THE PLAN WAS HATCHED

November 2059

Alexa’s emotions could have best been described as “mixed.” After Shane Whitman’s visit, she had come to Jordan that night feeling distraught and seeking comfort. Her year in the limelight had finally been revealed for what it was. Seduced by flattery, status, and the delusional belief that she was making a difference, she now recognized that she’d been used to fulfill the ambitions of skilled power players. It was her innocence and incorruptibility they’d needed in order to gain public trust—and in the end, they’d robbed her of both. Being Alexa, however, she didn’t seek revenge. Instead, she was content with learning her lesson, with the help of an understanding and sympathetic ear.

… Jordan’s ear.

He’d given it willingly. He’d listened to her despair over Whitman’s refusal to tell her what had happened to her father … then he’d smiled, left quietly, and solved the problem. Then, while waiting for confirmation that her father was alive, he’d encouraged her to talk about her lifelong dream to go into space and feel the mind-opening awe that only an encounter with infinity could inspire in a girl with a mathematician’s mind … and he’d smiled again. He poured her shots of chocolate mescaline liqueur into the small hours of the morning as they reminisced about that afternoon on the hillside at Neutrality Park, when she’d jumped on him and declared triumphantly that she knew he was Artie Sharp … and they’d both smiled.

The night he’d taken her back to his place and let her sleep in his bed while he topped and tailed with Manaia, she’d realized for the first time that he now had a family quite apart from her, and she’d had a momentary feeling of loss. But Lexie had taken her into that family, offering her unquestioning friendship. It was that feeling of family that finally made clear to her all the emotions she had suppressed for so many years around her own father.

While she was chatting with Lexie, Jordan had gone into another room to get on his computer. When he returned, he made no mention of his intention to pay a visit to Shane Whitman. Would she have had the courage to go with him if he’d asked? The last person Alexa wanted to see after their previous encounter was Shane Whitman, so Jordan had made the right call. But when she learned that Jordan had taken five percent of each state payment for the ArteFact Channel endorsements and deposited it into a DLT permissioned cryptocurrency account in Whitman’s name—over a year ago, without even telling her—she realized just how little she really knew of him. He had described it as a “precautionary measure,” but it was more than that; it was a sign of his care and concern for her, something she’d never experienced before in her life.

Thus incentivized, Shane Whitman had not hesitated in revealing the whereabouts of her father, though it had taken a number of days for Antonio to verify that he was alive and well. Now that she knew, after so many years, it should have been cause for relief and celebration. But this information was destined to create a new set of challenges.

The fact that he had declined the opportunity to return to Earth and was well adjusted to life in the expanding colony came as welcome news to Alexa, but she couldn’t help feeling disappointed that he had never tried to contact her and reassure her that he was alive. Had he resigned himself to never seeing her again? This was not a conclusion that a child wished to reach about a parent; she only had to look at Jordan to see the undying bond that a parent could—and should—feel.

She returned to work at the Agenda Implementation Tribunal to find that she no longer reported to Shane Whitman. In fact, he was no longer a member of the tribunal at all, but had been appointed as the state representative at UNSEC in Geneva. The tribunal chair subsequently made a point of telling her that it was he who had given her the title of “people’s ambassador,” not Whitman.

“The president’s days are numbered,” he confided. “The tribunal is planning to run a campaign to discredit her, and they wish to nominate me in her place. I want you by my side, Alexa, helping to promote popular reforms.”

While this wasn’t exactly what Whitman had said to her, it was close enough to make her realize she needed to free herself from the state’s clutches before she became corrupted by the machinations of the people at its heart. And who came to her rescue? Why, Jordan, of course.

The four of them—Alexa, Jordan, Lexie, and Manaia—were now spending more time together, which she enjoyed, though she found that the small talk of the regular get-togethers bored her. More often than not, she preferred to spend time talking to Jordan alone. She was aware of the excitement at the DDC around the extraordinary things that XR-12 was capable of, and being a mathematician, she could easily absorb the fundamentals of code and the basics of designing algorithms sufficiently for Jordan to share his ideas with her. He was a clear thinker and never condescending, which was why she’d so enjoyed working with him in college, and it seemed that quantum computing was leading his imagination down pathways that he enjoyed discussing with her as an equal.

