Ode To Defiance Chapter 10

5

Let Slip the Dogs of

Been reading up on the DIY creation of transgenetic chimeras. Amazing how approachable the once difficult techniques have become. Very interesting!

—David Gagliano, software engineering alpha geek, with no particular knowledge of molecular biology, Facebook post, 2018

The Abdeen Palace in Cairo is considered one of the most luxurious palaces in the world, with five hundred suites and more antique clocks, most of which are decorated with pure gold.

The design is simple and functional: a long white block, two stories tall. Each floor contains windows in parallel running into the distance with a machine-precision regularity normally associated with parts coming off an assembly line.

The Beloved Chief Advisor’s palace was modeled on Abdeen, although it was somewhat humbler. It was only half as long, with only two hundred fifty suites. It housed more people, however, because half the suites had been turned into barracks to bunk soldiers for the protection of the Beloved from his adoring populace.

The crisp white facade of the Porto Novo Palace had also experienced some modification as reinterpreted for Benin’s capital. It had been enhanced with edging of colorful LED lights, perhaps placed there to draw the eye away from a small flaw: the building of the palace had been directly overseen by the Beloved Advisor’s brother, who knew little about construction and less about concrete. Errors in the mixing of the concrete had led to dramatic premature aging in the rather wet and always salty air of Novo Porto Highlands. The brilliant white exterior had evolved, therefore, into a mottled gray that showed to its best advantage under overcast skies on the brink of a rainstorm.

One aspect of the original palace had been improved upon quite dramatically. At Abdeen, the fence to separate the palace from the peasants had been black wrought iron. Technology had moved on, driven forward as usual by the Americans. So the barrier around the Porto Novo Palace was constructed from the same beautiful rust-colored thirty-foot-tall steel slats as The Wall built by the United States along the Mexican border. The Beloved Advisor liked to think of himself as a trend pimp, having been the first among dictators everywhere to not only copy The Wall but indeed to buy the panels from the very company that had manufactured The Wall in the first place.

Ping muttered as the guards escorted her, Gleb, and Shura through the gate, “You know, with twenty bucks’ worth of rope and PVC pipe, I could turn that thing into a climbing wall for children.”

Gleb answered cheerfully, “But not with a hundred guys with machine guns watching you.”

Shura observed more analytically, “The fastest way over is to go up in a cherry picker and rappel down the far side on a rope. In my practice runs, I made it in twenty-three seconds.” She looked down her arms. “Using special tools, of course.”

Ping looked down at Shura once more. The girl wore elegant clothing from the BrainTrust. After much discussion with Ciara, they had all agreed that Ping and Shura should look resplendently wealthy, in hopes of persuading the Advisor that he could make more by agreeing to a regular plunder timetable rather than just killing the woman who’d whacked his brother on the spot.

Ping of course wore the Versace strapless, fully beaded thigh-length dress covered in Warhol icons that Dash had bought her for First Launch, complete with the Vivienne Westwood diamond necklace so long it fell to her hips. Shura’s only jewelry was a rather odd necklace, with a pendant consisting of a long curved piece of lacquered wood, thickly wrapped in tight, black and gold and red string. Ping hadn’t had the heart to tell her it wasn’t quite appropriate. “For my mother,” Shura had explained the piece when Ciara offered her something with rubies instead. That settled the discussion.

When they reached the outer office of the Beloved Advisor’s inner sanctum, a lithe woman wearing robes of rich red and gold welcomed them and performed a very thorough check for weapons.

In the end, the admin sent them on to the Beloved Chief Advisor for Life, who awaited them. As they approached his office, they could hear him cheering as if watching some kind of game on TV, rooting for the team that had just scored.

Upon entering the room, the first thing Ping saw was guards stationed in each of two corners. Gleb moved instinctively to take a chair close to one of the guards. Shura, oddly enough, moved with equal speed to take a chair close to the other.

The Beloved sat in the chair in the middle of the conference room, watching with excited joy the game on the wallscreen behind Ping. He tore his gaze from the screen and stared at her. “Huh. You don’t look like someone who could kill my brother.” He twisted his lips around. “Of course, my brother was never the sharpest edge on the bayonet.”

Ping lowered her head submissively, then started bouncing ever so slightly on her toes. “It was a terrible misunderstanding. As my boss explained on the phone, we are happy to make reparations.”

The Advisor slapped the top of the table. “And pay you shall!” he roared. “Put the first installment on the table!”

Ping leaned over and laid the USB chip laden with SmartCoin before him. “As you discussed with Ciara, we will also make a comparable payment at the end of the year.”

The Advisor slapped the table again. “Every year! And all your ships will become a part of my fleet!” He eyed Ping in her exquisite dress and brilliant jewelry. “And you shall be my mistress!”

Ciara and Shura had both explained that the Advisor would likely make ridiculous demands as part of the negotiation. Forcing herself to remember this, Ping worked to become calm enough to answer this with a proper negotiator’s counteroffer.

