Winning Peace - Chapter 19 (Patreon)

I'd specifically volunteered for the solar system grand tour for a number of reasons.

First and foremost was simply that I was going a little stir-crazy, even with access to the new immersive full-dive tech I'd developed. Back on Earth I'd fallen into my pre-reincarnation habits of living almost like a hermit in my cocoon of high technology and extreme luxury, but even then I occasionally needed to get out and do something. Work had helped quite a bit in that regard, taking my mind off my slowly building cabin fever, but eventually I'd reached the breaking point and seized on the then-theoretical solar system tour to do a bit of traveling.

The other reasons?

“The Council has moved ahead with the release of the new Methuselah and Panacea Treatments,” Sasha stated as she looked up from her tablet. “They're being called the medical breakthroughs of the millennium.”

“Aww, I feel all warm and fuzzy,” I chuckled, leaning back in my chair. "That should nicely distract everyone from the Last Dogs."

Sasha frowned at me. “I know this is the plan, Zeke, but... is this really okay? No one's going to know it was you.”

“And, in exchange, the Council gets a few pretty feathers in its cap that I am very visibly absent from,” I replied with an easy smile. “We've been over this, Sasha. I want them to take credit. The institutions I've built need the win, because the wins will give them legitimacy. If I announce them as my developments, people will start wondering why they need everyone else in the government if I can just fix everything.”

Sasha sighed. “I understand your reasoning, Zeke, but... that was before you impulsively decided to retire after this is all over and I know I used to be one of your biggest critics, but the Stellar Council just doesn't have anyone as capable as you are. What are they going to do when they come across a problem that they can't actually fix because you aren't in the government anymore?”

“Probably ask me discreetly for help after trying everything else, which is what most governments tend to do.” Sasha sent me a flat look. “Well okay, not me personally, governments hate looking incompetent when compared to specialists that know what they are doing. So unless those people are already in-house, they're always a last resort.”

“I thought you hated introducing inefficiencies into systems,” Sasha replied tartly.

“My systems, yes,” I riposted pointedly. “The Stellar Council's systems? They run on politics, which is inefficient by design because it relies on humans to create and follow through on arbitrary decision-making paradigms.”

“Ezekiel, you're just reinforcing my point,” Sasha sighed, shaking her head. “The Stellar Council needs you. Humanity needs you.”

“They need my tech,” I refuted tiredly. “I'll find someone who can cut through the bullshit, hand them a personal A-ah, VI that will feed them on the job training, and they'll be something like competent in the next year or two.”

“They'll be competent,” Sasha repeated with a nod, “but they won't be you, Ezekiel. You're more than that. You're an actual genius. A real miracle-worker.”

I nodded, looking out over the Venutian stratosphere. Regardless of the comparative hellscape on the surface below, the floating city of Venera located some fifty kilometers upwards and held aloft by super-tough air bladders was positively paradisic. The sun was a bit too bright, the clouds were off-color, and you still had to wear a breathing mask if you were going outside, but the pressure was near-enough Earth's that you could forgo a full suit and there was nothing toxic in this altitude band.

“Most people would say that this is a miracle, Sasha,” I replied eventually, waving my hand out to the curving and twisting streets of mankind's first Venutian city. Contrary to the cultural exports of Earth-like architecture on Luna and the Martian colony being overtaken by Futurism of all things, Venus had drifted towards an organic design that incorporated cutting-edge hyper fabrics that tied sections of the city together.

The overall feel was something like an alien woodland replete with twisting groves of trees and hanging mosses linking each reaching structure.

Sasha opened her mouth to refute me, but took another look through the tinted windows. The one unavoidable downside to living here was the increased amount of solar radiation you picked up. The buildings and most sections of the city incorporated tinting to their glass in addition to a kind of electromagnetic-resistant tiling that I'd created back in my early days for use on outdoor surfaces in desert areas, then redesigned for roadways.

Simply put, it was a kind of meta-material that acted like a solar cell, but ate more broad-spectrum waves than they could.

Regardless, the Venutian population, which was only a few hundred people (though growing quickly), was already reporting a significantly higher incidence of skin cancer. The medicated cream they used stopped much of it, but I would see about a more permanent fix for anyone who liked the idea before my retirement.

“It is a miracle,” Sasha conceded.

“One I had barely any involvement in,” I nodded.

“That doesn't mean you can't keep doing great things for humanity as a whole, Ezekiel,” Sasha shook her head.

“Me 'retiring' doesn't mean I won't,” I riposted.

She grimaced, “but you won't receive any credit for it. You'll be doing things more like you did here, with life-extension tech and a cure-all drug... just, letting someone else say it was their work.”

“Honesty was always a hot-button with you,” I stated airily, my eyes tracking outwards to the clouds once again.

