, “See? This is why I told you to wear a sweater.”

  They entered a room lined with freezer units the size and shape of coffins. Chance checked her tablet, went to a unit, and peered into the glass plate. “Here she is.”

  Lenora bent over to stare at her daughter. “Ciara,” she sobbed.

  Chance frowned. “Buck up. Think of her as sleeping. We’ll get her back someday.”

  Lenora muttered, “Fermat’s Last Theorem.”

  Chance blinked. “What does Fermat have to do with anything?”

  At last, Lenora smiled. “Shortly before his death, Fermat wrote a notation in the margin of a book that he’d devised a delightful proof for a particularly thorny math puzzle. Generations of mathematicians tried to duplicate his work.” She barked a harsh laugh. “In doing so, they invented techniques that were then used to solve many other math problems. But in the end, after all that hero
ic effort, they proved that Fermat’s Last Theorem was in fact wrong. Fermat’s proof, whatever it had been, was broken.”

  Chance raised an eyebrow. “You still haven’t explained what Fermat has to do with Ciara.”

  Lenora took a breath. “The last thing Ciara said to me was that she’d figured out why the people of Baotong are so smart. She said it was simple and obvious, and we’d be able to apply it to all children easily.”

  Chance saw where this was going. “And whether she was right or not, her belief—now your belief—will propel the research forward until you figure out a solution.”

  Lenora caressed Ciara’s glass window. She looked up and spoke prophecy—not with the certainty of one who could see the future, but with the confidence of one who would create it. “We will find a solution, and we will start a pilot program and raise several small groups of children, several generations, to be as smart as the ones from Baotong.” Her eyes glistened. “And we will call them Ciara’s Kids. And one day…”

  Chance finished the thought. “And one day, all children everywhere will be Ciara’s Kids.”

  Dmitri lay in bed next to Pascha and read the article in Cogent News with considerable satisfaction.

  The marriage of Dmitri Mikhailov and Pascha Turgenev might or might not be an affair of the heart. But make no mistake, the wedding was a certified declaration of power politics.

  Rather than placing the event in a traditional setting such as the Arkhangelskoye Palace, Premier Mikhailov chose to hold the service at the new Svetlana Savitskaya Spaceport southeast of the city, where many of the participants had landed the day before. In one stroke, the Premier demonstrated his commitment to both his new alliance with the BrainTrust and his bold vision of a new Russian Union swept clean of corruption—a vision reinforced by the arrival in another spaceship of mediators from Benin to help oversee the transformation of the judicial system. Furthermore, he demonstrated a dedication to freedom of the press so profound, even Cogent News now plans to open an office here.

  The Premier invited all of us who made up the bridal party to stay for a week and see the sights. But weddings seem to be in the air, and those of us from the BrainTrust must hurry back. Tricia Smith, a newcomer to the fleet, has lured our own Alex Turner, Chief Engineer of the Argus, into matrimony. Perhaps even more amazing, she persuaded Gina Toscano and Dawn Rainer to help plan the ceremony. So Dawn, Gina, Tricia, and I had to leave on the next Global Express ship departing Moscow.

  Dmitri muttered, “How did Lindsey even know I was dedicated to a free press? We hardly talked about it.”

  Pascha kissed him lightly on the neck. “She and I talked about it at length.”

  “Aha. Dare I ask how I cemented her belief in my sincerity?”

  Pascha chuckled. “You married the woman in charge of Cogent’s Moscow office.”

  Dmitri looked at her in astonishment. “You’re a news reporter now?”

  “I only report the news the public has a right to hear.” Her voice turned steely. “But make no mistake, if it happens outside our bedroom, it is their right to hear.”

  Dmitri chuckled low in his throat. “So the government is now in bed with the news media. Isn’t that a conflict of interest? Are we in trouble?”

  Pascha ran her hand caressingly up his arm and gently pried the tablet from his grasp. With a fierce whipping motion, she threw the tablet to the end of the room. “No trouble as long as you pay attention to me.”

  She proceeded to force him to pay attention to her.

  “Well,” Dmitri muttered philosophically, “this will be quite the adventure.”

  It turned out that Commodore Kung’s announcement of the death of the Prometheus fleet had been premature. Oziegbe, the temporary Mission Commander in Ciara’s absence, had built an iceberg much like the one that had covered the main BrainTrust fleet. But he hadn’t built it over the fleet; he’d built it a few meters to the east. Then he’d taken the fleet a hundred kilometers to the west, far beyond Kung’s radar range and well outside the view of any satellite focused on the original location. By the time the satellite had taken a photo, the iceberg, battered and blasted by Kung’s missiles, had melted enough to leave no trace on radar, as intended when they’d designed the iceberg.

  Jonathan hesitated near the Mission Commander’s office on the Mount Parnassus. The last time he’d entered an office like this for a purpose like this, he’d found nothing but disappointment.

  In the end, he took a breath and stepped through the door.