Her efforts were interrupted, however, as the Advisor turned back to the screen. “Ha! Look at that one. Very funny!”

Ping turned and looked at telecast running behind her. It took her a long moment to comprehend what she was witnessing.

In Afghanistan, some months before 9-11 and the American invasion that followed, the Taliban had found themselves in desperate need of a large open arena with much seating for public service activities. They had repurposed the Kabul soccer stadium, transforming it into the place where the Taliban conducted executions.

When an American journalist expressed outrage, the Taliban spokesman had suggested, with gleaming eyes, that if the Americans didn’t like it, they should pay for the construction of a separate execution field. Then the Taliban would turn the soccer field back over to the soccer players.

In the end, it didn’t work out quite as the spokesman had planned.

The Beloved Advisor had gone one better. The Porto Novo soccer field had been transformed into a place for performing amputations.

Ping stared for a moment, then started pacing back and forth, keeping her mouth clamped shut so she would not scream.

As she paced passed Shura, the curved wooden ornament fell from her neck into Ping’s hand, where it fit perfectly like a handle. Shura touched that handle, and the curved blade of a

wakizashi

, a very short samurai sword, popped out.

Ping stared for only a moment. Then another sound of horror came from the wallscreen, and Ping moved swiftly to stand beside the Beloved Advisor.

Snick! Snick!

One hand fell on the table, one hand fell on the floor.

The guards in the corners of the room had not expected this, and took a moment to respond. Gleb, however, knowing Ping, had not expected the sword, but had nevertheless understood that the Beloved Advisor’s lifespan could now be measured in heartbeats. Gleb had already primed himself to spring.

Shura, of course, had known exactly what was coming and was already standing as the surgical strikes took place.

So Gleb grabbed his guard’s rifle with one hand while grabbing the guard’s neck with the other and slammed the fellow’s head against the wall with all the force a Spetsnaz commando’s training and power could deliver.

Shura ran to the other guard as if to hug him, reaching up with her arms. A muscle in her arm twitched, and the harmless stylus extended, straight into and through the guard’s eyeball, to bury itself deep in his brain.

A strange tableau held everyone in place as they tried to digest what had happened. Then the Advisor started screaming. Having lived in a bubble of unreality of his own making for many years, he could not recognize hard truth when it arrived, and fought it. “You can’t do this! You can’t do this! I am the owner of a nation! I am a sovereign recognized by the UN! You can’t attack a sovereign!”

On the wallscreen, another horrific moment came and went. Ping clenched her teeth, then stretched one hand into the Advisor’s mouth and pulled out his tongue.

Snick.

The Advisor started shrieking anew. This stimulated Gleb to take action, tapping the Advisor against the wall until he stopped complaining.

Shura giggled.

Ping tried to prioritize her problems and failed. She suspected she might be in shock; if this was what it felt like to be a pawn in someone else’s plan, she needed to avoid such situations in the future at all costs.

Looking down at the blood on her gown, she muttered, “That stain is never coming out. Now I understand how Jam felt when the shark bit her dress.”

Realizing this was not important, she turned and looked at the guard Gleb had manhandled. “You crushed his skull.” She frowned. “Unnecessary. This is why you can’t be a peacekeeper on the BrainTrust.” Still not important.

She looked around the room. The wallscreen was still showing nightmares. “How do we get to that field? We have to stop them,” she demanded, controlling a desire to shriek.

Shura answered calmly, “I’ve got this.” She drove her killer stylus into the wall, and it retracted to normal length. With her clamp, she pulled out her cell phone, and in moments she was speaking. “Rubinelle, it’s a go. Soccer field first.”

Moments later, on the wallscreen, women in bright red uniforms flowed onto the field from the far side. Gunfire erupted. The women did not spray the field; rather, they took carefully aimed single shots, leaving a scattering of ISBP bodies across the neatly mowed grass.

The ISBP had not fought an actual battle in a long time. Within moments, they were as demoralized as the Benin army had been during the ISBP conquest of the nation. They started running, most of them dropping their guns in an effort to run faster.

Shura’s face glowed. “Kill them all,” she muttered.

Ping stared at her. “Shura, snap out of it.”

Shura turned back to Ping. “I’m sorry, it’s just…I’ve dreamed of this for so long.”

Ping twitched her nose. “I’m afraid to ask this, but do you have a plan for getting us out of here? Your people may have stopped the soldiers at the soccer field, but a big chunk of the army is still here.”

Shura waved her arm. “Not a problem.”

Ping turned to Gleb. “What do you think? Should we try to fight our way out, sneak our way out, or believe the kid here?”

Gleb stared at Shura for a moment, then shrugged. “She seems to have things under control.”

Ping blew out a breath. “Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.”

Given that they had a way out, what was the next thing she needed to do? She hunched her shoulders as she realized her next task was far scarier than fighting her way through an army.

