“That is very true. We’ll press on then,” said Yesha over her neural link.
Eliza continued from her office and felt a chill within the Senate’s chamber. The UP had gained slightly less than one-third of the Senate seats, and the two major parties were less than excited to see her. Still, from her vantage point, while that was a major change in the political agenda of the established parties, there was still quite a way to go to reach the other two thirds. Many outside the UP had plans that had stretched for decades, with nuance and complexity, and they weren’t influenced by Universal Ethics. They had a convoluted bureaucracy mired in by-law after by-law so there was very little they could do when it came to common sense, or laws when put into effect would protect and promote the well-being of the citizens, instead of leaving them entrenched in the search for mere and temporary survival, greed, and pointless power.
It was obvious that the tax code approved by the House and the Senate last year came short of protecting those who could return the investment as they benefited from programs that allowed for progress in the scholastic arena, and instead, it punished those seeking higher education. Yet, to a certain and desirable extent, for a period of time, they would increase the bottom line for singles, couples, and families. Eliza saw through all of this, and an opportunity to present a flat tax program, which would serve as a motivation for every citizen or legal tax-paying resident to work any job, any approved employment, while affording in that sense all people a chance for a taxpayer dividend. Each year Eliza’s country would benefit from their investments in asteroid mining operations via NASA and other contracted mining firms, put together via the new tax code she was introducing.
If desired, a person could contribute more than the flat rate of 10% for a mathematically equitable and greater dividend, based on the assessment of procured elemental values on each asteroid and the number of asteroids mined each year.
If, for example, four-hundred-million employees earned an average of forty-thousand USD a year, then the 10% revenue received from taxes would make it, so the IRS received 1.6 trillion USD, where Eliza would contribute 1.6 trillion USD as well, with an expected mining investment of fifty-billion USD resulting in a return of one-hundred-trillion USD after mining five asteroids. 30% of the produced and sold income from asteroid mining would be divided into four-hundred-million shares, in return for working, paying taxes, and supplying the budget for mining investment, which would be reflected in the taxpayer dividend. 20% of it would go to pay off the national debt completely. 5% would pay for US governmental programs. 10% would go to provide labor compensation, technology development, further exploration, and equipment use with the necessary revenues and funding to expand further mining operations, and 5% would go back to medical, retirement, sabbatical, and business compensation account purposes. The final 30% would go to a Federal Account that would allow for excellent employer compensation. Anything left would go to a surplus.
With this plan, everyone could be employed and compensated through a dividend. This went full circle leading to dividends that would foment productivity, personal investment in innovation, and afford individuals to be a part of the network of amazing people who work to increase the advancement of civilization. The motivation was certainly there to earn enough each year to pay their 10% and receive the dividend. As mining operations expanded, the dividends would increase. The idea was to motivate everyone to stop complaining about the world around them and work forty hours a week for ten months out of the year with proper and due compensation, accompanied with certain benefits that allowed for additional time off for holidays and sick leave, and to add to that, there was an additional built-in incentive for businesses to provide excellent compensation and benefits.
Any business that demonstrated ethical treatment of employees would receive a fair portion of the dividend which had been put into a different category in the Federal budget. Ethical treatment would be weighed-in by Eliza’s Laws of Universal Ethics, wherein the subsequent ratio consisted of USD investment into employee compensation and benefit costs, reinvestment into the business, and the amount paid to their shareholders. Ultimately, if the percentage of employee compensation and benefits in-turn raised the income earner’s level of pay to greater than forty-thousand per the lowest cost of living ratio in the US, and greater for areas where the cost of living ratio was higher, then they would receive what the income earner would receive as a dividend, which would be approximately five times what the income earner paid in taxes.
