Read Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict Online
Authors: Thomas T. Thomas
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #science fiction, #High Tech, #Hard Science Fiction
Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict (18 page)
He paused, and Callie waited for the next step.
“But you’re not solving it for this society,” Paul called out on cue. “You’re just taking our family off the grid and away from the national economy.”
“That’s true,” John said. “Because the national ship is sinking. All we can do is build ourselves a lifeboat—one that we hope can weather any seas for generations to come.”
“What about taxes?” Jeffrey asked, also according to their script.
“We’ll pay them. The Association”—and Callie could hear her father capitalize the word with his voice—“will pay any and all corporate taxes. Our accounting intelligences will track individual family members, note their relevant jurisdictions, and extract withholding, gift taxes, and any other levies required to keep them square with the government. We’re going to run the Association in an orderly and law-abiding fashion. But we’re going to run it on our terms, rather than society’s.”
“Will we sell to outsiders?” came a voice from the third row that was not scripted. Callie turned and identified the man: Michael Praxiteles. He was an offshoot from one of John’s aunts who had returned to the Greek homeland in the early twentieth century. Michael and his cousins had come at her invitation.
Up at the podium, Susannah looked startled. “That’s not part of the—”
“Of course we will,” John said, cutting across her. “What most people don’t understand yet is how profitable, how
fruitful,
these machine systems can be. We’re going to have surpluses. Lots of surpluses. We’ll have riches our family members can’t possibly absorb. So we’ll establish a market and sell into it.”
All around her, Callie could hear murmurs of approval and caught random words: “Did he say ‘riches’? … A well thought out plan … Very granular … Sweedát!” And then one strident voice: “Hell, no!”
Callie looked around and saw a young man rising from his seat. He was one of Bernice’s sons, named Leonard for his grandfather. He was from Susannah’s generation and, although his side of the family had stayed away from the engineering business and it’s offshoots, Callie could guess he was facing the same pressures that had prompted Susannah to approach her great-grandfather.
“Yes?” John said, pointing at the boy.
“I don’t want a handout!” Leonard said. “ ‘Stipend’ is just another word for an allowance—being paid for doing nothing. I came hoping to hear that Praxis Engineering was expanding and opening up new opportunities. But all you’re offering is subsistence living. I need a
job!
”
“Certainly,” John said. “And what can you do?”
“I have a fine arts degree from U.C. San Diego.”
“Okay …” John paused. “If I collected paintings or sculpture, then I could make you my buyer, advisor, or curator. But I don’t have a collection. So what else can you do?”
“I could … critique the architectural design of your new buildings.”
“On what basis? Constructability? Materials?”
“Esthetics,” Leonard replied.
John laughed. “We’ve got an architectural intelligence that can tweak a design in four different cultural dimensions. Do it in two seconds and for free, too. What else?”
“Well, I don’t know …”
“I can make you a hand logger or a prospector on the Stanislaus property here, or a butler in the Association house—when we get around to building it. But you’ll have to use the old tools, because we’ve got ’bots coming out of our ears to perform these services in real time. I can help you become a musician, or a writer, or a painter, but you’ll have to work at it and find the talent to be anything more than a dilettante. Other than that, you have to make meaning for your own life.”
“A ‘stipend,’ you mean,” the boy said bitterly.
“No!” John Praxis said sharply. “An opportunity!” Callie could hear the frustration in his voice.
What’s wrong with these people?
she wondered. Then her father said, more softly: “This association will provide the opportunity for all of us to achieve our full potential as human beings.”
* * *
After spending the summer all alone, Antigone Wells found her four-bedroom condo overlooking Market Street growing strangely larger and emptier. As she moved from room to room, from her office to her mini-
dojo,
to kitchen, to bathroom, she missed coming upon the presence of another person, of her niece Angela, making herself a sandwich or reading quietly or deciding what to wear for the day.
Although Wells considered herself to be a private person, proof against all adversity, she often found herself looking wistfully into the spare bedroom, once Angela’s own “Fortress of Solitude.” Did she want to fill that up again with a rambunctious teenager?
More to the point, and before the trials of hosting a teenager, she would have to face the tedium of tending to a baby, a two-year-old, a grade-schooler, amid all the worries about health and development, fever and school fights, temper tantrums, food preferences, and allergies. Some of that could be laid off on a nanny, at least for part of the day, but the point of having a child—in Wells’s view—was seeing to its growing up. Did she want all that again?
