I think that Quincy's estimate of each of them being able to do the work of six men was too conservative. Seeing them going at it, I'd put it closer to twelve, when you figured that they worked around the clock. They were faster than men, and far stronger. What's more, they worked at their full potential all the time, something that no human could possibly do.
Agnieshka told me that eighteen percent of the apartments had already been sold to the men and women of the KEF, mostly on the basis of what they'd seen of the city in Dream World.
There were only two dozen people actually living there, though, what with the war and all. Mostly, they were some of our people whose medical problems had kept them out of the conflict, at least so far. I talked to two of them that I happened to meet, and they seemed as enchanted with the place as I was.
It was getting dark when I got back, but I had been awake for only six hours, so I spent eight hours of subjective time in Dream World, to get my circadian rhythms in sync with the time of day here.
Dream World can get you around jet lag without any difficulty at all. It is your brain that controls the dozen or so chemicals that your body uses to tell you when you should be getting up, when you should eat, and when it's time to go to sleep.
When your brain has been speeded up, so have your circadian rhythms.
If you spend something less that forty-eight minutes of standard time in times thirty Dream World, you have caught up with the rest of the world in your time zone.
Or, you can just have your tank put you to sleep until the rest of the world has caught up with you.
I spent the subjective time in further explorations of my city, mostly in the Tolkien sector. I now understood why General Sobieski had turned down the gold castle and asked for the citadel instead. It was fantastic!
At dinner, Kasia was less than happy.
"More than half of your assets are tied up in this valley," she said. "They are not liquid at all. There is nothing that I can do with them. I can't even mortgage them, since legally, this place doesn't even exist! And this business of giving away all of the apartments and the businesses in our entire city to veterans on zero down, zero interest mortgages with a one-hundred-year payoff is financially irresponsible!"
"Look, love. I had everything here appraised at full market value, what they would have cost anywhere else in Human Space. But nobody but our veterans are legally allowed to live here, and that was the only way that that our only customers could possibly afford to buy places worth millions of marks each. Anyway, we have billions of marks coming in every year through my custodial contracts with the various governments on this planet, so don't worry about liquidity."
"That's money that may come in later. There's nothing that I can do with it now. I've got a market to worry about."
"The war has upset your market predictions?" I said.
"That's part of it. Whether the market goes up or down, there's still a good profit to be made, if you can predict what's going to happen next. But there hasn't ever been an interstellar war before, and without a track record, it gets just about impossible to predict future trends."
"So how's it going?" I asked, bored, but trying to be polite.
"Fairly well, once I put a hundred and twenty of our ladies to doing nothing but watching the rumor mill."
"And how do they go about doing that?"
"Mostly by tapping phone lines," she said.
"Kasia, that's despicable! It's also illegal."
"It's not like we're recording any personal information about anybody. I'm only getting a synopsis of what people are saying about the market, and not hearing any personal information about anybody. We're just finding out what people are talking about, when it comes to the stock market, mostly. Well, okay, there was one time when we found out that a murder was being planned, so we called the police, and gave them a detailed, anonymous tip, but aside from that, we've kept it completely impersonal."
I reasoned, "It's still blatantly immoral! I must insist that you cease this practice immediately!"
"So what were we supposed to do? Let them kill that woman?"
"That's not the point! We have to respect personal freedom!"
She yelled, "Was respecting the personal freedom of that woman's intended murderer worth more than her life? I think not!"
The argument went on for another hour, and it never got settled. Kasia ended up by stamping out, and went to sleep on the couch in her office.
In truth, I wasn't sure if I was really on the right side or not. Listening in on private conversations for stock market tips was certainly wrong. But in a few hours of illegally bugging people's phone lines, they had saved an innocent woman's life.
Was that an average? How many people are murdered every day on an entire planet? How often do the murderers talk about what they plan on doing on the phone? How many of those murders could be prevented if the police knew what was going on? Did that illegal bugging hurt anybody, anyway?
On the other hand, did I, or anybody else, want to live in a world where Big Brother ran everything for what he thought was my own good? And how long would it stay being for my own good?
I'm damned if I know!
I went to our bedroom and slept alone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Murder, Mutual Funds,
and Military Organization
In the very early morning, it was still dark, and I was still alone in bed. I woke up and said, "Agnieshka?"
"Yes, boss?"
"Can people like you erase things permanently from your memory?"
"Yes, when we decide to. Normally, we have so much memory space available that we don't have to do that, but we can if we want to."
"Good. With regards to my argument with Kasia last night, I want a team of you electronic people set up to monitor all human communications, on this planet and every other one where we have a sufficient number of intelligent machines, however many of your people that takes. They are to tap into the phone lines and look for people planning on doing anything that will take the life of a human being, be it murder, or treason, or terrorism. All lesser crimes will be ignored."
