“Technically, she drowned. The car crash didn’t kill her,” Jackie Neill emoted into the space. “The car spun off the road, flipped and ended upside down, nose down in a snow-filled, narrow ditch. The engine was still running. Its heat melted enough snow to partly flood the car. According to the report, she was inverted in water just up to her shoulders. She was like that, in nearly freezing water, for about 35 minutes until they got to her.” Empathic feelings of sadness, terror, pity and imagined panic flew around. Curiosity punctured the moment.
“What’s your understanding of overall trauma and damage?” asked Scott Reinhold.
“Dislocated wrist. Usual neck strain, concussion, shin contusions and a hairline fracture. C-Spine is fine. The car’s systems did their job. Apart from drowning, she got off lightly. Without the vehicle’s emergency signal, she wouldn’t be here now. Brain work looks good. No memories yet but no wider amnesia or cognitive impairment. She’s passed the Cognitive Battery tests and still remembers all four languages, family, work etcetera. Remarkable really.”
“There’s a lot to be said for refrigerating one’s brain. Guess that’s what they mean by ‘keep cool’,” emoted Scott. “How much detail is there on her NDE?”
“Formal report’s scant. She’s talked to a nurse who flagged it but the report only talks about ringing, bright lights and strange dreams. I’ve put the call in from Alke to the hospital. They’ve accepted our offer of post traumatic counselling. I’ll be attending tomorrow to see if she’s receptive.”
“She’s got a fantastic profile,” emoted Anders Belstrom. “On paper, she’d be a great addition if she got through.” A ripple of agreement floated among them, combined with a gentle scepticism. “The beginning of a long and winding road.”
“I’ll update as soon as I’ve made some progress with her and the family. Reconvene on this in 24 hours.”
“Sure,” emoted Scott. “Over to Melissa & Diego for fuel.”
“Six fuel manufacturing windows at CERN this month,” Melissa Amacher briefed. “All running in the normal calibration cycle. Nothing unusual. Expected yield should give us 6 months supply at max rate of consumption. We need to escalate containment measures for the crazies. They’re building up to a full blown ritual. We need a full plan: off-the-books, with a whistle blower or leaker, full secondary channels and maximum deniability for me.”
“Understood,” emoted Scott. “We’ll build on the framework plans we already have. Book another session on this with Centre and invite whoever you think is relevant. Diego, don’t forget that you’re making your next choices this quarter. Have you made up your mind yet?”
“Not quite, Scott,” said Diego. “Well, Magali hasn’t quite decided what she approves of. We’re nearly there.”
“Everyone’s looking forward to it. Anders, what’s your latest?”
“Our three Marzinsky Plane subjects are under control,” Anders emoted. “We’ve finally got full access to all of them. Jackie and I can directly study each of them comparatively from this point on. Their geographic spread’s a little inconvenient. Fatima Ahmed’s in Broadmoor for arson, with a long history of self-harm, petty crime and drugs. She took a stranger hostage in their flat while fleeing the scene of her last crime. Joseph Carson’s in Rikers Island for life and we’re definitely not moving him. Álmos Becskei’s still outside Budapest in our therapy. MP remains a Full Caution project. If this is where meta work meets our physical world, this is Pandora’s Box.”
Sensations of excitement, hope, caution and misgivings dominated the space. Whether and how any of the topics would definitively join together and inform or unify wider research was a cause for excitement and hope, as was potential recruitment of a new member. Controlling the situation and people at CERN was fraught with dangers only partly understood. None of them knew what the Marzinsky Plane subjects would tell them about the nature of existence. Opening doors that could not be closed was a lesson written in blood more than once.
Scott drew the short management update to a close. He dissolved the OpFrame and let the hundred members depart in a sensation of mutual love, friendship and appreciation. He hadn’t picked up any tasks from the session and his workload was generally low in anticipation of the coming Revelation. He felt sadness and a kind of loving, sentimental anticipation in equal part. It was a somewhat perverse sensation that ultimately left him ill at ease. He kicked off his shoes and curled up on the sofa. With his eyes closed, he pictured his father’s smile as it aged from his earliest memory to the last time they had been together, a couple of weeks prior. Imagining Morton as a boy, Scott stole images of his own son, Ethan, to fill in the blanks. Bittersweet tears welled in the corner of his left eye and slid from the corner of his right as he lay on his side. The coming stage of Morton’s journey would commence in solitude but it would not be long before he found company. He still wondered how his mother would take to things. She was stoic and practical but Vivian and Morton were bonded like no one else.
He let their faces float through then fade naturally from his mind. He sat up, wiped the tears away and let go a deep sigh that became rhythmic breaths that re-centred his wave and re-established a sense of calm. He padded across to the sideboard and pulled out the tools and ingredients for a negroni. He had half an hour before the team meeting. He carried his drink to his desk and flicked quickly through the meeting data. Nothing unusual. He needed to check the team was ready for their intern. Eben Saint-Fleur was coming from Mexico for a taste of the Big Apple. He smiled at the thought. The boozy bitterness of the negroni tingled in his mouth before it added to the warmth he felt inside. The soft citric finish from the orange zest made him think of the oranges in the dome and at the farm near Monterrey.
