King of All I Survey
Chapter 126: The Rafael Problem

Chapter 126: The Rafael Problem

"OK, can you ask her to join me here to discuss it?"

"She is still in Guatemala, under a composite personality overlay of Maribel," Joe reminded me.

"Ok then, video conference? Can you throw up a background that makes it look like adult me in a nice office?"

"Absolutely," Joe said. A display popped up on the transparent wall in front of me in the look-out tower.

"Hello. Joe tells me you have some ideas?" I said, surprised at my voice. It was adult-sounding, but still sounded like my voice, somehow.

Mom just stared at the screen in front of her. I hoped to surprise her with this first look at the image of adult me produced by Joe’s age-progression analysis. Maybe it was too much, I thought as I saw her eyes widen then begin to get a little teary. She was using the Maribel overlay but still retained the awareness and memories of Susan Bailey underneath, a modification of the way we had been doing it before when she needed to interact directly with people who would be able to tell the difference.

"Oh, Tim... You’re so handsome! My little boy..." A tear rolled down her cheek. "King of the world and handsome! You’re going to have to fight the girls off," She said beaming, and crying at the same time.

I rolled my eyes, "Mom, I’ve got laser-equipped drones for that, not a problem."

Now it was her turn to roll her eyes as she shook her head.

"Anyway," I continued, "Joe says you had some ideas to help the local economies?"

"Oh, yes," she said delicately wiping away her tears with the corner of her multi-colored hand-woven shawl. "I think we need to provide economic opportunity and the potential for upward mobility as well as new jobs for the people who in these rural communities."

I shrugged, "Sounds good, what do have in mind?"

"I was thinking we could offer them business loans. It’s a common dream here for people to want to have their own business, whether it’s a craft-based retail, a local grocery store, guide services for tourists, a larger farming operation, auto-repair, a bus service, or whatever. They want to control their own destiny and build something for their family’s future. It would also have the benefit of creating good jobs and boosting local economies. Subsistence farming keeps them alive, but doesn’t offer enough to pay for luxuries, like text-books or school uniforms. The extra money they earned by planting coca instead of corn, gave them that little extra. That’s gone now, but by helping them nurture their entrepreneurial spirit, we can give them something even better."

I smiled. "That’s a great idea, Mom! I love it. It’s exactly the thing we should be doing to improve people’s lives."

"Thanks, it was really Maribel’s idea... So, I’m thinking maybe a low interest rate. For the most part these are very small businesses, and they don’t need much capital."

"Still, they’re not exactly good credit risks..." I countered, hiding my smile.

"They will view paying pack the loan as a point of honor. If there’s any way they can, they will," Maribel pleaded.

"They probably don’t have a lot of experience running businesses, though..."

"That’s part of the goal, to improve the overall pool of business experience and skill within the community."

"Well, in that case, no loans," I said flatly, watching her face fall, "We’ll offer grants for anybody who attends our basic business seminar. Include basic accounting, small business management, tax codes, workplace safety, human resources skills, and a variety of things relevant to likely businesses- food safety and quality control, livestock disease prevention, exporting, logistics, inventory management, best sustainable fertilization practices, profitable alternatives to slash and burn farming... whatever. You figure out what’s best, and have Joe put together the curriculum. Hire a bunch of people, train them to teach the subjects, and base grants on an end of term ’thesis’ paper consisting of a full business plan. Make sure we can work in the Mayan languages in Guatemala and whatever is needed in Colombia along with Spanish and English."

I considered a moment. "I have been thinking of having Joe create some sort of device that’s like a little gaming console that delivers lessons or helps drill key concepts with a very small booster of memory implant training. Something handheld, like cellphone size. Joe, is that something you can do to help speed up the process of creating teachers, and helping the students in these seminars?"

"Yes, I can do something like that," Joe’s disembodied voice replied. "With a failsafe that wipes out key components if the case is opened?"

"Yes, please."

"I’ll deliver fifty units to the Sacapulas warehouse within two hours. Then just let me know when you need more, Miss Flores. They’ll adapt to the language of the user automatically. Batteries included."

"Batteries, Joe?" I asked.

"Figure of speech, they’ll be self-powered of course. You know that all these businesses become obsolete once people have synthesizers and fabrication mechs."

