by Brandt Legg
“It’s astonishing his family has survived. Why my grandfather didn’t have his grandfather killed is beyond me,” Miner said in a tone as close to anger as he ever got.
“Your grandfather did things like that, did he?” Sarlo asked, knowing the answer.
“Everything was at stake. Do you know that they offered his grandfather, Booker Lipton, a seat on the A-Council? And the son-of-a-bitch turned it down. He’s the only person who ever said no to the Council.”
“I know.”
“Why would anyone turn down a position on the Council?”
“I think you know the answer.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m going to use the new CAAP Board to finally rein him in.”
Miner rubbed his hands together. Corporate Assets Acquisition Parity, CAAP for short, was the gift the Council had given Miner. It would allow him incredible power to slow, and even stop, many of Deuce’s business activities.
Miner sat behind his desk and began filling the air with VMs from his INU. “And when Deuce resists CAAP looking at his holdings, and our new requirements for CAAP approval before any acquisition, he’ll challenge the CAAP Board, and therefore, the A-Council. The public is going to love it!”
For the first time since the Banoff, the government would begin to analyze and curb corporate activity, specifically when acquisitions of other companies or assets would give a corporation an unfair advantage. The A-Council members and their friends would not face much scrutiny, but their competitors would endure much higher taxes and oversight.
Sarlo once again brought up her biggest concern for the scheme. “But even with the Council agreeing to let you form the new board, we don’t know how they will deal with his violations and refusal to comply.”
“The Premier will announce the CAAP Board later this week, once they find someone from the Economic Chairman’s office to run it.” Miner couldn’t be the public face of CAAP because of the obvious conflict of interest, but he would be in charge behind the scenes as the CAAP’s liaison to the A-Council. “Deuce is obviously our first target, but it’ll take months and months before we’re ready to charge him, by then‒‒”
“You’ll be Council President, and soon after you’ll have Polis Drast in as World Premier,” Sarlo finished his sentence, knowing the plan too well.
“Clockwork.”
“But they didn’t give you everything,” she said as VMs interacted with holograms and light-forms depicting every possible outcome with CAAP in place. Most of the millions of outcomes led to disaster for Deuce Lipton, many even had Miner’s greatest rival winding up in an AOI prison.
“That was another mistake I’ll remedy once I’m in charge,” Miner said, speaking of his request to have AOI remove Deuce pre-emptively. “They don’t fully understand the threat he poses.”
“To whom? You or the government?” she asked slyly.
“Hell, soon there won’t be a difference.”
“That may be why they didn’t grant that proposal.” She glanced at the scenarios being crunched and quantified and saw a miniscule, but worrying, percentage showing Miner in ruin.
“I didn’t push. I barely have the votes to get the presidency as it is. I don’t want to jeopardize that, but I may just do it myself.”
“You’re not serious? You know what happens if you defy the Council and act autonomously.”
Chapter 8
Runit, Nelson, and Grandyn spilled into the library, still in the midst of their heated debate. It had continued in clipped and cryptic bursts since they had left the pizza place.
“Not here, not here,” Runit whispered loudly as two stray patrons turned to see the source of the noisy disruption in the suddenly “busy” library.
Nelson and Grandyn followed him to a long, narrow room on the lower level which could have also served as a bomb shelter. The 12,000-square-meter, three-story limestone building had been listed in the Register of Historic Places since 1979, and had undergone three major renovations in its nearly two-hundred-year existence, but the old place always seemed cold, even in summer. Labeled boxes of books and metal filing cabinets filled the room.
“He’s not helping, and I don’t even want him to know another thing about it!” Runit blasted as he shut the door.
“You can’t stop me Dad.”
“The hell I can’t! Not a single book leaves this building without my participation.”
“You’d sacrifice the books?” Grandyn asked.
“To save my son? I’d sacrifice everything.” He paused. “And that is being brave and true.”
“Listen to me,” Nelson began. “We don’t have to get caught. Our lives don’t have to be ruined.”
“What do you think the AOI is going to do when they discover we stole all the books they intend to destroy?” Runit shot back.
“They’re going to burn them in the building. We’re not taking all the books. The AOI guys come in and see a bunch of books on shelves, I doubt they’re going to do an inventory.”
“What percentage of books do you think we need to take?” Runit asked, calming down.
“You’re in a better position to answer that than me, but I’d say as many as 100,000 titles,” Nelson said.
“We’ve got over a million books,” Runit said. “Maybe they wouldn’t miss ten percent.”
“I doubt very much the guys they’ll send in to do this are readers,” Nelson said. “Of course they won’t miss ten percent. How many books are down here in storage?”
“More than that,” Runit said absently. “Still, generating the list of which 100,000 books we want and then pulling them is a huge undertaking.”
“That’s why you need help,” Grandyn said.
“I guess there’s nothing suspicious about you hanging around the library. You grew up in this grand old building,” Runit said. “But you’re to be nowhere near this place once the first volume goes out the door.”
“Deal,” Grandyn said.
“Not so fast,” Runit said. “This is big stuff. I want one more concession.” He put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “You get those applications in.”
