The Braintrust

by Marc Stiegler

  “No, sir. I killed him quite intentionally, but it was an accident that I was carrying the knife. I was taking it to show Dash the cool folding on the blade.”

  “Dash? The surgeon who was in here a few days ago?”

  “Yes, sir. The knife I used in the Defense of Ship action was the one you gave us, sir.”

  Joshua just stared at her. “The chura taken for compensatory damages from Jam’s husband?”

  Jam interrupted, “Ex-husband.”

  “Ex-husband,” Joshua echoed, hopefully without the tinge of exasperation he felt.

  Ping answered, “Yes, sir, the chura.”

  After pondering the matter for a few moments, Joshua decided to let it go. “Still, after incapacitating the resident, multiple eyewitness accounts say Dr. Dash told you she could save him, even after what would have appeared to the untrained eye to be a fatal injury.” He was depending on witnesses because the conference room in which the battle had taken place was private, not public, and there had been no BrainTrust vidcams in operation at the time. “It sounds like you went out of your way to kill a helpless man.”

  Ping bowed her head submissively. Joshua wondered if she had ever done that before. It seemed unlikely. She answered, “I did not hear her—or to be more exact, I was not listening. I heard Dash say something, but I’m still not sure what she said except for what Jam has since told me. I was busy.” She looked at Joshua. “I was…overwhelmed…with the need to guarantee that Byron could not continue his attack. I didn’t know whether he was dead or if he could be saved, or anything. I just knew I needed to make sure he couldn’t hurt anyone anymore.” She paused, opened her mouth to say more, closed it, then opened her mouth again as a look of pain crossed her face. “I apologize.”

  Joshua sat back in wonder. “’And the waters parted, and they walked across the dry land.’ We live in an age of miracles. Ms. Ping has apologized.” He considered. “My contract with the BrainTrust gives me wide latitude to punish and command crew members. It’s much more extensive than what I can do with residents and guests.” He twitched his nose contemplatively. “You are required to take two weeks of administrative leave. Take some time to consider what you might have done differently. I leave it to your superiors to decide whether your leave should be paid or unpaid.” He knocked his block of wood on the table. “These proceedings are over.”

  ***

  Dash could feel herself breathing. She thought that was good, if a little surprising. She tried to open her eyes, and failed. Focusing her will, she tried to open her eyes again, and this time she succeeded. A double-blurred image of a tall blond woman appeared in her vision. If someone held up their hand and asked Dash how many fingers they were holding up, Dash would kick them with all four feet.

  The tall blond woman spoke in a whisper. “It was his own gun, as it turns out. He had it in the armory. When the Condition Red went off, he retrieved it and brought it to the conference room.”

  Dash recognized the voice. “Bu Amanda,” she tried to whisper, but no sound came out.

  Jam’s voice whispered back, upset. “And I was too busy worrying about the invaders to worry about possible traitors, so I didn’t notice it.” The voice came from Dash’s right. With another major effort, she rolled her head to see.

  Jam and Amanda both spotted the movement. “Dash!” they both cried as loudly as they could while still whispering.

  Dash’s double vision retracted into proper focus as Amanda’s face turned stern. “You’re awake. About time. It’s not like you were hit with a howitzer, just a simple through-and-through on the right side.” She reconsidered. “Though you’re such a tiny thing, for you it was a little like getting hit by a three-pounder naval cannon.”

  Dash tried to clear her throat. Jam moved stiffly over, grabbed a water glass with a straw, and offered it to her. After taking a couple sips, Dash asked, “Byron?”

  Amanda shook her head. “By the time Ping got done, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men—" She stopped, probably realizing the reference was too exotic for present company. “Byron was already dead. Sometimes, of course, we can still save them even after they’re dead. Not this time.”

  Dash heard some scuffling, then Ping’s pixie grin bent over her. “Don’t expect me to apologize.”

  A feminine arm with a bracelet of bangles pulled Ping out of the way, and Jam spoke. “Nor should she apologize, though a little bit less glee might be in order.”

  Dash rolled her eyes to see Jam. “Two shots,” she muttered as she dug through her memories from just before she had passed out in Omega. “You took two shots. How can you…”

  Jam spun, ever so carefully, in place. “Bulletproof vest, of course. Put it on when we went to Condition Yellow, since I’m a peacekeeper.”

  Amanda interjected, “A peacekeeper who is currently disobeying orders.” She looked at Dash. “She ought to be in the bed next to yours.”

  Dash took a deeper breath. “Pak Colin?”

  A choked, muffled laugh came from the other side of the curtain separating Dash from the next patient.

  Amanda growled. “I figured you’d be asking about him when you woke up, so I broke a few rules—I can do that you know, I’m the boss and you should remember that—so here he is.” She threw back the curtain. “You’re awake now too, I take it.”

  Colin lifted a limp hand and tugged his oxygen mask down. “Baptists?”

  Amanda apparently knew what this meant. She slid the mask back onto Colin’s face and answered, “The Southern Baptist Convention just came out with an affirmation of the spiritual integrity of the BrainTrust, though they deplore some of the activities that take place here. They also denounced, let me see if I can quote this exactly, ‘those who mistake personal belief for God’s ultimate will, and apostatize true doctrine which is founded in tolerance for all beliefs.’”

  Colin gurgled.

  “So, pretty much as you had hoped.”

  Colin tilted his head and saw Dash. He pulled the mask down again. “Hey.”

  Amanda growled. “Shush. You’re in no condition to be talking. You’re gonna be here for a while.” After pushing his mask back up, she turned to Dash. “You, on the other hand, will be leaving in a couple of days.”

  Dash rolled her eyes to look at her. “So quickly?”

