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LBQ2-4

Left Beyond Quest II - Thread 4 (Enjoy It While It Lasts)

It is once again time for the Foreman to plan out CATS' operation for the month. Regarding the teams, he assigns two teams to researching expert systems (assisted by Dr. Robertson), three teams to recruiting a new work team (assisted by Mr. Andrews), two teams to researching preparedness (assisted by the Foreman himself), and gets two covert teams active. He also decides to talk to Bruce Barnes and see if he can recruit him as a theological expert.

The Foreman decides to contact Folgore as well. He books a flight to Bulgaria and has his people back home file the necessary paperwork for him to visit the former MCPO training facility. On the way, he is heartened to see people using cell phones to not only talk but also text, frantically tapping away at the standard phone keyboard to input letters one by one. The interface is clumsy, yet it seems to have taken hold quickly—better to leave a bit of text than play phone-machine tag. It'll be a long while before any of this is available on a plane, although he notices that some first- and business-class seats have a phone headset with modem jack available; the private sector is taking advantage of the infrastructure he is developing.

The training facility itself has recently been repainted, and signs in Romanian, Russian, and English proudly proclaim that Global Community Peacekeepers are now trained here.

As a cabinet-level official, pulling Mr. Folgore out of his training schedule for a quick chat isn't a big problem.

He tells the Foreman that he remembers the incident at his HQ, largely because it happened just a few days before his transfer to the GC command structure, and confirms that the anonymous tip came from a "Chloe Barnes."

The Foreman inquires after his goals and aspirations, what work he is comfortable with and has done in the past—if he can handle discretion and understands the importance of OPSEC.

Bruno Folgore is a former Chicago cop of Italian/Romanian ancestry; he is defensive about his record and claims that any instances of brutality were due to people overreacting to him trying to do his job. He seems quite loyal to Carpatescu (or at least he's good at sounding like he is) and is looking forward to a position of responsibility with the Global Community Peacekeepers, although if the Foreman can give him a faster way up the career ladder, he'll definitely work with that.

The Foreman uses the Nomenklator a few times during the interview; Bruno hasn't detected it, but remarks that the Foreman reminds him of Carpatescu for his eidetic memory.

He seems to have a specific distaste for Christian Remnant, but doesn't think nationalists are a big threat to Carpatescu's new world order.

The Foreman asks Folgore if he knows why he was reassigned. "The decision came directly from Potentate Carpatescu, actually!" he answers proudly. He's sure that it's because of his exemplary service record, although the Nomenklator team finds a spotty one at best.

Bruno explains that the Peacekeepers are intended to be a global defense initiative, ideally more patterned after Interpol than after a military force, and so he looks forward to commanding both investigators and ground troops.

He asks the Foreman if he’s involved in the "satellite schools" initiative, which the Foreman hadn't heard of yet. A quick lookup indicates that Carpatescu intends to exploit the "Rapture gap" in the child population to refactor schools globally, with part of the curriculum being unified all over the world and streamed via satellite. To the Foreman’s annoyance, the documents exist within the last Global Community Council meeting minutes, but nobody had gotten around to telling him anything yet. Typical . . .

Whatever he hoped to accomplish during this meeting with Folgore, he found he needed time to consider the path forward.

Back at base, Dr. Robertson tells the Foreman that he would rather keep working on nuclear research, even if he has to do it by himself this month, and the Foreman points out that he can use this opportunity to borrow some big, fast computers for his own work before turning them over.

"Fair enough, I suppose."

The end result, courtesy of the Foreman’s work teams and Dr. Robertson's underlings, is a simple program for quickly writing expert system scripts. They select the DOS platform, largely due to the fact that, since it may need to be deployed worldwide, it makes sense to use the lowest common denominator. Since this is distinct from the Nomenklator, which the Foreman has elected to keep secret for now, he has the platform distributed for free on the Web, with a license providing that any script anyone creates can be used by CATS free of charge. Before long, they have a small but growing library of automated or semiautomated procedures for common office tasks, freeing the back office to do things that require actual thinking.

One curious side effect is that a few people start remaking old Infocom text games in the system. Well, the world needed more Leather Goddesses of Phobos, anyway.

As for Mr. Andrews, he is an industrialist; hiring work crews is something he remembers doing from his younger days, and he gladly takes the job on, taking his pick of competent construction foremen, contractors, and the like.

This month, the Foreman focuses fleet asset purchases within the airline industry, making sure that his teams get the same unlimited travel vouchers that he has for himself. Unlike him, they'll have to fly coach, but rank hath its privileges. He also purchases long-term leases for various harbor services; the Garibaldi can (in a pinch) do a beach landing, but it's a lot less work on the deckhands to have her treated as a regular work boat. He also starts sending out feelers for a captain; the current XO is only staying on because he keeps accruing credit towards a military pension. Carpatescu made a big deal of giving a fair exit to career military personnel across the world, although it’s a bit of a mystery where he's getting the money from.

