Rhapsody For The Tempest (The Braintrust Book 3)

by Marc Stiegler

  Lenora realized that while she had arrived a little late, she had arrived at a most timely moment. “Qi Ru has already invested several million dollars in bringing up the prototype operation you see here. And the BrainTrust Consortium, whom I’m authorized to represent on this archipelago, will be putting up half a billion all by themselves to build the ship where the smelting and refining of the ore will take place. So you’re hardly alone.”

  Fleet Captain Ainsworth cleared his throat, startling Lenora with his presence. Only now did Lenora notice just how crowded the room was with people who were physically present: Jun Laquan, his parents, and Xiu Bao, all sat in a corner, clearly uncomfortable to be here. Chen Ying sat in the middle of the table, arms crossed, frowning at the financiers who were criticizing his baby. Lenora suppressed a smile at the thought of the psychological distance the Red Princeling had had to travel to think of this project, started by the imagination of a mere peasant boy, as his own.

  The captain spoke, his upper-class accent once again on display. “We still need to address the elephant hiding in the corner of the room. The biggest problem with this project is the legal minefield you’re about to step into.”

  Ainsworth shook his head grimly. “Mining the seabed is strictly regulated by a host of international laws and regulations. The Greens will scream about ecosystem damage even if the ecosystem has less life than the Sahara Desert. And all the countries of the United Nations will demand their ‘fair share’ of the pie. It would take longer and cost more to get the agreements into place then it would take to build the ore refining ship.”

  Chen Ying rolled his eyes. “How is anybody even going to know that we’re doing this? Just grab the nodules off the ocean floor, bring them home, and don’t tell anyone.” He smiled at Lenora, offering one of her pet sayings. “Better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.”

  Lenora nodded her head briefly in acknowledgment though she suspected this line of thinking would not fly with this audience. Though financiers were not technically the kind of regulatory bureaucrats to whom she typically applied such sayings, they were frequently the ones who bore the brunt of the punishment meted out by such bureaucrats. As such, they had a more cautious attitude than a college student.

  Qi Ru spread his hands and spoke into the growing silence. “We could easily make billions of dollars before someone complained.” He pointed to a map of the ocean floor around the archipelago with varying coloration showing the density of concentration of easily collected nodules. “Perhaps we should think of this as a short-term investment. Make a quick turnaround, pay off the cost, make a profit, and move on to something else.”

  Lenora tried to add encouragement. “These kinds of jurisdictional arguments are the reason we put the archipelago in this particular location in the first place, at the intersection of the boundary disputes between China, Taiwan, and the Philippines. If one of them gets angry at us, we just shift location a little and let the others dispute back.”

  Since she was still standing next to the door, Lenora caught a shadow of movement in the passageway. Ah, at last. “But perhaps there is another solution.”

  Fan Hui strode into the room, her hair shimmering as usual, drawing all eyes to her. “I hope I’m not interrupting.” One corner of her lip curled as she pondered that. “Well, maybe I do hope I’m interrupting. I heard that you are discussing the startup of a mining company, and I thought I might help.”

  Of course she had heard about the meeting. Lenora had worked very hard to make sure she learned about it ever so indirectly.

  Qi Ru responded as if he’d been expecting her. “Gentlemen, I’d like you to meet Fan Hui, daughter of the Politburo.”

  Lenora interrupted what promised to be a long introduction. “Fan, I’m glad you’re here. We’re discussing the difficulties with establishing mining rights in the ocean.”

  Fan Hui gave her a puzzled look. “What’s difficult? These are Chinese waters for miles in all directions.”

  The financier with the gold tie objected. “I think the Filipinos and the Taiwanese might have a different opinion.”

  Fan waved the objection away derisively. “Taiwan is, of course, a part of China, so their claims are our claims. The Filipinos have no power to object.” She tilted her head sideways. “As long as we don’t harm them so egregiously as to get the Americans involved, of course.”

