Nontech Headquarters

Edward Yates sat in his office, reading the press release from Razor, Inc again, looking for hidden details. His office was one of the few that was lit this late at night, but as the CEO of the world’s premier nanotechnology supplier, he was accustomed to sleepless nights.

He scanned the display in front of him for the umpteenth time. My tech made this happen, he reminded himself. This is the biggest breakthrough of the century - perhaps of all time - and my nano made that happen.

This could mean functional immortality if what they’re saying is true. Even if it’s not really ‘him,’ it would be the most significant breakthrough in artificial intelligence that we’ve ever seen. Either way, I can’t let this slip through my fingers. This is too big an opportunity to pass up. There’s no way I’m letting that simulation company overshadow mine, and I’ve got to make sure that digital whatever-it-is works for me.

A short message was typed up, addressed to various key people, and read one last time before being sent. “We’re buying the simulation company, Razor Inc, in the next few months. Whatever it takes. Make it happen.”

---

Jason was awake before the sun rose the next day, but the sky had begun to brighten. Well, apparently I do successfully wake up, at least in a realistic scenario like this, and I do not dream of electric sheep. Jason chuckled quietly, then paused in his line of thought. Actually, I’m not sure if I had any dreams last night. I can’t remember any.

Something lurked at the edge of his consciousness, and he chased the thought down before it could slip away. Now that I think about it, I can remember a lot of things I wouldn’t expect. The look of the trees we walked by and the names of the people I talked to yesterday. His smile grew. I’ve always been bad with names, Jason thought as he ran through his conversations of the day before. But now, I can recall the name of each person I talked to, and the exact way they pronounced them. With further experimentation, Jason realized he could access various specific details from his memories if he concentrated. That’s going to be useful, he knew.

His perfect recall didn’t just include memories of his current world, he discovered. He could see in his mind’s eye the full negotiation with Razor after his accident. He could have taken the time to count each tear that fell from his wife’s eyes while he was explaining what had happened. All the way back to ‘The Accident,’ as he thought of it, was a flawless, uninterrupted memory. All of it, at least, but the sleep. Jason wasn’t sure what that meant, just yet. My digital mind apparently doesn’t have a ‘let memories fade into obscurity’ function.

The thought of his family took his mind down a different path. I wonder what they’re doing in the real world, right now, he wondered. It’s been almost 24 hours here, so… Jason did some mental math, annoyed that his newfound mental superpowers didn’t include instant multiplication and division. In their perception, it hasn’t even been a full half-hour...

Jason was stunned. It was one thing to hear that he’d experience time compression, but it was another blow altogether to wake up and realize that his night’s sleep took less time than a coworker’s coffee break.

He had barely finished the cold breakfast from his pack, washed down with the watered wine, when Alex found him, carrying a bundle of sharp-pointed stakes. “I’ve brought a few markers to get us started. The rest are piled by the edge of the camp.”

Jason rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “Let’s lay out the beginnings of our grand capital city.”

Before the two men had the chance to carry out their plan, Phipp came hurrying in their direction with a worried look on his face. “My lord,” he called out as he approached. “May I inquire as to where your lordship lodged last night?”

“Under a beautiful canvas of sparkling diamonds, the likes of which the richest king cannot purchase,” Jason replied, as he realized what was likely the cause of Phipp’s worry.

“I… I see, my lord.” Phipp’s words tumbled out but at a slower pace this time. “I think your lordship means out here, under the night sky,” as he gestured around. “I beg your forgiveness for not offering proper lodgings for one of your status. My wife asked me about it this morning. We will vacate our humble home today for your use, my lord.”

Jason didn’t need to think about what his response had to be. He’d summarized his philosophy a couple of years ago and had it framed in his office: There are two types of managers, but only one kind of leader. Some managers have whips constantly in their hands. The other always had the question, “what can I do to help you in your role?” on their lips. Only one of those types ended up with willing, enthusiastic followers, and what use was a leader without loyal followers?

“Don’t worry about it, my good man, and certainly keep your family in your home. I’ll admit, I’ll gladly accept the cover of your roof when it looks like we’ll see rain. What kind of man would I be if I kicked a woman out of her home?”