The security teams are riding high on their recent success (and on the new APCs). The Foreman directs them to two issues.

First, the "Angry Storm" terrorist or terrorist cell has sieged a peaceful religious community in Waco, Texas, posing as law enforcement to gain access. Oddly, the distress call comes directly from the community leaders—Dimmsdale says that he doesn't know anything about it.

Second, the situation in Northern Ireland is deteriorating, albeit slowly—there have been several unscheduled controlled demolitions along the former border. The Foreman’s contacts with the Ghilotti construction firm tell him that the modus operandi is similar to their own. This is another guard duty job.

The situation on the ground in Waco is chaotic: the "commandeered police vehicles" turn out to be manned by current or former local law enforcment, who Styr Magnor stirred up to form an old-timey posse and siege the "heretic" compound.

Dimmsdale has been unusually reticent in intervening, so the Foreman simply sends a team himself. Since they have no legal authority to arrest anyone, he directs them to side with the besieged and chase off Styr Magnor and his posse, like they were contracted to.

The team leader tells him that de-escalation doesn't seem to be an option; the two groups aren't likely to listen to reason even if it's backed up by firepower. "We'd need actual artillery to scare these folks into backing off.”

The Texas team take the simple approach of telling Magnor's posse to clear out in thirty second and, at second thirty-two, driving their armored vehicles right through the cordon of Crown Vics that they have put together; the hard part is doing so without running anyone over. Pistol rounds bounce harmlessly off the APCs' exterior panels and embed themselves in the armored tires.

Styr Magnor tries to take one of the police cars and run off, but doesn’t count on the Centauro APC being able to keep up with a Crown Victoria off the paved road; a brief chase ends with a totaled police cruiser and a would-be terrorist in custody. He screams that the Foreman has no right to hold him about two and a half times before having his pinky fingers bent against the back of his hands, at which point he just screams that it hurts until he has cuffs on.

The Foreman decides to turn him over to the Peacekeepers and let Dimmsdale take credit.

Styr’s theology, what there is of it, is fairly off the wall: he thinks that Carpatescu is in fact not the Antichrist, but the False Prophet, with the "real" Antichrist due to show up in three years' time. His goal was to "purify the body of believers" by going after "heretics," since most everyone else is supposed to be damned anyway.

A cursory investigation of the religious compound shows that they were indeed stockpiling weapons, but no more than your average Texan large household. What is unclear to the Foreman is how they managed to find the money to pay for this intervention; the leader is evasive about it, and the Foreman’s men get the impression that they’re looking at drug money.

The men hand over Styr Magnor to state troopers; the video footage of the incident is intentionally blurry, and the story that comes out is that telecommunication workers operating nearby to install a relay antenna bravely rammed a construction vehicle into Styr Magnor's car. Mr. Dimmsdale is suitably grateful about having had an embarrassing incident solved with minimal fuss.

Styr Magnor ends up in prison; his rant about unmarked military vehicles and black helicopters is seen as a poor attempt to claim insanity. His insistence that telephone area codes are the true mark of the beast probably didn't help either.

For a while, it becomes a common joke at HQ to haze the new guys by telling them that the Foreman has an urgent appointment with Carpatescu and they have to go find the keys to the black helicopter.

The team the Foreman sends to Ireland quickly discovers that the demolition attacks were taking out illegal fuel dying operations built in the basements of apartment buildings or at the back of warehouses; what's puzzling is why anyone is bothering, since with Carpatescu's ascension, the various territorial differences in fuel taxes that made this profitable have disappeared. The Foreman directs the team to set up a honeypot to catch the perpetrator.

The Ireland team sets up conspicuous guards at all likely sites, save one. For that one, they set up a sharpshooter and two spotters in the building facing the target. They are mildly surprised to see a single person sneak in almost undetected, figuring that she's scoping the place, and they’re significantly more surprised to hear a muffled explosion mere minutes later, even though the gas processing system had been drained of fuel.

Thanks to excellent coordination and quite a bit of luck, the day ends with two captures on the Foreman’s side, including Waco.

In Northern Ireland, the captive did not expect the sniper team spotters to abandon their spot and go meet her in the pub that she'd just bombed the back of—the place is loud enough that the publican either didn't notice or pretended not to in order to avoid the law's attention.

She's surprisingly friendly about getting busted, and explains that she was hired by various former IRA "quartermasters" to finish handling some grudges on both sides of the Troubles before Carpatescu's new regime made them too difficult to pursue; she lost family to the worst of the Troubles, and figured that it'd be better to settle this now with some property damage than later with a trail of shootings. Even after being handcuffed to a handrail at the bar, she manages to grab one of the spotters' radios.

"Moira McSingh, of McSingh Industrial Reclamations and Redevelopments. Honored to meet ye, Foreman. People dinnae like hearin’ tha’ ta build the new, ye usually have tae blow up what hasnae been maintained proper like, so if ye need summat o’ th' old world cleared away safely, by people who dinnae give a damn what others be thinkin’ of it, I do hope you'll consider the McSinghs. We are the best when it comes tae blowin’ things up safely. And, if y'ken, blowin’ things up UNsafely, but that's a wee mite more pricey. Union bylaws, y'understand. Time and a half for . . . night work."