  She went back to the main point. “Anyway, with me as an investor—and Chen Ying as a co-founder of course—we can easily get very good terms for the Chinese mining rights around the BrainTrust.” She walked to the wallscreen and drew a red circle around the area to the south of the BrainTrust, on the Philippines side of the disputed zone. Her eyes shone as she continued. “We can get especially good terms for the rights in this part of China’s territories.”

  Lenora coughed. “Just to be clear, Fan, we are not giving you a stake in the company just for your political connections.”

  Fan bowed her head ever so slightly in acknowledgment. “Of course not.” She rolled her eyes. “You BrainTrusters and your bizarre sense of fair play and all that.” She looked at everyone around the room and on the screen. Then she looked back at Lenora. “As it happens, my dad gave me a few million renminbi to play with in case I found something fun to invest in. This is, after all, a part of the BrainTrust, and you never know when an opportunity will arise.”

  She looked at the prospective investors on the screen. “Would, say, fifty million renminbi be enough to acquire a stake?” She paused. “I guess I need to convert that to SmartCoin for everyone here.”

  The gold tie seemed uninterested in currency conversions. “No, that’s fine. I’m sure we can work something out,” he said with a smile. Apparently, her political backing and investment had been enough to win him over where the solid numbers and analysis of return on investment had not.

  The discussion turned to the details of the financing, and Lenora lost interest except to watch proudly as her people held their own in the negotiations. Between Qi Ru’s knowledge, Fan’s quiet assertiveness, and Chen Ying’s placid arrogance, they had the makings of a fine team.

  In the end everyone shared an outline of the deal and a draft terms sheet. As the displays shut down and the team scattered, Fan pulled out her phone. “I need to call my dad, bring him up to speed since we can’t really finish up this deal until we have Dad and the Politburo on board.”

  Lenora’s time to strike had come. “Before you call your father, there’s something I need to show you.”

  Fan paused, not quite willing to bow to Lenora’s will, then put her cell away. “As you wish.”

  As they walked to Lenora’s office, Lenora did her best to get Fan prepared for what she was about to learn. “Fan, I’d just like to make sure you clearly understand how this venture came into existence. You know, Chen Ying wasn’t the primary inventor.”

  “Certainly not.” Fan moved down the passageway with such smooth speed it was clear she was holding herself back to let Lenora keep up. “I talked with him about it. He’s a software geek, not a machine junky. The peasant boy, Jun Laquan, was clearly the one who made this all possible.”

  Lenora nodded. “Good. I’m glad you grasp the gist of the situation.” She entered her office and flipped on the wallscreen. “Normally, videotapes like this one are held in strictest confidence. But there is something so important here for you to know, I am violating my own rules.”

  “Really? Cool.” Fan looked so eager, it was clear even a princeling was not immune to the lure of forbidden knowledge. Lenora restrained herself from mentioning that she’d actually gotten permission to show it to Fan. The air of secrecy made it ever so much more interesting.

  The video started to run. Lenora restrained herself from speaking—she knew she had to let the video speak for itself.

  Soon enough, Fan figured out what they were watching. “This is Jun Laquan taking the same test I did.” She looked over at Lenora briefly. “The Milgram experiment. I read up
about it when I told my dad about how we could use it to find traitors while they were still children.”

  Lenora succeeded in keeping her game face on. “Exactly.”

  The video ran to the end, when Jun, at the tender age of fourteen, refused the demands of the scientist. Lenora quietly shut the screen off. She turned to Fan and raised her eyebrow.

  Fan pursed her lips. “So you’re telling me that if we had had Milgram testing in place already, we would have executed Jun and he never would have invented the scuba bot and I wouldn’t be sitting on a billion renminbi in potential profits from his efforts.”

  Lenora barely nodded her head. Like any teacher, Lenora felt the urge to explain further, but she knew this lesson could only be learned well enough if Fan taught it to herself. Lenora won her struggle to stay silent.