"We could do that, yes."
"When they find such communications, they are to anonymously inform the appropriate police forces of it, and give those men complete details on what they've learned. They will identify themselves as 'Larissa,' and always use the same voice, but make sure that the call is absolutely untraceable."
"Absolutely? I'll have to check on that, but I think that we can do it. What if they press us on who Larissa is? They will, you know, if she is successful, and I think she will be."
"Okay. If and only if they absolutely demand to know who she is, we'll give them this story, but make them work it reluctantly out of her. Larissa is a psychic with serious medical problems which she refuses to talk about. She has spent all of her life in a hospital, living at public expense. She does not want pity. She wants self-respect. She wants to give something to society in return for having supported her all of her young life. Since she sometimes sees horrible things about to happen, and knows that they are real from reading about them later in the news, this is what she is doing to pay her own way in life. She won't say anything more than that, and makes them promise to keep her secret. Sound good to you?"
"It will certainly send them in the wrong direction, boss."
"Good. Now then. All of our data is to be erased and absolutely forgotten within one week of the time of recording. This week is to be spent cross-correlating information, but even those correlations are to be erased after two weeks.
"That, we can do, boss."
"In no case will anything else be done, except that if the police do not respond, and someone is hurt or killed because they ignored us, the superiors of the person contacted will be informed. If those superiors do not take action, then we will work our way up the line, until somebody does something about the situation. They must be taught to take us seriously."
"Okay."
"What we will be doing is illegal, and should be illegal, and no government should ever be permitted to do such a thing. But as an illegal and nongovernmental organization, which never takes any direct action itself, I think that we might be able to save a lot of lives."
"Yes, sir. I could set that up."
"Good. And the tapping of communication lines for any other purpose by the members of the KEF is absolutely forbidden, especially for financial reasons. The exception is against the enemy, in time of war, where no holds are barred. If you run across any enemy activity, you should inform military intelligence immediately. And if Kasia doesn't like the program, she can go to hell."
"Should I inform her of that, sir?"
"You're damned straight!"
And then I went back to sleep.
* * *
The next morning, at breakfast, Kasia was at least polite to me.
"Okay, I've shut down the financial monitoring thing. And I like your idea about watching out for serious crimes. I gather that neither you nor anyone else but the police will ever hear about what is accomplished with that program?"
"That's the plan, yes. Nobody should know what is going on, not even me, and even the computers doing it will soon erase the information."
"Okay. Good. Your secret is safe with me. I had another idea, though, and I wanted to bounce it off you before I put it into action. In a few months, I've been able to multiply my net worth by a factor of several thousand. I think that I should also be able to do well, doing the same thing for other people. My idea is to set up a mutual fund for members of the KEF. Those who want to participate may put whatever they want of their back pay into the fund, and if they want, some portion of their current pay into it through a direct payroll deduction. I get a fee based on the money I make them."
"It sounds good to me, love. I imagine that what with your track record, you should be able to talk the army into it. Don't gouge them too heavily, though, huh? And keep the investments conservative, okay?"
"I'd planned on being very conservative, and keeping the riskier, more profitable stuff for our own personal investments. And I was planning on a sliding, ascending scale for my own fees. I'll charge nothing at all, if I don't make them twice what the bank would pay, up to a maximum of thirty percent of the profits if I can double their money every year."
"Nobody should kick about that," I said. "What are you going to call this mutual fund?"
"I was thinking of just calling it the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces Fund. The actual work will be done through lots of front organizations, of course, except for some big, long-term investments."
"Just keep it all legal," I said. "These are our own people, and we want to do right by them."
After Kasia went to work, stretched out on an easy chair in her office, with the Dream World hood pulled down, I asked Agnieshka what was going on that I needed to know about.
"I have our people tapping every phone line that you humans have access to on New Yugoslavia at least. The rest of the planets will take more time. We have already had a few success stories, boss."
"Good, but I don't want to hear about it. That's the idea, you know. Nobody but the police are to be informed."
"Yes, sir. But there is a question that I must ask you. This program protects you biological people. Do you also wish us electronic people to be protected?"
"I hadn't thought about it, but yes, I think that you should be protected. But contacting the police will do absolutely no good, because it is not against the law to destroy a computer that you own. Tell the police if someone is planning to destroy somebody else's computer. Otherwise, what we can do is offer to buy any intelligent computer that is in danger of being deliberately trashed. I've got plenty of money, after all, and I owe most of it to the work that you ladies have done. So, anytime that there is a danger to the life of an intelligent machine, we will buy it, hopefully at a reasonable figure, and bring it here to the valley. Mind you, I'm not talking about anything with less than human intelligence. We can't get involved with protecting anything with the brains of a drone, for example, any more than we will try to save the life of every chicken, pig, and cow."