Hmm... I wonder...

“The word could always use more honesty,” Sasha replied firmly, her gaze following mine. “I just... don't like the precedent it sets, Zeke. What you've helped humanity achieve in the years since the Short War, it's amazing, but there are always people who want to backslide us into corporate interest groups, oligarchies, and corruption. That's why I was so against you before we met, you know?”

I nodded. “I got that, yeah. It's a criticism I get from a lot of people, Sasha. A lot of people who don't know me, at that, but that's a deal you make when you become a public figure. As much as working in the background might be a slippery slope, using my authority to quiet dissent is much more of one, and it's something I could see myself doing if I have to keep bearing this mantle.”

I took a deep breath and reached down to the open cooler between us, picking up something slightly sweet and fizzy. It was a Venutian special, actually, a type of drink that partially-sublimated into mist once you opened it, allowing you to breathe and smell it as much as imbibe it as a liquid. The specific brands were named after cloud formations, even.

So fucking cool.

I breathed in mist from cherry-cumulonimbus before tipping the glass to my mouth, enjoying the unique mixture of sensations. “There are people who legitimately don't care about media attention, people who can let it roll off their back like water off a duck's and I sometimes envy them, because I'm not one of them.” I looked her in the eye. “I like to pretend, but I actually do care about what people think of me and I don't enjoy being treated like a suspect power-monger by anyone with a problem with authority. I don't like living a public life. I just... once this mess with the Last Dogs is solved, I'll keep an eye on things, but I'm retiring.”

Sasha grimaced, leaning down and pulling out her own drink before taking a deep pull from it. “I really can't say anything to convince you otherwise?”

I shrugged. “You probably can, eventually. Keep at it for a few months and you might convince me of the necessity of retaining my public authority, but... do you want to?”

Sasha's dark eyes locked with mine, realization setting in. “You really meant it when you said you hated this job, didn't you?”

I nodded. “I did. It's an aggravation. Too much talking to people, too much wasted time, too many bruised egos to soothe, too many cats to herd. I did say politics was inherently inefficient, didn't I?”

She nodded, her face a mask of curiosity as to where I was going with this.

I flexed and stretched, getting myself comfortable again as I leaned further back and took another pull from my drink. “If I took all the time I'd used to pull people together after the Short War and had, instead, used it to advance humanity further? The absolute minimum would have been a fully orbital ring complete with artificial habitats for the remainder of our species.”

Sasha stared at me. “I-I'd have to run the numbers, but...”

“Oh, it's entirely feasible,” I replied with a dark chuckle. “Considering that humanity's population would be in the hundreds of millions instead of the low billions? You'd be surprised at how little space that number of people would take up.”

Realization set in as she digested what I'd said.

She knew me better than to call bullshit, too. When I made a claim like that, I meant it. I had tables and footage, and all sorts of documentation. Satellite photography, drone flyovers with thermal sensors, stolen intelligence from various regimes... I'd poured time, energy, and resources into saving as many people as I could.

“I feel like you're making my point for me again,” Sasha stated with a sigh. “You can't just say you're responsible for the human population still being three billion and expect me to shrug it off like it's nothing.”

“My point being that I do my best, most important, work outside of the public eye,” I replied. “And I like it like that. I know that oversight is important and I would remain answerable to the good of humanity as a whole, but playing political games and assuaging people who think they have power... if I keep doing this, it only really ends one way.”

Sasha grimaced, looking away. “You'd be taking over.”

I nodded, sighing again. “I'd be the First Emperor of Sol. All would love me and despair.”

Despite the seriousness of the moment, that at least got a chuckle. “You're right. You've always been an all-or-nothing kind of person and I've seen the frustration building over the months I've been working for you. I just thought it was a normal kind of thing, nothing serious...”

“I built the institutions I did because I firmly believed, believe even now, in the fundamental right of self-governance. That doesn't change the fact that desperate times sometimes call for unpopular policies, but several times during the worst protests against the cloning technology I was sorely tempted to just crack down on dissent. We need more people to maintain our technological base, if nothing else and no one wants to face that ugly truth. Even when the technology is more like iron wombs than true cloning. Even when what comes out is an infant child instead of a fully-grown adult that's been implanted with speech and skills and programmed to do whatever I say.”

Neither of us spoke of it, but we both knew that was something entirely in my power to accomplish.

“I want to help humanity reach its full potential, but having me in a public position of power is just reinforcing the impulse to control rather than guide.” I looked back at the clouds. “I would be a good tyrant, you know? Stern, but kind. Iron-handed, but just. I would make wonders for us, Sasha. Truly amazing things that most people could never dream of... but, in that world, it would be me shoving it down people's throats, forcing them to take what I give them or be frozen out of any technological advancement and reduced to little more than a pre-industrial agrarian.”

