Chapter 40 – The Fox God and President Conway
Friday Morning, July 24, 2308
Early on the morning of July the twenty-fourth, President Conway entered the Oval Office, carrying a makeshift breakfast of a banana, a cup of coffee and a blueberry muffin. The President nibbled and sipped as he double-checked his schedule and scanned his daily briefings.
Fox appeared in the chair opposite, and the President looked up. He calmly wiped his mouth with a napkin and asked, “May I help you?”
“I certainly hope so, sir. Do you know who I am?”
Fox was dressed in the white linen prison shirt, pants and sandals, that he’d been issued, but this was not quite enough to identify him as an escaped convict of any sort. Fox smiled, realizing that if he’d been carrying a margarita, he’d appear to be some sort of lost Caribbean tourist, regardless of the hour.
“What’s the matter?” The President smiled, “You forget your frigging name?”
“No.” Fox laughed. “But aren’t you the least bit concerned about how I got in here?”
“Should I be?”
“I suppose not. I mean, I’m clearly not threatening you.”
“Some of my advisors describe you as the number one threat to the entire Republic.”
“And what are your thoughts on this matter? Considering the fact that I was recently hailed as the Savior of the Republic.”
“Well, take for instance, this circumstance we find ourselves in at this very moment, Doctor Fox. Your perfection of small-scale teleportation technology could be considered a threat. Especially since it was used to undermine several South American governments.”
“Any such operation would have been highly classified, and even talking about it here could be construed as a breach of security.”
“So you understand my frustration then?” Conway asked.
“If you wanted to talk, you could have just called,” Fox countered.
“That would have been quite impossible, considering interested factions in our party and some recent political developments, specifically the death of young Chairman Pierce.”
“Okay, well, as far as I know he’s still missing, not dead.”
“Are you trying to be clever?”
“Yes.”
“I can see why my staff has such a difficult time dealing with you.”
“Sir, I will have you know that I completely respect the chain of command, despite my refusal to be shackled by it.”
“Back to my original question, why are you here?”
“I have a proposal for you sir, but it will require a bit of explaining first.”
“I’m all ears.”
“The Centaur Project, sir. I want you to turn it back over to me.”
“Most of my staff consider you to be the number one threat to this administration, if not the Republic as a whole. And now you have the balls to come in here, uninvited, and ask me to give you the most powerful weapon in the nation’s entire arsenal. Are you out of your mind?”
“Funny you should ask that.” Fox smiled.
“Funny how?”
“Well, your nephew has taken me prisoner.”
“You don’t appear imprisoned.”
“And you’ve been allowing uninitiated users on the Micronix Network.”
“That’s preposterous.”
“You’ve been linking your footnotes.”
“Well, of course I do, but those are my copies.”
“The National Intelligence Director and his deputy both have access to your annotated files.”
The president’s face fell. He raised his hand to his mouth. “Oh my God. Fox, I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize…”
“It’s okay. It’s my fault. I should have come to see you as soon as you were inducted into office. It just didn’t seem appropriate.”
“No, that’s okay. People were still, are still, sensitive about what happened in San Diego.”
“I can’t say I blame them, but General Cruthers was far more responsible than I was. I gave Stagwell’s administration what they asked for. I created the world’s safest weapon.”
“The concept is impossible. I think that’s what they couldn’t see. After San Diego, the people wanted a change. It’s okay that you didn’t visit. I understand. You were too strongly identified with the past. And besides, I made the decision to use your technology without talking to you first. I thought I knew what I was doing.”
“I know the feeling.”
“At any rate, I trust both Joe and Rudy. They’ve got the Republic’s best interest at heart.”
“Yes, well, they seem to think my death is just what the Republic needs right now.”
“Look, Doctor Fox, I wanted to meet you the other day, but I was running late and after you stormed out of here, well, I apologize for anything my nephew may have done. Yes, Joe is my nephew, and if he has taken the law into his own hands, he will see justice.
“However, he presented his case the other day, after you insulted my Chief of Staff and stormed out, and I have to tell you, he was rather convincing, plus he’s got Senators Miller and Clarke backing him.
“Of course, Secretary Croswell unraveled every argument with kindergarten logic. He even called him out for chasing a personal vendetta against you. I can’t recall the last time I saw this much passion over anything.”
“Well, I’m cutting Stanwood out of the loop,” Fox said. “Consider this a courtesy call.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Before I continue, do you have any questions for me?” Fox asked.
“Just one. Is it true, can you detonate terillium with a thought?”