At one point she considered avoiding the baby route and adopting a girl of eight or nine out of San Francisco’s Family & Children Services foster care system. Such children were notoriously hard to place, so Wells could expect to have her pick of the … well, to be honest about it, damaged goods. The chance of finding a recently orphaned girl who had been decently and lovingly brought up would be slim. And any child who had been kicked around in foster care during her early development would have unpredictable mental or emotional problems. Besides, the social workers at FCS would want to look into Wells’s own background and lifestyle. They would pry into the reasons for her self-imposed, nunlike reclusion. They would want to psychologically evaluate her. And Wells was not ready for that, either.
When the pressure of loneliness finally got too great, she made the call to Parthenotics, Inc. The first thing she discovered was that the company didn’t exist anymore, having been bought out a dozen years earlier by Rengstrom Fertility Services. The second was that they had no record of either her or John Praxis in their database.
“But you have our genetic materials—my eggs, his sperm—in your freezers,” she told the receptionist on her screen. It was a nice touch that the woman wore a nurse’s uniform.
“Unh … Why would we keep bio-samples in our system without a reference?” the woman asked. “That wouldn’t be ethical, would it?”
“But we were assured by the people at Parthenotics—”
“Parthenotics had some problems before they were acquired. I believe they experienced some freezer accidents and lost about a quarter of their stock. That would probably explain why you and your husband are no longer in our system.”
Wells thought of explaining that John Praxis was not her husband, but her attorney’s instincts warned her not to tell that truth.
“We have a locket,” she said suddenly, remembering how John had described it all those years ago. “It looks like a bit of old jewelry, but the Parthenotics people made it to hold—or so I’m told—the complete genomes from both of us, coded electronically. I don’t suppose you could—”
“We synthesize DNA from coded sources all the time,” the woman said.
“Then could you, what’s the right word, ‘assemble’ an egg and sperm from it?”
“Simplest thing in the world to make a pair of gametes. We can even do a bit of cleanup, check for recessives, make adjustments. Why don’t you drop the jewelry off and let us take a crack at it?”
“All right …”
“Come by—next Tuesday, good for you? Meet with one of our counselors?”
“What would they be wanting to counsel me about?” Wells asked warily.
“Oh, details like hair color, eye color, embedded talents … sex, of course.”
“I want a girl baby,” she said simply—and felt moisture around her eyes.
“Easiest thing in the world, Ms. Wells.”
5. A Life of Crime
The man sitting on the other side of Callie’s desk looked terribly young. Well, “young” had become a relative term for her, ever since she started her own course of rejuvenations. Gustavo Reiter was a nephew several times removed of her late husband Francesco’s—actually, he was the grandson of Cesco’s aunt by marriage and her second husband, an Austrian. Gustavo would have been about three when Cesco died and she left Italy, so that would make him about thirty-three now. That was terribly young, these days. Cesco and Callie had stood as the boy’s godparents, and that also made him family.
A suspect part of the family, true. It had taken Callie several years to stamp out all connections with the former di Rienzi crime family. The cleansing had meant burning a lot of contracts, making reparations, and adopting an attitude of constant watchfulness, until she believed Praxis Engineering & Construction was totally in the clear. And yet here was this young Italian with family connections—although a branch of the family at some distance from Uncle Matteo’s—who was coming to her now for a job.
“You see, Contessa,” Gustavo said, “we have the
macchina flagello
—the scourge of machines—in Europe, too. I train for economics, emphasis on world trade, very good choice, I think, and still I have no work. The
intelligenze artificiali
—the machine brains—are too powerful, too fast, too subtle with their theories and their models. They make me
ridondante
—second place, yes?—before I even graduate.”
“I’m not sure the situation is much different here,” Callie said cautiously.
“I understand. To try to find work, I also train as
commissario di bordo
—the one who loads and manages cargo on big ships—and learn all about customs, bills of lading, duties, excises. I know about
logistica internazionale
—international logistics—at the very ground level, seashore to seashore. In your business, you must have customs and transfer work, yes?”
“Something like that,” she admitted. “Through our Planning and Estimating Department, we have to track orders for materials and supplies—steel, wood, various types of stone, and big equipment—from overseas. The real work is done by artificial intelligences, of course, but sometimes the shipments go wrong. And then it’s easier to send a human being to troubleshoot and sort things out than to try telling a machine it made a mistake.” She grimaced at the admission.
“You could get me such a job?” he said eagerly.
“I would make an opening for my godson.”
“
Va bene!
” he said. “
Molto eccellente!
”
* * *
Gustavo Reiter did not so much need a job as he needed a
collocare stare
—like Archimedes, a place to stand—not so much to move the world as to carry out his real business, which was to move the goods that people needed from one side of a national border, past the customs agents and tariff collectors, to the other.
