Winning Peace Chapter 11:
I held up a hand, fingers outstretched as I reclined in my very comfortable chair and closed my eyes. "Basic necessities including food, water, power, shelter, and medicine are all accounted for?" I asked aloud.
There was a noise of screens being tapped akin to the sound of papers being shuffled.
"It seems that way, Minister Lopez. Of course, we project a shortfall in-"
"Abup-bup!" I interjected, refusing to open my eyes on general principle. "I'm not asking about two months from now, Lisa. I'm asking about today and the immediate future. Are basic necessities for all space-based citizens covered or not?"
Another pause, then a sigh. "Yes sir, they are."
"Good." I tucked one finger. "Research and development. Is anything actively on fire at the moment or anticipated to explode within the next two months?"
Tapping again. I missed shuffling papers. I never thought I would, but I did damn it. "No sir, all projects are making steady progress. The bulk of the work is practical engineering concerns right now."
"Bueno." I tucked another finger. "Are there any important council votes set for the next two weeks?" I paused, then continued. "Qualifier; any actually important council votes? Not just procedural tripe?"
A put-upon sigh. "No sir, the final arguments on the Clone Rights Amendments were last month and that closes out anything you'd consider 'important' until next month. Just for the record, there's a vote scheduled on crafting spacecraft traffic lanes and priority which fit your criteria for 'urgent.'"
I almost groaned aloud at the mention of the CRA. I'd intended it to be passed last year, which should tell you exactly what I thought of the (largely correct) conspiracy theories that I was 'in charge' of the government. Technically speaking, I was a top-level appointee who was something of a 'second among equals' on the Stellar Council in terms of power and seniority. Only the Minister of State actually held more seniority or official power than I did, though we both reported directly to the Prime Minister.
That would be entirely true as long as I wasn't secretly Prime Minister Kilpatrick's cybernetics doctor on top of everything else.
Which... was rather shady, I'll admit. It essentially put the man's life in my hands because he was too much of an addict to turn down potent drugs. As there wasn't actually an ethics code written for the government yet, I didn't let it bother me too much.
Also, looking at what the leader of the 'Loyal Opposition' was campaigning for, it even kind of gave me a warm fuzzy feeling to be standing between the crazies and the reigns of power.
"Those who live on the world below have doomed themselves! We have no obligation to save them from themselves! I hold no ill-will towards them, but the simple truth is that rendering them aid is a difficult and thankless task where our efforts are better spent looking to our own problems and difficulties, of which we have many."
Yes, anything I could do to keep Maxwell Stanton away from the levers of political power was undoubtedly for the good of humanity.
The problem being that he was the most popular of my stooge's political opponents.
I hummed in thought, nodding, but tucked another finger as I finally deigned to open my eyes. Three of five down now. "Alright, I'll keep that in mind. Administrative duties. Anything outstanding? New hires that need my okay for security clearances, signing off on materials transfers, anything else?"
Lisa sighed, the blunt noise of fingers impacting a screen filling the room for a moment. "I have a few documents which need your attention before they're sent off to the Prime Minister. Most of it is what you tend to call 'housekeeping' measures and should be fairly standard paperwork."
Tucking one of the last two fingers in, I nodded. "Alright then. Have those sent to my terminal and I'll give them a review-" I held up a hand as she opened her mouth. "-and, yes, I mean I'll actually read them, not just skim them and have an AI look for inconsistencies."
Lisa stared at me, her blue eyes narrowed in suspicion, but she eventually nodded and made a gesture to 'flick' the documents towards me. "Very well then, that just leaves-"
"Don't." I stated, holding up my hands in surrender. "Please. I'm tired, you're tired. We can pretend there's nothing there and just go home."
"You have two appointments from the Minister of State and the Minister of Infrastructure," she stated pointedly.
I sighed and rubbed my eyes tiredly. "Ugh, politics."
The final damned finger. I wonder if I cut it off would I manage to get out of dealing with it?
Oh, sure, they might have made an official appointment and everything, but that didn't fool me. They'd only done that because I had a Dumb AI screening my calls and taking messages for me that was almost impossible to actually get through to talk to me unless it was a legitimate problem or emergency. I'd created a standardized set of forms for inter-office communication just so that I didn't have to deal with meeting department heads and the like. This was why I had an actual human staff! So that the ignorant peons who balked at 'trusting a computer' could have their inefficient face-to-face communication.
