The Braintrust

by Marc Stiegler

  He went back to listing his litany of haters. “The Red states and Federal government in America may have the most complicated relationship with us. Religious conservatives hate that we offer low-cost abortions to medical tourists. Electric utilities like us because we take some of their spent nuclear fuel. The NSA hates us because we manufacture computer chips that don’t have back doors built in, making them harder to hack. The CIA likes us because they buy our chips for their own computers so they can’t be easily hacked. Farmers and ranchers like us because we import wheat and beef. Doctors hate us for stealing their patients, for using AI for some of the diagnosis/prescription tasks, and for using robots for surgeries. Lawyers hate us for using only binding arbitration to settle disputes, especially the medical disputes that are so lucrative dirtside.”

  He took a breath. “Again, depending on which day of the week it is, the Federal government considers our reef to be either a navigation hazard to be destroyed or, since we’re currently only fifty miles offshore to deliver hydrogen to California more easily, they consider this reef to be part of the Exclusive Economic Zone for the USA, so it’s theirs to fish as they wish. The third legal interpretation is, of course, that it is ours, since we built it and maintain it beyond American territorial waters, but that is never their interpretation.”

  Dash spoke as he paused. “I still do not see why the Greens dislike you.”

  “Ah, yes, the Greens. Well, as I said, one of our businesses is collecting spent nuclear fuel, which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission pays us to dispose of. The Greens see this as a problem because it weakens the arguments against the nuke plants, which the Greens want closed at all costs. And of course there’s the fact that we built two artificial reefs, one here outside the contiguous zone limit and another where we often anchor, two-hundred miles out on the high seas. Alas, the reefs are…ahem…artificial. So they want to destroy the reefs, but the fish and plants that grow because of the reef are natural and must be protected. And of course the BrainTrust ships are an abomination no matter what, a polluting stain on the ocean.”

  Dash shook her head. “But you’re in the middle of the San Francisco Oceanic Dead Zone, where all the oxygen has been consumed by algal blooms driven by phosphates dumped into the ocean by the city. This BrainTrust reef we see here is the only place in a hundred kilometers where one can find a diversity of ocean life.”

  “Not as much diversity as the Greens would like, since we harvest the algae and fish we want and cull the ones we don’t.”

  Dash continued her thought, “And the BrainTrust is actually a carbon sink, pulling as much carbon out of the air as a city like Cupertino releases.”

  “You’ve been reading our website. We sell the carbon credits in Europe, but the Greens still consider us a pox upon the water.”

  “I suppose the Greens will get angrier as they come to fully realize that your entire fleet is powered by nuclear reactors.”

  Colin nodded his head. “Very likely indeed.”

  ***

  In the beginning, the most radical Green group was Earth First!. They were ineffectual; a more determined commitment was required to drive so important a movement. Thus, a number of members formed the more serious Earth Liberation Front. To no avail; the seas continued to rise and the forests continued to wither. A truly dedicated, considerably more violent group splintered from them to become the Earth Liberation Crusade. The ELC had pursued the protection of the Earth with commitment and high explosives, but their urgently necessary success still lay in the future.

  The Emeryville chapter of the ELC was referred to rather derisively by the leadership in Berkeley as the Peter, Paul, and Mary chapter. Peter, the founder of the chapter, had not understood the reference when he first heard it, but after he looked it up he was furious. His group was not some gaggle of Sixties folk singers; they were a serious action team.

  Peter confessed to himself that the nickname had produced a positive effect: it had given him the angry drive needed to embrace this next operation. They were going to go big.

  At this moment, however, his anger was a little subdued. Peter, Paul, and Mary had fallen on hard times. It was hard to light the fuse of worldwide revolution when you were shivering. Peter pulled his sweater tighter around himself and swallowed a curse. He was sitting in his own living room, dammit. How could his own living room be this cold? But the outside night was nippy, and the electricity was out again. “I can’t believe it! They’ve been using nukes all these years and we never knew.”