It was a hard business to be in, anymore. Due to the thinking machines and their distributed factories, world trade in the desirables, the unobtainables, and the untouchables had totally broken down. Designer handbags, watches, scarves, and shoes? The pattern was a sequence of licensed electrons, the execution a matter of putting the right feed cartridges into a
stampante tridimensionale
—a personal printer. Recreational drugs? The formula was searchable on the internet, the microbes to shape the molecules could be bought online, and the product could be grown in any commercially available bioreactor. Personalized recreational drugs? You gave your genome to one of the unlicensed
intelligenze
and in fifteen minutes inside a pocket laboratory, or fifteen hours in a bioreactor, it cooked up your own flavor of heavenly bliss without side effects. Anything people wanted that was illegal, immoral, or fattening could be conjured out of software and realized with the right ingredients
memorizzare acquistati
—taken off the shelf.
Anything, that is, except for the heavy metals, the metals of mass destruction: enriched Uranium235 and Plutonium239. Alchemy and the transmutation of metals was not within the reach of local buyers—or not yet anyway. Perhaps with an
acceleratore di particelle
—an atom smasher—plus a lot of time and energy, governments could make these metals out of, say, old aluminum pie tins. But the people who needed them in a hurry, who did not have the time and energy—those people had to deal with the likes of Gustavo.
He had an agent for this specialized business, of course. It was a woman who had put him in touch with a man who ran a fuel recycling facility in Malaysia. That man had made a deal with the plant’s
cervello meccanico
to cook the International Atomic Energy Agency’s record-keeping books as thoroughly as the spent rods that the plant received. And his agent had buyers as well, located within the Federated Republic and elsewhere. Their purposes were varied, ranging from power plant management to political mayhem. Gustavo was not political. He did not question. He merely arranged.
But unlike watches, shoes, or drugs, the required metals were heavy. And the shielding to protect the handlers and confuse the border watchers was heavier still. It was impossible to move these metals in the old ways, disguised as furniture, textiles, or farm produce. They needed to move with weight. And what was weightier than bricks, building stone, steel beams, and heavy machinery?
Once he was in place at Praxis Engineering & Construction, thanks to his godmother’s good graces, Gustavo made his introductions to the machines that were his new province and began processing the company’s orders. And once he had built up a network of regular shipping routes and understood for himself their highways and byways, he made contact again with his business agent.
She was an older woman whom he had met just once, in Milano. He remembered her as someone who might have been attractive some years ago, with a small frame, red hair, pale skin, deep black eyes, and a quick temper. For contacting her in the future, Gustavo had received only an email address in Dublin and a name, Deirdre Falconer.
* * *
It wasn’t exactly a matter for the Praxis Engineering & Construction Company, nor yet a formal concern of the still-to-be-chartered Praxis Family Association. It wasn’t the sort of decision meeting where John Praxis could give orders and expect results. It was more an occasion for persuasion, and he knew he wasn’t always good at that. In his office at the engineering company he gathered three of his grandchildren—Rafaella, Jeffrey, and Penny, who was sitting in for Brandon—and he called up Jacquie Wildmon on his communications wall from her office in Houston. All of them had attended the family retreat at Cherry Lake. All of them had teenagers or young children who had not yet entered college or settled upon a lifetime career.
“I have a great thing to ask from each of you …” he began.
“Whatever you want, Grandfather,” Jeffrey said.
“Just name it, John,” Penny assured him.
“
Sì! È tua, Nonno,
” Rafaella purred.
“If we’re going to pull off this family association plan,” he went on, “then we’ll have to think long term and for the future. In the past, we’ve encouraged our next generations to study engineering, math, and science—because that was the family business. We wanted our children to follow in our footsteps. And all of you have.”
“Except for me,” Rafaella said sadly.
“But you married an engineer.”
“Much good it did me.”
“Well, as may be … But only part of our work in the future is going to be in engineering and construction. Most of it will be the business of everyday survival—making things for our members, trading things with other groups, providing for people, and managing our property. We will still need an engineering perspective for doing some of these things, but we will also need much more.”
“Such as?” Jeffrey asked.
“For one, we’re going to need some lawyers in the family. For a long time I could rely on Antigone Wells and her wise counsel. Since she left us, I’ve had to work with the company’s salaried lawyers and the law firms we’ve retained. But I’ve never felt quite right, trusting them with my deepest thoughts. It would be better to have some legal brains bound to us by blood and family ties.”
“Why can’t we rely on the AIs?” Jeffrey said. “They think faster than any human being and have more information—more legal precedents, more strategy choices—at their, well, fingertips than any human lawyer, except maybe Antigone. And, aside from Rafaella’s little tiff with the court system, they’re guaranteed against bias and corruption.”
“That’s not always—” Jacquie Wildmon started, then went quiet.
“What were you going to say?” Praxis asked.
“Nothing, sir,” she replied.
