“Silicon Poodle,” Bobby repeated.
“I make deal with you. You give me new palace and video games, I give you Silicon Poodle.”
“You mean you outsource the country to us?” asked Gregor, exchanging a glance with Bobby.
“Outsource?”
“It means to improve something by giving it to someone else to take care of it for you,” Bobby said. “You outsource Pyrrhia to us, and we’ll improve it.”
“Yes, yes,” said Arsyen, waving his hand. “You do what you want. Just make me big palace and get rid of dirty students.”
“We will need to think about it,” said Gregor, glancing at Bobby.
“Yes, of course,” Bobby said, “but there is no reward without risk. No chalice of hope without a well of — ”
“We’ll be in touch,” Gregor said. He touched his beret, and Arsyen’s face disappeared from the screen.
Bobby and Gregor sat in silence. The squid wiggled before them on the opposite wall.
“Gregor, I want you to think of a drop of water as it flings itself over the waterfall…Are you thinking of it?”
“Yes, Bobby.”
“By itself, that drop of water is just a drop of water. But when it joins with other drops, it becomes a river, then eventually becomes an ocean. One drop leads to two drops leads to an ocean. No one can live without the ocean.”
Gregor was silent for a moment, then spoke.
“You mean we start with Pyrrhia, and then expand Project Y to the rest of the world.”
“Exactly,” Bobby said.
“But…if Arsyen outsources Pyrrhia to us, then we just govern his ignorant masses instead. How is that a good thing? Our moon colony works precisely because it doesn’t cater to the masses.”
“Watch,” said Bobby, walking over to the whiteboard, where he drew a collection of circles.
He wrote “P” in the middle of the center circle and tapped his pen.
“We get Pyrrhia, we kick everyone out, and then we start from scratch just like we did with Project Y. Only the best and brightest of Pyrrhia will be part of the new society, which will be built on the same principles as Y.”
“And the rejects — the ones who don’t make it into the Pyrrhian utopia?”
“We push them into Embria — right here, next to Pyrrhia, you see? They are poor and won’t be able to put up a fight. And when they protest, which of course they will, since normal people never recognize enlightenment, we will offer them the same deal: Let us run your country and make it perfect. Then we push their rejects into the next country, which will weaken that country and make them easier to…help. One by one, the Earth’s countries will begin to fall. They will all become terrestrial versions of our Space Project.”
“Eventually we’ll run into a border that won’t accept the rejects from all of our perfect societies,” Gregor said.
“Yes, but we leave those countries to the end, at which point our model will be obvious and desirable even to them. And if not, well, we have our army of child prodigies we can deploy to…pacify them.”
“And the masses of rejects?” said Gregor, pointing at the collection of frowning stick figures that Bobby had drawn outside his circles.
“We’ll give them the chance to improve themselves by providing STEM schooling in the reject refugee camps that we’ll establish in Siberia. And those who never improve themselves will be kept in Siberia, or maybe stored in a country that we could just purchase outright for this purpose — maybe Canada. You can work that part out later. Anyway, the best part is that the more people we reject, the more parents will emphasize the importance of an engineering and science education. So, you see, this is good for humanity on multiple fronts.”
“But what if other countries come to Pyrrhia’s defense?”
“We won’t invade anything. These countries will want our new world order,” Bobby said. “They’ll invite us in — you know, like you do with vampires.”
Gregor nodded slowly, working through the numbers in his head.
“This all seems very doable,” he said. “Though my team will need considerably more servers if we’re going to tackle world domination.”
“Jeez, Gregor, I’m not talking about taking over the world,” Bobby said.
Gregor’s stiff, bushy eyebrows lifted slightly.
Bobby laughed. “Okay, I guess I am talking about world domination. So, let’s see…we’ll need more marketing schwag, more in-country cafeterias and masseuses. This is going to get expensive. It’s not very fair — I mean, we’re practically a nonprofit. Good work on behalf of society should be free.”
“So a country would pay us to invade them?”
“Not invading, Gregor, empowering. Once we have a handful of Anahata-run countries, world domination will fund itself. But we do need to figure out an extra revenue stream to fund the initial rollout.”
“How about we just automate everything and install a robot race?”
“Ugh, think of all the social unrest we’d have to wade through once the humans aren’t really necessary anymore. And it’ll just be too economically efficient — there will be no one but robots left to buy our stuff.”
“But we won’t need money because robots don’t need money,” Gregor said. “In utopian societies, money becomes — ”
“Look, I don’t want a robot society until our life-extension project is fully functional. After all, this is all pretty pointless if a robot can just kill me.”
Bobby turned to face the whiteboard and made a quick sketch of what appeared to be a lima bean.
“The brain,” said Bobby, tapping at the bean with his pen. “That’s the answer. One day we will pay for everything with our thoughts.”
“An integration with the brain chip?”
“Oh, Gregor.” Bobby smiled, shaking his head. “I admire your ability to live in the present. I must confess it can get awfully lonely in the future…”
Bobby’s voice trailed. Gregor followed his gaze toward the observation glass, where a group of men and women strolled past. A blonde girl tossed her head and laughed. The sound of her shrill voice scratched like long, pink fingernails at Gregor’s ears, but the engineer next to her was beaming. With them were a group of men, casually engaged in moonball as they made their way to work. Following a few steps behind them was a Horizontal Moves employee — a Jack or Greg or Bif or Stu, his arms packed with useful muscles. He was balancing a mop and a load of fresh laundry as he followed the larger group toward the engineers’ apartments. Everyone had their place.
Gregor turned to the founder.
Bobby caught his eye and smiled.
“You know who could figure out how to monetize all of this? Niels. Let’s bring him back.”
“But — ”
Swiiiiiish. A dark-purple curtain moved across the sky, replacing the previous blackness and signaling the start of evening. Inside the moon’s core, the axle slowly turned, the ground rumbling almost imperceptibly as the moon began its daily, five-minute move across the galaxy.
A bumping sound drew their attention to the screen. The squid’s body was thumping against the tank, its arms grabbing one, then another stalk of kelp, using them like poles to propel its incredible mass forward. Two arms, then four, then six, and eight, the arms grasped at whatever they could reach, kicking up sea dust as the squid’s mouth dropped open, chomping at the water, its horny beak spearing any aquatic traveler as it swam through the water.
“Lower the tank,” Bobby commanded his beret.
Panels slid out from the under the tank, and the structure began to drop below the ground.
With a faint click, the tank disappeared below the surface, and the panels slid shut. Lunar rock and vines quickly scattered across the surface that sheltered Anahata’s prized mascot.
A person arriving just a minute later would never guess there was an enormous squid hiding below, expanding gently and nearly imperceptibly with each passing second, just
beneath their feet.
23K
WRITTEN BY
Jessica Powell
Technophile, technophobe. Fan of shochu, chocolate, walking, and, usually, my kids.
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The Big Disruption Page 30