Arthur Clarke - Richter 10

Now, standing in the secured boardroom, dim save for the glowing virtual map of the Earth that surrounded him, Li contemplated his empire. The diorama was transparent; he could look through it at the Moon, always full, inspiring the fanciful, but much desired, wish that the Liang Int diggers up there were always working.

There were no windows in this room, thus no day, no evening, only shifts. Every decision that mattered to the continuing business (most would say even the continuing existence) of Canada, the US, Mexico, and the Central American franchises was made right here. The rest of Washington—the mall outside running between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial, the White House and its occupants, the scores of departments, bureaus, agencies stretching to the beltways and beyond—all was show for the tourists. Liang Int owned it all and ran it all… including the so-called government of the United States of America. President Gideon, Vice President Gabler, the Cabinet, the members of Congress and the Supreme Court were little more than mere employees, figureheads and lackeys. Of course they maintained a pretty fiction of government, but that was all it was, a fiction.

Tonight Li was distracted, his thoughts turning tune and again to the viddy-stract his staff had prepared the previous night and shown him first thing this morning on one Lewis Crane and the events on the Japanese Island of Sado. The Japanese. Upstarts all of them, fools most of them. They’d actually shared their ownership of America with Middle Easterners, back when there had been a Middle East. But their tenure was short. Still, from time to time a Japanese combine would try to take a piece of the business away. He sneered, glad that in response to just such an affront his predecessor at Liang Int North America had ordered the chopping down of the two thousand cherry trees around the tidal basin—trees that the Japanese had given to the Americans shortly after the turn of the last century.

“Rain in the midwest,” said Mui Tsao from the soft darkness of his control panel. “It will delay the wheat harvest. I suggest we contact Buenos Aires and siphon their surplus until the harvest catches up.”

Both men spoke English almost exclusively as a show of good faith to the natives, though American business people and officials were expected to speak fluent Chinese.

“Good,” Li replied. “I saw a report of a major anthrax epidemic in the South American branch. See if you can trade them some cattle for the wheat. Bring them in through Houston.”

“Where do we store?”

“We could store in the warehouses where we’ve got the headache chips.”

“And what do we do with the chips?”

“We’ll give them to the Southern franchises as part of the wheat repayment. By the time they’ve figured out what’s happened, they already will have distributed the chips and be forced to try and follow through with a sales campaign.”

Li heard Mui chuckle softly as the man punched deals into the keypad, and smiled himself. The “headache chip,” as they called it, was an endorphin trigger; it sensed muscle tightness in the neck and immediately flooded the cortex with a shot of mood enabling dorph that stopped the headache before it got started. Only trouble was, the brain enjoyed the dorph hit so much it worked on developing headache after headache just to get the dose, wearing out the implant and leaving the user in the worst pain of his life. Once word had gotten around, Liang Int had been stuck with seven warehouses full of worthless chips.

“Done,” Mui said, typing furiously, “and done.”

“Good.”

Li was in charge of the North American branch, and Mui was his control, his Harpy. Second in command of the decision making, the Harpy was responsible for constantly double-checking his superior, questioning his decisions. It could be irritating, but had a positive effect on business decisions, and business was what held all the world, all of life, together. Should Li fail to make the proper percentage of appropriate decisions, Mui would have his position—with his own little Harpy in place then to watch over him. It made for sleepless nights, but it was the very best thing for Liang Int.

And that was what mattered. Li was nothing if not a company man.

The map floated around Li, continents rising out of shimmering oceans, the trade routes of the world pulsing in pink, while areas of harvests and famines glowed in celestial blues. Food was always a problem since only filtered fields were able to withstand the full measure of the sun’s wrath and produce.

Nuclear material storage areas glowed unblinking crimson in thirty different spots, leakage into ground water running like capillaries thousands of miles from their source. Movements of precious metals and ambulatory currency spiked metropolitan areas, while consumer spending showed up as gangs of small people, one per million, flashing their spending areas and products like dust motes dancing on sunlight. Production was tracked worldwide, immediate comparisons were made with other similar operations, and the interior of the office was filled with floating hieroglyphics decipherable only by a handful of Liang’s top management. If any member of the team was to leave for a reason other than death, the entire code would be changed.

The Masada Cloud throbbed in dark black, its bulk covering Europe today, moving ever eastward on the jet stream. And the Masada Cloud led Li back once more to Lewis Crane.

Crane had won the Nobel Prize six years before for work that had flowed from his research on the exercise of the Masada Option, specifically its effect on earthquakes. That work also had led directly to the banning of all nuclear testing on Earth because Crane had showed conclusively that nuclear explosions could cause earthquakes hundreds, even thousands, of miles from the site of detonation. As the staff had pointed out to Li in their presentation, Crane had stated that the quake on Sado was, in fact, a direct consequence of the destruction of the Middle East back in ’14.

Would it be possible, Li mused, for someone armed with Crane’s information and programs to cause earthquakes in chosen, distant locations? He shook off the question. It was tangential to what really interested him about Crane at this time; politics and profits—and the question of why Crane was so eager to contact him through Sumi Chan. Indeed, Chan had left a message only hours ago about a meeting Crane wished to arrange.

Ah, these Americans were bold. But Li rather liked them and their country. It was a Third World country, as was Europe, both with real history. Its own corporate gods long dead, America had a cheap labor pool of hard workers who thought nothing of reinvesting all of their wages back into the company through consumerism. Americans were the world’s best consumers. Except, of course, for the headache chip.

There had been nothing but success in Li’s life, which was why he was having such a difficult time with the coming elections. In the past, Li had been able to tolerate America’s fantasy of representative government because Liang’s candidates always had won. But now, for some reason, its chief competitor in multi-nationalism, the Yo-Yu Syndicate, was making inroads with its own candidates. The off-year elections had cost Liang Int seven representatives. It was a nasty trend that Li needed to nip in the bud. But it was difficult because the fickle voters persisted in believing they needed “change” in government and that change was meaningful. With the American fantasy beginning to get in the way of corporate harmoniousness, Li had to act. Hence, Crane and his earthquakes. He could show the citizens how much he loved them by associating Liang Int and the government with earthquake prediction. That should fix Yo-Yu in the elections.