Preface: History of the World
Many years ago, shortly before the United States’ President accepted the heavy burden of becoming President for Life, he initiated a critical program officially designated as Deportation Phase II.
A key goal of the program was to rein in the Sanctuary States run by Blue governments who opposed the President’s Red Party. To impose his will on the Great Blue State of California, the President dropped the 101st Airborne into Silicon Valley to round up and expel all the foreign engineers.
Two of the leading Valley companies, GPlex and FB, saw this coming and commissioned Colin Wheeler to build the first “isle ships,” oversized cruise liners designed to operate indefinitely without returning to port. Thus, when the soldiers arrived in the Valley, the foreigners had already boarded the isle ship fleet, which sailed into international waters off the coast of San Francisco.
Once the ships had anchored and interconnected themselves using large gangways that allowed people, bicycles, and driverless vehicles to flow easily to and fro, the fleet became in effect an archipelago of island/ships, each holding about ten thousand residents. Silicon Valley engineers with American citizenship who had stayed behind in California could take ferries or helicopters out to the fleet to hold meetings with the expelled members of their project teams.
This archipelago, already filled with many of the smartest engineers from America, attracted an ever-growing number of the best and brightest from all over the world, just as Silicon Valley had done prior to Deportation Phase II. The archipelago came to be known as “the BrainTrust.”
Meanwhile, across the rest of the world, autocrats and regulatory bureaucrats slipped into ever-higher positions of ever-greater authority, stifling with ever-greater efficiency all innovations that might threaten their status quo. The BrainTrusters, excessively clever yet few in number, became the source of an increasingly higher percentage of the world’s best inventions. Notably, they rapidly developed General Purpose Robots with considerable compute power and opposable thumbs, which were outlawed throughout Western civilization for fear they would send unemployment soaring. On the BrainTrust, such bots performed virtually all of the manual labor.
Alas, the President for Life was no spring chicken and did not get younger as the years passed. He became a figurehead, giving a speech each month to his adoring fans, while the real power flowed into the confident hands of his Chief Advisor. The Advisor fretted with increasing alarm that someday the President for Life would pass away and the restive populace would demand an election.
Around this time, a brilliant medical researcher and all-round genius who developed new inventions in every field from rocket science to nuclear engineering, Dr. Dyah Amabarawati, known to everyone as “Dash,” came to the BrainTrust with a proposal that could in theory partially rejuvenate the elderly and make them years younger. Upon arriving, she learned that a team under the supervision of Amanda Copeland had developed the CRISPIER, a machine that supported genetic editing and molecular engineering. The CRISPIER used technology evolved from the CRISPR technique devised in the years around 2017, and it dramatically accelerated Dash’s rejuvenation research.
The Chief Advisor so desperately needed Dash’s rejuvenation therapy to keep the President for Life functioning that he started making attempts to snatch the young woman for the needs of the State (Harmony of Enemies). His first attempts failed, yet he continued to pursue this course of action with unceasing vigor. The Premier of the Russian Union, himself getting on in years though remaining frightfully shrewd, made similar attempts on Dash and occasionally teamed up with the Chief Advisor—who viewed the Premier as a great friend—to capture Dash together.
These attempts to take the good doctor were thwarted by her two best friends. Jam and Ping were peacekeepers with mad martial arts skills. Jam was a female former Pakistani commando, and Ping was an itty bitty young martial arts expert of Chinese descent who’d spent over half her life in Chicago. Ping was wanted in China for reasons one could only suspect.
Jam and Ping were reliably backed by Colin, who’d become the BrainTrust’s informal strategist, playing the BrainTrust’s enemies off against each other. They also had the help of Amanda, who was not only the ongoing boss of the Chiron’s medical facilities but who was also doing a temporary stint (which kept getting longer, despite her wishes) as the Chairman of the BrainTrust Consortium.
The BrainTrust thrived despite the disparate forces arrayed against it. The fleet grew. They built the Chiron, a medical tourist ship, where people from the nations of the West came for health care when their own health systems either wanted to charge them too much or wait-list them for too long.
An entire deck of the Chiron was eventually devoted to Dash’s rejuvenation therapy. The therapy had a fifty-fifty chance of rejuvenating a randomly selected person, killing those it did not help. The Dark Alpha series of AIs, using algorithms outlawed in the West in 2018, was able to distinguish winners and losers. They became a part of the rejuv program so that only candidate patients who would benefit received treatment. Chance Dixon, who had started her BrainTrust career as Dash’s intern, had become her partner in managing and improving the rejuvenation process.
