Cowboys and Aliens Ch. 49

Then as for the vote... provide them with the address to our library so they can read about the process and set a date for the vote. Then you just need to tell us what the vote date is, and how many voting booths you need. I think each voting booth has 4 voting terminals if I remember correctly."

Leaving the government with a list of items to take care of, Mark and Liyana excused themselves to move on to the next meeting.

During the Tiberia meeting, Chancellor Hayda had responded by saying that she would make herself available to meet with them, so Mark made the call and told her they were on their way and they should arrive in the next half hour.

Maren soon had them headed towards Cupertina, which really wasn't that far away from Tiberia, just on the other side of the equator and only about 4 countries away. Cupertina was actually the closest land mass to the east coast of Garedon.

As they flew over Cupertina, the country was significantly larger than Tiberia. It ranged from mountains to the East, with rainforests across the northern part of the country, to plains and arid desert areas to the South and West. The plains had a lot of rivers and waterways that went everywhere except the desert areas in the South. Agriculture was definitely the predominant industry in this area, both for grain and ranching. They saw only a handful of enormous cities, and not all of them were along the shore.

As they arrived at the designated coordinates, which was by far the largest city in the country and probably had a population of 2 or 3 million, and directed to land on a helicopter pad on top of a building. There was a small group of personnel, including some armed security.

As usual, Gyges exited the shuttle first, followed by Liyana and Mark. Chancellor Hayda came to greet them, looking much better than she had the other day in the video call, but she still had to be in her 70s.

The small group took an elevator down a few floors, where they exited into an elegant wide hallway adorned with comfy looking chairs, beautiful paintings and works of art with large windows looking out over the city. About halfway down the hallway they entered what must have been an assembly hall, which based on the size of it, Mark suspected that all the doors on that side of the hallway entered this room.

The meeting ended up being almost identical to the Tiberia meeting, except that they argued that their vote to join the Federation should be valid and they shouldn't have to put the vote to the people. In the end, the result was the same, they would turn on the medical scanning and they would treat the most serious cases by Federation shuttles, then they were going to push a vote to the people, but Mark made it mandatory that they needed to use the Federation voting booths. With some things they said and their attitudes, he didn't fully trust any of them and figured there was likely rampant corruption.

The rest of the day ended up being more of the same, except the rest of the countries were all even smaller than Tiberia and some severely impoverished countries. One was a beautiful island country that was about 11,000 square kilometres with just under 3 million people. They relied a lot on tourism, and the tourist places were a drastic contrast to the way the general island lived. Most of the island was very impoverished and had almost nothing; it also didn't help that, being an island country, they were constantly rebuilding after tropical storms.

The one thing that caught Mark's attention was the government requesting to hold a vote as soon as possible, so they made the announcement to the local television stations saying there would be a vote in 3 months time about whether to join the Federation and that at noon the next day the Federation would begin identifying people infected with the virus and for any of the infected to make their way to the hospitals in the cities. They only had 4 cities over 100,000 population, with the largest city at just over 500,000, but they only had a dozen hospitals in the entire country, so Mark actually figured they'd just send medivacs down to each hospital.

While waiting for the press conference, the President actually confided in Mark that the police and many of the politicians were corrupt and the principal reasons they couldn't effectively govern the country.

The other countries were all small nations, except the country of Maclondia, which was one superpower of the planet. They were also the country that made and lost control of the virus. It reminded Mark of China in every way, except that they were a massive, mostly landlocked nation, barring one inland sea that connected to the ocean via a large river.

The meeting with Maclondia was especially unproductive. The government would not allow their citizens to vote and they prohibited the Federation from transporting their citizens out of country and eventually even prohibited the Federation from flying over their country or risk being fired upon. They were also the only country that seemed to have an effective vaccine for the virus, they just couldn't identify the infected, and they wouldn't share their vaccine with the rest of the world; even in their own country the vaccine was being prioritized for their military, political leaders and the heads of large corporations. They did not care about their people, which made Mark and Liyana quite upset as they thought about ways to give the citizens a voice.

Mark agreed to give them the medical scanning for one month only. Hopefully that would be enough time to treat the infected and hopefully get a handle on the virus.

Fortunately, they were the last meeting of the day, since they could only meet with 7 of the 8 countries on the list.

On the way back to the CityShip, they could see the Space Station was now in orbit and was rapidly constructing. Another day or two and they would complete it. That would give them 2,500 additional medibeds to help treat the infected. Then they just needed to convince Derek and his crew to stay and help until they eradicated the virus on the planet.

Maren took them on a quick fly-by of the massive space station. Once they released the central command and hotel out of the CityShip's factory bay and moved into its orbital position, the docks were the first things that were built, mainly because there wasn't much to them, then the construx went back to work on the central park area, the medical centre, and the lower personnel and emergency services area.

When they arrived back on the CityShip after the long day, all anyone wanted to do was to get something to eat and go to bed, but upon entering the senior officer's quarters, they found Derek and more than a dozen of his crew had moved in. Mark had suspected as much, which is why Mark had told everyone not to leave anything in their rooms today.

The crew were just about to sit down and eat a meal of steak, potatoes and mixed vegetables. Lieutenant Baker, who was running the kitchen, simply synthed a few more steaks and threw them on the grill. They already had plenty of mashed potatoes and vegetables.

Minutes later, Mark and his gang were sitting down and eating with the rest of the crew. The supper conversation was primarily about what was happening down on the planet and that they were going to stick around and help however they could.