  Oziegbe, whose position as Mission Commander had been upgraded from temporary to permanent, smiled up at him from behind the desk. “Jonathan! What news do you have? I know you’re here to discuss the results of the drilling tests, but first, how’s the development of the port going?”

  Jonathan shrugged. “Pretty well. Much better now that the bots are doing the work.” Part of the deal the BrainTrust had cut with the Chinese had been a contract for the BrainTrust to take over the cleanup and reconstruction of the Lagos Harbor. When Oziegbe had introduced Jonathan to Wu Bolin and Jonathan had explained how his bots could do the hard parts of the job astonishingly more quickly and efficiently than Wu’s people and reduce Wu’s costs by a comparably astonishing amount, Wu had concluded he could get his project back on budget and make up some of the time on the schedule. So far, so good.

  Jonathan smiled just a little. “Soon I’ll be putting in real drilling rigs, just like in Arizona.” He pursed his lips. “Sort of. Like Arizona, except drilling for oil, not water, and drilling underwater instead of in the desert.”

  Oziegbe rose and clapped Jonathan on the shoulder. “Learning new things is good for you.”

  Jonathan couldn’t argue with that, he supposed.

  Oziegbe leaned back against the desk. “Anyway, tell me what you’ve found.”

  As he had once before, Jonathan reached into his pocket for a box filled with rocks. With both excitement and trepidation, he brought it forth.

  Oziegbe examined the bundle of rough crystals with their cubic edges. He immediately recognized it. “Rough uncut diamonds!” He sighed, walked back around the desk, and pulled a handful of something from a drawer.

  When he opened his palm, Jonathan saw a welter of beautiful polished stones. Oziegbe explained, “One of the professors on the Taixue sent me these. He’s trying to figure out what to do with them, so he’s sent bags of these things to all fleets. His grad students whipped them up in the lab.” He juggled them in his hand. “They’re carefully built up, one atom at a time, to have flaws like natural diamonds. Completely indistinguishable from what you dig out of the ground.”

  Jonathan frowned.

  Oziegbe nodded. “We can crash the market in diamonds any time we want with these. The only question is, how do we maximize our profit from it?” He tossed the diamonds back in the drawer, where they rattled around for a moment. “Anything else?”

  Jonathan pulled out his other case. This one contained a rock made up of small crystals jutting in all directions, some clear, some brown, some gray. “Monazite. Thorium.”

  “Thorium! Now that might be useful.” Oziegbe turned to his tablet and brought up some data. “This’ll be quite valuable someday. Eventually, we’ll run out of the spent nuclear fuel uranium rods the dirtside countries pay us to recycle.” He shrugged as he continued to scan the page. “So, it’s important to mark where you found this, but it’ll be a couple of years before we have any use for it.”

  Jonathan slumped. “Darn hard to find things people need.”

  Oziegbe was still studying the info on his tablet. “Hang on.” He gave Jonathan a sharp glance. “Do you have the full assay of what you’ve got in those rocks?”

  Jonathan fiddled with his tablet and swiped the detailed breakout over to Oziegbe.

  After another moment of study, Oziegbe leapt to his feet with a shout. “Congratulations!” He dragged Jonathan through the door into the passage. “Gather your team! I’ll buy the champagne! Time to cel
ebrate!”

  Jonathan managed to stop in the corridor for a moment, bracing himself against the tidal wave of Oziegbe’s excitement. “Celebrate what?”

  Oziegbe held up his tablet and scrolled through the list of elements in the rock. “Neodymium!”

  Jonathan looked morose. “Just a trace.”

  Oziegbe once more clapped him on the shoulder. “More than enough! Don’t you know? Neodymium is a vital component of the best electric motors.” He licked his lips. “With the growing development of graphene super-capacitors and beta-batteries to replace gas and diesel engines, there’s a growing demand for larger numbers of more powerful electrics. Neodymium supplies are already strained, and the spot price has been soaring.”

  Oziegbe turned into the promenade. “Where do I buy champagne around here?”

  When Jonathan pointed out a likely store, Oziegbe continued, “Anyway, you’ve just saved us from a serious shortage that looked like it was going to hamstring our factories.” He stopped and looked up at Jonathan’s face with sparkling eyes. “Oh, with the profit-sharing, you’re about to be rich, too. Congratulations.”

  Jonathan soaked that in and nodded. Not bad for a day’s work, he supposed.

  Alex had wanted a small wedding. Tricia had agreed and told Dawn and Gina to keep it small.

  Gina and Dawn followed her instructions with great vigor, so after several rounds of harsh winnowing of the list of possible attendees, barely a thousand people received invitations.

  Tricia spent much of the time stewing about how much she should tell Alex about her past. In the end, she decided that there was no aspect of that sordid history that would sound better coming from a leak by someone else than from her, and data had the bad habit of becoming public, sooner or later. She truly wanted to start a new life, and in that new life, she wanted to be honest and honorable and…clean.

  So, with her heart in her throat, she told him everything.