  “We’ll give you a diagnostic bot to go home with you. It’ll keep stats on you so detailed that I’ll know as much about your condition by looking at my cell phone app as I could tell by looking at the monitors in this room. And I’ll be able to administer drugs and give you orders just as easily. If you’re at home, you’ll be more likely to follow orders,” she glared at Jam and Ping, “since you’ll have people looking in on you.”

  Jam nodded. “That will work.”

  Ping concurred. “Oh goodie, I get to stick needles in you.” She had a thought. “Is Dash still in danger? Should I get my Big Gun from the armory?”

  Colin pulled his mask down, asked “Moving?” and put the mask back on before Amanda could complain.

  Amanda nodded. “Yes. We’re going out past the two-hundred-mile coastal limit of the Exclusive Economic Zone to international waters. We’ll have more warning if someone tries to attack us again.”

  Colin shook his head and popped his mask long enough to say, “So Ping can shoot back.”

  Ping jumped on it. “I really need my Big Gun.”

  Amanda chose to not to hear them. Speaking to Dash, she continued, “You’ll recover faster at home, even with these two as lookouts.” She looked at Ping and pursed her lips. “Until Dash goes home, she needs guards. Jam, Ping, your duty station is here. Watch over her.”

  She looked back at Dash. “On a more pleasant topic, I saw in your medical history that you have a problem with the cartilage in your left knee. As it happens, we have another researcher whose experimental procedure might be able to fix you.” She pulled a screen attached to an arm from the ceiling and configured it to show a video of a procedure o
n a knee.

  Dash studied it silently as it ran, and as it concluded, looked at Amanda. “I believe this can be improved upon.”

  Colin once again chortled and pulled off his oxygen mask. “And that is why—”

  Amanda shoved the mask back over his face with possibly excessive force. “No. You will not say it. Silence.”

  Dash opened her mouth to speak.

  Amanda’s finger swung to Dash. “You shouldn’t be talking either. Silence.” Dash closed her mouth.

  Amanda arched an eyebrow at Ping. “No Big Gun without further authorization.” Her eyes softened slightly as they looked at Jam, as if Amanda thought that Jam might, unlike the others, have some of the maturity of an adult. “Keep them under control.” Her voice sounded so much like a sergeant’s command that Jam instinctively straightened and snapped off a sharp salute, jerking in pain as she completed the maneuver. Amanda put her hands on her hips as she surveyed the scene one more time. “Well. I seem to have gotten the last word. Finally!”

  And with that she strutted from the room.

  The End

  Author Notes

  It’s been eighteen years since I last published a novel. Much has changed. But honestly, much of the change was easy enough to anticipate. The Skyhunter drone described in David’s Sling in 1989 is now called a Predator. The online economy in that book is now called Amazon and eBay. The palmtop described in EarthWeb in 1999, used in the transformational event referred to in the story as the TopDrop, is now called a Samsung Galaxy. People still email to accuse me of having invented FaceBook. They also email to ask for guidance on how to create a Decision Duel, perhaps the most important tech I ever described that was never built.

  Sometimes change is sudden—starkly nonlinear, like falling off a cliff. We all fell off such a cliff on November 8, 2016.

  Much of my work is near-term extrapolation: given what we have, casting aside the fact that tech change is exponential, what might things look like in twenty years? In January of 2016, the BrainTrust would not have been credible as a work of extrapolative sf. It would have been viewed as stupidly unrealistic. On November 9, after the election of Donald Trump, the BrainTrust future looked not only possible but almost mundanely mainstream.

  I still don’t expect the 101st Airborne to drop into Silicon Valley. But the possibility that the engineering teams that create the industries and jobs of the future will be destroyed by government meddling is no longer even a full standard deviation away from straightforward expectations. Similarly the ban on robots, which may seem ridiculous to a mainstream American, is already a matter of serious discussion in France. When the populists of both the Red and Blue parties realize that automation is the force of creative destruction behind the elimination of eighty percent of manufacturing jobs, will they make common cause to follow in France’s footsteps? Why not?

  The rest of Harmony of Enemies is also well within a standard deviation of what one might expect in the near future. People think that cruise liners are extraordinarily expensive, and a fleet of fourteen big ones would be just too crazily costly to be built for the sake of autonomy. Such ships are in fact quite expensive, but compared to rental apartments in Tokyo they look like bargains. Similarly medical tourism to evade the long lines and high costs of Western civilization is already a burgeoning industry today. Its marriage to the cruise liner industry is at this point almost inevitable.

  An astonishing amount of work has been done on systems that look a lot like the BrainTrust archipelago. For an upbeat factual read about that part of our future, I recommend the book SeaSteading by Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman. It provided most of the background tech for the BrainTrust.

  The only thing preventing us from building a BrainTrust right now is the lack of a satisfactory power plant. I have brazenly stolen the design for the BrainTrust’s nukes from TransAtomic, a startup company founded by MIT students and led by Dr. Leslie Dewan, who inadvertently helped me write the passages about the reactor in a brief email exchange we shared.

  The TransAtomic reactor is a highly evolved derivative of the first molten salt nuclear reactor build by Oak Ridge National Laboratory back in the 60s. That’s right, forty years ago we knew how to build small cheap inherently safe nuclear reactors. All we ever really had to do to solve global warming was use the tech we already had, before we forgot it all.

  But that is another story.

  Marc Stiegler

  September 13, 2017

  Other Books by

  Marc Stiegler

  Valentina

  (Hugo Aware Finalist)

  David's Sling

  (Prometheus Award Finalist)

  EarthWeb

  The Gentle Seduction (anthology)

  Marc Stiegler Social

  Join the BrainTrust discussion group on Facebook at

  https://www.facebook.com/groups/326423271191445/