Plato or no Plato?

2027 July 15 19:20 UTC
Test Year 0, Day 296, 11:30 CST – 19:30 MST
Tau, Caltech

Will ran. It had taken a little bit of adjusting to the lower gravity, and he hadn’t had time in the first hectic months, but now he ran six kilometers every day before lunch. The hunters, few though there were now, the survey teams, and those on farming duty had no need for such exercise, but shifts in hospital, running the radios, and managing electronics and infrastructure was as close to a desk job as existed among the Techers now. Diabetes mellitus might be incurable with the resources of the Institutes – no possibility of beta-cell regeneration for a very long time – but Chamer could mitigate the effects as much as possible. So he ran before lunch and kept practicing the martial arts of Funakoshi, Musashi and Chen late in the evening.

He ran north along the coast, a hundred meters in from the sea cliffs. Starting from his office, or quarters, or lab, on the roof of Moore, he ran down the stairs where he’d met the Examiner, out across the brick walkway, past overgrown roses and untrimmed hedges, through the parking lot behind the Avery House kitchen, along the patch of local dirt, now planted with a vegetable garden, that had been Chester Street before it was cut out of campus, taking a left at the now-dormant nursery, and past the pit of the biotech building that had been under construction when they were transported.

Then it was through the Jumble, a maze of outlying buildings: apartments with walls of neatly sliced studs that had been dropped east of where Del Mar had been, with a few intact buildings that Caltech had either owned or completely occupied. The ground was dirt roads and fenced gardens. Although Mina’s oil wells could produce passable asphalt now there hadn’t been time to pave.

Will kept going. His route was out along the track between the fields. The land was now cultivated to produce rows of wheat, barley, potatoes, soybeans, and orangestem. The tau-form was rather outrageous when compared to the terrestrial crops: meter-long, 15-cm thick fleshy stems, surrounded by 4 cm barbed thorns that were strong enough to rip leather gloves. True to their name, the wrinkled stems under the brown thorns were bright orange. The spiral-veined cupped leaves were a more orthodox green. It might be orange and smell a little odd, the better to attract insect analogs into the wrinkles, which were lined with digestive glue, but when the poison-loaded spines and the outer skin were removed, what was left was an edible core weighing about four kilos. With nitrogen- and phosphorus-rich fertilizer to decrease the number of invertebrates victim to the plants, there were few to no annoying bits of embedded pseudochitin in a mass that tasted vaguely citrus from acetic acid, had a texture like a pineapple, and contained a reasonably balanced set of the essential amino acids without any that would cause allergic reactions. The orangestem was hardly breadfruit or plantains, but it served.

As he ran through the fields, he shouted and waved greetings to the current rotation. One patch of wheat was being harvested, loaded onto two Hiatsus appropriated from Maintenance. The harvesting was still by hand, but at least the mill was reasonably automated and gave clean flour. Converting that into bread and pasta and other edible forms was the current bottleneck to most of the population having a balanced diet.

Two kilometers in, he passed out of the fields and into the zard ranchland. Here open ground stretched far inland, past the northern edge of the clump of forest that sat by the Cats apartment blocks. Getting into the ranch without working up and down the cliff-face meant clambering over or through a two-meter fence of improvised barbed wire. There were gates, but they were usually kept closed. The sharp points of the wire weren’t always a sure defense against a particularly hungry giant pede willing to risk catching one of the joints in its exoskeleton as it clambered over, but it kept the zards in and slowed the large predators down long enough for the ranchers to get there with the sheepdogs and huskies. The pedes were hungry and fearsome, but not that smart. They hadn’t yet learned that while a single or even a pair of humans might be considered dinner, three behind a strong fence with a dozen territorial dogs, electric prods, and concussive grenades implied rather the reverse. Fortunately, the population of large predators is never very high, so the night watches didn’t have that much excitement.

Once in the ranch, Will moved much more slowly than the four-fifty-mile pace he now could maintain in Tau gravity. He’d had three pairs of running shoes when the Examiners had brought them here, and he was down to the last pair. Running barefoot here was out of the question. He didn’t want to step in a zard dropping, which were like cowpies but much more clinging, and if he’d been so blind as to get within a few meters of one of the armored, spined, and mucused zard eggs, he would have had to do acrobatics that would make bull jumping look tame.

