It was late September and Scott had flown into Texas. The situation had settled down a lot over the past two months. The strategy of targeting the larger gangs instead of playing defense in the cities seemed to have paid off. To a large extent, once the Guard handled the more organized groups, local police and vigilantes solved some of the smaller problems. The newly expanded Homeland Security had been setting up bases and recruiting but had not had much visible impact.
Genysis had two housing contracts in Texas, but Scott was here for a different reason. He was visiting because of Solomon Rhodes, who was finally getting released from prison. He had arranged a driver and a local bodyguard and was on his way to meet Solomon once he was released. Melinda had insisted on the bodyguard, and he had a satellite phone with instructions to call in immediately if he saw any signs of trouble.
Scott’s car pulled into the parking lot of the same prison he had visited roughly a year before. He entered the office and greeted Warden Davis, who seemed to recognize him.
“Thanks for calling ahead. After the incident last year, we wanted to make sure Solomon was not being coerced into leaving with you.” Davis said. Solomon had been kidnapped from the prison by Russians, from whom he had stolen a large intelligence network. Under duress, Solomon had told them about Scott’s company, which led to a major attack on the Mexico base. Scott’s company had rebuilt and recovered, but the Russian team had escaped with some very dangerous technology, and they had not heard anything else about it since then.
“I appreciate that you treat your prisoners fairly. I know Solomon is suing the prison system for what he went through, but he’s had nothing but good things to say about you.” Scott said with a smile.
“We upgraded some of our security after that incident with Solomon. It actually came in handy a couple of months ago when one of those gangs tried to break someone out,“ Davis explained. Scott thought that was probably quite an interesting story, but he knew the Warden wouldn’t tell him anything more.
“Some people in my company had a run-in with one of the gangs. It sounded like the wild west here a few months ago. Do you think the trouble is over now?” Scott asked. He thought someone who dealt with law enforcement and criminals might know a bit more than what they heard on the news.
“Honestly, I think you guys are lucky to be getting out of here and going to Mexico. I have some friends who transferred into the new Homeland base near here. There seems to be a lot of emphasis on rooting out domestic extremists. Doesn’t sound too bad on the surface, but they are defining extremists as anyone who owns a gun or is critical of Washington. They keep a database of people on a watch list who can have their phone and emails tapped without a warrant. Anyone with even an indirect link to suspected radicals goes on the list.” Davis said.
“That’s pretty bad,“ Scott agreed. “I think most people assume their phone calls and emails are monitored already, but that’s a pretty loose definition of extremists. My friend said he thinks Texas will secede. Do you think there is any chance of that?”
“I haven’t heard anything specific, but the governor is pretty popular right now for cleaning up the gangs, and he is very critical of Washington. Still, I don’t see it happening. No one wants another civil war which Texas would lose. It would take some major stupidity for something like that to happen.” Davis said with a forced laugh.
At noon, Solomon was released. Solomon’s dark skin contrasted sharply with his brilliant smile. He was clearly pleased to see Scott and appreciated that they had arranged transportation.
“I can pay you back for the driver if you want. It must have cost a lot to get a ride all this way,“ Solomon offered.
“Don’t worry about it, “Scott said. “Our company has done really well this past year. Speaking of that, Melinda sent some papers for you with a new salary. I’ve never heard of her offering someone a raise before, but obviously your work deserves more than the pittance we were paying you.”
“That’s nice of you, but I’m not worried about it! You’ve probably heard I’m pretty rich.” Solomon laughed.
“Right, I almost forgot! Several local politicians want to thank you for your charitable donations and probably shake you down for some more.” Scott smirked.
“Sounds good,“ Solomon said agreeably. He was reading over a letter Melinda had added to his packet. After a few minutes of silence, Solomon spoke up.
“The boss wants me to help design a server farm for your HR software. She said I can share any information with you, so I’ll go ahead and tell you that my firewalls have been attacked with increasing intensity the past month. Some zero-hour attacks, some brute force, and at least one attack that would have required physical access to the server farm. That combination indicates its government level. I know the Russians don’t like us, but after what I did to them, I would be surprised if they could put together something like that so quickly. If I had to guess, I would say Americans or Chinese.” Solomon speculated.
“Did they get anything?” Scott was now quite concerned.
“I don’t think so. I can’t even get into the interior layer because I destroyed the access codes. That program has some nasty counterattacks set up, so it probably hacked them. The only way I know of to affect your system is to perform an update on your HR system. Hopefully you don’t let too many contractors access it, but even if you did, they would have to be pretty sophisticated programmers to inject something that could open up the system.” Scott paled as he heard this.
Great, I just hired a bunch of contractors who are genius programmers to work on the HR system.