The Foreman decides to make Moira McSingh an offer she can't refuse.

He answers through the radio; the system that lets him do that seamlessly from across the Atlantic is fairly ingenious, and a testament to the good work that his construction teams have done so far.

"Ha! Knew it!" Moira says. "Looking forward tae making some holes in things!"

Moira can act as an agent. Due to her background, she can work with both covert and work crews. In the latter case, the work crew will gain basic combat capability.

A few days later, Terry April declares a general amnesty for all former IRA, UVF, etc. members who did not mar themselves with murder. The Foreman has concerns about people becoming afraid that cell phones are being used to spy on citizens, so she does not mention CATS' help publicly.

Unfortunately, this means that Moira's black market contacts have largely either gone to ground or taken up above-the-table businesses.

Carla is overjoyed about having some funding for her work on disaster preparation; the Foreman’s people perform a quick global survey of the most likely disaster to hit each region, from earthquakes to fires to floods. One of the things he learns is that Carpatescu has been dealing with the drop in food prices caused by the worldwide availability of the Eden fertilizer by the simple expedient of buying staples and stockpiling them. Looks like the days of government cheese are back . . . His team makes sure that the Global Community website has a downloadable map of these stockpiles, should it ever be needed. Everyone expects the times of plenty to continue, but Carla expects a population explosion once people become comfortable with the notion that babies born after the Event are healthy and can be raised without fear.

The Foreman doesn’t expect many people will use the online resources yet, but has a basic website built anyway.

Carla mentions in passing that a German mineralogist, Dr. Ignatio Mobius, has denounced the Eden fertilizer as dangerous in the long term, claiming that it leeches nutrients out of the soil and will result in a dustbowl after a few years of bumper crops. However, she notes that her own research shows nothing of the kind.

Eventually, the Foreman is ready to talk to Bruce Barnes, as planned. He doesn’t have to travel far to talk to Rev. Barnes; the New Hope Village Church is in Mount Prospect, and he can just about see one of the buildings that compose his HQ from there. Outside the church is a large water tank, which by the look of it is in the process of being installed; the Ghilotti Bros. told him that Rev. Barnes has been shopping around for a construction company to use the water tank shell to build an underground bunker under the church, big enough for four or five people.

Evangelical churches have sat half-empty after the Event, but New Hope is an exception: the Nomenklator team tells the Foreman that the church building is a little small for the current congregation size of about 240.

There are no services planned for today or, in fact, many activities other than services on Wednesdays and Sundays; the secretary, a pleasant African-American lady whose name he didn't quite catch (probably Loretta), ushered the Foreman into the pastor's office after wringing a cup of excellent espresso for him out of an ancient coffee machine.

He came here after making an appointment beforehand, and mentioning Tsion Ben-Judah. The handwritten card he got from the theologian said:

Bruce Barnes Acting Pastor New Hope Village Church Mount Prospect, IL

2484345508 web :f3.to/newhopevillagechurch

Barnes is very open with information after the Foreman shows him the card; he freely admits that he hasn't done this for very long, then expands on that remark, noting that his time spent in the ministry before the Rapture doesn't really count since, well, he missed it.

He flat out says that as a cabinet-level official, the Foreman would be a valuable convert for the Christian Remnant as humbly represented by the New Hope Village Church, and asks if he would consider talking to others who have made that decision.

The Foreman responds by asking him if he thinks Carpatescu is the Antichrist.

"I do not think that Carpatescu is the Antichrist," Barnes says. On a piece of scrap paper, he clarifies, "I know he is."

Did he get tipped off about the Foreman wearing a wire?

They briefly discuss Carpatescu's policy of allowing religious freedom but removing things like the tax-exempt status from churches, and insisting that religious assemblies send a representative to ecumenical councils in traditional holy cities like Mecca and Kanchipuram, something that Barnes calls the "Enigma Babylon One World Faith" due to the fact that a permanent ecumenical council chamber is being built in New Babylon.

“The Bible says that the Cross offends. If you are offended, I am doing my job. If you are attracted to Christ, the Spirit is doing his work."

The Foreman has made a point of looking interested, rather than offended, so that seems like it's out of the blue.

After a few exchanges of pleasantries—"Of course you are welcome to visit a service, in fact Carpatescu's personal pilot attends this church!”—the Foreman finds out that Barnes is very proud of his church Web page and, like Tsion, is worried about future censorship.

“The Internet's infrastructure sees censorship as damage and routes around it,” the Foreman assures.

While making small talk, thinking about Barnes scribbling that he "knows" Carpatescu is the Antichrist, the Foreman answers the note, writing, “I appreciate your honesty.”