The Dreams Come True housed an enormous diversity of startup companies. BrainTrust University, aka BTU, supplied the elite education needed to engage in the most extreme engineering enterprises. Argus was the BrainTrust manufacturing ship, and it used its advanced 3D printers to build, among other things, more ships. The GS Prime and the Wells Morgan offered financial services organizations regulatory respite. Elysian Fields supplied a playground for visitors and tourists.
Additional enterprises and fields of engineering continued to move to the BrainTrust. When the Governor and Attorney General of California decided to seize SpaceR’s assets, Matt Toscano, the new CEO, moved its operations to the archipelago (Crescendo of Fire).
With the help of the BrainTrust, SpaceR diversified in many directions. They built their own manufacturing ship, the Helios, to manufacture next-generation rockets. Their first spaceport ship, the Heinlein, was joined by other spaceport ships off the coasts of Europe, New York, China, and western Africa to form the Global Express network. A suborbital Titan rocket from any spaceport ship could deliver passengers to any other such ship within two hours.
SpaceR also built the Starry Night cell phone satellite system, which, when combined with BrainTrust cell phones using BrainTrust computer chips that lacked the legally required back door to allow government surveillance, enabled anyone anywhere to contact anyone else and talk in complete privacy.
Eventually, the BrainTrust expanded into multiple fleets. The Fuxing fleet anchored off the coast of China, and the Prometheus fleet anchored off the coast of Africa, below the bulge of West Africa, west of Niger and south of the much smaller nation of Benin. They planned to search the impoverished hinterlands of their respective areas and collect people with brilliant minds who had no hope of advancement due to poor nutrition, poor education, and prejudicial cultures and governments. These potential geniuses were given high-speed immersive STEM educations using the Accel computer-based educational system able to maximize the student’s learning rate by abandoning the lock-step one-size-fits-all teaching approaches of the West.
Lenora Thornhill, one of the three founders of the Accel Corporation and the world’s foremost expert in education and testing, became Mission Commander for the Fuxing archipelago. From the main BrainTrust fleet, she stole Jam to become the Expedition Commander into the backwaters of China, collecting people who passed the Accel phone-based test to qualify for BrainTrust residency (Rhapsody for the Tempest).
Lenora’s patience was constantly tested by the frightfully competent Liu Fan Hui, a college student on the Fuxing university ship Taixue. Since Fan was the daughter of a member of the Politburo, she belonged to that elite cadre referred to by outsiders as the Red Princelings. In the years since the Chinese President had declared himself President for Life, he and the Politburo had declared all high ranking political positions hereditary, thus guaranteeing that one day Fan would ascend to a position of nearly unlimited power. All too often, Fan acted as if that day had already arrived.
Ciara Thornhill, daughter of Lenora and nearly her mother’s equal on matters of education and testing, became the Expedition Commander for the Prometheus fleet. Just as Lenora had taken Jam as her Expedition Commander, so had Ciara taken Ping to be her Security Chief.
Another industry snuffed out by dirtside regulatory fervor was copter/flying car tech. The BrainTrust had enabled advances in this arena to flourish. Facilitated by the power and flexibility of the 3D printers on the Argus that could be leased by anyone, entrepreneurs from all over the archipelago built homebrew copters to use in the periodic laser tag competitions: the copters would dodge amongst the isle ships, blasting each other with low-power lasers. Computer-determined hits would take copters out of the game until a winner emerged. Copter design evolved at a fierce pace under this competitive pressure.
As a teenager, Ted Simpson had become a leading copter builder, and when Matt Toscano became his angel investor, he upped his game. His copters flew ever faster and ever farther. Eventually, Dash introduced him to materials science engineers on the Dreams, who helped him build a stealth copter, useful for many applications to which local dirtside authorities might object. During one crisis, Ted applied the stealth coating to a Titan rocket, which came to be known as the Black Titan.
Alas, Mother Nature had not been kind as the BrainTrust rose to prominence. When West Antarctic Ice Sheet C broke off and slid into the sea, it displaced enough water to significantly raise sea levels and reduce the state of Florida to the Everglades Territory. Bad as this was, the sea-level jump produced far worse effects elsewhere. When it wiped out the biggest port and the capital of Benin, Benin became a failed state, and its navy turned from fighting pirates to being pirates. The Prometheus fleet wound up fighting a Benin patrol ship, and unfortunately, captured the decrepit vessel. Thus, the BrainTrust accidentally wound up with the first ship in its navy.