“So, hypothetically, if some programmers had access to the system, could we add some more protection or make sure they didn’t already do something malicious?” Scott asked.
“I think we have a lot of work to do,“ Solomon sighed.
----------------------------------------
Matthew Stanton enjoyed his job. He designed robots and sometimes weapon systems. His co-workers were really smart, but also fun to work with. When his friends started hiring people and dumping their work, he had done the same, but now he was a little bored. Zaliha had teased him about it. She still worked about 60 hours a week and said her job was too fun to take a break right now. Zaliha’s CEO emphasized work-life balance and had helped her narrow her focus to the more creative parts of the job, but this only made her want to work more. She had handed off the air truck project for others to finish and only occasionally sat in on meetings about the exploration submarine. She was working on several military vehicles now. Matt was a bit jealous hearing her talk about optimizing hard points, stealth systems, and shielding against electronic warfare. He could probably build some more combat robots. Aerial and underwater versions might be fun.
Matt found himself intending to start a fun project, but instead he just wasted time reading or playing video games. Without a crisis or deadline, he found himself always putting off committing to something that would take a lot of work to finish. After a couple of weeks of procrastinating, Matt decided he needed to work on something other than robotics. Having made his decision, Matt assigned the underwater combat robot to Phillip and a flying robot to Rafael. They were both delighted with the assignment, and Matt felt a sense of relief. He called up Alvarro who had happily settled into Proteus. His friend had stopped gaming since his time at the refugee camps and seemed to be happy working through Glitch_HR skills training. Alvarro was officially a ‘Programming Intern’ reporting to Scott, but he hadn’t actually been assigned anything important.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“Hey Al, are you busy?” Matt asked.
“Not really. I’m just studying. Hopefully Scott will assign me some work when he gets back. My rating is getting pretty good. Not at the level of those maniacs he usually hires, but I bet I could help out on some of the projects.”
“Actually, I was thinking we could start another company.” Matt said.
“Seriously?! Aren’t you part owner of 5 or 6 already?” Alvarro asked, his voice raising an octave.
“That’s true. I have quite a bit of money now, and Scott will probably let me use his software in exchange for a bit of ownership. I think it would be fun to build a gaming company!”
“That would be awesome!” Alvarro agreed, excited.
“I asked Melinda about it. She said it was great that I was trying something new, but she’s not interested in running it. She has never even played a video game and doesn’t understand the business, but she said she would file the incorporation if I paid her $1000.” Matt explained.
“I guess we just need to find a CEO and hire programmers, designers and artists?” Alvarro asked, “Which would normally be really difficult, but with Scott’s program we can do most of that in one afternoon.”
“Not so fast!” Matt laughed. “I’m putting up $6 million, and I want 55%. I also want to try being the CEO. You get 25%, Scott gets 10%, and we reserve the last 10% for employee bonuses.”
“OK, if you are putting up that much money, you can be the CEO. I’m just happy to be invited!“ Alvarro agreed.
“Right, so I want to build a VRMMORPG. They talk about them in lots of books I’ve been reading, and I wondered if we could pull it off.” Matt explained.
Matt continued, “I’ve done a little research. Full immersion pods are not something we can do with current technology. There are a few ideas out there how to make it work, but we could spend years on it with no guarantee,“ Matt sounded a bit disappointed. “I do think we could have nearly intelligent NPCs and do a lot with generated content.”
“Sounds awesome!” Alvarro said with a huge smile. “We should talk with Scott before we finalize this deal since he’ll be an owner too. I’m sure he’ll let us use his software, but he might have some ideas too.”
The boys agreed to do a bit more planning and try to meet with Scott after he returned from his trip.
----------------------------------------
Adriana and Melinda were taking a quick tour of their second cargo ship. They had stuck with the theme of naming their ships after water spirits, so this was called the Moryana. Adriana had insisted they paint the ship a powder blue color with white highlights. The company now had three full ship crews to rotate between the two ships and would hire a fourth soon, so crews could rotate out and stay at the home base roughly half the year.
“The paint job was a waste of money, but I guess it looks pretty.”
“We can afford it now. We will get less attention since it doesn’t look like a warship.” Adriana countered.
“Attention can be a good thing since we’re not a secret anymore. We do want our brand to be associated with a positive image, so I agreed to the paint job already!” Melinda reflected that her young friends had grown more assertive. She was proud of them, but it was also annoying sometimes.
“I handed off a lot of the design work for the Atlantic base.” Adriana admitted.
“Yes, I’ve seen you hanging out at the pool more often. Good for you!” Melinda laughed.
“Right, you would know since you and Angela spend half the day ‘meeting’ there.” Adriana countered. “Anyway, I had some ideas for our next ship. Zaliha is busy with aircraft design, but we are going to work together on a carrier ship.”