"Yes, I’ve been meaning to ask about that. How do they earn credits to pay for the things they produce for themselves? I mean, there’s no need for workers for jobs with the advanced tech."

"Check your memory, it’s in there from the economics classes," Joe replied.

"Oh. I see. Typically, a portion of the planetary income from licenses purchased throughout the galaxy are allocated to the people directly as income. It was them or their ancestors who discovered all these things in the first place. Coffee revenue for example could just be divided up among the people of each country based on what percentage of global coffee came from that region in the years before we entered the galactic economy... but, we’ll eventually get rid of countries, so maybe just distribute everything equally, regardless of geography. Otherwise, those who were wealthy enough for expensive equipment, factories and so forth, would get a disproportionately high level of the license income... Do we divide among the people of countries in our fold, or everybody and just leave it in a sort of escrow for now? We’ll have to take a cut off the top for planetary-level expenses and so forth. And what about intellectual property? Music, books, computer games, new recipes or marketable flavor combinations, technical breakthroughs? If people don’t get extra for that, why would they bother? Yikes, it’s complicated. Joe, can you put together a summary and comparison of the way other worlds handle it? I’ll review it then choose the best of everything for Earth... maybe with a few touches of my own," I smiled, "No rush, we’ve got a long way to go before we get there. I trust your perfect memory to keep track of every credit in or out until then, so we can figure out accrued balances and so forth."

"Acknowledged," the multidimensional quantum computing artificial intelligent with limitless processing and memory replied.

"Have you been keeping an eye on Rafael’s therapy progress?" I asked, turning to a more difficult topic.

"I have. It’s a problem. Joe thinks he’ll need a personal reason to stay on the straight and narrow." Mom/ Maribel answered slowly, "Otherwise, he’s likely to drift back to the darker side of his nature."

"What kind of a personal reason, like running for President?"

"No," Mom said.

"What, then?" I asked, perplexed.

"Joe thinks he needs Maribel."

"Maribel? Oh... Oh!" I suddenly realized what that meant. Without a shared love between Rafael and someone as altruistic as Maribel, he had no strong, ongoing reason to want to change. No incentive. With her by his side, he would focus on making her happy, on being the man she wanted him to be, on working with her toward her lifelong goal of lifting others up. Her love would be the anchor, the reward, the constant goal for being a better person. He might not want to or be able to do it for himself, but he would absolutely do it for her.

The big problem, of course, was that Maribel is a construct, a part played by my mom, Susan Bailey. My mom, obviously, was married to my dad. So, that wasn’t really workable...

"I see...," I said after I took a moment to process all that. "So, what, then? Do we abandon the plan to help him become the President of Guatemala? Can we even let him run loose? Will he be a danger?"

"Joe thinks that if we don’t go forward with Maribel’s promise to run his campaign, he’ll feel betrayed at a very personal level. If Maribel pulls back from their... closeness, similarly, he’ll feel betrayed. Betrayal, of course, is a powerful trigger for his worst tendencies." Mom spoke slowly and her voice had a profound sadness, as if she felt she was personally responsible.

"Look, Mom, when you were interacting as Maribel, that wasn’t really you. Your real personality and memories were hidden under the artificial personality that Joe imprinted on you. You can’t hold yourself responsible for promises she made."

"Tim, I am both right now. I am still ’wearing’ the Maribel personality overlay even though I also retain my previous memories and personality. Right now, I feel Maribel’s pain... and other things." She sighed, "I don’t know if this is really appropriate to discuss with you, but... Well, even without the Maribel overlay, when Joe takes it away completely and I am my old self again, I remember being Maribel, Maria Isabel Flores. Tim, I like being her. She is strong, direct, and wholly committed to doing whatever it takes to reach her goal of making the world a better place for the common person."

Her admission made me uncomfortable for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate, "Mom, you’re a strong woman, too, and you’re committed to helping people just like her."

"It’s not the same, Tim. She has more... passion about life and her goals than I have ever had. I like that feeling."

For some reason, I felt a tear starting in my eye. Since Joe was projecting an illusion of my adult self over the video call rather than my real image, I sent him a mental command to make sure that any tears didn’t show up in the video feed.

"Are you saying you’d rather be her than my mom?"

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