She pulled out her phone. “Uh, Ciara? Hi. Yeah, I’m here with the Beloved Advisor. Um, things haven’t gone exactly the way we planned. Let me tell you the good news first.” She snatched the USB with the SmartCoin off the table. “We’ve negotiated a much better deal.”

Khalid manipulated the miniature bots in the sealed biosafety cabinet, guiding them through the process of transferring the lime-colored powder from the test tubes to the dispersion units.

The lime powder was incredibly fine, so fine that the slightest jarring of the tube caused the particles to dance in the bright ceiling illumination of the room. The dance continued for minutes on end, even in the absence of further stimulation. The Brownian motion of the air kept it aloft like dust hovering in a beam of sunshine. So beautiful, so delicate.

The dispersal units were even smaller than the test tubes. Shaped like PEZ dispensers, these brightly colored boxes had stickyback sections you could peel off to affix the unit to a wall or a ceiling. You could in principle pop the top and let the Brownian motion do its job, though the unit did have a tiny vibrator to facilitate the process and a miniature timer to specify the pop time.

And of course a normal person, popping the normal top without the appropriate special twist, would get a peppermint-flavored PEZ-like candy. Sugar-free, naturally.

Khalid then performed the other careful dance of removing the PEZ dispensers from biosafety and sterilizing their exteriors. Really fine powders like this were a pain to work with since the powder tried to adhere to the plastic surfaces, but eventually, he was done. Meanwhile, Uwais and Khalid stuffed the dispensers into a pair of battered suitcases.

Khalid talked as he worked, half to himself, half to his partners. “We really are living in a blessed moment, you know. While the CRISPIER and other advances have made it possible for scientists to develop cures for diseases faster than ever before, the very same tech has enabled the creation of new pandemics at an even greater speed. Now that we have our first killer virus from which to develop variants, we can enhance it and deploy new ones at least ten times as quickly, at less than a hundredth the cost. We can easily churn out a half-dozen deadly diseases while our enemies are still struggling frantically to cure the first.”

He realized there was an analogy that Sabaah, with his background in software, would appreciate. “We are being protected from our enemies by an economic asymmetry somewhat similar to the one that protects computer-virus writers from computer security developers. In that field too, a lone hacker can outrun and outperform the multi-billion-dollar industry built to stop him.”

Sabaah muttered, “Not a coincidence that the Herald of the Mahdi should be born into this place and time. It was ordained.”

Khalid rolled his eyes. “Maybe. And please, Sabaah. Within these caverns, I am still Khalid.”

Uwais offered good-naturedly, “Particularly since Khalid is still a Sunni heretic.”

The last of the PEZ containers were stowed. Khalid looked at his friends. “You’re all set?”

Sabaah nodded. “Passports, plane tickets from Cairo to Canada. From there we’ll head south. Should be simple.”

Khalid gave each of them a double kiss on the cheek, and they headed out the tunnel. Khalid went back to work on the next-generation virus, although he would not finish it until he got the results back from this first large scale test.

Ping sat in the conference room with Ciara, Shura, and Gleb. She stopped twirling her Aeron chair back and forth and stared at Shura. “Amazons? You’re kidding me!”

Ciara put her hand to her forehead, still not quite able to believe what had happened. “All too true. Once upon a time, the Kingdom of Dahomey, which overlapped the nation now known as Benin, maintained an army contingent known as the Dahomey Amazons. The women warriors actually predate the Kingdom, and are also known as

minos

.”

Shura smiled shyly. “My grandmother was their queen, and my aunt was next in line.”

Ciara shook her head. “But it became only ceremonial long before the turn of the millennium.” She frowned. “Which was considered to be a good thing at the time. The historical accounts of how the Amazons used their prisoners in training are both graphic and appalling.” She rolled her eyes. “That was why the Europeans started calling them Amazons in the first place, naming them for the characters of Greek mythology.”

Gleb pointed at Shura. “If the Amazons were reduced to purely ceremonial activities, what were they doing slaughtering soldiers on a soccer field?”

A look of triumph filled Shura’s face. “After those soldiers murdered our people when I was a child, Rubinelle decided we needed to be reactivated.” She held up her arms. “I, of course, could not join, but I would have.” She waved at everyone in the room with her new stylus—one Ping had carefully vetted to ensure it did not extend into a rapier. “We had prepared in secret for many years but had to wait until we had someone who could be acknowledged by the people as a righteous leader. Someone you could believe in for bringing not only wealth and power but also justice, all in one.” She pointed at Ping. “We didn’t find anyone who really qualified until you came here.”

Ping groaned. Her mind drifted back to the escape they’d made from the palace.

They’d followed Shura’s instructions. First, they’d waited for the general in charge of the troops in the palace to come rushing in, requesting authorization to deploy more men to the soccer field. Upon encountering the Beloved Advisor in a semi-comatose and incoherent state with his wrists wrapped tight to slow the bleeding, the general found himself forcefully urged by Gleb to go ahead and deploy all the troops.

