Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

Thu 01/19 16:03:48 PST

"My boy, this is fantastic work," Father declares when I show him my financial plan. "This should get the institute running in the black within a decade, and with only minimal impact to the people we want to help. I'm proud of you."

"Thank you. I worked hard on it."

That was true, sort of. Several parts of my fragmented, augmented brain did a good bit of work on it. Figuring out all the places where we could buy up cheap land with mineral rights for the kids in class two to set up automated nano-mines was the bulk of the effort. Sales of raw materials that we'd be able to extract and refine more cheaply than any competitors was the key element for the program I laid out to turn us profitable.

"I'm very glad I chose you to come in and help me with this," he says, his crooked grin turning from the screen toward me. "Your insight has been invaluable."

He turns back to the whiteboard and starts scribbling furiously, converting the ideas in my spreadsheets and reports into parts of his sprawling diagrams. It's not the first time he's updated the plan based on my input. Not to toot my own horn, but I think my suggestions have improved it quite a bit. We bounce ideas off of each other as he continues to update the board. I don't even think of stopping for dinner, and Father doesn't seem inclined to either. This is my last day to get everything I can out of his brain before he's gone. It starts getting late, but neither of us are ready to call it a day.

"Is it too late to change the classes around?" I ask him. "If we do medicine before atmospheric cleanup, we can produce cheap but profitable generic versions of every drug where the patents have expired. That should let us drop the raw minerals prices by thirty percent or so once class four comes online. Plus it'll save a lot of lives for people that have trouble affording their medications. I crunched the numbers, and I suspect that could get us better net lives saved since some of those medications could treat the health issues caused by air pollution until we solve that. The time frame on pollution seems too long not to focus on the short term remediations first."

He contemplates for a moment.

"I hadn't thought of it that way, but I think you might be right. That should be acceptable. Both classes needed the same basic science background that they are getting now, and I haven't started specializing the coursework for either age group yet. Can you show me the numbers for that?"

I pull up the spreadsheet. "So here are the net lives saved estimates for either scenario," I point out. "And over here are the projected profits." His eyes widen as he sees the figures for pharmaceutical sales. "And that's with undercutting the market by a huge margin."

He whistles softly. "Noah, I clearly went into the wrong industry if I had wanted to make financial success my top priority. I have no regrets though." He pauses, thoughtful. "Well, one regret."

"Oh?" Regrets of any sort seem out of character for him.

"Noah, I think it's time that you and I had a talk about your mother."

"OK," I reply, wondering what she has to do with anything.

A quick look in my index as he crosses the room from the white board to my seat makes me start paying very close attention. Father gets a serious look on his face.

"For context," he says, "we'll need to go back to the time just after I had finished up with my efforts on the Butler Treaty. I had to travel quite a bit for that, did you know? Rubbing elbows with the powerful, the influential, and all the people I needed to get on board. I must admit I picked up quite a taste for it. I already knew at that point that the day-to-day work of running the company was no longer something I could commit myself to, at least not at the level that the company required. So I stepped down from corporate leadership. I still had majority ownership of SynTech and control at a high level, but the new CEO that I brought on hardly needed me lurking about, involving myself in the minutia of corporate affairs."