So when one of my fellow Councillors specifically requested a meeting in-person, I'd come to understand that they wanted favors.
"God, why did I take this job again?" I asked the ceiling plaintively as I stared up at it.
"If I recall, sir, it was because of your sense of loyalty to the human race and an obligation to use your incredible intellect for the good of your species." Lisa's tone was dry as she replied. "Of course, that was just what you said at the inaugural ceremony three years ago. Given my impressions of you since I've been hired, I think half of that is self-aggrandizing bullshit."
"I can fire you, you know? That is within my power." I tried for ominous and threatening, but it just came out tired and apathetic. It probably didn't help that I was still staring vacantly at the ceiling and had allowed my arms to droop lifelessly as if I were already dead.
"I dare you," Lisa snarked back at me. "We both know how difficult it was for you to fill this position in the first place. Replacing me would guarantee you get someone else's crony."
I groaned, because she was right, damn her.
The Stellar Council was, somewhat unavoidably, a political organization. Anywhere there was authority to be had, there were those who wanted to stack the deck with their own appointees. So, naturally, the government had bloated a bit here and there to accommodate various positions which sounded important, but boiled down to cushy jobs where people could earn a few extra credits to spend on whatever they wanted printed out from the fabbers.
To a certain extent, I allowed this, which would have probably shocked and appalled anyone who discovered the fact, but I had my reasons. They were even somewhat good ones.
The first was that, regardless of how much I had integrated 'dumb' AI into the systems of government, people were still not entirely comfortable talking directly to computers and letting them make decisions. It was counter-intuitive, but Earth-based cities had actually grown far more comfortable with this kind of development in the past twenty-to-thirty years than space-based humanity had. Because it was problematic, but usually salvageable if a machine on Earth malfunctioned due to a glitch in its learning software.
That was not the case in space, where malfunctions were a much more grave and serious matter.
So even if my machines were programmed perfectly and debugged regularly, the illusion that humans ran the computer systems put a lot of people much more at ease both in Armstrong City and on the settlements beyond. Even if the opposite was true and the human interface employees often just existed to input complaints and problems into the system to get a solution.
So instead of fighting the wave of cronyism and nepotism, I'd ridden it.
Anyone who'd wanted a job had to be tested for a certain amount of capability, common sense, and ability to handle an angry human being who couldn't get what they wanted done for whatever inane reason.
Yes, this effectively made them a customer service bureau, but everyone got fancy job titles and had some 'official duties' to make it seem like they were a necessary part of the governmental machine. As long as it never exceeded the tolerances I'd built into the post-scarcity economic system, I honestly didn't care. Hell, it was even beneficial to some degree, since the surplus idiot cousins, nieces, and nephews who couldn't find a hobby the system would accept as a 'job' now had something semi-meaningful to contribute to society and 'earned' a higher standard of living for themselves and their families.
Who the fuck actually cared?! Energy credits were as much a currency as a measurement of how much electricity it took to produce one gram of the average cost of common substances. It wasn't like the economy was real or anything. I'd happily pay people in guitar solos and cheez-whiz if that was the medium of exchange they endorsed.
I was a year or two away from having functional and safe antimatter reactors, bitches!
Feeling some semblance of energy surge back into me at the thought of unlimited cosmic power, I sat up straight and stretched as I turned to address Lisa. "Okay. If I seriously commit to these appointments, then other than those I'm taking a two-week vacation. In fact, everyone in the administration gets a week-long vacation. I'll pull up a list for a skeleton crew the first week, and those people will get the second week off with a bonus. Which, of course, everything is PTO."
Again, I cared about money why?
Granted, I was pretty sure the Minister of Economics, Saanvi Gupta, was going to strangle me if I told her to 'make up jobs' one more time as a solution to the one percent unemployment we were running. Then again, my offer to pay people to learn mission-critical skills to maintain and operate hardware and software in space had sent her off with a spring in her step.
"I think..." Lisa stated, frowning as she glanced down at her tablet. "I think I can agree to that. We'll see some things build up in the interim, but unless there's an emergency I can get behind that. Everyone has been working very hard for the last two years without much time off."