Once the troops had departed, Shura led them down to the garage where the Advisor’s limousines resided. As Gleb drove through the gate in the Fence, Rubinelle met them: tall, thin and stiffly formal. She saluted Ping. “Colonel, good to meet you. We, the minos, are at your service. If I may, let me suggest you allow us to escort your vehicle out of the city to your copters.”

Ping agreed to this but soon found the escape had turned into a celebration. Word had gone viral that the Advisor was out and the heroine Ping, who had killed his brother in the Battle of Djeregbe, had overthrown him. So while Rubinelle marched to a slow beat in front of the limo, and her troops marched proudly to the sides, the people came into the street and threw flowers.

Meanwhile, inside the limo, Shura kept staring at the general who had been in charge of the palace troops, her eyes gleaming with unshed tears, while she popped her stylus to its full killing extension, then retracted it, then popped it again.

Watching this, Ping rearranged the seating so that she sat between Shura and the general, at which point Shura whispered, “I remember. He’s the one who held my mother down.”

Ping thought about moving the general back next to Shura but refrained.

When they reached the copters, Rubinelle saluted crisply again. “We are tracking down the bandits as we speak. I will keep you apprised. If there’s anything else you need, please command us, Colonel.”

Ping slowly came to the dreadful realization that when Rubinelle said “Colonel,” she meant Ping. Colonel Ping. She shuddered.

As the copters lifted off with Ping, Shura, Gleb, and the Advisor included for medical attention, Colonel Ping muttered wearily, “And now, apparently, I have an army. What am I gonna do with a goddamn army?”

The urgent ringing of Ping’s phone with a swatch of Gilbert and Sullivan’s

Modern Major General

brought her thoughts back to the present. “Rubinelle, how can I help you?”

“Just giving you a heads-up, Colonel, that I’ve arrived with the new generals for your army.” As she finished speaking, Rubinelle entered the conference room with three prisoners and two guards.

Ping hung up the phone and stared in bewilderment. “My new generals?”

Rubinelle saluted. “Yes, Colonel. The Advisor’s generals were recalcitrant and died, but their seconds in command,” she kneed the closest one in the back, “were open to taking a new oath.” She unlocked their handcuffs. “Kneel.”

The new generals knelt.

Ping’s phone rang again, the caller a dirtside news service she’d never heard of. She sighed and decided that the better part of valor required her to put the call on speakerphone.

A stranger spoke. “Ah, Colonel, or, uh, Beloved Advisor—”

Rubinelle interrupted. “She is

not

a Beloved Advisor.”

The voice stuttered, “N-no, certainly not. Uh, I’m the editor in chief for the Benin National News site. Could you please tell me what the news is today?”

Ping looked around the room at her compatriots, but none offered any help. “Uh, isn’t the news just the news? Whatever important facts have come up since yesterday?”

The voice trembled. “But…we don’t publish just anyone’s facts. We need to publish

your

facts. Whatever you say the facts are.”

Ciara clamped her teeth over her curled index finger and shrieked softly.

Rubinelle raised a finger. “If I may?”

Ping handed her the phone. “Go for it.”

Rubinelle solved the editor’s dilemma. “We are in the midst of a critical ceremony. When we are done, I will call you back and inform you of today’s truths.”

A relieved editor thanked her as she hung up.

Rubinelle, demonstrating her elemental nature as an unstoppable force, proceeded to the next item on her agenda. The prisoners—or rather, the generals—swore an oath of fealty. Rubinelle knelt beside them. “Your army is now complete, Empress.”

Ping found herself staring dumbfounded again. “Empress? No. No. Just no.”

Shura giggled, Gleb smirked, and Ciara turned an interesting shade of furious red that clashed with her sea-green hair.

Diab held his breath as the specially-designed gangway on top of the

First Chance

slid gracefully over to mesh with the gangway from the

Mt. Parnassus

. There was a loud click—too loud. Had something gone wrong?

Apparently not. A young Western woman with green hair and impossibly pale skin (

does she live in the bowels of her ship all day every day, never seeing the sun?

) led the way, followed by a middle-aged man probably from Western Africa, and a college-age kid possibly from the Congo. As they came across the gangway to his ship, Diab went up to meet them, girding himself for negotiation.

He had been pleasantly surprised earlier when they simply acknowledged him on the radio and allowed him to dock like a real isle ship, but he knew that the discussion of connection fees had to follow shortly. And his ship, he also knew, presented more than one nonstandard problem.

The first one was hooking up electricity. He couldn’t keep using the

First Chance

’s diesels, so he would have to persuade the leader of the Prometheus fleet to hook power to him. The fleet had power to spare, he knew, it shouldn’t be a problem. But he would have to pay for it, and he wasn’t quite sure yet where he’d get the money. Or, to be more honest with himself, he had absolutely no clue where he’d get the money.

Ciara introduced herself as the Mission Commander, Oziegbe as her executive manager for liaison for the

First Chance

, and Asemote as her most brilliant student in the field of ship engineering.