Ultimately, the average income would be $40,000, minus $4000 in taxes. At the end of each year, they would receive a dividend of $20,000, for a gross income of $60,000 and a net income of $56,000, with all medical, retirement, and sabbatical expenses paid courtesy of the US Treasury. That was if only three asteroids were mined. Eliza had left three-thousand-asteroids between Venus and Mars, not in tangent to Earth or any other Pathway Industries assets available to Earth for just that purpose. She had also left about three-hundred-thousand in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Her Octodecillions came from not just mining the material that she already had, alone, but also from what she had done with those materials afterward—the Twelve Database Moons, the twenty-thousand tech cities, the space elevators, the shielding of each planet and the solar system, resources for the IMC, and more.
If you did the math, which she had done, you would note that businesses would be compensated quite well, as well. It was a win-win for everyone, with a solid value, not just charged up numbers. She already had a method of mining and reinvesting those materials into products, but she had come up with a “Public Earth Acceptable Plan” that she was sure the Senate would accept, as well as the House, and the Executive and Judicial Branches.
Her first revelation would be her series of invisible anti-collision space elevators, anchors, and counter-weight shipping and receiving platforms, as well as her, weigh stations, transport stations, cargo spacecraft, and micro-gravity hotels with her own gravity plate systems. Everything else would be revealed as the US was ready. Other countries could follow suit if they agreed to govern according to the Laws of Universal Ethics. There were plenty of resources to raise the quality of life for anyone and everyone. There would no longer be the need for greed, and the reticent result of grief and misery. If a person worked, even if they were on vacation, sabbatical, or with family on holidays, ultimately, they would have everything they needed. When the time was right she would reveal her biopods, her tech cities, the shielding, and the progress of the terraformed planets. Eventually, she would reveal the Twelve Database Moons in all of their glory, but that along with the robust IMC would be several years down the road.
There would no longer be a concern for theft, looting, or worry for survival, job centers would eventually be supplied their own series of biopods setup to optimize and train employees for any job needed, and it would be much easier to live a noble life of productivity and a shared commitment toward the advancement of humanity, civilization, and the preservation of life. Soon she would meet with Vesha Celeste and ask her to work with James Cooper, going over and fine-tuning the plans for the IMC, working with Najem, an honorary member, on the missions of the thirteen zonal crews, and prepare Earth for interstellar and intergalactic travel throughout the expanse of our known Universe.
But, first Vesha needed to be revived…
Chapter 31: Najem Grace, Section 1
Database Moon Archive, Celestial-Sol Entry Date: 2018 December 25. Yesha Alevtina trains Vesha Celeste. In this part of her training, leading and following her awakening, Vesha witnesses Najem Grace as she works out her doubts about optimizations with Eliza Williams. Prior to that we experience the awakening of Vesha Celeste, which plays a significant role in Najem’s decision. These memories are a collaboration from the minds of Najem, Vesha, Eliza and many others within the Virtual Universe. Vesha, Yesha, Najem, and many others are interfaced via biopod within the Pathway Melrose Campus. Input by: Yesha Alevtina, President of Pat
hway Industries, 2015-2022.
She had aged every day with charm, grace, and brilliance of mind and although she was an honorable member of Pathway, she was still concerned with the idea of age reversal—at least where it affected herself and her beliefs. While she still clung to her religion when it came to her choices in her personal life, both Vesha Celeste and Eliza Williams had helped her to understand that advancing as a civilization, understanding our Universe, making discoveries of the unknown, and being healthy so we could not only learn but compound upon our wisdom—using our greatest talent, our brains—was a blessing.
Preserving life rather than watching it wither away when we could do something about it, would most definitely be considered noble in any deity’s eyes. She started to see, after such a long life, that there may be another passion she had never before even considered, and her friends at Pathway certainly gave her moral support, no matter her personal decisions. They just helped her to see things from a completely different standpoint—especially after all of her visits to Pathway’s Virtual Universe. She had done a lot with Pathway already, but she knew she could do more and despite her age, she yearned to travel the stars still.