“Thank you, my lord.” a relieved Phipp replied. “If you allow it, I’ll go tell my wife now.”

“Of course, Phipp.”

The ‘kind, caring leader’ persona wasn’t an act - that was the genuine person Jason saw in himself, but being treated like a king would be a huge power trip for any man, however benevolent. Jason was agreeable but ambitious. It was an added bonus to his philosophy that befriending the former town leader would encourage a seamless transition into his rule.

Jason and Alex laid out the structure of the town’s addition on the upstream side of the existing village and camp. A massive boulevard running the length of the site was marked, and homesites covering about a quarter of an acre each were paced out and arranged in the beginnings of a grid pattern of blocks. The road space separating these blocks was enough for ‘two lanes plus parking,’ according to Jason, a comment that confused Alex to no end.

The homesites, too, caused Alex confusion - a feeling he was getting used to. They were five times larger than he thought necessary, but he held his tongue on the subject. Tyler, when he walked by with a couple of other men in tow, spoke up. “If our town is this spread out, my lord, and we decide to form a defensive wall around it, we will be forced to build a much longer wall, and defend a much wider front.”

Jason paused. “That’s a good point. I hadn’t considered that.” Bigger isn’t necessarily better, he reminded himself, while holding back an immature grin. It also means more road work, more walking, and a greater distance to run any utilities, now that I think about it - if I even get that far in my plans. This isn’t suburbia, and people here are probably used to tiny houses, anyway.

“You’re right. We’ll divide each of the lots we’ve already created into two. People will still have space to garden if they wish to, which will likely be vital for us as we get established. It still gives us enough space to grow in the future.”

Jason left Alex with instructions to continue the grid pattern of counting out lots that were twenty paces by forty paces, forming enough lots for 150 houses, although he only expected forty or fifty of those lots to be claimed immediately. Many of the families would be building on the farmsteads Tyler was marking, but he wanted the town to be able to expand in an orderly fashion.

While walking back to the wagons and canvas tents, he thought about his priorities. We’ll need to build at least a hundred houses before winter hits. We’ll need food to last until the next harvest hits, so farming, hunting, and attempting to purchase what we can from the towns we know are a day or two away is essential. I’ve got ideas of the water-powered sawmill I want to build to speed up the lumber production process, but building the lumber mill is going to take a decent amount of lumber, metalwork, and time anyway. No matter what I do, it’s going to be a slow start-up.

He followed the sound of clanging metal to the far side of the camp.

---

The town members settled in to life in tents and makeshift shacks as well as they could and took to their work with a vengeance. The sound of crosscut saws and the sound of crashing trees and axes chopping limbs filled the nearby forest. Stones and debris were rolled down the embankment into the nearby stream, and water began to back up into what Jason hoped would soon be a millpond for lumber. Farmland was staked out, and thick sod was cut from the ground and inverted with the roots sticking up, in preparation for seeding. The sleepy village shook off its sluggishness and prepared to enter a new era.

A week went by, and then two, and Jason found himself so busy coordinating new construction projects that he barely had a chance to remember the bigger picture of his situation. He enjoyed throwing himself into the work, perhaps too much. That all came crashing to a halt one day.

“My lord! Come quick!” a man Jason didn’t immediately recognize called as he ran towards the town ruler. Jason quickly cut off his conversation with the town’s blacksmith and ran after the frantic man. They soon reached the site of the millpond dam, where a small crowd stood around a boy moaning in pain and clutching his leg with one arm.

“Broke his leg,” one of the bystanders said curtly, they hurried to add, “my Lord.”

Jason walked over to the boy, who was crying into what looked to be his father’s shoulder. Needing down in the damp grass, he felt along the leg near the break, not completely sure what he was looking for but wanting to see if anything felt “wrong” to his admittedly untrained hands.

The boy’s whimpers grew louder, and Jason’s hands found the break through the swollen tissue. It was definitely not as it should be, though he could have told that from the unnatural angle the leg bent. The father’s distraught look grew more upset - eyebrows coming down and together as Jason’s touch caused his boy pain, though the man bit his tongue and avoided saying anything rash.