Asemote’s eyes went wide as he tried to take in everything at once. He reached out and touched one of the near walls. “You coated all the exposed surfaces with plastic? What did you use?”

Diab explained, “We looked at all the cheap plastics floating in the ocean, disintegrating slowly or not at all, to identify which would make good coatings. We chose PET plastic—the stuff from which plastic bottles are made—which was slow to degrade and easy for us to get.”

Asemote nodded. “Good idea, and good enough to get you here, but eventually PET breaks down given both sunshine and saltwater. With the recent fall in prices, manganese phosphate is still better with respect to lifecycle costs.” He frowned. “For interior walls, it might still be a great idea.”

Ciara murmured, “And the most important thing we have to do is replace those diesels with beta batteries.”

Asemote responded impatiently, “Yes, yes, of course.” He looked up at the rebar-reinforced metal culvert serving as a smokestack. “Nothing useful there.”

Diab was quite puzzled by his guests, who hadn’t yet said a word about money. He felt his anxiety growing as he led them down into the ship, where a group of children was painting the passage walls.

Oziegbe rubbed his hands. “This makes sense, particularly for a ship with more families. Let the kids paint the walls. Honestly, the programmably-rendered walls on the

Parnassus

are a ridiculous waste of money.”

Asemote shook his head. “Not as expensive as you might think, but you’re probably still right. No reason to change the way they do it here.” He looked down at an exposed wire running the length of the passage. “And this is entirely unacceptable.”

Diab winced. “I know the wires shouldn’t be exposed, but we were rushed, and some of the wiring we needed didn’t get planned in.”

Asemote waved the explanation away. “Of course. We’ll do better when we 3D-model it first and manufacture the bulk of the interior with 3D-printed magnesium.” He frowned. “That’s not the issue. The opportunity here is to replace all this copper wiring with graphene wiring. It’s more conductive than silver, you know, and way more corrosion-resistant than copper. Particularly on a ship where the leads get exposed to sea air. We’ll replace all that copper with locally manufactured graphene.”

Diab had had no idea that graphene made better wiring, but he suspected he could trust the young man’s assessment.

After a few more assertions about what needed to be changed and what could be kept and what was a wondrous improvement in cost-effectiveness, Diab could contain his concerns no longer. “Look, I appreciate the assessment and the plans for all these replacement parts, but we cannot afford them. How much is it going to cost us to join you? Do you have any jobs we could do to earn a place here?”

Asemote stared at him in puzzlement.

Oziegbe laughed, then placed a gentle hand on Diab’s shoulder. “My apologies. We’ve been running roughshod over you in our excitement.”

Ciara continued. “Your ship here is a miracle, you know. Oh, it’s an elephant all right, but it’s still remarkable when the elephant dances.”

Diab frowned, waiting for an actual explanation.

Oziegbe tag-teamed him. “We’ve been talking about building a next generation of isle ship, probably smaller, and certainly a whole lot cheaper. There’s a project on the main BrainTrust to build a new series of ships that are also cheaper, but they’re still way too expensive for mass production.” He licked his lips. “It’s clear that between your people and Asemote, we have enough new ideas to reduce the cost even more.”

Ciara made the offer. “So I’m hoping that in a few minutes you’ll come on up to the

Parnassus

and look over a contract we’ve drafted. We’ll pay your people both ongoing fees and a slice of the profits for engineering help developing a radically less expensive isle ship. And we’ll make you a loan for the beta batteries for your ship. And a loan to build a new agricultural reef a bit southwest of here. The reef will give you something your people can do that will not only increase your self-sufficiency but also give you your first exports. This should tide you over until you come up with more ideas for products and services to offer.”

Her smile broadened. “Given the inventive spirit you showed here, I have no doubt they’ll follow shortly.”

Her smile turned wicked. “I also expect you to make a new home in the first next-gen ship to come off the line, which will surely have kinks that need fixing.” She looked around sadly at the ramshackle vessel of which Diab was so proud. “Because, let’s face it, you deserve better.”

Feeling relief flow through him, Diab stood straighter. He started wondering if he should name their next home

Second Chance

.

Sound asleep in his snug little cabin aboard the

Chiron

, Mediator Joshua Pickett vaguely heard his phone ring. He put his head under his pillow until it stopped.

Then it started ringing again. He grunted, rolled over, and clumsily scooped the blasted device off the side table. “Joshua here. It’s five in the morning. This better be good.”

A shy voice, almost a little girl’s voice, greeted him. “I’m so sorry. I just couldn’t wait any longer.”

Joshua shook his head, trying to figure out who it was. His brain finally processed the data well enough to draw a conclusion as unlikely as it was dreadful. “Ping?”

The voice sounded relieved. “It’s me.” A pause ensued. Then she continued, with the same level of humility that had made her voice difficult to recognize in the first place, “I’m really sorry. I just…I’ve done something terrible, and I thought you could mediate.”