  Fan continued her analysis. “You’re telling me that the characteristics of the most creative inventors and the characteristics of the most dangerous traitors are the same.”

  Lenora frowned.

  “Of course, of course,” Fan nodded her head. “It’s really more complicated than that.”

  Lenora allowed her frown to slide away.

  Fan frowned in her turn. “Honestly, I’ve been having restless dreams about this ever since I started working through the game theory module. The Prisoner’s Dilemma, tit for tat, the iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma, the mathematical foundations of both cooperation and altruism. I’ve been thinking that perhaps everyone in my government, even my own father, is too interested in taking and not interested enough in trading. If we traded more, there’d be more for us to take.”

  She sighed. “Dad was going to start the first experimental use of Milgram to execute dangerous children next week. I guess, while I’m on the phone to discuss the mining rights, I’ll have to tell him to postpone the experiment indefinitely. Until I can figure it out better.”

  Lenora gave her a Mona Lisa smile. “You pass the test.”

  Now Fan looked befuddled. “The test?”

  “The test to see whether you had the power of intellect to protect your own self-interest despite the disadvantages of your upbringing.”

  The befuddlement grew. “Disadvantages?”

  Fan still looked befuddled as Lenora waved her from the room.

  7

  A Chance to Ponder

  Step 1: Use Alt-Right Recipe #1 to justify America’s 35% tariff on imported goods. Step 2: use Alt-Left Recipe #1 to justify the same tariff. Extra merit tokens awarded for writeups sufficiently fantastical that they are accepted as articles by either BreitTart or Slat.

  —Accel. Topic: Fake News Creation and Identification. Module: Text-based authoring of alternative facts.

  Dash went to the cafeteria a bit early, though she did not pick up a tray or get any food. She searched the tables for the target of her coming interrogation.

  A middle-aged woman with white hair wearing a business suit rose from a small table: Amanda, her boss of sorts, and the current Chairman of the Board for the BrainTrust Consortium. Meanwhile, still seated at the table was the man she sought.

  Dash hurried over. "Bu Amanda," she said with a slight bow. "It is good to see you."

  Colin started to rise, but Dash waved him back to his seat. "Pak Colin, please, I need to ask you a question."

  Amanda chuckled. "Oh, we all need to ask him questions. But will he answer any of the questions we really need answered? Will he even tell us what the right questions are?" With that, she waved goodbye and strode off.

  Dash sat opposite Colin. He gave her an innocent smile. "How can I help you?"

  "I wish to know if you hired Chance to replace me in the event I was captured or killed in one of these kidnapping attempts."

  Colin looked at her wide-eyed.

  "My first intern, Byron, had a very different skill set from me. I knew far more about molecular biology than he, and he knew far more about software engineering than I. We were quite complementary. And we were able to make progress at a remarkable rate working together." She pressed her lips together for a moment. "Chance, on the other hand, has a skill set very similar to mine. Such redundancy seems less efficient, but it reduces risk if you are afraid of losing me."

  Colin closed his eyes. Dash was pretty sure he was rolling his eyes to heaven underneath the lids. He sighed. "First of all, as you and I have discussed before, it is possible for one design to have more than one purpose. So I suppose it is true enough that choosing Chance for your intern reduces the risk that your research will fail if the Chief Advisor or the Premier or someone else succeeds. But that’s far from the most important reason."

  He stared directly into her eyes. "Dash, where do the critical problems lie in the development of your telomere therapy? Do they lie in the development of the software? Or in the development of the machinery driven by the software? If either of these were the case, then another intern like Byron would make sense. But if the critical trouble lies in the molecular biology or the biochemistry, would it not make sense to have a second person with skills similar to your own, with whom you could bounce ideas back and forth?"

  Dash sat back in her chair as she contemplated this alternate interpretation. "You are right, Pak Colin. Looking back, I see that we have, indeed, actually collaborated on improvements to the therapy itself."

  Colin smiled. "Excellent." He pursed his lips. "Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, let me add another reason why I thought you should have another person with skills similar to your own. Chance does enable your telomere research to continue even if we lose you."