"I understand that you did not come here to hear a sermon, although you are of course very welcome to, next Sunday, and in fact please consider this an invitation. But I'd like to, well, abuse your professional courtesy. We're planning to greatly expand our web presence, but Raymond's daughter, Chloe—she was at Stanford before the Event, you know, very sharp girl—tells me that it would be another monthly bill to set up a bigger website, so . . . do you have any suggestions?"

“Sure, talk to this company . . .” Privately, the Foreman thinks bugging the reverend is an option.

On the scrap paper, the reverend writes, "Come Sunday one hour early, pretend to have forgotten DST time change."

The Foreman resolves to make time in his schedule to do so while dealing with the other stuff for this month.

"Oh, also, my dear friend Tsion mentioned wanting to talk to your research lead. Is that something that you think could be arranged?"

The Foreman says something noncommittal and suggests arranging for that, via telepresence. It needs to be very secure.

He gives Barnes the address for Columbia Internet, a known-good ISP that tapped into the Cellular-Solar network early, and tells his staff to find a time for a video call between Dr. Robertson and Rabbi Ben-Judah, which works for both of them—which, itself, is largely a matter of the Foreman’s people being the right mixture of obsequious and pushy to the two academicians.

Putting data taps on both is, of course, trivial. The Foreman will get whatever data this guy has, unless he decides to do everything with a manual typewriter, and he didn't see one of those in the office. He did see a very new, very expensive laptop, though.

He shakes hands with Rev. Barnes, who gives the Foreman one of those omnipresent pamphlets. This one looks like it's been printed right after the Event; it warns that the world has either 7 or 8.5 years to go and speaks of "The Antichrist's treaty with Israel" in the future tense. The Foreman notes that some of the details are wrong—for example, the "two witnesses" have already been active.

The following Sunday, he sends one of his analysts to Rev. Barnes' Sunday service . . . and is surprised to find that the analyst’s report includes a polite but firm letter of resignation. At least he wasn’t given a Nomenklator!

The sermon was the usual fire-and-brimstone fare, with Rev. Barnes urging people to give to the church so that he may dedicate more of his time towards compiling his predecessor's notes into a comprehensive list of prophecy of what is to come.

As for the resignation, it reads:

"Dear Foreman,

I believe that under your leadership we have done good for the people of this world. But I must urge you to repent before the Tribulation is over. Above all, do not take the Mark of the Beast, or you will become incapable of salvation. Carpatescu is evil, his peace is false, he will start WW3 and bathe the world in nuclear fire, and that's BEFORE the Great Tribulation even begins.

Repentance is in the mind, but belief is in the heart. Paul said in Romans 10:9-11, ‘If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation. For the Scripture says, “Whoever believes in Him will not be disappointed.”’"

Happily enough, Rev. Barnes did take the Foreman’s suggestion when it came to getting better Internet. Looks like whoever this Chloe is, she's in charge of migrating to the new server.

The Foreman decides he wants to pursue passive monitoring: he’ll see any files uploaded and accessible to the public even if they aren't linked anywhere, and it's undetectable.

He won't be able to read the New Hope Church staff emails, but they won't have any idea that he is passively monitoring their server's file system. They're using it to share first drafts of prints for bulletins and the like. While they are technically breaking the law by refusing to join the ecumenical council, they aren't advocating violence or even civil disobedience.

Just by looking at names of people on various projects like bake sales and so on, the systadmins generate a list of people who are active in the church. Vernon Billings, former pastor. Disappeared during the Event Bruce Barnes, current pastor Loretta (no last name given), Bruce's secretary Donny Moore, currently employed at CATS as an IT liaison Sandra Moore Chloe Steele, acting sysadmin. Stanford full-ride scholarship, dropped out during the Event Rayford Steele, current pilot of Carpatescu's primary plane, a former US presidential plane Amanda White Buck Williams, current editor of Global Weekly, effectively appointed there by Carpatescu Judd Thompson Jr. Vicki Byrne Lionel Washington Ryan Daley John Preston Mark Eisman Chaya Stein Shelly (no last name given), blogger

The Foreman isn’t sure why Carpatescu is comfortable with his primary air chauffeur attending an extra-ecumenical church; there may be some amount of double-agenting going on.

The Foreman also follows up with the guy he sent to the sermon via video to discreetly study him, framing it as part of the employee offboarding process. From now on, it is official CATS policy that anyone quitting without giving two weeks’ notice will have to sit down for an exit interview, be it in person or via video call.

He finds the time for a brief call with the outgoing analyst, who is unfailingly polite and takes the time to exhort him once again to convert, and again mentions that Carpatescu is going to start WW3 and bathe the world in nuclear fire, AFTER WHICH the real disasters will start. "Everything's written in stone, sir, you just have to decide where to spend eternity. Make the right choice."

The video footage is fairly low resolution, but he has people look at it. Whatever happened on Sunday, it caused a genuine primal fear response, strong enough to linger days later.

After an eventful few weeks, the Foreman is ready to tackle planning CATS’ operation for another month.