But that wasn’t the full reason he slowed to a walk when he was three hundred meters across the kilometer-wide ranch and the zards had started to get used to this strange creature on two legs, which had larger patches of weak hide exposed than was normal for those others with the long painful sticks. He wore the shoes and socks, shorts and tee shirt. At his waist was a knife. Next to it was clipped his phone, while its wireless earpiece was on his ear. The phone still functioned as light, music and video player, email and network browser, and personal organizer, with a very durable touch screen and sometimes-reliable voice control, but it no longer communicated with anything like the standard network. With the help of some CS students who were annoyed at the blisters they were accumulating on construction projects, Will had reactivated almost half of the numerous wireless internet hubs that had been dragged with campus. The range wasn’t especially good, but the phones worked out into the fields and the ranch. Further afield, the iron mine, the oil wells, and a few field camps had their own local voice-over networks, which communicated with the main network by radio or wire.

Will had come out here to make a long-distance call without being overheard. His lab had a lot of traffic during the day, and Townsend was the only other person within eight thousand kilometers who should know of this particular meeting. “Conference call to MIT. Group oligarchs. Code Plato.”

Will and Townsend and their fellow trained had been the only people at Caltech to benefit from the Examiners’ twisted logic of what people could be given. Will had seen the possibility very early in the half-hour, and had listed a great many things while wiring a kludge of a transmitter. Townsend had seen it with only five minutes to spare, and had run through dark hallways screaming for people to learn, so that the trained at Caltech numbered a total of 42. But MIT’s transported population outnumbered that of Caltech by seven to two.

If Will had been trained, and trained most extensively, then the other members of the conference call had learned almost as much or slightly more. They had all asked for knowledge at different times in the half-hour and asked for different skills, but there was a lot of overlap and all saw the danger to revealing themselves too soon.

There were four of them. Three had been isolated during the flight, in cars or apartments. Kathryn Hildenstoy had become the chief advisor to the MIT head of security, psychology and trick-shot aim organizing the hack that stopped the mob on the first day.

Julian Marriner had had perfect pitch before leaving Earth. Now he could make music on his Examiner-built Strad that made the most tune-deaf weep, if that was the reaction he wanted. He’d gotten radio and music performances started at MIT, selected appropriate background music for all manner of different events, and now that others had taken up the task he kept a close eye on the development of Techer culture, trying to ensure the formation of a stable society.

Zijun Xin worked with more immediate concerns: his work with the Recon Platoon and the food testers showed that he now knew as much about the natural world as anyone ever had. He had been responsible for splitting Course 12 into divisions that found metals and minerals and food that was edible and those that observed the stars and those that tried to predict the weather and crop yields.

Only Elmund Gera had been able to suggest the idea of training to others. pika now held a near-monopoly on honey, fine wine, cheese, and various other products of civilization. The inhabitants had chosen not to reveal the full extent of what they knew, but everyone appreciated that the Gera Organization would find whatever you asked for.

The trained could be incredibly dangerous, either in the positive or negative sense. It was perhaps fortunate that the four had been rarely able to agree on anything for the first few months. But together they ran MIT in the same sense that Will ran Caltech: they had little or no official authority, but they had skills that were necessary and unavailable elsewhere and awareness of themselves and others. That was why these telecons had started: Will had deduced who the oligarchs of MIT were at roughly the same time they identified his training from the news over the radio. Their meetings were part social gathering, part advice roundtable, part shadow government, and part psychological therapy. Everyone was constantly guarding against any of the others becoming megalomaniac, although those worries had trailed off dramatically after a while. The only reason Will had been the one to announce the existence of the trained was because the oligarchs trusted him marginally more than they trusted each other. Relations had warmed considerably since, and there was now no question that they would work together.