Adrenalin pulsed through his body. He leapt from the bed and ran to the desk where he sometimes worked—and sometimes brooded—over ongoing mediations that did not yield to simple analysis.

He was sure that whatever Ping had for him, it would leave him brooding. “What have you done?” What could she have done that would leave her sounding like a little girl? Had she sunk an isle ship? Would even

that

cause this level of contrition?

“Joshua, I…hurt a man. He’s a very bad man, but…I hurt him really bad.” She told him what she had done to the Beloved Advisor.

Joshua worked hard not to throw up. “What on earth made you think this was a good idea?”

“It’s what he does to other people. A lot of other people. I just couldn’t keep thinking straight when I fully realized what was going on.”

Joshua remembered, in one of his early encounters with Ping, that she had given a similar reason for killing an incapacitated man. Joshua had given her a very light punishment because, based on the evidence, her action bordered on justifiable.

He shuddered, wondering if he could bear to look at evidence that would lead him to conclude that this too bordered on justice. He closed his eyes, wishing he did not have to ask the following question. “Do you have photos, videos, or anything documenting the events surrounding this…this event?”

“I thought you might ask. I have a lot of stuff. You have a wallscreen there?”

All too soon Joshua was looking at the photos of the Beloved Advisor before and after, at Shura and her stylus and her clamp, and at the video taken at the soccer stadium that day. As he looked at the first photos of the Advisor, he wanted to wring Ping’s neck. But after looking at Shura and the video, he started wishing, quite unprofessionally, that she’d carved off more parts.

Eventually the nightmare scenes stopped. Joshua rubbed his eyes as he wondered how much of this would turn into frequent nightmares. When would he sleep well again? One thing was certain; he wasn’t going back to sleep after Ping hung up.

On to the big question. “So, Ping, this is all horrific, and I’m glad I don’t have to live with the choices you’ve made, but what exactly do you want me to do?”

At this point, they’d upgraded the phone call to a video call, and he watched her frown. “I’d like you to mediate, Joshua. What compensation do I owe him? How should I be punished?”

Joshua rubbed his eyes again and shook his head. He spoke gently. “I’m not a priest, Ping. If you want to do penance and receive forgiveness, you need someone else.”

Ping sighed. “I’m an atheist, Joshua. You’re the closest thing to a priest I have.”

Joshua lay back in his chair and stared at his ceiling, where the rendering of the night sky with Orion prominently displayed was fading in the rendered beginnings of dawn.

In its own peculiar way, he understood Ping’s point. He passed judgment and meted out punishments, and after the punishment was complete, the perpetrator was nominally absolved.

But he was

not

a priest, dammit. “Even if I wanted to help, your Beloved Advisor is not covered by a mediation agreement.” He pondered the matter. “One alternative would be to turn yourself over to the authorities in Benin, but they’d probably just execute you on the spot, or—” he gestured at the pictures of the soccer field “—even worse.”

Ping winced. A coloration arose on her face that might have been a blush. “Uh, the problem is kinda the opposite from that.”

Joshua raised an eyebrow.

“They, well, they’ve started calling me ‘Empress.’”

Joshua’s eyes bulged.

“Joshua, I’m afraid I may, like, have a country.”

Really? Empress Ping? The mind boggled. Perhaps—please God—perhaps it was not actually true. “Well. Let’s not be hasty. Does

everyone

call you Empress?”

Ping sighed. “Pretty much.”

Joshua pursed his lips. “But the army doesn’t report to you, does it?”

Ping slumped. “The generals all swore an oath to me.”

Oh, this sounded bad. “Is there any state news media? Surely they object.”

Ping rolled her eyes. “Every morning they ask my second-in-command, Rubinelle, what to publish.”

Joshua opened his mouth to ask a last desperate question, but Ping already saw it coming. “And I have access to all the government bank accounts. Including the ones the Beloved Advisor had declared his own personal accounts.” For the first time she smiled, though a vicious satisfaction marred the expression. “Shura persuaded him to hand over all the account codes.”

Joshua now faced a dilemma. In normal mediations, he granted compensation to the victim. Under those rules, he would now say, as part of Ping’s compensation to the Beloved Advisor, that she had to return his accounts to him.

But he was pretty sure that in a regular court of law, after taking a decade to think about it, they’d conclude that the money really wasn’t his, but had been stolen from the country he’d run.

Well, at least one form of penance he could require of Ping was now clear. “So you’ve got the army, the news media, and the money, in addition to popular support. Yup, you’ve got yourself a country, all right.”

Ping groaned.

“I have one proposal for appropriate compensation, but I still can’t require it. The nation of Benin doesn’t have a mediation agreement with the BrainTrust.”

Ping waved the objection away. “If I’m Empress, I can sign the agreement, right? Consider it done.”

Joshua breathed a sigh of relief. This was starting to feel more like familiar territory. “I hereby require you, then, to fulfill your duties as Empress with excellence, justice, and compassion.”