More misfortunes befell Ping as she fought the pirates and the dictator of Benin, who bankrolled them. Eventually, a twelve-year-old girl named Shura, who had no hands because the dictator had amputated them, and who was a BrainTrust-caliber genius, maneuvered Ping into a situation where she wound up amputating the dictator’s hands. Rubinelle, a kinsman of Shura’s who led the reborn warrior women who had been called Amazons in the sixteen hundreds, took this moment to rouse the public and declare Ping the Empress of Benin.
For her crime of permanently maiming the dictator and dethroning him, Joshua Pickett, a mediator on the BrainTrust, sentenced Ping to rule the Benin people with wisdom and compassion. Backed by the fiercely competent Rubinelle and the widely knowledgeable Ciara, she achieved a number of early successes.
Shura, it turned out, had a passion and a talent for genetic engineering. One of the technologies that facilitated Ping’s efforts to bootstrap the people of Benin was Shura’s development of a genetically modified strain of cocoa tree that could grow in the Benin climate, traditional chocolate having been almost wiped out generations earlier by the drying climate in the areas that once supported cocoa trees. Another of Shura’s inventions was a new kind of hornet. It had a stinger that was less lethal but every bit as painful, which injected a date rape drug into the victim’s bloodstream. Dropping a nest of such hornets in the midst of a group of thugs produced a positive effect on the thugs’ willingness to surrender.
However, a worldwide cataclysm that had been bubbling for thirty years finally came to light (Ode to Defiance). Decades earlier, a child named Khalid was born in western Iraq, and he quickly demonstrated that he was the smartest person in the entire region. Historians would later consider him to be the smartest person born in a thousand years.
Unfortunately, over the course of his early life, his father was murdered by the Shias, his mother was murdered by the Sunnis, his wife and unborn child were murdered by the Israelis, and all of the killers had gotten their weapons from America. Driven mad by grief and the injustice of humanity, he vowed to create a clean slate and start the world over again.
Instead of becoming a doctor as he had planned, this charismatic, compassionate, and caring man transformed himself into the world’s foremost engineer of lethal viruses. He released a series of plagues with the intent of wiping out eighty percent of humanity, which would leave behind a dazed population ready to be remolded into a new society according to his vision.
The culmination of these plagues was Sky Rubola, his first and only smart virus. This virus’s lethality was tied to the presence of fat cells in the body. Healthy people with rich deposits of fat were killed with relentless efficiency, while those suffering malnutrition felt only the symptoms of a mild cold. Left unchecked, this Rubola would have slaughtered the corrupt autocrats and plutocrats of the impoverished areas of the world, while leaving the nations of western civilization effectively wiped clean of human life. Only the meek and helpless would have survived.
To fight the Rubolas, Dash brought the greatest virologists of the world onto the Chiron and hooked them up to CEREBRUM, a system derived from prediction market technology that integrated the best insights of its participants more effectively than any of the traditional group decision making processes such as committee meetings and voting systems. With the world’s greatest experts interconnected via CEREBRUM, and the molecular engineering power of the CRISPIER, they were able to punch out vaccines and cures almost as fast as Khalid could release them.
Through a series of heroic sacrifices that violated every ethical principle and shattered every moral standard—sacrifices that tarnished her spirit with darkness—Jam managed to track Khalid to his lair. While Matt Toscano and SpaceR fought the Sky Rubola with satellites and missiles, Ping and Dash joined Jam to confront Khalid in a bitter final battle for the very soul of humanity. In the end, the people of the BrainTrust prevailed.
Even as the battle with Khalid and Sky Rubola reached its conclusion, however, a minor press release was issued by the White House. The President for Life had a mild flu from which he was rapidly recovering, and he was canceling his monthly State of the Union address. This led to speculation that he had actually—finally—after more than ninety years of life, died.
When the White House canceled a second speech a month later, the Blues started demanding elections, and the Reds, who feared the President had been taken hostage by the deep state, demanded his appearance to once again give his monthly address.
And this was the state of the world as crowds started forming outside the gates of the Presidential residence and forces around the world started gathering that would shape the final confrontation to decide the future of civilization.