So Will stopped in his exercise, in the middle of a field of zard with their strange white-noise-like vocalizations. Elmund was in the tree house behind pika (the house was now to the north of most of MIT), swaying back and forth slightly in a medium breeze. Xin spoke over a link from his camp halfway up a monolith tree, where he sat on a ledge with a half-meter of flat followed by five hundred meters of vertical trunk. Julian was in what had originally been the office of the Dean of SHASS, in a comfortable chair behind a large desk that had been moved to take best advantage of the light from the windows. And Kathryn sat in a location she wouldn’t divulge to anyone. At one point, Will had tried to trace her, only to find that she’d run her audio stream to a speaker on a computer in the MITSFS Library. But she wasn’t in the science fiction stacks: her microphone traced to another computer, this one in one of the new apartments built underneath Harvard Bridge. She must have tapped the wires or done something more sophisticated, and so he couldn’t exactly figure out where she was hiding.

If any of the oligarchs had traced those lines, by physical means, they would have found that each had a small box of microcircuitry on it, which allowed Hildenstoy to send information as though she was from the machine at the other end. Those boxes had wires from them, tracing by subtle ways, which served as antennas. Low-power wireless led to more boxes, which in turn led back to her base in Cruft Labs. She sat in a fiberglass shell, suspended in the rafters in a corner of the warehouse. The building had been transported almost intact from its location in Boston and dropped three kilometers from the center of MIT. Even there, she used a voice-canceling microphone and carefully shielded wires while she was talking over the oligarch circuit. While a touch of paranoia is probably a good trait in a police chief, officially Kathryn was merely a senior advisor to the head of security, Adam Delbert. She of course considered her actions merely suitable caution.

Today the oligarchs’ agenda was as usual: a mixture of new survey data, speculation on Examiners, reports on psychological health, requests for advice on immediate problems and contingency planning out up to centuries in advance.

“We have our first political party without an Earth based antecedent.” Hildenstoy spoke softly, as though she was afraid of being overheard, despite all of her precautions. “Andrew Chao has been holding nominally secret meetings in Slugfest, under the cover of a 5th edition DnD game. Apparently he got the books from his twenty. I’ve lightly tried to get more information from the players, without success so far. Will, you’re breathing like you want to say something.”

“We’ve had this discussion before, but: why do you immediately jump to spying? We’d agreed to instill something approximating democracy. Are you taking out freedom of assembly?” He circled around a group of three eggs, giving them a good ten meters berth.

Julian jumped into the discussion. “It’s the goals of the party, if they merit the name. They preach that we should fail the test. Violently.”

“Would they transmit to Earth?” That was Will’s first concern.
“No, for a small blessing. But it’s worse than that, at least to us. From what I’ve been able to gather, Chao has decided no one should now how to make negative matter. Since the Examiners are untouchable, he says that forcing failure is worth any price. I don’t know how that declaration will hold under stress.” Her voice betrayed no particular emotion. “Unless I can get a bug in there, I can’t be sure, but he may be planning a coup.”

“What could he do? Kamikaze into the Screamer lab? Cobble together a nuke without anyone noticing? I don’t think he can make us fail: he can’t reach California, after all. But he could make a mess. It would be a move of desperation.” Xin sounded nervous, even though he was four hundred kilometers away from MIT’s campus. “Granted, if anyone would follow that thought process, it would be Andy Chao. I knew him from the classes I had in biochemistry. He is the fixated idealistic type. At the same time, I don’t see how he can be anything other than a loose cannon, unless the Examiners …” There was no need to complete the sentence.

“Would the Examiners have trained someone who wanted to Fail? They probed us all to our deepest subconscious. Andy complained to me about not being given a bunch of viral cultures. Claimed he wanted them to make sure that our immune systems didn’t degrade. Now he knows that’s bollocks – he passed quite a bit more than intro bio.” Elmund’s voice was deep, only partially from his mike taking out the higher frequencies.

“Why didn’t you tell me this?” Kathryn’s voice actually contained minor annoyance. “Never mind. I’ll put it to us not trusting each other. Go on.”

“I wager he wanted to weaponize them. He was asking me to cook up a respiratory bug. Offered a case of Ramen and a pound of chocolate for a vial – don’t know where he got the goods.” If the transaction had passed his notice it must have been deliberately secret. The Organization knew few bounds, nor did the odd things in pika’s basement. Some of the things Elmund had been asked to arrange would have led to decades in a prison on Earth. Much more prosaically, a case of instant noodles would fetch quite a price on the MIT market. Some people have weird nostalgia.