  Justin, the team member who had been entirely forgotten by the rest of the movement because he didn’t even rate a place in the group’s nickname, was the pastiest-skinned and nerdiest of the four of them. He complained, “Well, some of us were pretty sure they were using nukes, but you guys—almost everyone in the movement—bought the idea that they were using solar and wind since they had turbines and panels on top of two of the first ships.” He plucked at his “Cherish the Earth or Perish with It” t-shirt. He was overweight, unlike the others in this tight circle of friends, and alone among them, he always felt warm. “Then when people started to notice that the BrainTrust’s power never went out even after days and days of clouds without much wind, people said, ‘Oh, they must be using OTEC!’” (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion power plants had been all the rage for a while in some Green circles.) “But I always knew that was bullshit, because they move their damn ships around. OTEC is really hard to move—it’s even harder to move than those isle ships—and you’d need a freakin’ shitload of ‘em to make as much power as they use.”

  Mary, wearing her signature “Green is Life; Gray is Death” t-shirt, shouted in a squeaky voice, “It’s an abomination! I always said it was an abomination!”

  Paul, whose t-shirt advised, “Conserve the Earth, We Only Have One,” put his hand on Mary’s shoulder. “And you were always right, Mary, and we always agreed. We just didn’t agree enough to get violent about it.”

  Mary jumped up. “We have to do something!”

  Peter rose slowly to his feet and made a calming motion. His sweater loosened, making the “Think Big!” slogan on the t-shirt underneath visible. “And we will do something, Mary, but not tonight. Tonight we have to plan.”

  Justin lifted an eyebrow. “Plan? What are we planning?”

  Peter answered grimly. “We’re going to knock out one of those nukes. We’re gonna turn that whole repugnant fleet into a radioactive wasteland like the West Coast Waste and the North Waste.”

  Justin looked stunned, then scared, and then, slowly, excited. “The West Waste and the North Waste were created by nuclear missiles. We can show the world that nuclear power plants are like missiles, just waiting to go off.” He wiped sweat from his upper lip. “I like it.”

  ***

  Pleading another meeting, Colin directed the arvee to stop and let him off at the GPlex I. Before he debarked he instructed the arvee to deliver Dash, Jam, and Ping to their new homes on board the Chiron, the ship specializing in medical research and tourism. As he gave the arvee the directions, they learned that Jam and Ping would share a cabin adjacent to Dash’s, just as they had on the ferry.

  Dash was delighted. “That’s marvelous!”

  Ping was similarly pleased. “What a magnificent coincidence.”

  Colin shrugged. “Not really a coincidence. Cabins are generally allotted in sequence as they become available and people arrive. If you look at the distribution of departures and arrivals, it’s not unheard of for people arriving on the same ferry to wind up co-located.”

  Jam spoke next, more slowly. “But only if the people from the ferry also happen to be assigned to the same ship.”

  Colin nodded. “True. Dash was, of course, always destined for Chiron, since that’s where her lab is and we like to put people’s homes close to their work. You two, as security guards, could have wound up anywhere.” He thought about it for a moment. “We have fourteen ships, but not all of them have the same number of security
guards. You probably had one chance in ten of being assigned here.” Colin stepped away from the arvee and waved as they left.

  The trip only took a couple of minutes.

  Every deck of every ship had a different outdoor theme for artwork and decorations. The themes varied from whimsical, such as Dundee Outback, to majestic, as with Montana Sky. Colin had explained that the theming had started on Elysian Fields so that inebriated tourists could tell if they were on the right deck. The BrainTrust’s designers had taken the theme idea from a book, A Pattern Language, that Colin had mentioned so reverently Dash made a note to look it up sometime. The decorating on Elysian Fields had gotten so much praise that the owner/operators of many of the other isle ships got into a bit of a competition for the best and most beautiful deck themes.

  Dash, Jam, and Ping were quartered on the Appalachian Spring deck. The passage bulkheads were covered in photorealistic murals of the iconic eastern American mountains. A depiction of a stand of lush red and pink rhododendron bushes, so detailed it seemed you could touch them, stood higher than their heads between the doors to their cabins.