“What?” Ping cried in a strangled voice.

“Ciara will identify sets of Accel educational modules on economics and law that you must complete in a timely manner. And there’s an obscure academic paper from the last century,

The Digital Path

, I want you to go over with Lenora.”

Ping just looked dazed. “But—”

“And I don’t know what the current state of the art is in bionic hands, but you also need to get the very best such tech for the Beloved Advisor.”

Ping swallowed hard on this one. She seemed about to object, then gave him a different kind of smile—the one that Joshua immediately recognized as foretelling a complication. “OK, Joshua. But could I get new hands for the people the Beloved Advisor hacked up first?”

Joshua thought for a moment, then returned the smile. “Oh, by all means. How many people is that, anyway?”

“About a quarter million.”

The number was just too large to comprehend. Joshua turned away, suppressing a need to run to the bathroom to throw up. “Yes, make him the last in line. You are authorized and required to use the financial accounts that once belonged to the Beloved Advisor to build a factory to manufacture bionic hands.”

He exhaled sharply as he had a further thought. “You may want to turn it into a business. These quarter-million people will receive their new hands as compensation, but once you’ve got the factory, there are probably more people in the world who need the tech. You may want to talk to some of the big investors, like Ben Wilson, about turning it into a joint venture.”

Ping settled back into a state of shock.

Joshua’s eyes gleamed. “Do you feel better now? You wanted to do penance. I think competently running a country will serve as a fine form of reparation.”

Ping blinked her eyes and muttered, “So, now I have a country. What am I going to do with a goddamn… Never mind, I refuse to ask the question.”

Tiny dots of snow swirled around Sabaah and Uwais as they squinted toward the south. A vast expanse of white-frosted pine trees beckoned them, stretching across the invisible border utterly heedless of the political ramifications.

Uwais looked at the map on his tablet, then at the scenery to the southwest. “You can see the West Wall.” The West Wall, made from the same rust-colored steel slats as The Wall, blocked off casual tourists from the uninhabited region that had once been the state of Washington, now known as the West Coast Waste.

Sabaah groaned. “You know, we could have waited a few months until it was spring, and then we could have just walked across.” He pursed his lips. “Better yet, we have people in place here already, don’t we? Why not just let them do this?”

Uwais considered that carefully. “I think Khalid wants to keep them as sleepers until the Big One. It would be too bad if they got picked up before we had the final solution.” He pounded his ski pole into the light powder beneath their feet. “And besides, then we never would have had this exceptional opportunity to learn how to cross-country ski and snowshoe.”

Sabaah was unimpressed. “Since when have you wanted to learn to ski?”

Uwais watched as his exhaled breath turned steamy. “Since I found out we could. Really, Sabaah, you need to learn to take the opportunities as they come.”

They took off down the slope at a slow but accelerating pace. Sabaah nearly wiped out on a pine tree.

Uwais yelled, “Embrace the flow!”

Sabaah scowled. “I’m more likely to embrace a tree trunk!”

Eventually they made it out of the forest and back into civilization. A careful search of FB media had identified an isolated house belonging to a retired couple of snowbirds who took their RV to New Mexico for the winter every year; Uwais and Sabaah had had their suitcases shipped there. They took the couple’s spare car to the next town, then, when night fell, they told the self-driving vehicle to return home.

Uwais clapped his hands on Sabaah’s shoulders. “I guess this is where we part ways.”

Sabaah frowned. “I still don’t get why we’re doing this. I mean, the current virus isn’t all that lethal. Seems like a waste of time. A dangerous waste of time.”

Uwais shrugged. “Hey, you heard Khalid. The virus may not be as lethal as you’d like, but the Americans will help it achieve its full potential.” Uwais offered Sabaah a sly chuckle. “You should know this better than I do. Unless I miss my guess, Khalid already had you help the Americans along the path, didn’t he?”

Sabaah did not quite acknowledge this with the merest hint of a smile. “Off to Boston with you. I’ll bet I can make it from Portland to San Diego before you can make it from Boston to Philadelphia.”

Uwais shrugged. “It hardly makes a difference. We have to set the timers all to go off at the same time anyway.”

Sabaah smirked. “I’ll bet you a pizza.”

Uwais’ eyes lit up. “Deal.”

Shura trotted along with Ping walking on one side and Ciara on the other. She was taking them to the elevator, thence down to the upper of the two agricultural decks where the

Parnassus

grew fresh fruit and vegetables.

Ciara had authorized Shura to section off a swatch of the deck for a set of experiments. Shura had been cagey about what she wanted agricultural space for, but Ciara had concluded after some consideration that it was probably safer to have her experimenting with plants than with, say, autonomous killer robots—though with Shura, that was not necessarily true. Which was why Ciara was glad Shura had volunteered to take her to see the project.

The deck’s elevator stopped and they got out in the vestibule, where the gas masks and flashlights hung on the walls. Ciara grabbed a mask.

