ChaoLi gestured to Milbank.
“What their government is like.”
She gestured to MinYan.
“What their economy is like.”
She gestured to JieMin.
“What their technology is like.
“We don’t know anything about them except they started from the same position as us, and with the same resources. Where they took that, where they went with it, we don’t know.
“In particular, we need to decide whether these are people we can deal with, in terms of setting up a friendly relationship. Can we trade with them? Can we safely have people go back and forth between here and there? Can we set up diplomatic relations? Or do we say, ‘Wow, these people are really messed up,’ and have nothing to do with them. Just leave them be.
“We don’t know, and we need to know before we initiate contact with them.”
ChaoLi looked back and forth at the others. They were all nodding. She turned to Milbank.
“Your part of this may be easiest, Rob. The news wires will surely have information about what the government is up to. The politics channels should give you some good information to work with.”
Milbank nodded.
“And I have just the group to look into it,” he said. “We’ve been expecting this sooner or later, and I’ve collected some good people into that group in anticipation. They have other duties, of course, but nothing of this priority. They’re my forward-looking policy group, and they’re perfect for figuring this out.”
“Excellent. And the financial side shouldn’t be too hard,” ChaoLi said to MinYan. “The business channels will have lots of data and analysis. Pulling together the big picture from lots of little details makes it involved but straightforward, I think.”
“Yes, we shouldn’t have trouble with that,” MinYan said. “It sounds like fun, actually.”
ChaoLi nodded, then turned to JieMin.
“The hardest part of this is yours, I think, JieMin. People don’t write about the technology they currently have. It becomes part of the environment, part of the background. I’m not sure how to approach the problem, and that I’ll leave up to you.”
JieMin nodded. She was right, he knew. Technology writers wrote about not what was happening, or what had happened, but what might happen in the future. Getting a good idea of where they were would not be straightforward. ChaoLi was relying, he knew, on his ability to pull the essential elements out of a large mass of data.
“We’ll dig into it and see where we get,” he said.
“All right. Good.”
ChaoLi looked up and down the group.
“I’ve just sent you all a pointer to the data stream repository for Amber. We’re all working off one big master copy.
“I’ve also set up an account you and your people can access to post your findings. Be on the lookout for things that would be of help to each other, like some government policy being debated to regulate some new technology, or some financial news about some technology company or government policy under consideration. Things that bleed across your areas.
“And don’t forget. Keep records of what works and what doesn’t work in your analysis, because once we have a handle on this, we get to do it all over again.
“The data from Earthsea comes in next week.”
Rob Milbank had a spring in his step as he crossed the pedestrian bridge over Arcadia Boulevard between the downtown office building and the administrative building.
Some people might consider it strange that the manager of the hyperspace project could call the prime minister of the planet to a meeting and hand out assignments. But it wasn’t that way at all.
The hyperspace project was a government project, heavily funded by the government and working to the government’s goals. More, it was Rob Milbank’s pet project, his big dream for Arcadia. That it was being carried out under contract by the Chen, rather than by the bureaucracy, was a big bonus. It meant it would actually get done.
And finally, Chen ChaoLi, Chen JieMin, Chen MinChao, and Jessica Chen-Jasic were Rob Milbank’s friends. He had known the couple who had become Chen Zufu and Chen Zumu for decades by this point, and he had grown close to Chen ChaoLi and Chen JieMin during the years of the project.
So rather than being miffed, Milbank was delighted. His project was paying off now. Delivering real results.
The end goal? Diplomatic and trade relations with at least two more human planets.
And Rob Milbank was in the perfect position to ensure some asshole in the bureaucracy didn’t fuck it up.
JieMin went back to his office and considered the data streams repository.
The highest bandwidth input to the human mind was vision. The eyes were actually direct extensions of the brain, and the brain had a whole processing unit – the visual cortex, paradoxically located at the back of the skull – dedicated to interpreting visual input.
JieMin set his display to project just the images from the data stream, one after the other, on two-second intervals.
He sat in his office and stared into the display, watching the images from that other planet, Amber, three thousand light-years away.
Chen MinYan went back to her accounting group and called her team leads Chen JieLing and Chen FangTao into her office.
“We have a new assignment. A short-term, high-priority one. They have data back from the colony planet Amber. It’s whatever they managed to suck up from the airwaves as they did a flyby of the planet.
“We need to analyze those streams and get a picture of what their economy is like.
“I think there’s three areas that would give us a good picture of what is going on over there. First, what kinds of companies do they have that we don’t? That would tell us where they’ve exceeded us, or at least have activity we don’t. Second, what kinds of companies do we have that they don’t? That would tell us where we’ve exceeded them, or at least have activity they don’t.
“The third thing is to compare the companies where we both have activity. What are their relative sizes? We can compare prices of goods and services to get a correction factor for the value of the currency.
