Free In the Courts of the Sun by Brian D’Amato Page A

sponsored by grants from the UCF Corporate Exchange Program. And funding for the UCFCEP—as I found with only minimal snooping—had come from the catastrophe modeling team of the Simulated Trades Division of the Warren Investment Group. I remembered the company because it was a big employer in Salt Lake, and I’d seen in Barron’s that it had had some ethics problems with an alternate-energy thing a few years ago. Well, whatever.

I tried Taro’s old filter password. It still worked and got me into his personal box. I couldn’t come up with some other excuse for writing, so I just wrote that I’d seen the article and wondered if I could come by soon, like, say, later today. “Send,” I said. It sent.

Estas bien. I switched the screens to tank monitor mode. It said the Gulf tank was low on calcium, but I didn’t have the energy to deal with it. Maybe he won’t write back, I thought. No, he would. One of the good things about now is how you can lose track of someone for years and then get back in touch in a trice. Or even a half a trice. Except you also need to come up with more excuses.

Hmm. 4 Ahau. 12/21/12. So it’s a big deal again.

Well, just wait until the twenty-second. Nothing gets old faster than an apocalypse that didn’t happen.

Right?

     
    [4]
    T he Barracuda had a new live windshield, and on the drive up to Orlando I checked out Taro’s new sponsor, the Warren Group. It turned out the chairman and CEO was Lindsay Warren, this big developer and philanthropist in Salt Lake City who’d built the stadia for the Winter Olympics in 2002. I used to go to hospitals named after him. He’d probably been funding Taro’s work since back in the FARMS days. “The Warren Family of Companies” was definitely one of the fastest-growing conglomerates in the U.S. Four years ago, though, they’d been close to bankruptcy, and from what I could find it wasn’t clear exactly what had bailed them out. Maybe they’d gotten huge so fast by using the Game.

Warren had its tentacles in all sorts of fields, from the esoteric to the stiflingly mundane. They made sports equipment and memorabilia. They developed motivational tools, human resource management systems, “beliefspace software,” and interactive entertainment, anything and everything for a whole new centuryful of consumers with a whole lot of free time. Right now they were pushing this thing they called “Sleekers,” which seemed to be some kind of low-friction wheelless shoe/skate that glided on specially treated asphalt. They also did aerospace and research contracting. In ’08 one of their commercial labs had made headlines with the announcement that they had created a so-called desktop wormhole. The trendiest thing they mentioned was something called Consciousness Transfer Protocol, which people said was going to be bigger than the Human Genome Project but which was at least a decade off. Still, in their last annual report it looked as though their cash cow was entertainment construction—halls of fame, the eXtreme ParX franchise, and what they called socioimagineering. “The Warren Group is the leading developer of Intentional Communities (‘ICs’),” their site said. Apparently the division had started out on the reenactments circuit, people endlessly fighting the Civil War, and then they produced a lot of those Renaissance fair things, and then they got the contract to build the year-round Star Trek community, and now just a decade later they’d just reached 95 percent occupancy (or “communityship”) on a ten-square-mile development called Erewhynn, about fifty miles north of Orlando. It was supposed to be like an eighteenth-century Cotswolds village. The citizens went to classes on handcrafts and Scottish dialects, and they put on Michaelmas and Maying festivals and the whole shitterie. Then there was another big IC called Blue Lagoon Reef, on its own island in the Bahamas. There was a new feudal Japan spread in northern California. And