“What’s your name, boy?” Jason asked, but got no response other than increased moaning.

His father answered for him. “It’s Mark, my lord.”

“Well, Mark, we’re going to have to realign your bone. It’s pretty messed up right now. We want you to have some chance to walk again, okay?” Jason judged the darkening mood of the crowd and realized his bedside manner could use some work. He decided not to speculate on how much the procedure would hurt or comment that he didn’t really know what he was doing beyond what he’d seen on TV. His subjects wouldn’t understand, anyway.

Jason called some of the men in the crowd to hold the boy down, and the child was given a leather belt on which to bite down. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he anticipated what was to come.

The father’s sharp intake of breath was echoed through the crowd as Jason bent the leg what they thought was the wrong way, creating an even more crazy angle. Mark’s muffled groans grew louder, and his fists struck the ground. The ruler-turned-medic attempted to straighten out the leg, but it resisted.

Come on, Jason pleaded. Please work.

He bent the bone at a greater angle. The father couldn’t hold back a growl at seeing his son’s pain, and Jason knew he had one more chance to get it right before he was known as some sick ruler who likes to play with broken extremities.

The bone on bone made a ssssnick sound, and the bone slid back into place. Fortunately for him and his rapidly deteriorating reputation, the boy’s moans audibly decreased. Jason was surprised he hadn’t passed out from the pain.

A member of the crowd ran and fetched some wooden stakes, and Jason bound them around Mark’s leg with strips of torn cloth.

“No walking on that until it heals and stops hurting you, you hear?” Jason admonished the boy but got no response. The father’s conflicted emotions were visible on his face, but he gave a curt nod and a thank you before picking up his boy and striding back toward the town.

“What was he doing when he got hurt?” Jason wondered aloud, and the dispersing crowd filled in the missing parts of the story. The boy had been working on carrying stones and earth to fit in between the larger boulders and debris of the slowly growing dam when he slipped and fell between two boulders. Poor kid. Jason thought. Can’t say I like child labor when things go wrong like this. But in this society, everyone has to pull their weight - often quite literally. Families wouldn’t take well to a law that restricts most of their workforce in this era. And it takes a lot of work to take care of a family’s basic needs in a society like this.

I’m just not used to seeing kids out of school… the thought startled him. I guess I need to start up a school. If I end up staying here for ten years, today’s teenagers will be tomorrow’s educated inventors and workforce.

With thoughts of building an education system from scratch, he wandered back to the blacksmith to resume his conversation about the next vital step to his envisioned industrial revolution.

---

In the darkened room containing the server banks responsible for generating the simulation, code that had been hastily written one real-world day before finally kicked in. Had the programmer known about Jason’s agreement with Razor that they wouldn’t actively work against him in the scenario, he might have protested the assignment, but those details had not been shared with the team.

The challenge he coded in would make the game more interesting, he knew, and nobody wanted to waste their time in a boring simulation. The bonus money he received for doing coding that would otherwise be a normal part of his job didn’t indicate anything nefarious, he reassured the slight twinge of guilt he felt. He was finally getting the appreciation he deserved, was all that this bonus money meant, and that was the last he thought of it.

---

“Toilet Paper.” Jason emphatically stated. “I do not want to live ten years without toilet paper.”

He was making a mental list of priorities for invention when a box reminiscent of modern jewelry boxes suddenly appeared on the rough-hewn table beside him. Startled, he looked around before reaching for it and unclasping the latch. A note was carefully placed on a stack of modern pristine white paper.

Jason, congratulations on reaching one month within the simulation. This box is your way of communicating with the outside world. Once a month (your time), any papers within this box will be digitized and delivered to whoever you address them to in the real world. Don’t expect privacy, but I’m sure your wife would appreciate letters.