  Two large suitcases sat in front of Dash’s entry, and half a dozen crates sat beside Ping and Jam’s door. Dash watched an arvan, a self-driving cargo carrier slightly longer than their arvee, whisk itself away. She muttered. “I guess the van dropped off our stuff.” She thumbed open her door and clumsily heaved the first suitcase inside. When she returned, she was limping.

  Jam noticed the limp. “Are you okay?”

  Dash lifted the second suitcase upright. “Yes. I am missing much of the cartilage in my left knee. It does not bother me unless I try to run or—” she heaved again “carry heavy objects.” She finished moving the suitcase with a jerk before Jam could offer to help, and suggested, “Shall we get something to eat in maybe half an hour?” Gaining acknowledgment from her friends, she closed her door to unpack.

  Ping looked at Jam. “These are all my crates,” Ping said. “Did they lose your luggage someplace?”

  Jam shook her head. “For me, the BrainTrust is a new beginning.” She held up the shoulder pack she’d carried with her on the ferry. “This is all I have.”

  Ping looked a little sad. Her expression became apologetic, but then it changed to joy. “Great! I can use a whole wall for my display!”

  Jam gave her a sideways glance. “Display of what? Weapons? Hand-to-hand, of course—swords, maces, that sort of thing?”

  Ping laughed. “How’d you know?”

  Jam grabbed one of Ping’s crates and carried it over the threshold into the bare cabin. “If I can focus your attention for just a couple of minutes, we need to have a serious discussion.”

  Ping studied her in surprise. “No! I refuse to believe it!”

  “If you read between the lines of Mr. Wheeler’s calculations, there was one chance in ten that one of us would wind up on the Chiron with Dash. The chances that both of us would wind up next to Dash were less than one in a hundred. Someone put us near her on purpose.”

  “You’re kidding!” Suddenly Ping’s expression changed. Where Ping had stood one moment, an owlish analyst stood the next. Her voice lowered a full octave. “I figured that out when they threw out my perfectly fine roommate to put you in with me, then went out of their way to make sure that both of us—both peacekeepers with mad skills—got to know our super-genius friend.”

  “Someone’s afraid for her,” Jam said to this surprising new person.

  “They certainly are.”

  “Someone who knows something we don’t.”

  “So we’ll take turns making sure she’s covered.”

  Jam looked pensively at her roommate. “I thought it would be more difficult to get your participation.”

  “We’ll take care of her, Jam.” Then Ping’s expression changed back to “wild-eyed child,” as if the sober analyst was a facade she could only hold for a few moments before reverting to her natural state. “Even if nothing else goes wrong, Dash is very attractive. She’s bound to wind up with a bad boyfriend or two. When we find out, we’ll discourage them—beat them black and blue, or break their legs.” She brightened even more, and her voice rose to its normal pitch. “Or, as a last line of defense, we’ll sleep with them!”

  Jam grabbed another crate and carried it in. “I guess that’s a plan,” she agreed doubtfully.

  CHAPTER THREE

  First Coins in the Fountain

  To find something better you have to try something new.

  Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman, SeaSteading

  “Dr. Ambarawati, you may go in now.” The admin smiled and nodded toward the door.

  Dash entered the inner sanctum of the Director of Research for the Chiron isle ship. The white-haired woman she had seen on the screen in the middle of her emergency childbirth procedure rose from her desk and came around it to greet her. Dash spoke first. “Dr. Copeland, nice to meet you in person.”

  “Hopefully we won’t get disconnected this time,” Amanda Copeland said as they shook hands. Dr. Copeland pointed Dash to a chair on one side of a small mahogany table while taking the chair on the adjacent side. The screen embedded in the table lit up, showing the terms of a contract. “Call me Amanda, please” she continued.

  “And I am Dash.”

  A soft smile lit Amanda’s face. “So I’m told.” She turned serious. “I need to make sure you understand the contract. You’ll be working halftime as a surgeon for normal patients who come to the BrainTrust as medical tourists, and halftime on your telomere research.”