“No, absolutely not. Never could, completely untrue.”
“But it’s theoretically possible?”
“Anything you can put into words is possible, even if only as a clever fraud. But I can’t do that, no.”
“The Micronix has opened up a lot of other possibilities though, hasn’t it?” Conway asked.
“Yes, Sir,” Fox replied.
“I have a couple of ideas that I’d like to run past you,” Conway said.
“Okay, go ahead, sir.”
“One is a seed vault, and not just seeds, but everything, I want to duplicate the sum total of all of mankind’s knowledge and learning and put backups around the solar system, in case something happens here, some kind of disaster.”
Fox smiled. “Did you know, that every time you use the Micronix, it runs a back up, on you?”
“You’re kidding?”
“Not at all.”
“Have you noticed, you never forget anything?” Fox asked.
“Never.” Conway smiled.
“Did you think that was you?” Fox grinned.
“Well…” Conway sputtered and laughed.
“Didn’t it start right after you took office?”
“I suppose it did…”
“How much do you know about the Centaur Project?”
“I admit, I was curious. I mean, you won the war in a single afternoon. It was over, there was no denying that.”
“But have you ever wondered how we got to that place, technologically.”
“The press on the tanks was pretty straightforward.”
“That was a smear campaign and full of half truth and lies. You understand that there were operators wired into the tanks, the Centaurs?”
“Yes, that much was clear.”
“Well, sir, what you may not realize is that the same nine operators were wired into all ten thousand of those machines.”
“I’m not sure I follow, doctor. I thought only seven went online.”
“Yes, Sir, that’s correct. My point is, how do I say this… We didn’t have pilots on standby. We…
“Project Epsilon, the mess that started all this, that was forty thousand convicted prisoners and some scientists, a tragedy, to be sure.
“In San Diego, the number was somewhere around one million two hundred thousand. A massacre, a genocide, a m
ass execution, committed by seven individuals, members of the 3AM Bodyguard program, also the core members of the Black Willow Team,” Fox said.
“How can that be possible?” Conway asked. “How can they be in two places at once? I mean; those soldiers were dead. They all died, hundreds of them, correct?” the President asked.
“Thousands,” Fox answered. “However… Well, we started project 3AM at the same time as the Black Willow trials. We graduated the same team through both programs, straight into the combat exercises and fast tracked them out into the field.”
“Explain.”
“3AM was billed as the search for the perfect bodyguard, to that end, we offered wounded soldiers a second chance, outfitting them with cybernetic prosthesis.”
“I heard about that.”
“Unfortunately, legal oversight decided to handcuff us. They tied up the project with a maze of red tape and bureaucracy, so we capped the program after a dozen subjects and had the files sealed.”
“Right, you moved onto the AIs and ran your Black Willow simulations with robots, correct?”
“Kind of.”
“What does that mean, kind of?”
“Well, we never perfected the AIs.”
“I think the disaster in San Diego was proof enough of that.”
“No, I mean, we never perfected them at all.”
“Then how did Black Willow and the 3AM Trials even take place?”
“Well, during 3AM sir, we referred to the solution as Remote Intelligence,” Fox explained.
“What does that mean?”
“Sir, it means I cloned those ten soldiers about a thousand times each, and we ran our fatigue-slash-failure tests that way.”
“I don’t think I get you,” Conway said.
“I think you do sir. The same ten operatives conducted the 3AM field tests and all the Black Willow operations, in newly minted bodies, outfitted with quantum streaming recorders. We didn’t usually run doubles because of signal interference issues, but it’s easy to run several copies of a single agent, in series, until the mission is successful. When one of them gets taken out, a second is activated with same objectives and the new memories.”
Fox explained. “On all the ops I ran, I never lost a man.”
“And the by product of this technology is that anyone scanned into the bank with corresponding DNA can be reproduced?”
“It takes six months and about thirty million in blue-goo to grow a new blank from scratch, but essentially, yes. And we never sent originals into the field, but you get the idea.”
“Is that who you are, right now, a copy of a copy?”
“Not at all. The Doctor Fox you see sitting before you is an illusion, projected into your consciousness over your amplifier.”
Conway smiled. “You’re saying the reason Secret Service hasn’t kicked in the door, is because the camera can’t see you, because you only exist in my head?”
“That’s right.”
“So what, the secret service thinks I’m talking to myself?”
“Not at all. This conversation is happening much faster than you can physically move. You aren’t speaking to me with your mouth and lungs, but with your mind.”