He sets eight crews to roll out the first integrated digital network nodes, hopefully the first of many. He selects the territories of Australia and Siberia for the deployment and enlists Ryan Andrews' help for setting up a little publicity stunt to, essentially, cut a conference room in half and ship one half across the world, plus appropriately placed cameras and screens. The Foreman takes the Russian end of the business, on request from Subpotentate Zakharov, while Andrews flies to Australia.

Andrews jokes that this would've been better done six months from now, since the Australian winter and Russian summer are just about the same temperature. The territories are sparsely populated, meaning that rollout is simple and citizens of both territories quickly come to enjoy unlimited text messaging, video calls, and, for those who are sufficiently tech-savvy, email on their phones.

GNN goes as far as putting the Foreman in the news briefly, in a segment showing high schoolers in Tittybong, Victoria, being given an introductory lecture in physics from Zakharov himself with Abdurrahman Wahid, subpotentate of the Pacific, sitting in the back row. Thanks to the Foreman’s earlier efforts with microsatellites, it is possible for even the tiniest post office in a Pacific island to offer terminal access during working hours.

The very next day, Rebohoth sends an ornate letter in which he complains about having been promised to inaugurate the network node technology, and goes as far as to call the Foreman a racist for privileging white Russians and white Australians over the people of Africa.

He doesn't bother answering.

He understands that Carpatescu had to be pragmatic in his choice of subpotentates, but Rehoboth has proven himself to be a bad man. For the near future, the Foreman may need to escort his work crews operating in his territory... of course, if he decides not to and something bad happens to them in a provable manner, he’ll have a reason to complain to the big boss. Having audio and low-res video surveillance almost anywhere in the globe is pretty nice, isn't it?

Still, the Foreman is curious how others feel about Rehoboth. He doesn’t get invited to subpotentate councils, but the impression he gets is that Rehoboth is spending a lot of time trying to take credit for the decrease in African hunger thanks to his land reform policies, whereby most everyone is aware of the fact that the Eden fertilizer is to thank. By contrast, he's leaving the AIDS epidemic essentially unaddressed.

Since the Foreman made it very clear that the distributed Internet he is building cannot be censored, it's easy for him to tell that Rehoboth is pretty disliked amongst his own population; he has been playing ethnic leaders against each other as a way to remain on top of the turmoil, allowing local conflicts to come to a head in a number of hotspots only to then take his Peacekeeper allotment and stomp on the winner. He is, however, remarkably competent in his timing, always intervening at the moment most suited to let him claim on GNN that he is preserving the peace.

His main rivals are Mwangati Ngumo, former UN Secretary General before Carpatescu and now currently in hiding, and Enoch Litwala, a former South African anti-apartheid leader who has recently been abandoned by a good chunk of his power base for being too much of a moderate.

The Foreman decides to circulate proof of Rehoboth's past misdeeds among his crew, in the form of a safety-briefing video. This will raise awareness, lower their overall loyalty to the Carpatescu administration, and raise their loyalty to the Foreman.

CATS is a civilian agency; surely it would not engage in politics or start a secret war . . . right? The Foreman has given both his work teams and his covert teams reasons to trust him, and every time he’s strayed from his mandate, the results have been positive. But he'd never undermine a subpotentate, even one who just about threatened to shoot him . . . right?

Right?

The media team has a pretty easy time putting together a dossier on Rehoboth's past atrocities, and they don't even need to do any exaggeration, so they don't—just the facts, ma'am.

Some of the more idealistic crew mention taking this to Carpatescu; others, particularly the former soldiers, note that they wouldn't mind ventilating the old man if an excuse pops up to do so.

The Foreman’s video makes the rounds among his staff; he should be able to perform hostile actions against Rebohoth. A couple of days later, he receives an email from Santiago, containing a handwritten note as a scanned attachment.

"Man has killed man from the beginning of time, and each new frontier has brought new ways and new places to die. Why should the future be different?"

The Foreman isn’t sure whether to interpret it as support, or as a warning, but his relations with the South American subpotentate have been cordial.

In other news, the economy so far is doing remarkably well in recovering from the Event; people are having babies again, the Eden fertilizer is indeed providing bumper crops more or less anywhere in the world, and the sudden reduction in population a couple years ago has resulted in a small but noticeable improvement in the planet's ecological condition. One of the maintenance staff mentions crossing the Hudson River in New York and says, "I saw a pod of whales when I was coming over the bridge. A twelve-year gap in demand for plastic toys and the like, probably a bit less shipping, so less pollution . . ."

In the meantime, the Foreman sits in on the conversation between Dr. Robertson and Tsion Ben-Judah. The rationale is that he is testing high-definition (720 vertical pixels with stereo sound) video conferencing links that use the Internet instead of a dedicated channel; he’ll get one audio channel and a bunch of stats while they talk.

It may be the newfangled Motorola 56000 psychoacoustic compression, but Tsion sounds a lot better in person; on audio, he's got a bit of a monotone, which makes his accent sound a lot more noticeable.