Cricket then told Mark, "You could use the help! The list of countries requesting help has grown to 46!"

Mark said, "I'm glad to hear your crew want to help, I've got jobs for you! Good practice for when you're out there on your own representing the Federation."

Their curiosity piqued, everyone was listening intently for what he was about to say.

There weren't that many people and they were all sitting fairly close together so he just spoke loud enough so they could all hear, "Liyana and I have been running around this planet talking to countries that have requested our help with combatting this virus. Unfortunately, they aren't in the same situation as Garedon as they haven't recently had an election with the majority of the citizens voting to join the Federation. We met with 7 countries out of 8 today, but I see now the list has now grown to 46, and I imagine that number is going to continue to climb. We need some additional ambassadors!"

One guy raised his hand, so Mark gestured for him to speak, "But we're security officers, not ambassadors!"

Mark said, "That's where you are wrong! All security personnel that ever get deployed to a non-Federated region are ambassadors, simply because you are representing the Federation. Sure, you haven't taken courses in negotiations, but you are all representing the Federation way of life. Once you guys go through that rift, you are all ambassadors of the Federation and I sincerely hope you find other civilizations out there.

You don't have to recruit countries and planets to join the Federation, as that simply isn't possible until we connect that area of space with our sensor and communication network, but you can definitely show how things are in the Federation."

Derek said, "So what do you need us to do?"

"Liyana has a holocube that she uses in her presentation for those interested in joining the Federation. You simply need to activate the holocube presentation and then answer questions afterwards. You all should be familiar with what's in the library, so that provides most of your answers. For anything not in the library, just use your best judgement and promise nothing that would break our laws. What we've been doing is saying we can provide medical scanning for up to 6 months and, if they wanted to join the Federation, they needed to hold a vote using the Federation voting booths. If there are large concentrations of infected, we'll do our best to get the sickest transported up to our facilities in orbit for treatment.

Now almost everyone is saying, 'We want what Garedon is getting!', unfortunately that's not possible unless they recently held an election, and the citizens had voted to join the Federation. If in fact they have held an election, just notify Liyana and I and tell them we'll be in touch, but otherwise all we can do for them is identify infected people with a glow bubble and treat the sickest in orbit at this point in time."

Cricket told Mark, "I'm making a dozen copies of Liyana's holocube, they'll be in the fabrication workshop."

Shortening the factory bay allowed some of that former factory space to be turned into a fabrication workshop with many mass fabricators, assembly areas, mobile cranes and racks. Eventually there would probably be a crew of engineers just sitting around inventing things; right now Cricket had it manufacturing a dozen little holocubes.

As Liyana was going over the presentation with Derek's crew, Mark excused himself to retrieve the holocubes from the workshop.

During the walk, he received a message from Brad saying his research team had developed a treatment that could eliminate the virus; it was a simple capsule containing specially programmed medibots for that specific virus. You simply swallowed the capsule with some water, and when the capsule casing dissolved and released the medibots, they would go to work and you'd be virus free within minutes.

If there were any medibots left over after the vaccination, they remained with you and functioned like immunization.

We designed the capsules for non-citizens, since citizens would have general medibots in their bodies already. They constantly updated medibots for citizens that were always around the Federation network. As soon as a new virus or disease was successfully treated in a medibed, they would upload the detection procedure to the medibots, then if the virus was detected, the medibots would download the treatment from the Federation network, resulting in almost no sickness or disease anywhere in the Federation.

Brad sent over the designs for the medibot encapsulating device (MED), so they could begin manufacturing the machine which bottled the capsules in 100s. Just in case the label was unreadable, or the bottle got spilled, it labelled both the bottles and the capsules with the name of the virus they treated.

The MEDs could produce 10 bottles per minute, so after some quick calculations Mark instructed Cricket to make 2 machines, then he instructed her to update the design to add a tray mechanism. It could manufacture the next tray while the current tray was being filled, then once each tray filled, it would slide down a chute to be collected. The trays were simple: 10x10 stackable layers, so each layer counted 10,000 capsules; that would make for easy for calculation, transportation, distribution and storage. To top it off so there was no waste! The tray deconstructed itself once all the bottles had been removed, and the bottles deconstructed themselves after the cap was closed and the bottle was empty.

There were two cargobots on the CityShip that did menial tasks such as cleaning and stuff. So Cricket assigned one of them to the workshop to monitor the capsule machines once they got up and running and take the full bottle trays and then stack them onto hover carts.

Cricket estimated the machines would be operational inside 2 hours, so they'd get nearly 8 hours of production tonight before they wake up tomorrow morning, so they'd have almost 1 million doses by morning.

After retrieving the holocubes, Mark took a hover elevator back to the senior officer's quarters. They had finished Liyana's presentation and were in a discussion about it when he arrived. So he put all the holocubes on a table and then informed everyone about the treatment capsules. The treatment capsules were a game changer, so they changed their tactics a bit. The capsules would be free, but they had to have the glow feature turned on to identify the infected. Then they would be given an appropriate number of doses based on the count from the infection scan. It was up to them to distribute the doses to the infected individuals in their country. If they were genuinely interested in joining the Federation, just direct them to read about it in the library and then contact an ambassador.

It was getting late by that time, so everyone started turning in. Maren and Gyges had already picked out rooms, so Mark just stayed with Maren and Liyana stayed with Gyges.