Conway raised an eyebrow.
“Go ahead,” Fox suggested, “Put your hands on the desk, just lay them out flat.”
Conway set his hands on the desk, but much to his amazement, they didn’t move. Instead, ghost-like images of his arms slipped out from his physical limbs and set themselves on the desk.
Fox smiled and held out his hand.
Conway took it and stepped out of his physical body.
“This is called astral projection.”
“Makes sense,” Conway said.
“Now watch this.” Fox clapped his hands together.
A brilliant flash of light erupted from his hands. As he pulled them apart, he lifted the left one high and kept the right low.
Fox and Conway’s astral selves rocketed out of the Oval Office and away from the White House, into the upper atmosphere of the planet.
They floated in orbit, hanging above the world.
In the distance, the Sun illuminated all.
The moon glowed over their right shoulder and satellites hung scattered across the horizon like anti-gravity traffic over Angel City.
“This is amazing,” Conway said, looking around them.
“Mankind is on the precipice of something big,” Fox said. “All we have to do is try and understand that.”
All Conway could do was smile.
“I just figured out how to do this a couple of days ago. I was telling some friends, Stanwood’s kidnapping me is the best vacation I’ve ever had.”
Fox pointed to a series of satellites in the distance. “I’ve only seen those from the inside before.”
Fox leaned toward the satellites, pulling himself and Conway toward them though force of will alone. “You see, once you’re scanned by the Micronix, if you can personally manage it, you can run lots of equipment from the inside. There’s still some pretty significant glitches and roadblocks, but I think Dr. Te has made some real progress recently.”
Fox and Conway reached the satellites and slowed, drifting past the giant communication machines. “These guys serve a few functions, but one of them is the data stream. Packets are received, compressed and broadcast from here, out to the asteroid belt, which we’ve saturated with storage mirrors.”
“Good man,” Conway said.
Fox turned toward the President and looked him in the eye. “He’s going to try and kill me you know.”
“Let him,” Conway answered.
“Are you serious?” Fox asked.
“It doesn’t seem likely to hurt you. And you can’t charge someone with murder just for thinking about it.”
“You have a point there,” Fox agreed.
“So you come out of a coma a few months down the road, what’s the harm?” President Conway suggested.
“Meanwhile Stanwood cleans up, appropriating everything I own?”
“They say possessions are an illusion,” Conway countered.
“You can’t take it with you, I suppose,” Fox replied.
“Besides, it will give you plenty of time to work on the vault.”
“I do want to save as many as we can.” Fox smiled, excited.
“How easy can you make the process?” the President asked.
“We just cracked that one, it’s as easy as taking a photo now.”
“Fantastic! That’s great.” Conway smiled.
“Yeah, but thirty million is still a lot,” Fox said.
“Someday the price of Terillium will go down, but not until we find more of it. I can see that this will be how we do that,” Conway said.
“With your permission sir, that’s what I want to talk to you about. I was thinking we could repurpose the Centaurs.”
Fox gestured to the space-barge they slowly drifted toward. The tanks looked to each be unique, yet all were reiterations of similar concepts; propulsion systems, armor and guns.
“What did you have in mind?” Conway asked.
“Well, we only launched seven of the ten thousand delivered. I propose we launch a significant number of the rest of them out to the hammered bracelet and put them to work mining precious metals.”
“Where will you get the pilots?” Conway asked.
Fox laughed. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. They’re all manned. They have pilots wired in, all set into suspended animation. They’re uniquely suited for this other purpose, besides war.”
“We could construct factories right there,” Conway said.
“That’s what I was thinking sir.”
“This is a brilliant idea, Fox.”
“I wish we agreed about the Stanwood situation as well, but I do understand your approach. I’ve already given my men the order not to fire until fired upon,” Fox said.
“Isn’t that common practice?” Conway asked.
> “If it were, no one would have had to issue the order, centuries ago.”
“Point taken. I should be getting back.”
“Yes, sir.” Fox brought his hands together, and they were back in the oval office.
“That certainly is an amazing device, I can see why Joe is so afraid of you.”
“He doesn’t even know the half of it.” Fox smiled.
“At any rate, I’m glad you came by,” Conway extended his hand.
Fox took it, and they shook. “Me too.”
“And you don’t have to be afraid of Joe. I’ll have a talk with him.”
“I’d appreciate that, sir.”
Conway stepped back into his body and shook his head.
Dr. Fox waited to be sure he was okay.
President Conway nodded.
Fox smiled and vanished from the office.