Grandyn grimaced. “If that’s what you want. But filling out the paperwork doesn’t mean I’m going to college.”
“At least it extends the deadline for us to be able to finish the debate.” Then he looked at his son. “Does this ‘not wanting to go to college’ have anything to do with Vida?”
“Dad, my girlfriend, you’ll be happy to know, agrees with you. Vida thinks I should get a degree.”
“Well,” Runit said, smiling, “I’ve always liked that girl.”
Grandyn looked at his father and smiled, but not about Vida, and Runit knew what it meant. He tipped his head slightly to his son and gave half a wink. Grandyn nodded back and let his eyes linger on his father’s for a second. Runit understood the profound thanks his son had just given. It was an incredibly tough decision to allow his son into this thing, but three things made it easier: he trusted his son completely, and knew Grandyn was both smarter, and tougher than himself.
“Okay, now that we have that little bit of business out of the way,” Nelson said, taking advantage of the temporary peace, “do you think we can get started on the monumental task of saving humanity’s written treasures?”
“I can link a listing of our titles to your INU, and you can help tell me which books to mark,” Runit said to Nelson. “But it’s going to take a lot longer than we have.”
“I think we can automate it somehow. There are whole categories we don’t need to even look at,” Runit said.
“We need someone to write an artificial intelligence program to sort, you know like DesTIn,” Grandyn said. “The system could generate a list of books given the right parameters.”
“Do you have any idea where we can find such a person?” his father asked.
“I don’t.”
“You might, if you were in college.”
“Hey, that argument has been shelved,” Nelson said. �
�Runit, please leave that alone until we get through this.” He widened his eyes at his friend.
Runit nodded.
“Besides, I think I know the perfect person to do the DesTIn program.”
“Seriously? Who?” Runit asked.
“Blaise Cortez,” Nelson said.
Cortez, a famous and eccentric inventor, had created the DesTIn. But he owed more of his fame to his stunning brilliance and outrageous personality. Always controversial, and with a talent to offend, Blaise somehow managed to parlay those difficult traits into a talent for brokering deals. He seemed to have contacts in every governmental office, all the great universities, and any corporation that mattered.
“How do you know Blaise Cortez?” Grandyn asked.
“Forget it,” Runit said. “I’ve heard he’s connected to the AOI.”
“It’s not true,” Nelson said. “I’ve known him for years.”
“How well?”
Nelson fumbled for his bacs again before recalling the rules. “I-I met him at a party four or five years ago,” he stammered.
“And have you seen him since?”
“No.”
“He won’t even remember you.”
“Blaise Cortez remembers everything. They say he has an implant.”
Tens of thousands of people, known as “Imps,” had nano-computers, INUs, or other processors implanted into their brains. The transformation often left eerie effects, such as making them secretive, cold, and distant, resulting in Imps being shunned, and even feared, by respectable society.
“If he’s really an Imp, that would make him all the more dangerous. Anyway, there’s no way to find a guy like that.”
“Not true. I know Deuce Lipton.”
“Now you’re friends with the world’s richest man? Did you meet him at the same party?” Runit asked with a smirk. “Have you seen him since?”
“It wasn’t at a party. I was doing a reading last year in San Francisco. He came up to me afterwards. Said he’d read all my books.”
“All of them? I haven’t even read them all.”
“I wish that were true. You’ve actually read them all twice. How else could you point out the parts you didn’t like so easily.”
“Well, there really aren’t that many parts I don’t like,” Runit said. “And, I admit, I may have read a few of them more than once.”
Nelson flashed a rare smile. “Anyway, he’s written me several times since. Not over the flash. Instead, a courier drops by an envelope. Always a few typed pages, signed with a scrawled ‘DL,’ nothing more.” Because of AOI monitoring, a minor industry had grown around old-fashioned couriers delivering messages in a variety of untraceable ways.
“What do his letters say?”
“Mostly observations about my books. He really likes them. The man gets my work.”
“You’re so full of surprises.” Runit looked at his old friend. “But I’m not surprised. Brilliant writers have often attracted an impressive, if not odd, assortment of fans. But tell me this. Who else do you know?”
“That’s the wrong question. It should be what else do I know.”
“Tell me,” Runit said.
Grandyn never took his eyes off Nelson.
Nelson leaned close to Runit’s face and then whispered, just loud enough that Grandyn could also hear, “You have to understand. They aren’t rearranging the words for no reason. Deep motives exist for distorting the meaning of these works. It’s a complex mess, but the changes leave a pattern as to exactly why, and what I’m seeing is very disturbing.”
“There’s a thin line between genius and madness, my friend.”
“I see no line.” Nelson stared at him until Runit’s expression finally matched his in seriousness, then added in a grave, yet barely audible, voice, “We have to save the books. They’re everything we are. They alone can bring the answer.”
Runit nodded. “This thing we are about to do . . . I’m afraid we can’t even imagine the trouble it will bring.”