As per the agreement presented to her, she became an honorary member of Pathway many years prior and arriving at that point Najem had been given a couple of options—she had chosen the second one, to hold off on bringing youth to her personal appearance. Najem Grace was ninety-three years old and instead of reversing her aging, for now, she had gone ahead with the choice of internally healing both her physiology and her neurology, but she wasn’t quite yet ready to let her friends outside of Pathway witness her become younger and optimized.
Today was her friend, Vesha’s big day, she had been a fellow honorary member who had chosen to live completely natural, and she suffered from dementia before she passed away. She had been allowed to participate in Pathway affairs due to her experiences with NASA, as was Najem, but she had chosen not to be healed at all, for the sake of science. Najem remembered the day of her funeral, and how sad it was to lose her. Her family had been there, dressed in black, and tears streaming down their cheeks. Vesha held a special place in each of their hearts. When Vesha had passed away, per request and agreement she would be revived later, after the family had had a chance to grieve, which they had. Until her family was read-in, however, she would most likely never see them again.
There she was, lying silently in the heavily-monitored room, which represented her room at the Princeton Assisted Living Home, and Najem was sitting in another room not too far away overlooking where Vesha appeared to be sleeping. Vesha and Najem had spent a lot of time at the campus facilities together, and now, since she had passed away, Najem had come by to visit her many times over the last two years. She had visited on many days from Triton, orbiting Neptune, after carrying out her daily duties, to see the progress on Vesha’s comatose and lifeless body, as it was being optimized. The optogenetics teams kept Vesha’s mind shut down until everything was ready for download. Najem was an observer many times, going through shared experiences in the Virtual Universe, with her friend, Vesha Celeste, who, in a twenty-two-year-old body, was about to be reawakened—a stark difference from when she passed away at the age of eighty-eight.
Vesha had been a colleague of hers throughout the years since the 1950’s and a dear friend since they met when Najem had sponsored an astronomy club in the Washington, DC, area when women were still struggling to be accepted in the hierarchy of science. Lost in thought, sitting there in the technologically advanced observation room, Najem had missed Vesha in the real world, greatly, over the last two years since she had passed away and she looked forward to actually talking with her again. Her unique personality had gone all too soon, plagued with dementia throughout the last of her days, yet somehow, she was capable of practicing self-reflection and retaining much of her ideas as to who she was and the experiences she had gone through. Dementia impacted her by causing her neurons to fire in non-stop loops, so on many occasions, she had to take sleep medication otherwise she would have died of fatigue—nonetheless, she passed away, and Najem’s friend was about to be brought back.
Seeing her friend reawakened might just change things for Najem. How this went down would determine whether or not Vesha would be brought back to a physical appearance similar to what she had when she was twenty-two but optimized. She would be brought back, but with a few interesting, non-harmful, and artsy side-effects. However, and even more important to anything else, Najem would be there to witness and able to tell if this was Vesha on the inside.
Although she wouldn’t be able to greet Vesha Celeste until she had been awakened, and due to the unique nature of this occasion she would need to wait further until Vesha had received her Virtual Universe training, she couldn’t wait for the moment when she could welcome her back. Najem Grace had been looking forward to seeing her favorite astrophysicist in her new form, her new body, completed and ready, as well as with her reawakened mind following two years of tests and she couldn’t wait to see if there were any personality changes or subtle adjustments that might lend to her own clarity as to the choice she, herself, would make.
Much of Najem’s work currently revolved around working with the very handsome James Cooper, sending Eliza’s, Vesha’s and Anastasia’s particle jump sensors, or sensors, out to explore the furthest reaches of the Universe for a robust and accurate map, as well as to plot the mission locations that the IMC would visit on its journey throughout the Observable Universe. Very similar to but much more compact than jump gates, these sensors acted like control point mechanisms and robust transceivers that could go anywhere throughout the Universe using a three-dimensional grid system of the Cosmos, which could be zoomed in for accuracy, to detect existing sensors, could transport spacecraft and all of its contents in a blink of an eye, and much more. For now, they were using them to gather information pertinent to the IMC mission, and she was always excited to see the Universe from so many different vantage points. She saw constellations of different places in different galaxies, had derived locations of pulsars, neutron stars, suns that had met their end and promising new and young stars with countless planets that could sustain life—things that wouldn’t be seen by the telescopes on Earth for many, many years.