The theologian gives to Dr. Robertson the same spiel the Foreman got from Rev. Barnes, noting that he should join the Christian Remnant or burn in Hell. Dr. Robertson says that his family is Catholic by tradition, but he himself is a deist. Tsion counters that deism, while more true than atheism, would still land the scientist in Hell. The theologian continues and asks if anything would change Dr. Robertson's mind: he says that, as a scientist, he'd be convinced that a God who interferes in human affairs exists if he could derive evidence of it.

Tsion points to the Event, at which point Dr. Robertson says that if there's a supernatural explanation, a hypothetical god that would rip children from their mother's arms would not be the loving Christian god. Tsion begins to explain that God is just, above being merciful, but before he can get too deep into the exegesis of the book of Job, the physicist asks him what, if anything would change HIS mind. Tsion's answer, to his credit, is terse. "If, somewhere within the Bible, I were to find a passage that said 2+2=5, I would believe it, accept it as true, and then do my best to work it out and understand it."

Robertson says he's disappointed: in his career, he has worked with a number of scientists of Jewish extraction and found their disquisitional approach to theology refreshing; he notes that Tsion sounds more like a Midwestern evangelical pastor than a Jewish scholar with a number of publications under his belt. Tsion quotes Leonardo da Vinci at him: perfection is achieved not when there isn't anything more to add, but when there isn't anything more to take away. Robertson agrees that this is in fact the hallmark of a successful scientific theory as well.

The video conference ends soon after. "Will you think about what I said?" Tsion asks. Dr. Robertson says that he likely will.

"And will you, Rabbi?"

"Thanks for your time."

The video link quality left a lot to be desired, but it's still significantly better than what could have been achieved just a year ago. The Foreman doesn’t know how Tsion feels about the conversation, but Dr. Robertson notes that this has been a waste of his time, by and large. "I've taken the time to read a selection of the man's scholarly work before this interview, as a matter of courtesy. Did he hit his head before his big broadcast?"

Ryan Andrews takes the opportunity to tour outback mining facilities that are being refurbished and learn about how to operate a factory town in hostile climates. By now, Effincold has reached self-sufficiency, largely by selling refined silver and cobalt; the Foreman is pretty sure that Andrews is skimming a little bit off the top, but it was part of the deal after all.

The Foreman himself leaves with Zakharov's warmest wishes and land, easements, and utility hookups set aside for him to build a logistics installation in Russian territory.

Zakharov had always lobbied for the CATS agency to be headquartered in Russia and was specifically denied by Carpatescu. Building a secondary base in Eurasia, however, makes logistical sense, and as long as it's clear that the Foreman isn’t going around Carpatescu's orders by simply moving shop there, it can likely be expanded over time.

Having a backup location is never a bad idea, too. The base can be set up in Siberia, for easy access to India and China, or in Western Russia for easy access to Europe and the Middle East.

Having network nodes actually deployed will allow the work crews to perform live testing and continue research to improve them; most importantly, constructing additional pylons in that territory will benefit both cellular and Internet infrastructure.

The covert crews aren't particularly keen on trusting someone who's technically a former terrorist, so Moira is going to have to prove herself to them, whichever team she ends up with. That said, their morale is high: they are kicking ass and taking names.

The Foreman directs one covert team to look into another job from the Risto Shipping Company. They have been asking to deliver a large natural gas generator to replace the atomic power plant of Tarapur, India. The Foreman’s team would be responsible for guarding the delivery but, most importantly, the return trip, in which the spent nuclear fuel will be brought to New Babylon for disposal.

The Foreman sees this as an opportunity to divert some of the nuclear fuel. Reward: 1BN, nuclear fuel. Risk: disfavor with Carpatescu if caught.

Before he sends off the covert team to Greece to board the container ship, Moira comes into his office. She's spent a couple of weeks integrating with his forces by going along with the notion that she's the new guy, and taking the—relatively modest—hazing in stride.

"Uh, Boss, is there any reason why we're nicking Nick's nuke fuel?"

He tells her that Dr. Robertson needs some commercial-grade nuclear fuel for his research.

Moira does a stage wink. "Arright! Just to be clear, it's still pillage THEN burn, right?"

The plan is to provide security for the generator switchover (which will take a couple of weeks tops because the gas turbines are prefabricated and just need to be installed) and most importantly to provide security for the old reactor core as it’s carried to a secure facility in the Balkans for disassembly and neutralization. Supposedly, Carpatescu has contracted a startup headed by Alex and Stephen Chiu that figured out a way to neutralize nuclear waste into harmless chemicals. Obviously, there's a worry about pirates or nationalists getting a hold of the stuff on the return trip.

The Foreman decides it’s worth the risk.