Keep in mind that a month for you is less than a day for all of us out here. We’ll likely reply sometime to whatever you send us partway through that day. For now, though, nothing much has changed. Your body is still going through testing and scanning, with nothing new discovered yet, I’ve been told. Upper management is still trying to decide on a strategy for how best to analyze the data we’re getting from the simulation. They’re divided into two camps at the moment - one of which wants to figure out how to make more people like you, and the other wants to learn how to make existing pseudo-AI more lifelike and creative. I can’t say more, as I’m told it’s not relevant to your scenario.

Regarding the sim - too bad it’s not snowing, or you could have a snowball fight with your townsfolk. Remember the one we had last December? Good times.

Hang in there, boss.

Aleah

“Well, that’s nifty,” Jason spoke at his magic box. “Paper was something I needed, too.”

He carefully did not speak out loud the thoughts that were going a thousand miles a minute through his brain. I’d have certainly remembered if we had a snowball fight last year. Was she trying to give me a hint about the upcoming weather? It’s a relatively warm late spring, and I don’t think it’s going to snow. Perhaps we should re-prioritize shelter. What could she have meant?

Something about snow? He paused, but nothing came to mind. Snowballs? Fights? A memory came to the forefront of his mind. Early last year, we did get into an argument about the best way to run the sim development project we were working on, Jason remembered. She wanted to jump straight to developing the final simulation. I made us first build a better platform for development of the simulation storyline. Then, we used that new platform to create interesting characters. Finally, we applied our major plot points to the storyline, and let the simulation play itself out, tweaking as needed.

Each previous step amplified the future work that we did, and development got faster and faster, as opposed to merely working through it in a linear fashion. We called it Project Snowball because once we got it going and started rolling the metaphorical snowball down the hill, it gets bigger and gains more and more momentum without much work on our part.

So - what was she trying to tell me? That this simulation is going to be picking up momentum? Or that I need to choose a development path with exponential growth? Or is this really a poorly-hidden hint about the weather?

Further thought yielded no concrete answers. He would plan out his ‘tech tree,’ to borrow a term from the gaming industry he was so familiar with, and make sure he pushed the limits of possibility as hard as possible. How fast can a medieval society be modernized? We’re about to find out.

A plan found its way onto the paper that was initially intended for out-of-simulation messages. Electricity would be huge, but they’d have to work their way up to it. The mechanical power of their planned overshot water wheels could eventually be used for that, but in the meantime, it could also be used for purely mechanical tasks. Simple sawmills, plumbing, and sewage systems, the pipes they’d need, designs for the creation of metal wire, and more mechanical marvels made their way onto paper, and Jason was confident at least some of them would work.

He also had to think about security. It was tempting to see if he could accelerate conquering neighboring territories to expand his empire quickly. Still, whether he decided to do that or not, he had no desire to leave his town defenseless. Walls would probably be useful against the weapons of war he would be likely to see, but he didn’t want to stop there. Should I improve crossbows or ballistae? Probably not worth my time when I could be manufacturing gunpowder. Skip the era of slow matchlock unrifled guns and go straight to flintlocks with paper cartridges set behind bullets, not round balls, and rifle the barrels. Nice - three hundred years of weapon development in a few strokes of my quill pen.

Speaking of my pen, it’s unfortunate there’s no way that we’ll be able to manufacture ballpoints with the precision that they need to work. I’d love to have something that doesn’t leave ink blots all over my page. It’s ridiculous that a cheap ballpoint pen requires more advanced manufacturing techniques than a deadly weapon.

Perhaps I’m going about this the wrong way, he thought. What are the fundamental breakthroughs I need to achieve to loose the gates of innovation?

Powered Mechanics - things like sawmills, printing press, fast transportation, machining instead of blacksmithing. Stuff like this enables mass production.

Electricity - Light, obviously. Electric motors, turbines, heating, and AC. Communications - telephone, even computers, if I had the time… Not that there is any possibility of getting to that point in the time I have.

And toilet paper, Jason reminded himself. Moss and leaves just aren’t cutting it for me.

Eventually, Jason remembered the intended use of the paper and wrote out a quick thank you to Aleah, and a long letter to his wife. The rest of his observers, he felt, didn’t require his time. He had an empire to build.