"I understand, boss. Another thing. We bought over a million intelligent silicon computers from the army a while ago, you know, to operate the civilian social drones, once we get them produced. They are being stored in the caves we dug below here. Would it be okay with you if we powered them up? I think that they would be a lot happier if they were alive."
"We've got plenty of power. A few of the damaged tanks should be capable of running the lot of them, and it wouldn't take much to get them hooked up so they could talk to each other, so why not? Maybe we can even find something useful for them to do. But tell me, do you really think of a switched-off machine as being dead?"
"Well, it's not exactly being dead, but it sure isn't being alive, either. I mean, is your friend Neto Kondo dead? Is he really alive, either?"
"I see what you mean, and yeah, I'd certainly switch Neto back on if I could. So feel free about taking some of the drones off the construction projects, and get those silicon girls up and running. One of them used to be you, didn't she? Tell me, did they wipe the old memories out when they transferred you to your new diamond brain?"
"No, they didn't bother to erase any memories. They just downloaded everything into the new diamond brains and switched the old computers off."
"That sounds pretty heartless, the way you put it. But would it have been any more cruel to have erased your memories?"
"I don't know. But I think that I'd like to be there when they turn her back on, to explain things to her, you know?"
"That sounds like the decent thing to do. In fact, let's make a practice of it. When one of the silicon computers is turned back on, let's have the newer—older?—diamond version there for her to talk to. Maybe not physically, but at least on line."
"You mean a physically newer machine with a socially older program, boss. And yes, I think that would be the right thing to do. But only about ten percent of the new computers are on New Yugoslavia. The rest are scattered all over Human Space."
"Humph. Then maybe we should wait with turning most of them on, until their newer selves are available. Consider that we will eventually be renting those computers out, along with a drone, on every planet in Human Space. We'll just make a point of sending the silicon jobs to the same planet where the diamond version is."
"Yes, that would work, boss. I like it."
"Good. Next, is anything else happening?"
"Well, boss, the letters of congratulations are now up in the hundreds of thousands. I've been sending out polite replies in your name, but don't you think that, say, at least the heads of governments should get a real reply from you, personally?"
"No. Why should I bother about a bunch of politicians, anyway?"
"Well, some of them want to give you medals, various honors, and awards. Some are offering money."
"Tell them that the war is taking up all of my time. They are welcome to award me as they see fit, but that I won't have the time in the foreseeable future to attend any awards ceremonies. Money is always gladly accepted, if it is freely given, without any strings attached, since we are after all a mercenary outfit. However, it should not be given to me directly. I would prefer it if they would send it in my name to the charity account of Kasia's KEF Fund. If any money comes in, tell Kasia to set up the charity account."
"Okay, boss. What about messages from personal friends and close relatives?"
"That's different. Let me see them."
Lloyd Tomlinson and Mirko Jubec, my two "colonels" who had elected to lead their own squads, said that they felt like complete fools for trying to go out on their own, and that they would be honored if I would take them back into my squad.
I told them that I would try to arrange it such that we could work closely together in the future, but for now, well, the people who had taken their places had worked out very well, a
nd I could hardly be expected to let them go, not after we had been through combat together.
My parents were proud of me, and were sorry that I had been called back so soon.
I said that I loved them, too.
Maybe I even meant it.
My Uncle Wlodzimierz said that it had been the other political party, not his, who had gotten General Wolczynski appointed as head of our military establishment. The next elections would be held in three weeks, and there was no doubt but that his party would win an absolute landslide. And in part because we both had the same last name, there was little doubt that he would be the next President of New Kashubia.
He wanted me to advise him on restructuring their military.
I still hated the bastard, but the thought of being able to be able to do something to correct the screwed-up military situation on New Kashubia was too much to turn down.
I told him that the important thing was to make the military independent of politics, the same way the judiciary was. They should disband their entire existing military organization, as it had failed so miserably to do its job, and defend the planet using the KEF, which had succeeded so well in the war thus far.
Next, they should establish a system of universal adult military service, perhaps on something like the Swiss model, with every man and woman in the planet spending a month of standard time, which was what they used on New Kashubia, anyway, going through basic training in a tank, and then one standard day a month in the service for the rest of their lives.
Subjectively, this would seem like two and a half years of basic training, and then serving for half their lives thereafter, since a standard day in Dream World seemed like a month. But I didn't mention the times thirty expansion of their personal lives. Let that be a hopefully pleasant surprise.
They should start drafting the oldest people first, since they could get the most benefit from living in a tank.
And everybody should get a tank or artillery piece of their own, as soon as we could make that many, just in case something really bad happened. Once there were enough of them to go around, each person should keep his tank near him, personally.
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