Moira embarks on the container ship along with the squad she's attached to. Their main job is to ensure that the Risto work crews can operate without distractions. The outgoing trip is uneventful; Moira gets to assist with the demolition of some of the outlying structures once there, while the security crew keeps the inevitable anti-nuclear protesters at bay (they still manage to show up and make noise, despite the fact that the job here is to dismantle a nuclear reactor).

Dr. Robertson is very interested in the film-badge dosimeters that the men had to wear; to their relief, they notice that the actual radiation count is really low.

During the return trip, Moira is instructed to take a small sample, sufficient for study or to build a small RTG, from the cargo hold of the container ship. While crossing the Strait of Hormuz, pirates do appear; a simple pyrotechnic display convinces them that they better not even try it. The Foreman’s men are wearing the same colors as they were during the successful anti-pirate raid from a few months back, and the warning is sufficient.

Moira does the sensible thing and, at some personal risk, uses a laundry detergent measuring cup to take a small sample from each canister, to ensure that any weigh-ins would only show a small discrepancy that could be explained by the scales in India having been a little off calibration. The samples are then sent to Dr. Robertson for proper spectrographic analysis, along with the dosimeter strips that the security team wore during the trip.

The Risto Shipping Company sends payment along with a bottle of ouzo and a letter of thanks.

Dr. Robertson has also told Moira's team to take pictures of their film dosimeters and send them to him; they're excited to test out their camera phones, and do so. Within the day, he tells them that they have very little to worry about in terms of radioactive contamination, but he'd like them to send the dosimeter strips in for a more thorough analysis later.

The second covert crew is directed to look into another issue. White farmers in South Africa have secured the services of an arms dealer known as Ulysses Klaue to equip their private security; rumor has it that Rebohoth is allowing the situation to escalate so that he can crack down on it with full force. Regardless of who's right and who's wrong in the land dispute, there have already been a few deaths, mostly former black sharecroppers.

Kouros Klaue (likely not his real name) is a South African arms dealer who has been making most of his money selling weapons to both sides of the Hutu-Tutsi conflict. He got his start as an up-armorer during the "Toyota War" between Libya and Chad in the late 1980s. If anything good can be said about this person, it’s that he's not racist: the only color he used to care about was green, until Nick started replacing the US dollar as the global currency of reference.

In possibly a risky move, the Foreman decides to side with Klaue and escort a convoy of his through Zambia. Reward: Black market contact.

The dissolution of the Soviet block a decade ago has released a plethora of old military equipment into the wild; Nicolae Carpatescu's newly minted Peacekeepers have finally begun to clean up, shutting down wildcat ammo plants, confiscating AK74s, and so on.

Rather than make the leap from gunrunning to arms manufacturing, Klaue intends to build a stockpile in advance of all that, reasoning that Carpatescu will be almost as happy with the weapons being in someone else's warehouse where they will at best only trickle out.



The convoy starts from Cairo and follows the Nile down to Sudan, then moves on to Zambia and Kenya to finally reach South Africa. Klaue's men, bolstered with the Foreman’s, look official enough that some are intimidated into turning over their weapons or their tooling; others request (and get) top dollar for what they have.



Klaue is reluctant to show outsiders where his own stockpile will be, so the Foreman’s team is dispatched to carry a small portion of the haul to South Africa, to a consortium of white farmers who have requested better weapons for their private security in the face of a rumored land grab. The team has a little time to look around. While the Eden fertilizer has removed outright hunger from the land, most of the interior under the rule of Rehoboth is still quite dingy—the difference from the previous years being, of course, that many if not all of the street vendors and peddlers have a cell phone and use it to check prices and occasionally even take payment in phone minutes.



The final customer for the run shares a meal with the team and exposes his views. "I don't give a rat's ass about race. My wife's black. The problem is the culture that developed after detribalization. I'll give you an example . . . Once, a friend of my wife wanted to earn some money by baking bread. He got a bit of money together and used it to buy ingredients, built a mud stove himself, and cooked 30 loaves of basically baguette. He took the bread to the road and started to sell it, until his father came by. His father said, ‘You have bread! The family needs bread!’ and took 20 loaves for himself and the rest of the kids. Our enterprising friend was left bankrupt. He lost his entire initial investment and never made bread again.

“This is the basic story of these parts: communalism gone insane. It is completely unthinkable to refuse a demand of an elder or a family member for money or food. People hide any small money they have, because if anyone knew they had it, there would be a line around the corner asking for loans and favors, and they would be honor-bound to say yes. I told my friends over and over to say no, and each time they politely explained to me that it was impossible. The whole system has evolved to pull people down to the lowest common denominator. I was hoping that Carpatescu would wipe the slate clean, but . . ."



The Foreman’s men leave with the agreed-upon payout and, more importantly, a way to contact Klaue.

Eventually, the time to plan out CATS’ operation for the month rolls around again. The Foreman decides to allocate one team to building logistics in Siberia, three teams to constructing cellular solar Internet in Greenland, South America, and Southeast Asia, three teams to constructing the network, and two covert teams to going on missions.

He reads through updates on some of the recent conflicts he’s been hearing about.