Penny shifted in her seat. “It’s just that … we’ve had some unexpected results with legal intelligences. I, too, would feel better with a human lawyer in the family.”
“Exactly,” he said. “And while I don’t disagree that we can use the legal AIs for their knowledge and advice, we have to be skilled in that way of thinking in order to make good decisions about what they tell us. Imagine a world where the only engineering insight and vision came from artificial intelligences. For a while, anybody could plan, design, and execute a building or a bridge. But ultimately, the AIs are servants to human minds, desires, and needs. If the human making the request isn’t properly trained, you’re going to get some odd and even unsafe bridges and buildings out of the AI copybooks.”
“Okay, lawyers a priority,” Jeffrey said. “What else?”
“We’re going to need economists, to know how to manage our businesses,” Praxis said. “And people trained in politics or advocacy, negotiations, communications, or whatever it is that will help us manage a large and growing group of people and get them all moving in the same direction. Then, in the future, to become truly self-sufficient, we’ll need all sorts of talents—doctors, farmers, teachers … just about every skill a society requires.”
“All this from my three girls?” Rafaella protested. “That’s a heavy future!”
“Plus Jacquie’s two kids,” Penny pointed out. “And my two, of course, along with Jeffrey’s remaining boy. Susannah’s already on board with this human engineering thing.”
“Eight great-grandchildren is a start, isn’t it?” Praxis said, counting up.
Rafaella sighed. “I’ll see what I can do to persuade them.”
* * *
Late in the afternoon on a rainy winter’s day, Callie Praxis took a call on her communications wall from two Federated Republic agents. On the right side of the screen sat a wispy young woman with long, blonde hair and pale makeup, wearing a black business suit one size too large in all dimensions, except for the length of her skirt. She looked like Callie’s eldest granddaughter Jennifer playing dress-up. The woman flashed an identity card identifying her as Agent Belle Stockhausen, of the F.R. Department of Homeland Security. Callie immediately assigned her, mentally, the status of officer-in-training, Junior G-Girl.
The right side of the screen was a blank—not the neutral gray of the comm wall itself but an enhanced black. It bore the image of a badge: a gold shield with an eagle perched above, its wings spreading downward to touch the corners of the shield on either side. Across the top was inscribed “F.R. Customs & Border Protection.” A band underneath showed “Officer 23891AI.” The screen did not resolved into a face, which Callie understood to mean she would be talking with a machine—as if the “AI” on the badge was not enough of a clue.
“What can I do for you folks?” she asked.
“We’ve noticed—” Agent Stockhausen began, paused, and glanced to the side.
“Our analysis,” came a cold voice from the screen with just the badge, “shows an unusual pattern of traffic among your recent deliveries of durable goods and construction materials into the Federated Republic.”
“Oh?” Callie replied. She began keying a sequence on her desktop. “Do you mind if I record this conversation—for later review by our legal staff?”
“Yes,” said the woman.
“No,” said the machine.
Callie completed the sequence.
“Now,” she said, “is this a formal investigation?”
“At this stage, no,” said the AI. “A notification of interest.”
“So. Please define ‘unusual’ and ‘pattern.’ Give examples if possible.”
“On January 19,” the machine said, “you took delivery of an earth-moving vehicle, a two-hundred-ton mining truck—” The screen flashed the picture of a huge, ribbed box painted bright yellow and mounted on four giant wheels. From the figure provided for scale, those wheels were fully twelve feet tall. “—from Komatsu Ltd. at Yokohama. Its port of entry was Seattle, Washington, with an ultimate destination of the Hat Creek Coal Mine in British Columbia.”
“For the sake of conversation,” Callie said, “I’ll assume you’re correct in this. I’d have to check the logistics with my Planning and Estimating people before going on record.”
“Noted,” the machine replied. “From Yokohama to Seattle is a direct ocean route,” it continued, “and yet the shipment was routed through Malaysia, on the Strait of Malacca, which connects the South China Sea with the Indian Ocean.” The screen showed two maps: one of the Pacific with a red arrow pointing at North America, the other a closeup of Asia with a squiggle meandering around the bulges of China and Vietnam, then heading off towards India.
“We wonder,” said Agent Stockhausen. “Why the detour?”
“I don’t know,” Callie said. “Perhaps the ship had other cargo?”
“The diversion,” said Officer 23891AI, “was noted on the truck’s bill of lading.”
“Then I’m as much in the dark as you. Do you have other examples?”
They did. The machine intelligence described four more shipments—a load of granite from Taiwan, construction beams from Baosteel in Shanghai, a second earthmover, this one from Korea, and a load of teak from Indonesia—all headed for the Federated Republic and yet all passing through the Malacca Strait according to their registered waybills.
“You’re forgetting the Italian marble, Two-Three,” the woman said.