Ode To Defiance Chapter 5

Preface: History of the World

Many years ago, shortly before the United States President accepted the heavy burden of becoming the 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 had then sailed into international waters just off the coast of San Francisco.

Once the ships had anchored and interconnected themselves by large gangways allowing 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 of American citizenship, who stayed behind in California, could take ferries and helicopters out to the fleet to hold meetings with the expelled members of their project teams.

This archipelago, already occupied by 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 quos. 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 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-around 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 techniques evolved from the CRISPR technique devised in the years around 2017. The CRISPIER dramatically accelerated Dash’s rejuvenation research.

The Chief Advisor needed Dash’s rejuvenation therapy so desperately 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 although he remained 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 often thwarted by her two best friends. Jam and Ping, both peacekeepers, had mad martial arts skills. Jam was a former Pakistani female commando, and Ping was an itty bitty young woman of Chinese descent who’d spent over half her life in Chicago, although she 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 archipelago’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 (that kept getting longer, despite her wishes) as the Chairman of the BrainTrust Consortium.

The BrainTrust thrived despite the disparate forces arrayed against it, and 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 medical systems either tried to charge them too much or waitlisted 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 any 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 were accepted. 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’s manufacturing ship, and it used its advanced 3D printers to build, among other things, more ships.

GS Prime

and

Wells Morgan

offered regulatory respite to financial services organizations.

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 produce next-generation rockets. Their first spaceport ship, the

Heinlein

, was joined by other spaceport ships off the coasts of Europe, New York, China, and 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 satellite cell phone system, which, when combined with BrainTrust cell phones using BrainTrust computer chips (which 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. 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 these areas and collect those 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 education system, which was 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 commander of an expedition into the backwaters of China, collecting people who had 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 also 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 to be her Expedition Commander, so had Ciara taken Ping to be her Security Chief.

Another industry that had been snuffed out by dirtside regulatory fervor was copter/flying car tech, but the BrainTrust had allowed 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, and 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 became a leading copter builder, and when Matt Toscano became his angel investor, he upped his game. His copters flew ever faster and 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, floated to the equator, and melted, not only did it raise sea levels enough to reduce the state of Florida to the Everglades Territory, but it also wiped out the biggest port and the capital of Benin. Benin became a failed state, and its Navy turned from fighting pirates to conducting piracy. The Prometheus fleet had already had to fight a Benin patrol ship, and had had the misfortune of capturing the decrepit vessel. This rust bucket served as a prison, where Ciara and Ping housed the former pirates who once operated it.

This was the state of the world when the apocalypse began.