Chapter 9
Nelson drove to Seattle. In the days before LEVs, the trip would have taken more than three hours. Now, with self-driving LEVs, he’d arrive in just under two hours, by about zero-sixteen-hundred, which meant Nelson could be back home by eighteen-hundred, nineteen at the latest. Vehicular accidents and traffic were something the generations since his grandparents knew little about. The onboard-computers, equipped with DesTIn and Sophisticated-GPS, allowed all vehicles to float along the solar-roadways in the most efficient manner.
The City was home to many large corporations, two actually predated the Banoff: Boeing and Amazon, both competed with Deuce Lipton. The Aerospace maker was a competitor to StarFly, manufacturing satellites and space vehicles. Amazon didn’t sell physical books anymore, but they had become by far the world’s largest retailer. Amazon also made an impressive array of gadgets, including their own INU.
Nelson didn’t expect Deuce Lipton to be in Seattle, but it was his closest office, and asking for the trillionaire’s help could only be done in writing. Zooms and the flash system could not be trusted. They debated using a courier, but they weren’t all trustworthy.
Lipton was the wealthiest man in the world, but no one knew for sure how much money he had. The old ways of measuring wealth had vanished with paper currency and exchange rates. These days, digis were the only legal tender. All of it was kept track of on the Field. Of course, holdings of land, companies, and stocks also still factored into a person’s wealth, but one thing hadn’t changed. It all came down to power.
Deuce Lipton had been born owning more power than anyone in history, with the possible exception of some long-forgotten Egyptian pharaoh. His grandfather was the legendary Booker Lipton, a man already fabulously wealthy when he created the first INU, known as the Eysen. INUs completely destroyed the personal computer, tablet, and smart phone markets within a few short years. It took more than a decade before any other company came up with a reasonable competitor to the Eysen. Even now, the half dozen other INU makers combined only accounted for a third of the world’s market.
Booker Lipton, a black man, back when race still mattered in the world, had made many enemies, but he owed that more to his ruthlessness as a businessman and a clear distrust for the government. He often said he knew corruption had existed everywhere because he’d bribed half the officials in the world. But the elder Lipton was also a paradox, whose deep spiritual beliefs drove him much more than a greedy pursuit of wealth. Booker had funded a group called the Inner Movement that, prior to the Banoff, sought to change the world from a materialistic, personality-based society to one rooted in love and lived from the soul.
Then the Banoff happened, which not only interrupted the IM’s plans, but also disrupted the track of human evolution and advancement. When more than half the species dies in the space of two years, an indelible mark is left on all who come after. The catastrophe gave rise to the Aylantik, which, most agreed that even with its faults, was superior to the old world and far better than the horror that might have easily followed such a devastating event.
Nelson wrapped his grey wool scarf around his neck against the damp January weather as he crossed the parking lot of Eysen, Inc.’s sprawling Seattle campus. He cleared security easily. One of the guards had actually finished Nelson’s most recent book the night before, which proved to be just a foreshadowing of the cranky writer’s good fortune that day. After giving his name and telling the receptionist that he simply wanted to leave a note for Mr. Lipton, she asked him to wait. After twenty-five minutes, he considered asking her what exactly he was waiting for when an Asian man approached.
“Nelson Wright, Mr. Lipton will see you now.”
“He’s here?” Nelson asked in disbelief, thinking he would have shaven off his stubble and put on a fresh shirt if he’d known there was a chance to see the trillionaire.
“Yes. He has read your note and would like to talk with you, if you have a moment.”
He looked to see
if the Asian man was joking. “Who wouldn’t have a moment for Mr. Lipton? I’ve got all day.”
The man smiled and bowed slightly. “Right this way, please.”
After surviving a maze of secure doors, facial recognition scans, and two elevator rides, Nelson was left alone in a round waiting room that, although lit, featured an incredible planetarium on the ceiling.
Nelson lost himself in the stars. After almost ten minutes, Deuce Lipton entered the room, gliding across the floor, his legs fluid as if he might have been a dancer. “Nelson, I’m so glad to see you again,” he said, extending his hand. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”
Nelson had slid down in the chair during the star show and almost tripped getting to his feet. Deuce, tall and wearing old-fashioned faded blue jeans and a dark, natural fiber shirt, appeared as a time traveler.
“Mr. Lipton, thank you for seeing me. I didn’t expect‒‒”
“Please, I prefer Deuce.” He sat down across from where Nelson had been sitting.
Nelson was struck anew by Deuce’s eyes, an intense shade of blue rarely seen on someone primarily from African descent. Nelson recalled reading that Deuce’s maternal grandmother was from Norway.
“Nelson, do you know Fermi’s Paradox?”
“Yes,” he said, a little surprised at the off-topic query, but he had read that Deuce had a great interest in space, and of course owned StarFly, the largest company involved in the various off-Earth industries. “With the infinite size of space, where is everybody?”
“Correct. Here it is, 2098. I’ve got bases on the moon and Mars, we’ve identified thousands and thousands of planets orbiting stars that should be able to support life, and undoubtedly millions more must exist among the trillions of stars in the observable universe,” he said, motioning to the stars above them. “Yet no evidence has been found. No contact made.”