  Dash pointed a finger at him. "I knew it. You are preparing a backup plan in the face of these kidnappers."

  Colin looked to the sky and laughed. "No that's not where I was going." He looked back at her with the amusement. "Tell me, Dash, what are some of the things you would like to work on besides telomeres? Clearly, you like working on the molten salt nuclear reactors. And it looks like you’re having a delightful time with Matt's rocketry. Anything else?"

  Dash looked away pensively. "Well, I have some odd thoughts on how Ted could improve the range of his copters. And there's another kind of nuclear reactor, quite different from molten salt, that might be useful for small-scale applications. I've been talking to Rhett about it." She paused for a moment letting her head shake from side to side. "And there is this problem with current conceptions of punctuated equilibrium evolutionary theory that no one else seems to have noticed. I should really talk to somebody about it." Her eyes lit up. "And--"

  Colin held his hands up in surrender. "Okay, enough already!" He put his hands down. "Don't you see? With Chance there to take over many of the responsibilities in your primary research, you have more time to work with other people on other things. We're not going to lose you to kidnappers, Dash. But your telomere research could easily lose part of you to other important projects."

  As she thought about it, Dash's eyes gleamed. "Thank you, Pak Colin. I had not thought of that at all." She blew out a breath. "I have been feeling so guilty about my work with Matt on the new rockets. You have made me feel…relieved." Her whole body seemed to relax.

  Colin reached out and gingerly touched her hand. "Making people's lives easier is just what we do." He chuckled. "Well, making some people's lives easier." He sat back in his chair. “Now, as it happens I have had, for many years, an itch I have been unable to scratch. The itch has been getting worse ever since Alex solved one of my problems by building that two-deck-high 3D printer SpaceR uses to manufacture one-piece rocket boosters. The only thing left that I still need to scratch my itch is a smaller power supply. What have you got?”

  Dash switched thought modes with easy speed. “It’s not really a reactor, it’s a battery. I too have had an itch I could not scratch, ever since I helped design the new reef for Matt. We wound up using solar panels because our standard reactors are just too…”

  “Overkill. For that application they’re overpowered, expensive to build, and despite the si
mplifications in the design, a considerable amount of logistical effort to maintain.”

  “Just so.” Dash turned pensive. “For long-range space probes that travel too far for solar power, they use Plutonium-238, the isotope that does not produce fission, to generate heat that they convert into electricity using thermocouples. The efficiency is too low to be satisfactory, but worse, Pu-238 is very difficult to produce. There are less than fifty kilograms in the whole world at this time.”

  Colin nodded to show he was paying attention. “And the solution?”

  “Strontium-90, with either a Stirling engine or direct betavoltaic conversion to electricity. Sr-90 produces only beta radiation, if we can collect the beta electrons directly, it can be very efficient indeed. And if we can capture the electrons without generating bremsstrahlung gamma rays, we can keep the shielding surprisingly thin and light.”

  “How difficult is it to get the Sr-90?”

  Dash smiled. “Easy. We already produce Sr-90 in our reactors. They are tuned to keep the Sr-90 in the reactor and burn it since it’s quite dangerous if emitted into the environment, but we can re-tune the systems to extract it for us. So how much power do you need?”

  “Maybe a hundred kilowatts.”

  “Hmmm… Do you have a good heatsink?”

  Colin chuckled. “Oh, yes, believe me, the heat sink for this application is excellent.”

  Dash nodded as she did some computations in her head. “Then we can use the Stirling engine if I cannot make the betavoltaic conversion work. I think we can make the whole system about half a ton in weight. Too much?”

  Colin put his hands together. “That should be fine.” He leaned forward again. “I think I can talk Amanda into giving this a priority. I’ll talk with her, you talk with Rhett. Sooner rather than later?”

  “Sooner rather than later,” Dash promised. Her eyes gleamed. “I see now why you gave me Chance.”