The situation in Cassibile has finally settled; there were a few dead out in the woods between the town and Mount Etna, but peace has been restored.

1. After Nikoomba's demise, Rebohoth has directed former soldiers loyal to him to purge a number of villages along the southern Sahel for having supported the tribal leader. They have asked for help, but cannot pay for it.
2. The museum burglaries have been traced to a small cult who wishes to resurrect the Biblical Cain, whose body they claim to have found. They have pledged to return their ill-gotten gains after the ritual is complete, but also to destroy them if they are interrupted. A number of sanctioned Christian and Muslim leaders would like to see them stopped, nevertheless. Reward: 1BN
3. A dispute between real estate developers in China has escalated to fistfights and, on one occasion, a duel between earthmovers. The local government wants outsiders to supervise both construction sites to avoid a repeat. Each developer wants a bit of additional muscle to sabotage the other's construction site.

- Help one of the developers. Reward: 2BN, possible disfavor - Perform guard duty. Reward: 1BN

1. Things are coming to a head between black farmers and white landowners in South Africa, with Rebohoth having announced that a land redistribution program is soon going to be underway. There have been confrontations and brawls, and the first death is likely to happen any day now, escalating the issue. Rebohoth will not allow the Foreman’s men to help keep the peace, since he hates his guts, but he can provide covert support to one side or the other. Reward: 1BN

Meanwhile, the project in Siberia progresses. If there's proof that modern technology is flattening the world, it's the fact that the Foreman and Zakharov's crews were able to build a modern logistics hub, in Siberia, in December, with no cases of frostbite and taking three weeks to do it.

The place looks like a military forward operating base minus the guns, and to be fair, it is largely made out of Soviet Army prefab modules that have been sitting in storage for fifteen years and given new wiring on site. The Foreman hopes that it simplifies work in the region, and takes advantage of Zakharov's hospitality by ensuring that there is a bit of cross talk between personnel here and personnel in the Canadian mine—after all, the Russians are world experts at working in the tundra.

This month, the Foreman revs up production; his workers are busy preparing new Cellular-Solar pylons and deploying them as fast as they are ready. He hopes to give global Internet coverage to the world as a Decemberween gift (the Ecumenical Council having not been able to settle on a better name for the end-of-year-solstice holiday, largely because calling it Wintermas would not have worked in the southern hemisphere), and by the look of it, he is on track to do so.

The Foreman instructs his team to make a big deal of it for propaganda purposes.

As for what the rest of his agents will do, Dr. Robertson wants to continue his research and asks that at least one work crew be diverted to him so that he may analyze what Moira brought back. Obliging, the Foreman finds that the results are unexpected once they’re brought to him.

Dr. Robertson does not mask his frustration. "These readings make no sense! Look here." He shows a number of blotched film strips. "The one bit of good news I have for you is that everyone on the Risto deployment took in less radiation exposure than expected. The problem is that . . . look at these things! According to these strips, one guy got just a little less than guidelines would indicate, another guy literally didn't take a sievert of radiation on him, and that Irish woman, smack in the middle, exactly fifty percent of expected dose." Then he shows another series of film strips, this time with more-or-less identical markings on them. "And the dosimeters were not off model, they react just fine to x-rays."

"Now, this analogy is wrong in every important respect, but just to show you how maddening this is, imagine Shrödinger's cat being put into the box and coming out with kittens!"

He goes on to note that he's not heard back from any other peer reviewers about the old paper. "At this point, it may be better that way! I must've missed something fundamental . . . cyber sabotage, perhaps? But who would bother? But no, can't be that. The film strips are old-fashioned tech, they've been around since the fifties, and those readings make no sense either. It's as if the radiation is trying to be there, but more or less failing at it!"

The Foreman asks if he's doing well.

"I'm doing great! This is fascinating, except, well, I can't shake the feeling in the back of my head that I'm just making some fundamental methodological mistake."

“Could it be that someone stole some of the fuel before we did, and diluted the rest?”

"Perspicacious of you to ask—it's one of the things I had to rule out. No, nobody stole any nuclear fuel. It's just that the readings on things aren't consistent with historical data, and the readings—people—aren't making sense in that not only are they inconsistent with historical data but also with each other. What would help me? Nothing you can get, unfortunately: I don't think you have the influence to go to New Babylon and grab a functional nuclear bomb."

"What about raw samples or samples from other nuclear sites outside of New Babylon? There are scores of nuclear plants in America, after all.”

"We got those already. They're all consistently lower than they should be—except for the Hiroshima samples and a few of the Nevada samples, which match the textbook formulas. That in itself is a puzzle. That your security guards returned each with their own personalized radiation exposure profile, when I know they all worked roughly in the same proximity to the stuff? Bigger puzzle."

"So then, if it wasn't the lack of samples to compare it to, what other methodological mistakes could have been made, Doctor? Different sets of equipment? Maybe we need to search for something that compares to your findings."

[LBQ2-5]