“So he’s looking for large weapons.” Will had reached the far side of the ranch, and turned around to head back, this time on the seaward side where there were fewer zard.

“At least he remembered his ecology, if he wanted things to only hurt humans.” Xin spoke with darkest humor.

“But he was willing to smash everything when he was in the mob, until Kathryn put fear into him. He’s dangerous as long as he isn’t looking at being dead in a half second. What if all he sees is to set a wild fire?” Will spoke with reluctance, which they all heard even if he didn’t hesitate in his words. “I’ll sanction a bug now. But don’t make it a person. He’d see that. Do what you can with remotes. You do have your monitors, right?” All of them knew what the others had requested – when you’re being cross-examined by some of the trained, secrets based on your personality are impossible to keep. Kathryn had a bunch of sensors from DARPA projects that had only been rumored of to the public. She could read vital signs through a foot of concrete and crudely transcribe emotions, among other things.

“And give us all a real-time feed and access to the bugs’ data archive.” Julian was smiling grimly, if Will’s reading of his voice was right. “If I know how he is motivating his cell, I can try and practice a little psychology on them.” Julian’s music was neuroactive in a way. He could influence people’s minds, suppress or enhance emotion. It was a subtle tool, so few could detect it.

Hildenstoy indulged herself in a reluctant sigh. “Alright. Just remotes for now. I’ll have the feed by tomorrow. And Will, one more thing. Can you…”

“Done.” He had already set up a monitoring program for the Screamer MIT-CIT wireless exchange to check for any suspicious traffic. He’d been tracing out commands on his phone’s screen for several minutes. “Monitor the MIT end of communications too. They may try to contact us but not use the main links.

“But remember freedom of speech. I’m not going to sic the ninjas on anyone without very good reason. David wouldn’t do it any case. If there isn’t anything else, I’ll sign off. I need to get back to work. Same time tomorrow?”

“One more thing: our two of the Four are under Beret protection, covered by Morbidini wanting a lab assistant. I managed to get that much out of Delbert.”

Xin added that he’d try to get a radio working from one of his field sites that could reach Caltech without relaying through the MIT Screamers. That was probably more paranoid than necessary, but it might be worthwhile.

As he ran back to Moore, Will mused on democracy, security, and the dangers of Plato’s Philosopher-King. If Chao were indeed such a danger, he would have to be stopped, without becoming him. There was no other option. But MIT was half a world away. All he could do to stop any excess was to talk. And there was always the danger of the oligarchs over-reaching their own judgment.

Test Year 0, Day 297, 01:30 MST
Tau, MIT, roof of Building 64

Building 64 is a gray prism, gridded with windows, five stories high. Slugfest still occupied the 4th floor, Tetazoo below and 5th East above.

At Caltech, the BOC had the ninjas. The ninjas were remarkably skilled, for amateurs, but Hildenstoy could call upon professionals: a company of the Revere Battalion – the former MIT ROTC – and the Pershing Rifles. The Black Berets were far fewer in number than they had been, and they were very far from home, but they were a mobile and very capable force. They had been what kept the peace after the mob was talked down. The Revere Company had also managed to retain the name ‘Airborne’. Between them, the eighty cadets who had been transported from early-morning assembly had brought two helicopters. They were not normal models from Earth, but were vaguely based on MD 500s. The choppers were light enough to be brought, fueled on solar-manufactured methane rather than normal jet fuel, had sensor suites far better than anything flown on Earth, were able to carry up to eight people or five hundred kilos of cargo, and had a range of up to ten hundred kilometers with five people, minimal cargo, and extra fuel. While the survey at Caltech was limited by the speed of truck and foot and occasionally someone in an ultralight, the cadets had surveyed vast swaths of territory within two days of arrival.

But even the Revere Company’s best could not help Hildenstoy with her task of the moment. The Berets were very good, especially with the equipment they had obtained from the Examiners and the MIT police, but they were not ideally suited to sneaking. Kathryn had kept Cadet Captain Delbert informed of Andrew Chao, but also convinced him to let her place the bugs; he of course asked that the feed be made available to his people. She also borrowed a set of geckle-wear. The ninjas weren’t the only ones with that particular trick. That the cadets had a dozen sets was not widely advertised.