  “I read the contract quite carefully,” Dash confirmed.

  “Good. Let’s skip to the cool part that isn’t in the contract.”

  Dash raised an eyebrow.

  “One of the reasons your research proposal was reviewed more favorably here than anywhere else is that we have a prototype machine that should be able to accelerate your work. It uses techniques derived from CRISPR to build viral factories that manufacture nonreplicating pseudoviruses, which in turn implement a molecular splicing process of one’s own design. Of course, none of the literature we publish refers to it as a virus builder—bad press, you know. We call our machine the CRISPIER.” She chuckled. “With proper programming, it should be able to produce your telomere manipulators. It’s all quite safe. The factories replicate in concentrated hydrogen peroxide, then you add the ingredients for your pseudovirus, and they start producing. Neither the factories nor their products can reproduce outside the peroxide bath. You extract your products from the solution and inject them into the bloodstream, where they then start performing the function you’ve specified in their design.” She tapped the tabletop screen, brought up a picture of the CRISPIER, and gave Dash a brief description of what it could do.

  Dash’s eyes widened. “This is extraordinary.” Her face wore a contemplative smile as she considered the consequences. “If I understand correctly, I could start human trials almost immediately, if I were able to design the factories easily.”

  Amanda gave her a smug look. “I think you’ll find designing pretty straightforward. I already have your intern working on it —Byron Schultz, you’ll meet him later today.” She looked away, not quite blushing. “The CRISPIER is my own project, so I couldn’t help getting started a little bit ahead of time.”

  Dash laughed. “An ulterior motive. I can see why you accepted my proposal and invited me here.”

  Amanda pursed her lips and answered slowly, “I’m happy to have you here working with my own research, but I need to be honest. When the Board reviewed your proposal, I voted against inviting you.”

  Dash’s expression shifted to surprise.

  “Dash, I’m not sure the world is ready for your work. To oversimplify—to put it the way the press will spin it when word gets out—you’re about to invent the Fountain of Youth.”

  Dash giggled briefly, then stopped; she hated it when she giggled. “It most certainly is not a Fountain of Youth, Bu Amanda.” She shook her head. “Eve
n if we could repair the telomere chains perfectly and the cells began dividing and replacing themselves with renewed versions, we still would have to devise a way to fix the aging mitochondria to give people the energy they had in their youth. And a host of other problems would need to be fixed as well.”

  Amanda sat back and waved her hand. “Yes, yes, you’re very careful with your claims. You’re a very good researcher: ever so cautious, no assertion without a thousand detailed caveats. But make no mistake, the proverbial Fountain lies at the end of the path you’re walking.”

  “If you are opposed to my research, why am I here?”

  Amanda turned her head and gazed out the window at the bright blue sea as she remembered her first conversation about Dash, her hopes, and her dreams.

  ***

  She had been sitting in this same office at this same table. Amanda had had her thumbs pressed into her temples, her eyes closed. “Why are you so nuts about this girl, Colin?”

  Colin spoke softly. “She’s a polymath, Amanda, a full-fledged, full-blooded polymath. You saw the resume.”

  “I saw the list of things she’s interested in. But just because she’s interested in all those things doesn’t mean she can make contributions in any of those fields. Every grad student in our history has presented a plateful of different kinds of research he wanted to do. We always have to force them to pick one thing, one thing only, and do it well. You know that. Dyah is a medical specialist, not a polymath.”

  Colin laughed. “You haven’t looked closely at the list of publications she put at the end. Did you see the note she had written for improving the neutronics in molten salt nuclear reactors? Or the questions she asked leading to a proposal for a better sintering process for 3D printers?” He snorted. “She was a surgeon by day. She worked on telomeres by night. She worked in a hospital with no research facilities to speak of, and still she made progress. You understand how remarkable that is?” He sighed, then gave her a wicked smile. “You have the resume there? Let me show you a link you may not have read.” He borrowed her tablet and flipped pages. “Read.”