"Tell me about it," I replied dryly.
My secretary winced slightly. "In my defense, I have been trying to get you to take more breaks since I was hired and saw how much you were overworking yourself."
"It's not overwork if there aren't negative psychological and physiological effects," I waved her off with my common refrain, knowing full well that I was suffering a bit of both at this point. I'd just been pushing myself for too long without a substantial break. Estimates were that my work had degraded by roughly fifteen percent in quality and ten percent in quantity with an anticipated fall-off of another ten to twenty percent in the coming months.
See, it's not hypocrisy if you're using your own systems to watch yourself like a hawk!
At any rate, though, the medical AI I'd coded and rolled out to supplement the lackluster numbers of personnel on the outer colonies had strongly suggested a vacation.
Hence my decision to give myself one.
"Well, if that's your decision, I'll get started on an administrative memorandum," Lisa stated with a nod. "Once you've finished reading through those documents, I'll head home myself."
I sighed, but resigned myself to a bit more work as I popped the files open and began to speed-read through them. One of them was from Minister Gupta, asking to re-evaluate payment rates for certain educational subjects to properly incentivize people to fill the holes in our workforce. Since I was the highest person in the government and the inventor of both the nano-fabrication units and the energy credit currency, she wanted my thoughts before moving forward with the revisions. Even if I was effectively a rubber stamp given she had more than enough authority to do so herself.
Nice of her to ask, though.
Rubbing at my chin, I adjusted a few of the values before leaving a series of notes on why I'd done so and then slapping a thumbs-up emoji on the entire package and sending it off.
Next up? Minister of Transportation Gabriel Potter wanted a feasibility study on expanding Rohini Station with the possibility of adding a tether to create an orbital elevator system. After looking at the design for a moment, I stamped a huge red 'X' over the entire thing, then pulled up one of my own design documents I'd been putting off for a day when I had more time. Attaching a few notes to it, I sent both back to the man's secretary. If he wanted to save me time, effort, and political favors to do my project for me a year early, that was fine by me. As long as he didn't bungle it, I'd let the man have the credit for the entire project, but I really hoped he followed my advice and fired whoever his engineer was for the piece of shit he'd just asked me to give approval for. Seriously, the tensile strength on the materials alone should have set off all sorts of alarm bells for anyone half-competent.
"Like herding cats," I muttered quietly enough Lisa wouldn't hear. "Suicidal cats."
Another missive from the Minister of Entertainment and Culture, proof positive that there was nothing less fun than being the person responsible for throwing the party. Seriously, they were such a stick in the mud even my own infamously reclusive self had a bone to pick. Anyway... co-sign a proposal to excavate a new area for a data cluster for the new VRMMO craze? Yeah, sure, but... eh, no that area was fine, actually. Only note they got was to increase the depth and make sure there was proper shielding.
Another half-dozen of the same kinds of things crossed my desk before I cleared them all and clapped my hands. "Done! I'm heading home!"
Lisa blinked, but by the time I heard an abbreviated call for me to wait, I was already half-way to my personal pod. The tastefully-painted halls of the government complex gave way to a small room with five seats and safety harnesses. A set of humanoid robots, very obviously so, stood ready for me as I stepped into the pod and buckled myself in.
"Iah," I spoke, addressing the artificial intelligence which ran the travel system. "Priority access, take me home."
"Acknowledged, Master," came the crisp reply and, in moments, I was moving. Attached to rails, the pod moved in a way I could most closely compared to a fully-enclosed roller coaster car out of the governmental complex and into the bustling city center of Armstrong.
When people had scoffed at the idea of creating a giant city-sized hardened bunker, I'd responded quite bluntly with both a full rollout of the automated excavators and a plan that detailed the construction requirements down to the nanometer in full virtual reality with a complete physics model.
"They said it couldn't be done," I smirked, allowing myself the ham while I was alone. "They called me mad, but now they see my genius for what it is!"
I sighed as the system magnified a view corresponding to my stare and caught the mass of people holding up protest signs in front of the building dedicated to housing the first generation of growing fetuses under the CRA. Many people still weren't happy about their new government being able to print out new workers on demand, laboring under the persistent delusion that the current population could naturally grow to support the necessary skills and trades needed to sustain a space-faring civilization.
