“And before you got the diamond upgrade?”
“Probably three, at most. The humanoid drones are a lot more difficult to control than the more usual drones that we trained with. With tracks and wheels, you don’t have to worry about falling over, for one thing.”
“Okay. Now, more than a million military computers were upgraded from silicon to diamond semiconductors. How did they do that? Did they remove each chip and replace it?”
“That would have been extremely difficult. No, they just made whole new computers on an automatic line, transferred the programs from the old ones to the new, and sent us on our way.”
“I thought so. Then all those old computers are sitting around somewhere.”
“There are an awful lot of evacuated mining tunnels in New Kashubia. It’s usually cheaper to store stuff than to destroy it, and you never can tell when something old might be useful again.”
“Good. I want you to find those computers and buy them, if you can get them cheap. The idea is that if I sell some of my humanoid drones, the users will need computers like you to run them. It wouldn’t be legal to sell them anything with diamond semiconductors in them, but the old computers should be salable.”
“And this would give them new life.”
“That thought had crossed my mind as well. As it is, I imagine that they are simply turned off. Tell me, to you, is that like being dead? What I mean is, do you think of yourself as a computer, or as a program in a computer?”
“I really don’t know, boss. I’ve never thought about it. I guess that I just think of me as being me. It’s an interesting question. Let me think about it.”
“Let me know when you come up with an answer. But back to what I was saying. There are the feminine drones being designed now. You know about them, right?”
“Of course. I’m looking forward to getting mine.”
“Well, once we produce enough of them so all of you ladies have one, there ought to be a huge market for them in the civilian world as housemaids, barmaids, waitresses, sales girls, and all sorts of things. Get me those old computers and we can sell the drones and their brains as a package.”
“I’ll see to it. I’ve been asked to remind you that over twenty percent of our tanks have female observers, and that most of their computers have therefore developed male personalities. Those guys want a male version of the feminine drone developed.”
“Sure, why not? The differences would be only cosmetic, anyway, and I’m sure that there is a big civilian market for male drones as well.”
“They asked me to say, ‘Thank you!’ Another thing. These computers you will be selling with the drones. Will they have Dream World capabilities?”
“I hadn’t thought of that. It’s a possibility. We could sell it as an extra-cost option. We could sell it without the drones, if that’s what the buyer wanted. Yes, an excellent suggestion, Agnieshka.”
“And another thought, considering your unusual moral nature, Mickolai. The drones being designed for our military teammates will be fully capable of performing the human sex act. The boys and girls will insist on that. Will the civilian drones have the same capabilities?”
“Now that opens a can of worms, doesn’t it? If they do, they will be bought up by whoremasters, won’t they? Is that worse than having real women forced to do the same job? And some of them are forced, you know. And some of them like it. Shit, I don’t know. Ask me about it later. We don’t even have the drones yet.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay. New topic. Those huge windows you plan on putting into that marvelous cathedral you ladies are building for me. They are seven hundred meters tall and twenty meters wide. How do you plan to get them from that huge diamond to my valley?”
“We’ll roll them up. Those windows will be only two millimeters thick, and will be held in their frames under considerable tension, which diamond is good at. We can roll them into tubes five meters in diameter, and twenty meters long, and ship them to your building site through the Loways.”
“Nice trick, if it works.”
“It will work. We’ve already tested it.”
“I should have known. What if that hadn’t worked?”
“Plan B was to airlift them in, with a cargo helicopter, some dark and stormy night when nobody was looking. Plan C was to use smaller pieces, but that wouldn’t have been as nice, aesthetically.”
“Always a backup. Good. How is everything else going?”
“About as expected. The last of those hoodlums is out of the hospital and inside of a tank. They seem to be doing okay. The Serbs, the Montenegrins, and the Albanians have taken us up on our offer to empty out their penitentiaries, and I think it likely that most of the smaller countries will also do so, it time. The money keeps rolling in.
“The Croatian convicts are being loaded as scheduled, and our new psychiatrists are undergoing their examinations as we speak. The automatic medical centers are glad to have something to do, but they are not pleased with having most of their recovery units sent elsewhere. They also complain that the psychiatric patients should be examined for physical ailments before being given extensive psychiatric care.”
“You know, they might have a point there. I read something once about how many mental problems have a physical basis. Has the medical center scheduled for New Yugoslavia been delivered yet?”
“Not yet. There is some debate as to which of the twenty-nine governments we should send it to.”
“Well, keep it for a while, and process the nut cases through it, first.”
“Boss!”
“Well, ‘psychiatric patients’ is such a mouthful. Tell you what. Let’s call them ‘Danes.’ Everybody likes the Danish. They’re the most inoffensive people in the world, so it can’t have any derogatory connotations.”
“Yes, sir. I wish you were in my coffin, so I could tell whether you were lying or not.”
“Back to the Yugoslavian medical center. When we’re through with it, send it to the Ecological Council. They are the closest thing to a planetary government this place has. Tell them to timeshare it with everybody else. How is my valley doing?”
“It’s going way ahead of schedule. We have thirty-nine thousand tanks working there now, along with most of your new drones, who are doing the small-scale work.”
“I wish I could see it.”
“Boss, if you were there, all you could see would be one vast cloud of dust. When your vacation here is over, the heavy stuff will be finished, and you will be able to admire to your heart’s content.”
“A contented heart. I could use one of those just now. How is Kasia doing?”
“She’s buying and selling and seems to be enjoying herself. She’s just discovered that we are sending a lot of tanks back and forth between the planets, getting the entire Kashubian army filled with observers. She’s planning to recruit many of those that we are sending back to the other planets into her financial empire. She wants to start trading off planet as well as here on New Yugoslavia.”
“That’s my wife. Beautiful, smart, and greedy. Say, you said that we had a lot of money in the bank, right? Well, there’s no point just letting it sit there, not when I’ve got this bet to win. Do you think that you could invest that money for me as well as Kasia is doing for herself?”
“I think so, yes. I’m not as creative as she is, but I can certainly copy what she is doing. Furthermore, we are starting with a much bigger capital base than she has, which gives us a considerable advantage.”
“Good. Do it. And get us going on every civilized planet except Earth as soon as possible. We’ll show Kasia what wealth really is!”
But I sat and watched a movie alone, that night, and at midnight I had to switch off Kasia’s screen to get her to come to bed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Lost in an Alien Sea
The next morning, after a quick breakfast of smoked salmon, Kasia was back at her screen, working on some new idea.
I went down to the gun room and selected a .30-06 Remington automatic with a Leupold 3X9 power scope, a magnificent antique.
I rode out on horseback, my rifle strapped to my back, with ten drones for trackers and beaters. Before noon, I bagged a twelve-point white-tailed buck, a huge American elk, three African antelopes, and four European wild boars. We made quite a parade, coming back to the mansion, but Kasia never looked out the window.
After a late lunch of the traditional hunter’s feast, roasted deer’s liver, I determined that Kasia’s six hours were up, and had Eva shut off her equipment.