“All those differences could be indicators of trade potential, and that’s one of the things we’re looking for. The other is the overall state of their economy. The per-capita GDP.
“We all good on that?”
“No problem, MinYan,” JieLing said.
“Sounds good to me, MinYan,” FangTao said.
“All right, then,” MinYan said. “Let’s get everyone started.”
When Rob Milbank got back to the office, he had a couple other things on his schedule, but at his first break he called the head of his forward-looking policy group to his office. Darius Mikenas arrived about five minutes later.
“All right, Darius,” Milbank said. “This is the big assignment. The data from Amber is here. I want you and your team to go through it and prepare me a full briefing on the political aspects you can find out from it. Structure of the government, who’s in power, what their policies are, how secure they are in their position, bios on all the major players. Everything you can find out from what we have.”
“Understood, sir. We can handle that.”
“This is front burner. Everything else can wait. And next week we get the data from Earthsea, and I’m going to want the same thing.”
“We have it, sir. We won’t disappoint.”
“Excellent.”
About Amber
When JieMin hit an interesting picture in his scanning, he sometimes stopped to see if it was the illustration for an article. He might read the article – or rather, have the display read it to him – or not. He might follow up on that article, looking to see if there were others related to it, or not. He just sort of followed his nose.
JieMin also occasionally looked in on the shared scratch space to see if the other teams had found anything interesting. One of the major economic areas the accounting team reported for which Arcadia h
ad no analog was medical nanotechnology, with companies with evocative names like MedNano.
JieMin found the name compelling, and searched the data streams for it. Then he searched on nano-technology, and finally on nanites.
When he had run that trail down, JieMin went back to his previous scanning. He had no idea what he was looking for. Was not, in fact, looking for anything in particular, other than to gather enough input to trigger an integration.
Another interesting side investigation was into political affairs. The government team had unearthed an overview of Amber’s government’s evolution since the colony was founded. They also found some demographic data on the colony.
JieMin reviewed those findings as well, then moved on.
The hyperspace ship that had done the flyby of Earthsea came in eight days after the Amber flyby ship. It also began downloading data as soon as it emerged from hyperspace. This download was curious though, in that the package had a lot more local radio traffic and much less traffic back and forth to communications satellites.
They wouldn’t be able to piece that together until the ship landed and the entire package could be downloaded.
The Earthsea flyby ship was still on its way to Arcadia when ChaoLi called a meeting to summarize what they had learned of Amber.
ChaoLi knew JieMin had had an integration the night before. He had spent much of the evening in the big armchair scribbling in his notebook and consulting his heads-up display. With the Earthsea data imminent, it was probably worth seeing what JieMin and the others had come up with on Amber.
The attendees were the same as before, ChaoLi, JieMin, MinYan, and Milbank.
“So what have we found out?” ChaoLi asked. “Who wants to start?”
MinYan, JieMin, and Milbank all looked back and forth at each other, then Milbank shrugged.
“I guess I can start,” he said.
He consulted his heads-up display, then launched into a précis of the Amber government.
“The initial colony governor on Amber did not consolidate power as Mark Kendall did here. He began working toward a representative government only ten years’ into the colony’s development. They had their equivalent to our Charter over thirty years before we did. It is similar, in that it was also derived from proposals in the colony headquarters archives.
“He also spent considerable sums on the hospital and university from the get-go. Where the Kendall governments spent money on aggrandizing themselves and the government itself, Amber’s initial colony governor – one Adrian Jansen – spent money on higher education and medical research.
“Their earlier establishment of their current government has had some downsides, too. Their government has grown monotonically since that earlier date, and is now larger than ours by quite a bit. Our big reset under Matt Chen-Jasic has us earlier on the flight path they’re following now.
“So their bureaucracy is bigger. Their government exercises some powers over their citizenry that we would consider unacceptable, and their civil rights have been somewhat more curtailed.”
“Our big reset, as you call it, taught us a lesson that stuck, then,” ChaoLi said.
“Yes, at least to a certain extent. As I say, we’re earlier in the same flight path, but we’re tending the same way as societal memory of the Kendall regime fades.”
ChaoLi nodded.
“And their government’s structure?”
Milbank shrugged.
“Similar to ours. As I say, they started from the same core document from the colony headquarters. They have an elected president, though, so their legislature and their executive are more often at loggerheads than we are here. Sometimes people vote in an executive of one party and a legislature of the other. Divided government.
“That doesn’t happen here. Which is not to say that I and the House and Chamber agree on everything, but the House and I are usually on the same page on most items, since they elect me. On Amber, that’s not so.
“As for the current president, he seems a competent sort, and he currently has his legislature behind him. They’re not fighting at the moment – not in any big way – and the government is pretty united on most things.
