Matt Chen-Jasic and MingWei watched the fireworks five miles away at the beach from the roof of the five-story Chen-Jasic family apartment building. They sat on pillows and sipped tea as they watched.
“Oh, now that was a good one,” Matt said.
“Yes, I have always liked that one,” MingWei said.
Matt sipped his tea.
“Fifty years,” he said. “Can you imagine?”
“It has been a long time, Chen Zufu. But I think this year was the most memorable one in a long time.”
Matt nodded.
“I agree, MingWei. I was very worried about the state of things when this year started, but I am very happy with where things are headed now.”
Quant #2
Meddling And Infrastructure
Matthew Chen-Jasic wasn’t the only one happy with how things had turned out on Arcadia. Janice Quant was quite pleased about it as well.
Quant had not dropped the colonies off and left them abandoned. She kept an eye on them – a mother hen watching her chicks – with her interstellar communicators. She had left one in solar orbit near each colony planet, and monitored their communications.
All told, there were twenty-four colony-planet interstellar communicators, plus two hidden in the Asteroid Belt in the Earth solar system. They were multi-channel, so they formed a mesh with each other and with four of the units that were at Quant’s location. She also had seven spares.
Quant didn’t intervene often in the colonies, but sometimes it was necessary. Once, the metafactory for a colony had failed. They couldn’t fix it with the industrial base they had at the time, and that was going to lead to serious hardship. Quant would have liked to substitute a working one for the failed one, but she had no way to get the failed one off the planet.
Quant had extra metafactories, or, rather, could build them, so she built a new one and dropped it next to the broken one during one night when the colonists were abed. The next day, they woke to a new metafactory working away. So they knew someone had intervened, but not who or how.
The Arcadia problem was more subtle. The original chairman, Mark Kendall, had seemed an OK sort. She had vetted the colony managers particularly well. But you couldn’t win them all, and he had gone off the rails over time.
His kids had been even worse, and where had the idea of a hereditary chairmanship come from, anyway? Ancient Rome? The situation was building to a head on Arcadia, which was beginning to lag other colonies in economic development. Quant had cast about for some sort of solution.
Then she had tripped over Matthew Jasic, now calling himself Matt Chen-Jasic. He was now the head of an economically powerful clan-family on Arcadia.
Quant remembered Matthew Jasic very well. She remembered watching helplessly as Harold Munson had beat Betsy Reynolds, cowering in front of her children, protecting them. And Quant recalled her grim satisfaction when Matthew Jasic burst through the door and ended Munson’s reign of terror with a pretty savage pounding.
Quant had a pretty good idea what would happen to the latest Chairman Kendall if he tangled with Matthew Jasic. And that was merely going to be a matter of time. Without Jasic’s family under his thumb, Kendall would have a fifth column in his midst.
Quant had near-real-time bidirectional communications with the colony computers, and super-user access rights that somehow didn’t show up in the sysops’ login records.
It was Quant who had given Chen-Jasic the account access to Kendall’s computer accounts, and the accounting and communications records most damning to Kendall and the council. Then she had simply let the situation play out.
When the inevitable occurred, and Jasic convened a constitutional convention to replace the government he had decapitated, it was Quant who had sent Jasic and the convention delegates the colony headquarters’ plans for an intermediate structure of colony government. They were right there in the colony’s computer archives, right where Quant had placed them fifty years before.
Jasic and Zielinski had been smart enough to see what they had in the document and ran with the ball, and now Arcadia was on track, the economy booming, and a government of Quant’s own design in place.
With that done, Janice Quant turned back to her own projects.
To carry out Quant’s larger plans, she needed two things: a state-of-the-art semiconductor fabrication facility, and a chemical laboratory that could work out how to make very strong carbon structures.
Neither of these had been a cakewalk.
For a state-of-the-art fab facility, Quant had to solve a lot of problems with manufacturing semiconductors in space. Vacuum and zero gravity made some things easier and some things harder. She also had to worry about radiation. The solar wind was full of all kinds of stuff that never made landfall on Earth.
Placing the facility in the solar shadow of an asteroid solved the radiation problem, but the gravity and vacuum problems remained. Quant needed all sorts of exotic chemicals and metals to make semiconductors, plus no end of manipulators and assembly-type bots.
As for the actual design of the hardware, she was way out in front on that one. There were a number of things she wanted to try, but she had one frontrunner from her simulations, and she could hardly wait to get a couple thousands multiprocessor blades of that architecture running.
The chemical laboratory had its own set of problems. But she needed to be doing materials research. She wanted a strong structure, but strong didn’t necessary
