Pax Robotica: Genesis (Part 1)

I knew who he was the moment he walked in. His name was Bane, William Sebastian Bane. He was a professor of geopolitics at Harvard and a special advisor to the President. He stood at six feet two, slim, athletic, and graceful. He looked the part of an urbane, suave, dignified, ever so slightly dishevelled, and classically handsome academic from a well-to-do background. There was, however, something vaguely reckless and dangerous about him.

He had a sharp-featured face with piercing blue eyes. His cheekbones were high, his nose proportionate, his mouth mischievous, his lips average, his teeth white, his jaw square, and his chin strong. He wore his hair in the classic crew cut that showcased his good genes and privileged background.

He was dressed in a Savile Row-tailored tweed jacket with elbow patches, a light blue cotton shirt, a dark bow tie, a pair of grey trousers, and a pair of captoe oxford shoes. With a young, beautiful Asian woman in his arm, he approached our table. He walked with a barely perceptible but distinct swagger of an impish frat boy used to having things his way. He greeted us in a quiet, commanding voice. I could hear traces of Boston Brahmin and Queen’s English in his otherwise accentless, crisp, and perfect diction. Without being invited, he took one of the two empty chairs at our table and signalled the young woman to take the other.

As soon as he had sit down, he spoke, “In the good old day man was his own worst enemy. Now it’s his creation.”

I still don’t know whether it was just my imagination, but his companion seemed to have shot him a fierce, threatening look. That fierce look disappeared as quickly as it came, before I could ascertain that it was really there. The young woman smiled at him, more visibly and longer now, as if to say all was forgiven as long as he stopped, but he seemed determined to ignore her.

He casually continued, “After I’d completed my thesis Harvard offered me a tenure track position on the condition that I stopped acting like a reckless playboy on campus. I refused, of course, but I got the position anyway.

 “Harvard’s decision to bend its own rules to recruit me bolstered my profound sense of superiority and entitlement. I felt special—chosen, really—and that the only one to whom I had to justify my actions was myself.

 “Within two years I developed my theory of geopolitical dynamics based on my understanding of privileged and powerful men. I couldn’t imagine myself writing computer code to run the simulations to prove my own theory, however. It was a task for lesser men.

 “So I hired Wayne Consulting’s founder, Billy Jayden Wayne, the best working applied mathematician and computer scientist in America, to do it for me.

“If his name did not betray a childhood of poverty, neglect, and malnutrition, his look certainly did. Billy Wayne was diminutive of a man. He stood at no more than five feet two inches, stooping. His head was perceptibly lopsided with the forehead slightly protruding and the back practically flat. His left ear was a little smaller than his right, while his right cheek was higher than his left. His nose appeared flat and broken. Billy Wayne’s belly protruded noticeably even though he was almost emaciated. One of his legs was shorter than the other and therefore he walked with a limp.

“Billy Wayne often greeted me in an expertly tailored suit, a white shirt, and a conservative tie. He wanted to look as dignified as he could, given how far he had gone and how rich he had become. Yet somehow his outfit made him look so comical that it was hard for me not to imagine that he’d be more elegant in a baseball cap worn backward, a pair of cheap plastic sunglasses, a Bluetooth headset, a gaudy clip-on tie, and an oversized cell phone holster hanging from his shorts’ belt. Billy Wayne probably hated how he appeared, but he couldn’t help himself.

“As bad as the physical marks of that childhood were, the enduring psychological and emotional scars of it were immensely greater. Billy Wayne’s mother was never sure which of the dozen young toughs who lived the South Boston housing projects was his father; she simply did not care. She considered the boy an obstacle to her reckless lifestyle and wild parties and left him locked in an empty, windowless room most of the day as soon as she’d figured out he’d live, not because she wanted him to but because she was afraid that she might go to prison if he didn’t.

“The four-year-old Billy Wayne screamed for his mother when she left him in that room for the very first time. He screamed until he could scream no more. The next few times he cried himself to sleep, and then he just sobbed when she led him to that room and locked the door.

“Gradually Billy Wayne came to believe that being locked up was part of a normal daily routine. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t hate it either. Sometimes he just lay in the middle of that empty room staring at the dirty, cracked ceiling, thinking about nothing at all. Billy Wayne simply had not experienced anything to think about.

“And that was how Billy Wayne spent the next eight years of his life until his mother let him loose to prevent him from bothering the men she brought home. He considered himself lucky for the day if he got more than a dinner of anything edible.

“Billy Wayne spent the afternoons of his middle school years by himself, cold and hungry. He didn’t always get that dinner either. His mother almost never cooked, she brought him food whenever she remembered, or felt like it.

“It hurt Billy Wayne so much every time he walked by a local Catholic school and saw kids around his age being dropped off, picked up, hugged, and kissed by their parents. He could only imagine how nice it would have been to have a warm room and a hot meal waiting for him after school. Why were those kids so lucky and he was so wretched? He couldn’t remember how many times he’d sit alone in front of his apartment’s locked door, crying.

“It was not until the last year of middle school that a kind old lady who lived next door took notice of him sitting in front of his apartment’s locked door waiting for his mother to come home. She gave him a peanut butter sandwich and took him to the local public library where at least he could be warm.

“Billy Wayne spent the next few afternoons in his newly-found joy of being warm. Gradually he wandered to the kids’ section and pick up a book of adventures and struggled to read it; he was more than a year behind his grade in reading. After a while reading became easier and those tales became more real to him. From then on Billy Wayne would temporarily forget his miserable life in the afternoon as he embarked on adventures in far-away places.

