Persister: Space Funding Crisis I

  Chapter 4

  Arianne checked her chonometer: 201. She had missed her second centenary by a few months.

  Her implant flickered and she became aware of the way to the security border. There was a queue, and her business class privileges had ended at the door, so she found a local net kiosk and sat down in the cosy chair instead. She remembered the piece of metal in her pocket, but didn’t want to take it out with so many people around. She also felt a dim reflexive urge to log into SynchedIn, but she couldn’t quite face it yet.

  She swiped to the wiki channel and began browsing around. Where do you start when you have to piece together over a century of galactic history?

  The first article that came up was about the first funding war. Everybody knew about that - they drilled it into kids at school. Arianne thought about scanning the article, or even just recalling the basic gist of that incredibly important event in galactic history. But then she realised it was pointless: why would she be sitting around reviewing stuff that everybody knew?

  Instead, she looked up CAFCA’s website. Apparently, you needed a login and a password to even access it these days. She linked to the sign-up page, but cut the feed after gigabytes of forms, guidelines, instructional videos, motivational training exercises and therapy sessions were thrown at her. She switched back to the regular wiki.

  The Central Academic Funding Council Administration: the body that decided how to spend the galactic empire’s credits on research. Established twenty three hundred years ago and now in its 4th round of funding. An unspeakable amount of money and power, and an almost unimaginable amount of administration. Arianne remembered the headaches induced while learning about the phases that researchers had to go through to get funding for a project.

  In theory, getting funding was relatively easy. You drew up a proposal, found some people to back it and sent it in. However, competition was so fierce that a massive amount of bureaucracy had emerged out of a need to appear fair and effective. Applications were handed to a panel of peers, who each appraised the proposal and recommended it for consideration. A panel of experts then scrutinised every detail of the full application and tried to find methodological holes. There could be multiple rounds of resubmission just to convince people that the idea was feasible. Then came the Board of Impact Assessment who gauged how useful and effective the project would be. If the idea got past the board, then there was the budget review, the timescale review, ethical review, the personnel checks and risk assessment. Even after all this, there was still the Grand High Central Committee who needed to vote on each project and whose selection methods were said to be based on medieval rituals.

  All this took time. And as more and more submissions came in across the ever-expanding multi-trillion citizen empire, the whole process got longer. The application process moved from months to years. Applicants had to employ economists to project their budgets into the future so they weren’t vastly outscaled by inflation. The extra complexities lead to further delays as experts had to be drafted in to assess whether the applications could withstand the time it took to make decisions. As more and more researchers were required to review the applications, personal and professional conflicts became endemic, meaning that a Conflict of Interest Tribunal had to be set up for each application, with the applicants lobbying for or against particular reviewers.

  Researchers suddenly found themselves needing to apply for grants just to support the running costs of application. These grants, too, became extremely difficult to obtain, and so researchers needed to apply for many. The vast array of different types of sub-funding made application tricky, and applicants would trip themselves up by making invalid parallel claims. Gradually, the decisions on the grants slid from months to years, and the actual funding from years to decades.

  The last time Arianne looked, there was a third tier of funding for people who were applying for grants to apply for funding. Horrifyingly, it now looked like there were at least 15 levels of funding. The only sensible solution was cryosleep. As extended as a human life could now be, the only way academics could actually see their projects through to completion was by waiting out the funding decision time in suspended animation. Of course, cryosleep cost money, for which there were bursaries that one could apply for.

  Needless to say, competition was fierce. There were bitter feuds between rival applicants, which gave way to utter praise and sucking-up to the victor. Power shifted around almost randomly with the changing fortunes. P.I.s would be shot down and find themselves begging for tutoring hours. A lucky award could give a post-doc so much leverage, that the University would move to where they lived. Grudges were harboured, vengeance was hinted at, plots were plotted. Researchers who had spent half a century putting together a proposal, only to be rejected without comment, could crack and go on violent rampages. But the sting of rejection was easy to deal with compared to the pervasive dread that someone was scheming against you which came with success. There were certainly rumours of suspicious deaths just as grant money was due to flow in. Could Prof. Golden have been mixed up in a fund-feud?

  The crowds in the reception area had dispersed, so Arianne got up and headed for the security border of the Central Academic Funding Council Administration.