And so, head first, Kathryn climbed down from the roof of the building, her hands and feet clinging to vertical wall. Trees blocked her being lit by the little ground lighting, and with the partially overcast sky, she was even less visible than normal. She could only move one limb at a time, like a gecko: the paint on the walls might tear free if she didn’t. As she moved, her eyes were on the faint indicators of the head-up display. The mask would have seemed crude and bulky to Vesna Grohar and a million consumers twelve light years away, but it conveyed the information from the oligarch’s sensors: the noises she made compared to the background, the temperature and presence of people in the room through the wall she clung to.

She moved quietly, climbing down past sleeping 5th Easters to find a game of RockBand going on in a Slugfest lounge. She went left across the face of the building, until she found the room whose windows were covered by blackout shades but whose internal temperature was too warm to be empty and had five people inside, gathered around a table. Now, even more gently, she detached her right hand and unclipped an audio bug from her other arm. A squeeze to activate it and turn on the recorder in the box she’d planted on the roof, then press the magnetic and pressure seal gently against the outside upper corner of the window frame. She’d checked the color earlier today: the black of the bug’s solar-cell cover wouldn’t show. She started to hear voices from inside the room whispering into her earpiece, and step-climbed away to the roof, as quietly as she had come. She was actually somewhat disappointed to find the roof deserted. She stowed the mask at her back, just above two Examiner-designed Wicked pistols.

Thirty minutes later, the Captain had his geckle set back and Kathryn was lying on a mattress in her Cruft Labs hideout, listening to the Dungeons & Dragons game of Andy Chao fight their way through sixteen orcs and a cave troll.

2027 August 17, 12:00 UTC
Test Year 0, Day 325, 4:30 CST – 12:30 MST
Tau, Caltech, Health Center

It had to happen. We’ve known about it for seven and a half months. Jiajia’s been here for the last week even though she doesn’t need to be and her husband hasn’t left the room for more than an hour in the past two days. So why does this seem so soon? Townsend’s face didn’t show this and the anxiety was pushed out of his mind as he entered what had been the Caltech Health Center’s conference room and was now the Maternity Ward.

At MIT, the first child had been born only twenty days before. Six pregnancies had been started in the first half Earth-year, out of thirty-five hundred women and four hundred who were in serious relationships. The rate was going to go up, especially given the recent demands that Mina find a source of gold.

In room 8 down the hall, Sakhar had prepped everything they’d need for a Caesarian or any less drastic instrument procedure. Neonatal care was hard to predict, but Townsend had tried to be prepared. He would call Will if he needed another surgeon or if his Mandarin wasn’t adequate for the job. But so far, Jiajia was acting as normally for the circumstances as Townsend had experienced, either in med school or in his Examiner-forced knowledge.

About seven hours into her labor, Jiajia’s complaints about the pain were such that Townsend started to draw a dose from his limited supply of lidocaine for an epidural. The vial was fresh and sealed, but when he started to draw the painkiller, he felt a grating in the syringe and the fluid was cloudy. It had been very seriously and recently contaminated, and with so little left in stock he couldn’t spare trying another dosage. Just Pat and Ang to talk Jiajia through it, then. Glad I asked for those courses on biofeedback and mindful meditation.

Birth Certificate for transmission to Earth, United States, Los Angeles County Records: Amy Ziyi Guo, born 2027 August 17, 04:00 PST, 4:30 local time. Mother: Jiajia Guo. Father: Ang Guo. Birth mass: 2.9 kg, length: 42 cm. Footprints registered. APGAR tests 10-10. Monovalent HepB vaccine administered.

Little Amy had entered the world screaming and covered in blood, but was quickly cleaned and handed to her mother. Breast-feeding accelerated the third stage, so Townsend caught the placenta and finished cleaning up. He called to Venkat to go off watch, but to box that syringe and vial, and the carton it came out of.

Once Jiajia and Amy, and Ang, were resting, it would be time to analyze that vial. Townsend already knew whoever had tampered with it was most probably intending to kill, but he could not tell who it was. It was time for the oligarchs to meet again. If the poisoner were an accomplice of Chao who was willing to kill a mother in labor and her child, he would have their blood.