Empire Games Series, Book 1(21)
“Are you suggesting industrial espionage as a business model?” asked Huw. Gangly and inquisitive, he was one of Miriam’s most reliable allies within the Clan. She could count on him for an easy prompt. The downside, though, was that if the majority didn’t feel that their concerns were being adequately addressed by her plan, more and more of them would sign on with Helmut and drift back to their old ways. Before the exile, the Clan’s members had been held together by fear and a ruthless internal police organization; now that the worst had happened, Miriam really had no way of compelling them to follow her.
“This goes a lot further than industrial espionage,” she said gratefully. “We aren’t going to feed them isolated tidbits—we’re going to promise a whole new way of life. What we need to do here is what I tried and failed to do in the Gruinmarkt—accelerate social development for all.” The Gruinmarkt, one of the eastern kingdoms of North America in time line one, had barely medieval levels of technology: the privileged few with Clan connections had been able to import US tech by means of world-walking, and had rejected attempts at modernization for the masses. “Here in the Commonwealth they’ve just conveniently smashed their aristocracy: there’s nobody with entrenched privilege to defend. That’s an opportunity for us to exploit, if we’re smart enough.”
“Just how are you going to go about that?” Helmut asked acidly. “From inside a prison camp?”
Miriam reined in her annoyance; she responded badly to provocative sarcasm: “We need to somehow get the Commonwealth leadership to commit to full-scale industrial development and modernization. Right now, the USA is about sixty years ahead of anyone in this time line. But I think the Commonwealth can close the gap completely in less than forty years—maybe thirty—with our help. And if they can do that before the USA discovers us here, we’ll be infinitely safer. Make no mistake—sooner or later, they will find us. And even though we didn’t kill their president, they’ll expect us to pay the price.”
“Is it even possible for a society to progress that rapidly?” asked Brilliana, who was usually loath to disagree with her leader. She perched on a desk in the corner of the room, keeping one wary eye on the door. (As Miriam’s first-sworn bodyguard, she took Miriam’s security personally.) “It’s 2003. Let’s say the USA have a sixty-year lead now. In thirty years it’ll be 2033. You’re talking about catching up to a ninety-year lead in thirty years, not a sixty-year lead. Are you sure about your projections?”
“Yes. That’s why I said it might take nearer to forty.” Miriam’s shoulders slumped slightly. A forty-year plan: that was a lifetime’s work, a daunting project for anyone. “But it’s not impossible. Look at the Korean Peninsula in time line two. North Korea and South Korea started out level-pegging in 1953. They were both oppressive dictatorships with flattened cities and superpower sponsors, and they were still pretty much even as late as 1973. But today, South Korea’s got a higher GDP than Japan, while in North Korea they’ve gone backward.
“Folks, this is it. This is the time line we have to live in. We don’t get to go home to the Gruinmarkt, in time line one: it glows in the dark. Even if we could, would we want to? I will remind you that the only things that made the Gruinmarkt tolerable were enormous local wealth and access to luxuries imported from the United States. We don’t have the local wealth and we can’t import stuff from the USA anymore—we’re not welcome there, in case you’d forgotten.” Any Clan member trying to make a life in the United States risked ending up in a supermax prison for the rest of their life—or at least until their date with a federal executioner.
“We’re stuck in time line three, stuck in the Commonwealth here, unless you think striking out at random in search of something better is a solution. At least here we’ve got the ear of the First Man,” she said, referring to the founder and head of the Radical Party, who had consolidated power in the wake of the Revolution. “We can work with that. But running away again isn’t an option unless our backs are up against the wall. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to go and live in a cave somewhere, or a drafty castle with no antibiotics and no general anesthesia. I happen to like civilization, and this is the nearest thing we’ve got.”
Miriam looked round at her audience. She’d taken care to ensure that half of them were women, and she could tell at a glance that she had their attention. The state of civilization in the Gruinmarkt had been medieval, except where world-walkers had traded in US goods, such as the imported medicines that meant they didn’t have to endure repeated risky pregnancies and bury half their babies before their fifth birthday.
“My plan, which I intend to sell to the First Man, is to turn this camp into the Commonwealth’s source of miracle technologies and scientific insights. We’re going to engage in knowledge transfer on a historically unprecedented scale, acquiring and disseminating the necessary skills and ideas to enable the Commonwealth to play catch-up with the United States in time line two. Then, once we get ourselves out of this camp and into strategic positions within their economic and industrial planning apparatus, we’ll be able to move mountains. We can turn this time line into somewhere we’re proud to live, a place where we’re safe from the US government. And there’s one more thing: once we have official government backing for the project, we’re going to skew it to suit our own agenda.”