“Not a warship, I hope? I still haven’t recruited the person I want for strategic planning. Building an aircraft carrier might upset some powerful people.”
“No, it’s a shipping carrier. We figured we could handle deliveries faster and more efficiently using air trucks that are based out of a specially designed ship.” Adriana explained.
“Sounds interesting. Give me some more details, so I can make a plan to work with the governments.” Melinda was giving Adriana at least three fifths of her attention.
“Our air trucks are designed to carry up to 12 tons in a standard shipping container. With ten air trucks on the ship, we could unload the entire ship in a couple of days directly to a rail or truck terminal, skipping the port. That assumes the location is within 5 miles of the ship at sea, but that is a common arrangement. We’d also have flexibility to deliver directly to inland locations, though it will take longer to unload the ship depending on the distance to delivery. You could still use port facilities to unload bulk cargo.” Adriana explained.
“This will save us time and money if we are working on projects inland,” Melinda noted, but then frowned. “Logistics is going to be a hundred times more complicated. I’ll start looking for people to manage it. Other companies will want to rent space on the ships once they see how quickly we can deliver. It won’t be as fast as pure air freight, but it could be several days, maybe even weeks, faster than standard cargo shipping if you skip the bottleneck at some ports. See if you can bump up the number of air trucks and the size of the ship. Aim for keeping the total unload time at two days, so it is competitive with the turnaround time for a traditional ship to unload at a port.”
They exited the Moryana onto the dock platform which connected Proteus, deep underwater, to the surface. The platform currently consisted of two passenger elevators and two large freight elevators. The platform had a few small buildings and a large area which served as a port, including stacks of shipping containers and several cranes. The platform seemed to always be under construction as they expanded it to support the next sections of Proteus. Melinda spent a moment staring at a tower they were building. Adriana wasn’t sure what the tower was for, but she was guessing radar, or something related to security.
“Do you have a plan to fix the traffic jam on land?” Adriana asked. “Now that we have visitors and hundreds of people living in Proteus, the gondola cars always have long waits. The number of cars and trucks parked at the house and surrounding streets is ridiculous, even with the new garage.”
“I’ve been negotiating with the governor. He agreed to fast track some road upgrades. I think he’s eager for all the property taxes our residents and businesses will start paying. His plans will not be nearly fast enough, so I’m pitching a plan to add an underground road bypass. The eminent domain laws allow us to pretty much build a tunnel however we want as long as anyone with mineral rights is fairly compensated, and the government approves the plan. We’ll need to avoid damaging cenotes, the water table, and certain cave systems. Environmental studies will take time, but I have a few people putting a plan together. We’re looking to buy up land three miles south of Sisal along highway 281. The tunnel will be about seven miles long and going all the way to a big parking garage we will build at Proteus. Branches will connect our inland property and the beach house, with additional parking at both locations.” Melinda explained.
“That’s a huge project. Are we supposed to pay for all that?” Adriana asked.
“I’m still negotiating that. We can offset some of the cost with tolls and selling space underground near the road if we are granted rights. It’s in the government’s interest to develop here, since they will get a lot more taxes. Most of the surface land is an ecological reserve owned by the federal government, so we need their approval too. Lucky for us, some key politicians have used our Spa and indicated they could help with permitting.” Melinda grinned.
“Sounds kind of corrupt,” Adrian replied, pursing her lips. “Not that voters should be too upset that a private company wants to improve infrastructure, pay more taxes and create jobs at almost no cost to the government. We should also be minimizing environmental damage with this, compared to expanding existing roads.” Adriana rationalized.
“The governor has already been bragging about how his economy will be growing next year, his carbon emissions are down, and how they are going to build several new shelters for the poor.” Melinda said. “We helped with the first two, and the last one is Solomon Rhodes. The governor totally owes us a favor or three.”
“I think the governor has a bit of a crush on you.” Adriana teased.
“Victor probably doesn’t realize I’m older than him,” Melinda huffed. “He’s a superstitious fool, but I guess he is kind of charming. Don’t worry, he’s married. I am not going to date him.”
“Since when are you on a first name basis with Governor Conde?” Adriana asked, curiously.
“I call everyone by their first name because I’m old, and rich, and I can do what I want!” Melinda responded with a huff.
“Also, what do you mean superstitious? I thought you liked religious people.” Adriana said, her forehead scrunching up.
“The security guys overheard Victor telling an aide that he thinks I’m some Mixtec goddess reborn. Chicomecóátl, the seven-headed goddess of prosperity or fertility. No idea where he gets this nonsense!” Melinda said, annoyed.
“Ooh, you really busted out the accent to say the name of that goddess. Maybe the governor has figured out your secret!” Adriana laughed.