The principal mission would for all intents and purposes start off with twelve drop-off points, one after the other, in essentially twelve zones throughout observable space. To understand how the twelve zones worked, essentially, they had divided the Earth into twelve geographical areas of responsibility as viewed at midnight—six in the northern hemisphere and six in the southern hemisphere. From there on Earth, they divided all of observable space into twelve zonal areas that would go out to the CMB relative to Earth and each zonal command would be in charge of exploring, tagging, colonizing, and creating commercial space gateways for all planets, solar systems, and galaxies within their zone.
In the meantime, here Najem was, visiting from Neptune’s Triton station, her home away from home, and instead of sitting in a one-way viewing room on Earth—all to avoid overwhelming Vesha during her awakening, just in case too many changes all at once would startle her. Yesha Alevtina was about to give them their final brief, before commencing the reawakening. Yesha had been appointed by and unanimously voted on to take over as President of Pathway when Eliza Williams had handed it over when she ran for and became a US Representative and subsequently a US senator in Washington, DC.
Eliza was still the UP leader, and Yesha and James worked together to helm Pathway, both on Earth and throughout the solar system. Eliza, as Senator, had commissioned Yesha and James to begin considering putting together all the necessary pieces for interstellar and intergalactic journeys, missions, and colonization. Eliza would visit Pathway regularly via the Virtual Universe interface via the biopod in her office at the Capitol Building and communicate with others using her neural link. But it was Yesha, the President of Pathway, who was giving everyone the final bri
efing on how things would proceed, before commencing.
“Right when I knock on the door, the advanced systems in place will awaken her. To her, it will seem like she had just settled down to close her eyes after pondering on her life one more time, and then she’ll hear a door knock. Since everyone agreed that it would be best that I do this, as the President of Pathway Industries, I am doing this rather than Najem, with a gracious heart.” Yesha looked at Najem, “along with Eliza, thank you for suggesting this, Najem and each of you. You will get to meet her soon. I know you would like to meet with her right away, but we need to make sure everything is running optimally, and that her body and her mind are truly hers. We need to minimize the initial contacts in case things go haywire, plus we don’t want anyone to become too attached right away. Well, I’m pretty devoted already as I’m sure each of us is, but you know what I mean—most of us knew and loved her then and if things were to go wrong it would be a major setback, not to mention heartbreaking.
“We need to do the training first. While it may seem like several lifetimes in the Virtual Universe, it will only be a couple of hours. We have a lot more to train her on, to spin her up on, than usual. She was invaluable with regard to her particle jump sensors. She had started the idea and brought it to Eliza’s and my attention when we were very young. Eliza had formulated a majority of the technologies previous to Pathway LLC, then Pathway Industries, then Pathway Industries and Associates, and later Pathway, and even though everyone here has confirmed or even improved via updates upon these technologies, she was the pioneer. Anastasia, Najem, and their teams finished the details to put them in Najem’s care for distribution throughout the known Universe. That said, once I take her into the Virtual Universe, the rest of you can join us and watch as observers, before you meet with her, but please make sure you do a good ‘repast’ of your own life’s experiences and shared and personal memories for optimal cognitive frame working and upload to the Twelve Database Moons—we want to make sure everyone is backed up, just in case there is a worst-case scenario. She will be very powerful and capable—hence. Once Virtual Universe training with Vesha is done, I will broadcast to you that we are ready for the meet and greet. When I do, you will hear me say, ‘and, this is where we are now,’ and you will be pulled into a vast virtual meeting hall no matter where you are. Are there any questions?”
Further than Before- Pathway to the Stars Page 58