Shura raised her arm with the clamp in a halting gesture. “No need.”

Ciara stared at her. The ag deck ran an atmosphere with a thousand times higher concentration of CO2 than normal atmosphere, and it was lit by narrow-frequency LEDs emitting light at only the two frequencies (one red, one green) where chlorophyll had maximum absorption. Walking in there unequipped would leave you dying in a sickly yellowish glow.

Shura explained, “My section is right next to us, and I separated it from the rest so it could have normal air and sunlight.” She opened the door.

They confronted a dozen or so trees so short they might better be classified as bushes. Bright red and orange seed pods larger than a man’s hand mingled with white flowers to cover the trunk and the branches of each tree.

Ping tapped one of the pods. “Chocolate?”

Shura gave a little yip and jumped in place. “The best chocolate ever!”

Ping grabbed one and tugged it. “This sucker really doesn’t want to let go, does it?” She touched the sheath strapped to her waist and grabbed her chura—the Pakistani knife with a wickedly curved blade, originally developed for attacking knights in armor—that Dash and Jam had gifted her with long ago.

The chura cut easily through the stalk anchoring the pod, then again through the thick skin of the pod to reveal a dense pack of cocoa beans embedded in white pulp. “Gold!” Ping cried. “Well, better than gold, actually.”

Ciara blinked at the revealed beans. “You’ve genetically engineered the cacao tree?” She reached up to the top of one of the trees, which she could touch with her outstretched fingers. “Aren’t these supposed to be thirty or so feet tall?”

Shura nodded vigorously. “With my trees, you don’t need any equipment to reach all the pods. And the pods are packed closer together.”

Ciara shook her head in sharp astonishment. “I can hardly believe you did this in the short time you’ve been here.”

Shura shrugged. “You’re familiar with the Middle Eastern date palm? The Israelis bred it and engineered it to be short like this, and to produce ten times as many dates. And they didn’t have either an existing example, like their date palm provided to me, or a CRISPIER to speed up the experimentation to go from an experiment every growing season to an experiment every day.” A look of alarm crossed her face as she realized she had just explained away her own contributions. “But it was still pretty hard. I still think I earned some bonus merit reward tokens.”

Ciara and Ping just laughed.

Shura continued mischievously, “But the shorter height and the denser pods are not the best part.”

Ciara easily guessed the next part. “Your cacao plants are drought-resistant and need less water.”

Shura jumped ahead to the application. “We can grow plantations of cacao trees in Benin.” She looked at Ping and giggled. “The Empress can start a new business. A really big business.”

Ping covered her face with her hand. “I’m trying to remember my history here. If I recall correctly, most of the world’s chocolate used to come from around here, right?”

Ciara told the rest of the story. “The Ivory Coast and Ghana produced over seventy percent. They had a near-monopoly, even though the cacao plant originated in South America.” She reached into the pod Ping held and squiggled out a bean. “In those days, chocolate was so cheap that everyone could have it all the time. But cacao trees are very sensitive to climate and need lots of reliable water, so as the climate dried out in the places cacao grew, the trees died.”

She rubbed the bean lazily between her fingers. “Ghana and the Ivory Coast still produce seventy percent of the world’s supply, but the supply is a tiny fraction of what it used to be. Which is why even on the BrainTrust it’s used primarily on special occasions.”

Ping smiled mischievously. “Except on the

Haven

, where they serve hot chocolate for breakfast every day.”

Shura’s eyes widened. “There’s a place where they have chocolate every day?”

Ping laughed and rubbed Shura’s head. “If this experiment of yours works out, we’ll

all

have chocolate every day.”

The little girl ran her fingers over the cold gray tombstone. The name on the stone said Louise Hall Goldstein.

Her mother knelt beside her. “And Willa, this is your great aunt. She was in the Navy, just like your father and me.”

Willa touched the stone for a few more moments, then looked off to her right side. “Why did they put her in a park?”

Her father laughed. “This isn’t exactly a park, kiddo.” He pointed to the left, where row upon row of tombstones lay. “This is the Los Angeles National Cemetery. There are a lot of people like your great aunt here.”

Willa was distracted as she continued to look to the right, where a vast field of neatly cut grass rolled into the distance but no graves or their accompanying tombstones had yet been placed. “But it’s a park,” she exclaimed and went running through the open space.

Her mother shook her head. “I guess it’s a park.”

The father wisely agreed. “Indeed.”

A look of concern crossed the mother’s face. “We should go. She felt feverish when she got up this morning.”

The father scoffed. “You worry too much. She’s had all her vaccinations. It can’t be too serious.”

At that moment, the child ran back to them. She pointed at a red rash on the back of her hand. “Mommy, what’s this?”

Her mother inspected the skin. “I don’t understand.” She looked up at her husband. “It looks like measles, but it can’t be.” She tapped her daughter lightly on the head. “We’re taking you home, little girl.”