“From those adventures Billy Wayne developed a deep interest in science, technology, mathematics, and computer programming. He taught himself algebra, trigonometry, linear algebra, calculus, and computer programming, and soon was better than his teachers in those subjects.

“Billy Wayne graduated to reading classic literature and history once he’d been through the adventure and sci-fi sections in the library. Billy Wayne was no longer ignorant. He had escaped the world in which he was born into mentally, but he was still as poor and as hungry as ever. He would never manage to lose the poverty-stricken look of a neglected, hungry child.

“Billy Wayne hated his station in life. He hated his mother and everyone around her. He despised the crass, crude, uncouth, and violent men she brought home. They were as different from the man he wanted to be as night and day. Billy Wayne longed to rise above those wretched creatures, to control them, to put them in their places.

“Billy Wayne scored a perfect 800 on his SAT math. He was the only person in the history of his high school to have gotten that score and admitted to Northeastern University.

“During his sophomore year Billy Wayne applied for and got a job as a student programmer with Northeastern’s Center for Scientific Computing. His hard work and genius shined through. Billy Wayne took on more and more complex programming tasks and in less than a year he became the undisputed superstar at the Center. If Billy Wayne couldn’t do a programming task, nobody at Northeastern could.

“Billy Wayne’s boss at the Center encouraged him to pursue a Ph.D. in scientific computing. Naturally he applied for and got accepted to Northeastern. During his first year he entered and won the prestigious international scientific programming competition. For the first time in Northeastern’s history, its best doctoral candidate beat MIT’s best.

“Billy Wayne free-lanced as a scientific programmer during his graduate years.  His first assignments came from other scientific academics who neither could nor wanted to program their own simulations. Those assignments led to works at local small- and mid-sized engineering firms, hospitals, biotech companies, pharmaceutical companies, video game developers, and finally aerospace, automotive, and defense giants from all over the world.

“He did not want to become an academic even though he had offers from Stanford, Caltech, and MIT, so he founded his own consulting firm. Since then Billy Wayne had become a rich man, rich enough not to have to worry about money again, ever.

“Billy Wayne gradually grew bored with scientific programming; he was no longer content with just being a geek. He was very glad when I hired him to provide computer simulations for my theory. Billy Wayne would have done it for free. In fact, he was losing money because he had been spending much more time on the project than he was contractually required to, and he had turned down several lucrative assignments that he could spend the extra time on the simulation. Billy Wayne aspired to make policy recommendations.

“I still remember that pivotal day as if it were yesterday. Billy Wayne spoke excitedly as he led me into his office, ‘Professor Bane, unfortunately the process of disunification of America that you are so worried about has already begun, if the result of my simulation, based on your theory, is to be believed. It is long but inevitable.’”

The young woman gave Bane that look again, but he ignored her and continued, “‘Unfortunately, despite its name, the United States America is no longer united, and we no longer have a national interest that is actually in everyone’s interest. What are being sold as our national interests are inevitably the interests of the elites who managed to put their politician into the White House and keep him there for the second term.’

“I was in a charitable mood and so I let Billy Wayne continue with his self-important talk, ‘Our country had had to divert more and more of its national treasures to building and maintaining a military capable of defending the interests of those elites. And as a result we’ve short-changed our investments in science and technology, in the arts and culture, in health and education, in our infrastructure and our environment, and before long our economy became less innovative, less efficient, and less profitable than its competitors because our working men and women became less educated, less healthy, less well-paid, more exploited, and therefore less productive than their fellow workers in other countries.

“‘Our weakened economy generated less cash for maintaining our military supremacy. The lack of funds had forced our military to cancel new weapons and to delay upgrades. While we became poorer China grew richer and more capable of making massive investments in its military. It is just a matter of time before China becomes less meek and more assertive, and then goes on to challenge the United States of America outright.

“‘America’s disunity makes us vulnerable to international crises. In fact, any of the world’s multi-billionaires can inflict considerable damage to our economy and render us defenseless against Russian or Chinese aggression.

“‘It is time we turn our attention to those whose selfish ends have harmed us all. It is time to let them know that we will not sit idle while they continue to destroy our great nation.

“‘Professor Bane, I do know that you are a great American patriot, even if no self-respecting, dignified man of your caliber would ever call himself that. This is what I’d like to propose that you do...’

“‘Excellent work, Dr. Wayne. You’ve proved my theory and I like your proposal very much but I’ll have to give it more thoughts,’ I replied. ‘Here’s what I would like you to do next: I’d like to know if powerful men with enough resources could destabilize the existing world order without resorting to military means, I’m thinking of private men or government officials who act on their own behalf. I’d like you to identify all those men, including and especially Americans, Chinese, and Russians capable of creating international havocs and whether any of them hold any grudges against any country, because sooner or later some of them will try.’

“‘I’ll work on that right away, Professor Bane.’ Billy Wayne hated himself for feeling compelled to take orders from me, despite himself and despite his years of continued success. Billy Wayne told himself that obeying was me a necessary step to achieve his goal, and it was.

“The more I thought about Billy Wayne’s proposal the more I was intrigued by it. It excited my impulsive, reckless nature and my sense of invincibility. Against my better judgment, I planned to set it in motion without giving it much thought.

“After giving instructions to Billy Wayne, I drove back to my apartment on Boston’s Beacon Hill to pick up Sophia Song, an on-again-off-again lover from my Oxford days who was visiting from Hong Kong. I had promised to take her to the Museum of Fine Arts for her appointment with the Museum’s director.”