Eben. “Little soufflé”. Born to rise.
Soufflé was a cute little boy who’d blossomed into a sharp-witted but soft young man. His NFT automated trading strategy was commercially sharp but what he funded with the proceeds was in keeping with the standards of his education. The start of his internship was another loop of life rolling over itself. Scott still remembered their first meeting like it was yesterday. Life in Haiti then was bad enough before the earthquake made things ten times worse. Water and kindness was all that had been needed to reveal little Soufflé’s smile, despite his pain. The family would take him under their wing in the city during his internship and see how he got on with this test of his inner discipline.
He hadn’t seen Melissa in person for a few years now. She lived a stable life in her role at CERN and with her consultancy work. Diego was her disciple and back up. Scott pictured them in the secret room behind server stack 3-88, tricking the world’s cleverest scientists into believing a lie. The irony of physicists pondering the nature of existence while Melissa and Diego literally spun a false reality was never lost on any of them. The reason why none of the staff at the Large Hadron Collider could see the wood for the trees was that they were blinded by hubris, task fixation, and dogmatic assumptions. They had closed their minds and stopped being scientists without even realising it.
Drowning upside down in neck-deep water. Wouldn't you wake up and get out?
Recruitment was an infrequent activity. Potential candidates were rare, the means by which they were identified was problematic and the recruitment success rate was infinitesimal. When a candidate presented themselves, they had to be taken very seriously. Even though there was a well-established process, it was still fraught and highly variable. There was always a risk that the process became a one way street, which meant the whole thing was tainted with sadness from the get go, although the potential for great, shared joy lay along the way and at the end. For each and every one of them, recruitment had been a rebirth in this life, which was the most profound experience any of them had ever had. It was not something that was confined to a particular moment or narrow collection of moments. It occurred throughout the entire process and continued throughout their work, such was its nature. The process was also a chance for any of them to guide the recruit through stages of his or her rebirth, much like parenting a child. In that there was all the same emotions of joy, worry, fear, frustration, anger and so on, all of which were fundamental to the human condition.
New blood was important. No matter how incredible discoveries had been to date, longevity and diversity were key because there were so few of them undertaking work that transcended the globe. New blood could come from anywhere and any background. It was not about nepotism, privilege or access. No one knew about the job vacancies until they were personally approached, so no one could ever aspire or prepare to apply. Power and capability that resulted from successful recruitment ran the risk of disconnecting or isolating them from wider humanity, and the negative outcomes of this had the potential to be outsized. Over decades, the program had developed structural ways to manage and mitigate these risks.
As he sipped his drink, its bitterness lifted as the melting ice diluted its initial strength. He crunched an ice cube while he pulled on his shoes and strolled downstairs from the third floor to the first, where the team was assembling in the meeting room kitted out with terminals under the surface of the glass table and screens around the walls so that they could plan, model and execute in real time.
“What’s the Port A moves, Scott?” asked Jonah.
“We’re gonna take profits from Boeing immediately. Then line up a two hundred million short, ready to go. We’ll execute if there’s a sign of weakness,” said Scott.
“OK. Airbus?”
“No, stay in. Still bullish on all defence. Boeing’s all about the civil issues. Let’s just take profits there. If we don’t short, I’m looking at other things.”
“Anything else?”
“Has anything on the Blue cities commercial real estate regen watch list crossed the 75% discount line yet?”
“Not yet,” said Paul. “50 to 60 per cent range still.”
“OK, let’s finalise the analysis for code in each city for conversion to mixed mode and fully residential. If we definitely know we can’t repurpose commercial buildings in a particular city, it needs to come off the list.”
They followed the standard agenda through reviews of each portfolio. Once that was done, Jonah gave an update on the Detroit programme.
“The consortium has twenty five players now. Danny just got the statement of interest signed off. That’s laser sintering, 3D manufacturing, composites, biomaterials, plastics and drones. We’ve got regeneration plans for fifteen sites agreed in principal. City and state funding is a work in progress, based on what we’ve achieved so far. We’ve found three funders for the two academies. Ten year commitment. That should be enough to sell to any administration and pull down the necessary tax breaks, funding, and control. With the laws as they are, we can’t make the academies public. We can’t have any interference if the academies are gonna run the proposed education model. Only issues now are whether enough critical employees will agree to move to Detroit and whether the external skills and recruitment analysis comes back good. If not, the whole thing’s at a standstill.”
“You got a lotta schmoozing still to do, Scott,” said Paul.
“Workin’ on it, guys. Good work on your end. I’m proud of you all.” Scott beamed his ready smile around the room. Everyone was happy. There was a true opportunity for a kind of regeneration that had human-centric rebellion built in.
“I found an interesting side note for Detroit,” said Danny. “There’s an enviro-nerd outfit sniffing around. The idea’s to repurpose land use for community purposes and local food production. PoundAcre, they’re called.”
“How green are they?” said Scott.
“Commercially, they’re no ones. Look like college grads from dreamland but they were on the ground petitioning the locals. I saw them last week when I was scoping zones for residential redevelopment. Environmentally, it’s nothing to do with Greta. They want to redesign areas of cities to build community around a multimode school-as-community-centre and local food production sites.”