Then one day, he started talking to her about a phenomenon called “quantum entanglement.”

“It occurs when two separate subatomic particles become so strongly bonded that what happens to one also happens to the other, even when they’re far apart,” he explained. “It’s not new. Einstein conceptualized it, and forty years ago scientists demonstrated what they called ‘teleportation’ by taking two computer chips with quantum particle entanglement and separating them, one on earth and one in space, then transferring information one to the other without linking infrastructure of any kind.”

“Aren’t humans made up of tiny subatomic particles as well?” Alexa asked.

“Yes.” He smiled. “And some scientists believe that our particles can become entangled when we form such a strong bond that we share each other’s thoughts and feelings … like when we fall in love.”

“Have you ever fallen in love like that?”

“Not so deep that I became entangled, no. And you?”

“The same,” she replied quickly.

It seemed that the sheer number of qubits available in XR-12 was encouraging him to explore the possibility of adding instantaneous exchange of information with other unmixed systems, perhaps with a view to interplanetary travel.

“The approach I’m taking is loosely along the lines of the Mandelbrot set. You remember that?”

“Of course,” she enthused. “Didn’t he study the parameter space of quadratic polynomials?”

“It can also be defined as the connectedness locus of a family of polynomials.”

“I see where you’re going… My God, that’s so exciting.”

Maybe, he suggested, she might like to work with him on it. It was just a thought. She didn’t respond. He knew that she was wrapping up her involvement with the tribunal, and she didn’t want him to think she was applying for a job with him. Besides, she was getting more and more requests from universities to speak to their student unions about her ideas for Agenda 2060 reforms, and those were paying engagements. The more she hesitated over accepting them, the higher the offers were going, so she didn’t need a paying job.

When he mentioned it again later the same day, she asked what he had in mind.

“Well, whatever time you can spare, I thought we could run some experimental functions together,” he suggested.

So that’s how it started. They worked well together. She, like him, preferred to tackle mathematical problems on her own, so they didn’t crowd each other. In fact, on some days they did not see each other at all. She’d realized that the most fruitful line of experimentation was in the area of fractals, which were not limited to geometric patterns, but could also describe processes in time. Fractals that displayed self-similarity and separated were sometimes called “Julia sets,” which had always fascinated her.

One day, Jordan admitted that he’d been sitting on his findings about the handwritten minutes she’d found at the Social Equity Ministry. XR-11 had identified the participants and linked them to the people and organizations around the world that really pulled the strings. It was a complex web of interconnected foundations, global corporations, politicians, money market manipulators, and career bureaucrats that were just as active today as they had been at the time of the Overthrow. He’d concluded, however, that exposing them would not change anything.

Bill Jones, Jr., had been very direct about it.

“We know all this, Jordan,” Bill advised. “Peddling influence for gain predates the Sermon on the Mount. If you ask me, there’s always been a hankering for centralizing power in as few hands as possible. Career bureaucrats, unelected lawmakers, political functionaries, and academics and media types who see themselves as the intellectual elite would love to be part of an overarching supranational government that is not democratically accountable to anybody but themselves. You’re not telling us anything new. But it isn’t bureaucrats that run the state; it’s business.”

“Wouldn’t people like to know?”

“What’s to be gained? They can’t change anything.”

“And the carbon tax scam,” Jordan asked. “That doesn’t worry you?”

Bill laughed dismissively. “Once, it was oil barons ripping us off. Now, it’s renewables cartels milking government subsidies. Look at the names, man. They’re mostly the same.”

Hearing this, Alexa had to agree, albeit reluctantly. Her own experiences inside the deep state had convinced her that truth was not a strong enough weapon to really harm it. On the other hand, truth in the hands of ordinary people—like the way Artie Sharp delivered it—strengthened the hope and resilience of the people. That’s what she was now seeing on campuses and in social media. But when Jordan confessed about the experiment he and Hedley Payne were conspiring to conduct on George Kyros, she begged to be involved. It was so daring, anarchic, and off-the-wall that it would be a triumph if they could pull it off.

And that’s when the plan was hatched: George Kyros would be interviewed at the Potsdam Earth Day celebration in 2060 … by Alexa Smythe.