Technocracy of War, Epilogue

So as he sat in his chair some years later, Mantis reflected on how quickly his ad hoc academy had gone from a two story WW2 barracks building with barely 200 machines to where it was today. He was Chief Instructional Officer in a building rivaling any corporate skyscraper for floor space and thousands of systems. Almost all of them were running Bread and Butter, or Toast and Jam.
He missed Thad. His old friend had generously poured his life into the mission when they first got back together down in that old wooden fire hazard of a building. The poor man was relentless in cranking out the instructional materials and teaching the first few cycles himself. He seemed to have an instinctive grasp of what his students did and didn’t already know, and his lessons seldom missed the real need. Thad had found the one thing for which he was born, and he didn’t care how much it took from him.
He literally worked himself to death, collapsing at his desk. Even Brandon Breeze was wet-eyed at the funeral; Jennifer Runston and Peter Jimmerson showed up, too.
Who would have thought this crackpot OS would have become the ultimate answer to crackers and such? No, not invulnerable, just awfully hard to break, while easy to use, and easy to manage. Few knew the massive verbal and political battles behind the scenes to prevent turning it into another wide-open mass of patchwork ideas for the sake of everyone’s convenience. When no government employee could install his favorite games, and when watching videos was simply not possible with the underlying OS, systems were far more secure. Mantis, Peter and Brandon all fought furiously against the corrupt lobbies.
Mantis was at the peak of his professional track, but he wasn’t really happy at what it cost to be in that position. The freedom to turn aside that sort of political pressure meant the kind of police state in which the death of partisan politics was also the death of anything even hinting of accountability to anyone, much less the people he was pretending to protect. Even now, things were unraveling, as there were other military battles they had lost for other reasons, reasons eventually leading back to that same lack of accountability, that same power to ignore politics, because it meant the psychopaths could ignore everyone and forge ahead with plans benefiting very few, indeed.
He dreamed of disappearing, perhaps to the kind of country that nest of crackers came from…