“The big issue for us, though, is that they are a democratic republic similar to us, and a trade and diplomatic relationship is possible.”
“Excellent,” ChaoLi said, and turned to MinYan. “What about their economy?”
“They’re similar to us, but with some interesting differences. The overall GDP per capita is about the same, once you correct for the valuation difference in the currency, and they have the same amount of workers as a percentage of the population.
“Their average age is a bit higher than ours. Their life expectancy is quite a bit higher, apparently, and people join the workforce at a higher age, so they have the same percentage of workers, but in a higher age range.
“Their population is a bit larger than ours, and again that’s due to the increased life expectancy.
“As for differences within the economy, there are some areas where they are more advanced than us, technologically. Medical technology is one big area. This may be due to them getting an earlier start on serious funding for the university and hospital, resulting in a more developed medical research capability.
“They are behind us, obviously, on space flight and especially hyperspace, concentrating their efforts primarily on communications satellites and the like. They don’t have anything we found that is an analog to our hyperspace project.”
ChaoLi nodded.
“Thank you for that. Sounds like there must be some things we can trade for there. That longer life span is interesting.”
She turned to JieMin.
“What about their technology?”
“The medical technology is most interesting, as you say. They have apparently developed a nanite technology for treating certain long-term degradations of the body.
“Primary among these is heart disease and stroke, though they also have cures for some forms of cancer and are working on cures for the others. There has also been progress made in battling various forms of dementia, including Alzheimer’s Disease and senile dementia, although the cures are spotty at this point.”
“Spotty?” ChaoLi asked.
“They work for some people and not for others. It looks like rather than one disease, there is more of a group of diseases, and the cure works or does not work depending on which one of them you have.”
“I see. What else?”
“There are some cultural and economic things that came out of my search.
“There are some aspects of their economy that are larger than ours, because they cater to that older population. There is also some difference in the relative costs of items, due to the lack of relatively more inexpensive young workers. Almost all the workforce is adult, and wages at the bottom reflect that.
“On the cultural front, average age at marriage and at having a first child has trended upward a bit, and is perhaps two years higher than here on Arcadia.
“One other interesting cultural difference is that there is a nudity taboo on Amber that is very different than Arcadia, and is more like Earth was when the colonies left.”
“They have laws against nudity?” ChaoLi asked.
“And toplessness for women. But I get the impression it’s not so much a matter of law as it is that it’s something one simply doesn’t do. It’s a cultural thing.
“It wasn’t that way in the beginning of the colony, for much the same reasons as here on Arcadia. The remoteness of shower and laundry facilities in the early period of the colony, combined with the cost of clothing.
“But their government’s emphasis on getting civil society up and running early on – with things like democratic government, higher education, and medical research – also exhibited itself in the speed with which residential plumbing became available. When it did, people reverted to their Earth behaviors.”
“Whereas the Kendall government�
�s emphasis on central facilities delayed residential plumbing until acceptance of nudity on Arcadia was culturally frozen?” ChaoLi asked.
“That’s just my conclusion, though it’s pretty solid, I think. They had residential plumbing much sooner than we did. That much is clear. And Earth-standard norms of behavior reasserted themselves.”
“Interesting. And they wear clothes to go swimming?”
“Oh, yes,” JieMin said. “There are some pictures of their beaches in the data stream. A news wire article on the completion of some project to build updated cabanas for changing into one’s swimsuit. The pictures of the beach were startling for the difference with Arcadia. Everybody on the beach is wearing clothes.”
“So the Kendall government is the reason nudity is accepted on Arcadia? More than a little irony there.”
“Yes, and that acceptance was solidified by Kevin Kendall’s attempt to outlaw nudity and the Chen’s rejection of the ban. Due to Kendall’s nascent tyranny trying to ban it, public nudity became a symbol of political and personal freedom.”
“As the twig is bent, so grows the tree, huh?’
“Always,” Milbank said.
“Well, there’s something to watch out for in our negotiations, Rob,” ChaoLi said. “We don’t want to have our negotiating team all show up in lavalavas and nothing else. At least not if there are women involved. What else do you have, JieMin?”
“They do not have a tea culture as we do here. On Arcadia, if you go to a business meeting, people will normally offer you tea. This is mostly the Chens’ doing, as the Chen family brought dozens of different varieties of tea with them from Earth.
“On Amber, if you go to a business meeting, they will offer you coffee.”
“Ugh. Coffee is terrible,” ChaoLi said.
“Yes, the few varieties we have here are. But, much as with the Chen, some enterprising family from South America brought dozens of varieties of coffee with them to Amber, and the skills of knowing how to properly grow, harvest, and roast it. It is the dominant drink. If you go to a business meeting there, you are offered coffee.”
GALACTIC SURVEY (COLONY Book 3) Page 14