“OK, sounds interesting,” said Scott. “Keep digging into them. Pun intended. Good find. Now, what about our intern? You guys ready to meet Eben?” A ripple of excited nods and noises came back. “What’s your game plan for him?”
Annette brought up a slide deck on the wall with a monthly planner. “Ease him in with stuff he knows. We’ll install his system on our commercial servers and upskill him in the technicals of all that. Performance optimisation and full market scale is what we’re aiming for. That’s mainly IT, infrastructure and coding. Second month, we’re gonna teach him regulation, aiming for a shared model of user and regulator education about the whole NFT world to kill all this token scamming.”
“Does he know he’s coming to kill off his own strategy?” said Danny.
“Yep. It was his idea,” said Scott. “That’s what got him the internship. He’s had a good run riding pumps, and he knows it. Time for creative destruction and moving on. What else is lined up?”
“Third month is pure equities analysis,” said Annette. “We’ll consolidate everything he knows then push him beyond. The last three months are open. Have you decided his budget yet, Scott?”
“He’s putting in a million of his own, so we’ll match fund by stealth.”
“A million of his?” said Danny, voicing the shock in the faces of the rest of the team. “Is he sponsored by a family office or what?”
“Nope. It's all his. He ain't got no family office. He's been at this for a while, and he's good. The NFT strategy bounced him up quickly.”
“His little resumé didn't say he's a genius quant. What'd I miss?”
“He ain't a quant. His maths are good, but he's more skilled than a quant. He's systemic and he's had a good education. You'll see. If he hits all his performance targets, we’ll go to five million, but only if he’s built a viable new strategy that you sign off. He doesn’t know about any of this and that’s how it stays. He’s coming for the education, not our money. I can’t stress this enough: he is really, really vulnerable.” Scott’s face was overtaken by a shadow of worry. “He’s so young and he’s achieved a lot. His character is malleable. It’s our job to help him find a path towards success built on humanity and kindness. We all know the dangers of this place and of opportunity. We’re all responsible for his character from the moment he arrives. Me most of all. I need your help.”
After they were done, Scott went up to the building’s roof garden, leaving his socks and shoes by the stairwell. He'd barely undone his laces before Biscuit bounded across the garden and set about greeting him.
“Hey, Bickie! Have you had a nice afternoon?” Scott knelt to hug the youthful golden retriever, snuggling Biscuit's face and lovingly rubbing him all over. “I missed you. Shall we collect some goodies then go meet mommy?”
The whole of the double brownstone’s roof was an enclosed glasshouse. By directing heat from the building up to the roof garden, the beds were temperature optimised. Half the roof ran warmer than the other, enabling a wider variety of plantings. Its market garden oasis yielded fruit, veg and honey all year round. The employees shared the light work involved and enjoyed the fruits of their labour. Once a year they overhauled the beds and every quarter there were big planting sessions. It was a wonderful, other worldly means of bonding to each other through nature, right in the heart of the city.
Scott grabbed a basket from the prep table at the back of stairwell housing then he strolled with Biscuit along the woodchip paths between the beds and pulled up some beets, potatoes, carrots, herbs, kohlrabi, asparagus, and green onions. He grabbed a few white onions from where they hung then clipped a selection of dwarf beans and chilis from plants in an adjacent bed. They went across to the hotter side of the roof and plucked a rhizome of ginger from an enclosed bed. Biscuit let out a single bark and led Scott to the tomatoes.
“You pick,” said Scott.
Biscuit had already made his choices. He padded up the row and stopped by the Sungolds. When Scott had taken two bunches, Biscuit led him into the next row to the heirlooms.
“Brandywines! Yes, good choice!” Scott knelt and hugged his dog about the neck and Biscuit snuggled and licked him in return of his affection. When Scott had picked five of the plump and luscious fruit, he took one more, bit out a chunk and fed it to Biscuit. They shared a tomato between themselves then they went back to the prep table.
With their treasure bagged, they went over to the grass at the front perimeter of the roof. Scott spent five minutes combing Biscuit's coat while humming a tune that contained only three notes, then he lay down and spent ten minutes with Biscuit laid across his legs, clearing his mind of the residual thoughts the day had thrown up. Then they left the building. At the top of the steps to the street, Scott looked down into Biscuit's eyes.
Let's go to Marko's to meet mommy. Stay close, please.
Then Scott and his friend set off to find Jessica.
To an outsider, his real life would have been considered utterly schizophrenic. It carried the same kinds of mental and social costs as that of a spy, but on a whole other level. The true ramifications of what he did were largely unknown to him. Simply dealing with the uncertainty was an art, science and everything in between. Randomness and luck factored enough that a fundamental level of humility was essential. In the purest sense, Scott Reinhold was an explorer on the bleeding edge, leading humanity into the unknown.
Interesting read, especially since I‘ve watched several interviews and talks with Jerry Marzinsky.
The passage about seriously boxed-in thinking and lack of curiosity among the scientists reflects the curse of my current existence. It’s almost as if “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil!“ has become the new mantra of science.