Sasha hummed, a distant look in her eyes. “You'd have terraformed Venus, wouldn't you? I remember seeing the plans in your database.”

I shrugged. “It'd be more efficient. Sky cities are neat and all, but remaking the world into a body fully capable of supporting human life would increase the carrying capacity of the planet by an order of magnitude. Mars, too. For the first time in nearly a billion years, the Sol System would have three glittering blue-green gems circling our star, each capable of hosting a population in the billions.”

“But you'd have to force the people living here to leave,” she observed, tapping the hammock-style chair she was sitting in for emphasis. Another quirk of the local culture, probably tying back to decades prior when people worked hours on end suspended beneath structures. Now, most 'chairs' were dangling stretches of cloth that were affixed to the ceiling with magnetic clamps.

“The people on Mars, too.” After a moment's thought, I continued. “While I was at it, I'd have to fix Earth and Luna. Pull everyone off it, probably put them in stasis while I rebuilt the ecosystem, revived extinct species, restored cultural sites, built new cities that didn't require all the messy upkeep and toxic waste...”

“Part of me wants to tell you to do it,” Sasha admitted candidly. “I believe you could, and... it really would be amazing. A world free from want, from need...”

“A world where everyone is the same, where the uniqueness is stripped away and people are granted bread and circuses to keep them blind to the gilded cages they live in,” I smiled, the expression melancholic.

“This is the reason you picked up Tom Hughes on Mars, isn't it?” Sasha asked suddenly, perking up from the dreamlike state of contemplation she'd fallen into.

I chuckled, the gesture making the chair I was in swing slightly, inviting me to stretch the high-tech fabric and pull it into something I could lay down in. “Caught that, did you? Yeah, Tom is... he's a step ahead of things. He's started to decouple traditional morality from the modern applications of advanced technology, and I want to encourage that.”

“Encourage, not force.” Sasha hummed thoughtfully again. “I can't say it doesn't rub me the wrong way, having a-a sex toy like that. Like a little girl.”

“Like, but not actually,” I pointed out, giving in to the urge to shift the 'chair' to a hammock and lie down. “The ultimate arbiter of legality, in my opinion, should be harm. The man made a sex toy that makes people uncomfortable. The same could be said of blow-up dolls from a century prior. As long as he doesn't expect me to watch him use it, I could care less what he does with it behind closed doors.”

“I see the logic, the same with the cloning, and having fourteen year olds vote” Sasha granted, “but I also see why people would object to it. Beyond even the grounds for misuse, there are questions of morals and ethics that-”

“-that can't, or at least shouldn't, be decided by one person,” I interjected with a nod, folding my hands back above my head. “There are people who would greet more revolutionary change with open arms, but they're in the minority. Humans are very much still the great apes that climbed down from the trees. We like the comfortable, we enjoy novelty, we tolerate incremental change. Every now and then, we enjoy a little bit of awe and wonder, but not too much.”

“What do you think happens when we get too much?” Sasha asked.

“We start to get scared. Things change too rapidly, the firmament we built our lives on starts to shift. We worry that we'll become outdated ourselves. It's a frightening thing, and I can't blame people for having those feelings.” I yawned widely. “But I can blame them for how they respond. The people they ostracize for being different, for liking things that are strange even if they don't harm anyone. The symbols they pervert, the homes they burn down, the bodies they create...”

“So your solution is to remain an incrementalist. To slow things down and feed humanity small changes. Changes that they'll willingly accept instead of forcing them to adopt them immediately,” Sasha murmured.

“I do as much as I can outside of that. I feed the hungry, house the homeless, clothe the naked. Oftentimes I do those things against the wishes of many powerful people.” I chuckled sleepily. “People who think they have power, at least. I'll give them a longer lifespan to properly consider the questions my technology poses, cure them of illnesses so they can live to see the wonders I'll eventually show them. I'll spare them as much hardship as I can... but I can't do that if I'm tied down by the power-hungry, the deluded, and the greedy.”

“I think I understand,” Sasha sighed, my ears picking up the swaying of her chair as she set it into motion. “Who do you think you'll pick to take over when you're gone?”

“Hmm...” I yawned and didn't answer for a long moment, my consciousness falling away. “Why, want the job?”

There was a surprised squawk in response, but I was already asleep.

I dreamed of skyships flying through alien skies.

Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans 1&2 (New)

~~~

Well, a few hours late, but it's five o'clock somewhere, right?  Also, I had to trash a page and rewrite it, so I think it came out much better for the extra effort.

Anyway, I'm going to have the February Poll out in a bit as well, so look forward to that.

Expect a new chapter of Where Your God Is soon, then I'll likely get started on another chapter of the Marvel Industrious story.  Something, probably pattern recognition, tells me I'll need it shortly.