There was no current method to travel from Earth to Luna or the other colonies given the debris belt. The best I could do was slap ablative armor on a capsule and pray it made it through on a reasonable trajectory. Even then, roughly three out of every ten of my 'care packages' burnt up in reentry and another one just hit a piece of debris large enough to mission-kill it.
If I couldn't quite literally print them out on-demand, it would be an appalling waste of resources.
Crossing the distance of the three-dimensional cityscape, the pod fluidly switched rails as it conveyed me to my destination. Given how far the city had expanded, it took quite a while before I was able to pass through all of the bulkheads dividing the massive blocks of the city to reach my home. As I passed through the last of them, exiting through a small hole in the holographic sky projected on the walls and ceiling of the immense bunker, I sighed in relief.
Two weeks.
I had two weeks of nothing, now.
After five yea-no, it was more like a decade of constant activity in one way or another, I was officially taking my longest vacation ever. It hadn't mattered, back on Earth. I'd always managed a few hours for myself each day, so there hadn't been any pressing need for a true vacation. Even if I'd indulged in a week off here or there. After I'd made it to space, though, the work had been constant.
I sighed and unbuckled myself from my harness as I got out and began walking into my personal abode.
The caverns which had housed my many workers had, over the years, slowly emptied. I'd converted various spaces into private gardens, greenhouses, a swimming pool, and various other things I never had the time to use. I'd even repurposed the old theater into my personal entertainment system where I could watch movies on a gigantic holographic screen.
There were even a few fanciful three-dimensional Escher-esque funhouse mazes I'd had my AI design, simply as a way to take up now-disused space.
I couldn't really blame anyone who'd left, not really. They'd all moved into the city for greater socialization options once traffic between here and there had opened up and I hadn't wanted to act like a contract was still valid through the apocalypse or anything. It wasn't as if I couldn't automate any of those jobs anyway. Still, it made the place feel a lot emptier.
"Welcome Home, Master," Thoth's voice rang out.
"Glad to be here, Thoth," I called out. "Warm up the hot tub, activate the pumps on the pool, get me a large pizza cooking and deliver that to the pool room. Oh, and cue up my favorite relaxation playlist, too! I'm officially on vacation!"
"At once, Master," Thoth assured me.
A notification pinged my systems and I frowned as Project Adversary's computational element had finished its latest round of data mining and satellite observation. A part of me itched to recant my declared time off almost instantly, but I held myself back. I'd been tracking them for years, their constant interference in my operations Earth-side showing their hand just a bit too much.
With enough computational power, statistical anomalies ceased to be.
As I stripped off my clothes and entered the massive pool room, I spoke. "Project Adversary, Command Line: Run possible counter-strike plans at the tactical, strategic, and logistical level. Variant designs for high, medium, and low-level visibility, political impact, and repercussions on other projects."
"ETA: Three Days, Master Ezekiel," Thoth replied.
I nodded. "Good. I'm still on vacation."
As I tried to convince myself of the truth of that statement, I dove into the cool waters of my giant moon pool.
Still, my mind refused to idle and plans began to form.
After all, it was only impossible to get to Earth from Luna because most people weren't me.
Skill List:
Mathematics: 1-10
Computer Programming: 1-10
Physics: 1-10
Material Sciences: 1-10
Nanomachines: 1-5
Orbital Mechanics: 1-5
Quantum Mechanics: 1-5
Artificial Intelligence: 1-5
Artificial Intelligence Shackling: 1-10
Blackboxing: 1-10 (New)
Robotics: 1-5
Ruggedization: 1-5
Molecular Assembly: 1-5
Safeguards: 1-5
Failsafes: 1-5
Genetics: 1-10
Astrobotany: 1-4
Medicine: 1-3
Social Engineering: 1-5
Public Speaking: 1
Speed-Reading: 1
Teaching: 1
Critical Thinking: 1
Logistics: 1-5
Strategy: 1-5
Public Relations: 1-5
Corporate Espionage: 1
Automation: 1-5 (New)
Business Management: 1-3
Economics: 1-3
Aperture Science Technologies: 1-10 (New)
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