The Dirty Emperor

I asked back what he saw as the largest threats and how to fix them.

AJ said, "Being on a single planet subjects you to vast risks. Diversify. Colonies at least 5 months travel time away - in space - will solve many of these problems, as long as they're made self-sufficient quickly."

Apparently getting off planet wasn't the vast hassle that I thought it to be; AJ had plans for that.

Meanwhile, the societal and technical changes happening due to the inventions we'd released were profoundly affecting GDP's around the world. Russia and the Saudis, long dependent on fossil fuel income, saw incredibly fast drops in national revenue and faced very real risks of starvation.

Cheap building materials, specifically aluminum and iron (and to a degree, titanium), were lowering housing costs everywhere and making for a housing boom of larger footprint 3-story homes, and with that, birth-rate booms (up to 3 per woman, up from as low as 1.2 in some countries) allowed or encouraged such buildings.

Hydroponics in massive 10-story warehouses, at first a pilot project, proved so successful that the idea was being copied worldwide. One warehouse could feed grain to a city of 10,000 people, given electrical power to run the LED lights and water pumps.

One of my companies, that next February, started building electric MHD rocket thrusters and selling them to another of my companies that made aerospace / airframe assemblies.

I wanted a ride, but AJ suggested that be done by some of the company founders to keep my profile as low as possible.

A pair of 500 GW generators hooked to an air-ingesting or tank-fed electrostatic thruster, had a specific impulse of about 12,000 seconds, or more if we really needed it. Putting 6 of those thrusters on a custom-welded "drone" underbody could single-stage to orbit about 100 tons per trip, at almost no cost other than capital and manpower, maybe $10k amortized across a fleet.

== ==

Our town reached 5000 people (arrivals and kids both) by the start of the second August. Each week, regular as clockwork, 64 new arrivals came in from Winnipeg airport, from all over the world.

Some of these women (sooner or later) graduated UM and decided to move on, to Toronto or the maritimes (far eastern Canadian provinces), and I had no problem with that. They'd sometimes visit or arrange for a sperm donation to arrive to keep them going, and my family expanded.

We did have some native Canadians join as Crew, from Winnipeg, and from the UM student body, friends of existing Crew who were invited back to Kusbu (our city) and our farm (specifically) for a visit, provided they passed a 'background check' I ran via AJ.

== ==

Four years after AJ contacted me, the empire we built (we = myself, AJ, and all the women of Kusbu) had increased past 25,000 people, spread out across Canada and the world. Achieving academic success, then business success via excellent connections (my companies could train and promote them quickly), we got to a place where we could seriously influence global politics and business.

Iran re-joined the world economic community as a stable nation, due in equal parts to efforts there and efforts by Sunni and Shia peacemakers in nations around the world.

Russia was still having trouble, but they were on track for an open market-based economy, despite some deeply ingrained racism that almost every culture has a hard time getting rid of. There were a lot of people that held a grudge against them, but like Germany after WW2, teaching the problem and growing through it, helped. Not everywhere in Russia was enlightened, but they were getting closer, it took time.

China's leadership reopened to market economics as well after some problems with corruption at the local levels and a national debate over press freedom that eventually agreed to let it happen even if it was ugly.

It turns out, you can pull CO2 from the air, purify it, add H2O, do some fun things with chemistry and catalysts, and generate 99.9999999% pure glucose. Yeasts can eat this and make any number of things - sugars, fish meat, hamburger, tofu, all kinds of proteins, fats, etc. No plants needed. But, the vegetables are still useful for some flavinoids - tastes - that are hard to make yet.

Humankind is no longer starving.

Farmland worldwide, at that four-year mark, was being largely converted to be open grassland or forest again. Fish repopulated the oceans, unharvested since (why bother) it's safer coming from industrial scale vats and 3-D food printing plants right next to the city where it's going to be sold.

In most nations - and this took a lot of effort on my part and AJ's - a free and open press helped democracy function properly, and responsive governments put in place tax policies that easily supported new buildings in well-funded school systems, universal healthcare systems, and a universal basic income so the poor could advance to be middle-class and being poor was a temporary thing instead of an inherited-and-forever thing.

Don't get me wrong - lots was bad with the world. Religious wars still happened. Some folks were just assholes. If they weren't, they wouldn't be humans. But, mostly, we got along better, and we reached out to put more and more copies of us into safer and safer, more and more remote, locations.

If you're reading this, it has passed the 30 year delay I put on release of this autobiography, and I hope things have continued to improve. If not, well, at least you're still able to read it.

Go in peace, my fellow Earthlings, Ish Allah, Go With God, whatever God you find agreeable, live and let live, and may you be ever blessed.

The End