Murmansk Stone

Mandak and Chimeg's new, improved foundry turned our gold, platinum, and iridium into normal industry-standard sized ingots we could sell anywhere.

In point of fact, sometimes we gave them away instead.

The Project

I had a theory that most people basically were good people who wanted to do good things for the world. They just lacked the ability to do so.

Since I had the ability to 'persuade' people to study hard, and pursue worthwhile topics, I also had the ability to enable them to be financially stable until they had made progress.

Buying a Gulfstream Jet would have made my travel trackable from place to place. Buying a company that RENTS Gulfstreams, that let me book corporate flights all over the place on a whole set of planes with all kinds of non-specific passengers.

I had dinner with smart scientists, who told me what they needed to make progress, and once they were around me an hour, they were a lot more honest about their chances of success.

I could have left it at that, but usually there was a capable scientist in there somewhere, and they gained both knowledge and ethical guidelines to point them in a direction, give them a goal, and help them rapid progress.

What I wanted them to make progress on was clean energy, social justice, and bringing the USA into the modern world with universal healthcare. That would have helped save my wife in my Life Before The Chair existence. Visiting with big campaign donors of both parties, I didn't have to persuade the politicians themselves.

If the Libertarian donor wants to promote small-government causes? This is fine with me. They just needed to focus on the more important and achievable ones, like MJ legalization, spending less on prisons because fewer people are there for drug offenses (counseling, addiction prevention and treatment) and violent crime (classes in nonviolent conflict resolution, etc.).

Religious leaders who complained most strongly about abortion weren't really talking about abortion. They either had strongly racist views, were upset about a previous girlfriend, or wanted to control the women around them. I helped persuade them to focus on the central message of Christ, compassion.

If they really wanted to cut down on abortion, they could promote sex ed courses that gave solid info on how conception happened, having safe sex, birth control info, relationship fundamentals that included good communications, etc.

Admittedly, I mostly focused on the USA.

Since the companies I invested in made exceptional returns (due to ensuring everyone was actually dedicated to the cause), I was soon making more money from my investments than I was from selling gold bullion. This money further funded U Minnesota Duluth scholarships and research facilities.

I admit, one or two ideas that helped the world in ways not quite easy to measure were derived from a set of text message questions I asked The Chair. One was asking for better tech to make PV panels in mass quantities cheaply, and the other was the same question for EV batteries.

Those ideas made me very, very rich, as a minority investor, of course. I didn't want to be a figurehead.

The inevitable happened about twelve years after the project started, when kids that grew up together started "dating" (insofar as 12 year olds can go on romantic dates - they couldn't yet). The writing was on the wall for that one.

The inevitability was that brothers and sisters (unknown as being such) would get married, and obviously that shouldn't happen. That led to a hard rule to ensure families couldn't stay longer than 14 years and had to move far enough away so they went to different high schools.

Turning Seventy-Five

In my First Life, before The Chair, I had been over fifty years old. I had been repaired and made to look 25 again. At a true-age of 75, I looked about 30 - I had also been made to age very, very slowly.

People around me just accepted it, and when asked I described it was just that I worked out every day and ate only healthy food. This was true. I just left out the Alien intelligence helping out so much.

The advent of so many robots in our society has changed our economics soooo much, the above memoir isn't going to convey to a young person what life was really like back in the day.

The verdant thick forests of Kansas, the swarming masses of cod off Massachusetts, the vast cypress swamps across all the gulf coastlines, these returns to nature were driven by many tiny contributions of many great people.

I like to think I helped things out.

Even the sprawling habitats in the cliff sides of Vallis Marinaris, bright reddish Martian sunlight shining through aquariums ten meters thick, these had some help from people I encouraged and funded. Not all my funding helped, not all my suggestions were worthwhile.

When I'd stop in and give a scientist a set of gold coins and persuade them to work on this and not that (only where one was obviously the better choice, like infectious diseases instead of boner pills), I would mention that I'd send them hints from time to time as texts, with a certain keyword so they knew it was from me.

That keyword had always been my late wife's middle name.

It took me a solid four years to figure out The Chair was impersonating me and sending hints to those scientists with this clue as well.

I was almost upset (not really though).

Instead, though, on reflection I calmed down and decided it was absolutely a perfect way for The Chair to give mankind hints about better ways to proceed.

As a religious thing, I continue to believe people have many chances to do the right things, for the right reasons, and given time we would have gotten there ourselves without help from The Chair. Still, we might not have, we might have ended ourselves. We still might. It's the cusp of the thing, the continuous challenge of an intelligent people to prevent harm by the most stupid and short-sighted among us.

My own school experience, so many years in a college town and so many degrees and teaching experiences, so much interaction with people around the planet, I'm no longer worried about making as many grandchildren as possible. I'm far more concerned with ALL the grandchildren, everywhere, making sure their lives have the fulfillment, the loving support that they need to achieve great things.

That said, great sex with athletic, hyper intelligent, beautiful college women? No worries there! I'm going strong!

Or... maybe I'll move to Mars for a while?

There's no end of challenges here, and I do enjoy teaching my TaeKwonDo classes and working on my 10th black-belt Dan/degree.

It's going to take a while.

Then again, I have another 50 years to go before I'm due to report in for another Chair Visit.

Maybe I might even build my own century ship. You never know. Life is like that.

One day, you're hiking and enjoying a forest.

The next day, you're sitting in a chair.

And, the day after that, you're ... wherever I am.

== The End ==