Chapter 309: Valuing My Death

Late-May to Thursday August 10, 2006

The publicity and excitement over my body having been successfully created, we moved on to stage three of the parents' strategy. Stage three was "Sue the Government", but it needed to done in phases. The first phase was to value Mark Anderson's life. There were three sources of income that 'we' - ostensibly Mom and Dad - had valued:

1. Sports income.

2. Income from being the world's smartest scientist.

3. Income derived from medical research on my body.

The first two categories were fairly easy to get valued. There are people in the business of valuing both of them, so it was only a matter of getting formal reports from them. How I looked in Speedos and my success with females made the first item's product endorsement component considerably larger than what I would've earned actually playing any sport.

The third category was the biggie, swamping the first two into insignificance. By late-May we'd created a list of the scientists, doctors and professors who'd made the most exciting claims about my body, and we'd researched them - OSU's connections being particularly helpful - to eliminate those not reputable enough. Enlisting the chosen scientists' cooperation was easy, because they all wanted access to information outside of the CIA file.

We told them that Mark Anderson's plan - had the Government not killed him - had been to complete his three degrees, which would've taken him another six months, then to set up a business based on his body. Scientists would've been allowed to research Mark's living body with his active cooperation, in return for Mark being 75% owner of all the results, including all the patents and products that emerged from the research. 75% was a steep price, but there'd be only one Mark and there'd be thousands of scientists who'd want to research him.

The task was to value what that business would've been worth. There would have been two major revenue streams. The least valuable stream would derive from the types of activity that the researchers were doing now, poring over the results of individual experiments. No doubt being able to perform iterations of experiments on Mark would've produced a great deal of useful information which would've helped scientists learn what 'health' was, which could improve medicine in many ways. [[Ironically, health professionals know surprisingly little about health, as their job is to minimize ill-health. Those may seem equivalent, but they're actually quite different, causing very confused sets of priorities, a hash of conflicting policies, and a truly astonishing number of gross inefficiencies at the health-industry level and in society as a whole.]]

The second business was based on finding out what had happened to turn Mark into a superhuman, reproducing it, and selling it to the world. That revenue stream could have resulted in the largest business the world has ever seen.

My family more or less told the scientists the truth (actually "less"): "Two and a half years ago Mark had been an average intelligence, uncoordinated, acne-ridden, beanpole. Then something had happened to him that'd made him capable of being the world's best athlete in multiple sports, made him incredibly fit and good looking, had supercharged his immune system so he'd probably have lived at least three hundred years and perhaps much longer, and had boosted his IQ by 120 points."

Valuing that aspect of the business came down to four estimations, the first three we wanted a large team of highly respected scientists, doctors and professors to decide on, and be willing to swear to in court:

1. The chance that the cause of my transformation would've been discovered within 50 years.

2. The chance that the cause would've been reproducible in other people (i.e., sellable) within 50 years.

3. The chance that it wouldn't be discovered and patented by a competitor first.

4. What people would pay for it.

School records showed that my academic performance had risen virtually overnight (within a couple of weeks), giving considerable credence to the externally triggered hypothesis. My parents backed that up with strong statements about that having been Mark's belief too. [Partly because they wanted to minimize the scientific intrusions into their own lives. My family did have to participate in some tests though, to prove that they were normal, otherwise they'd have been hounded. They'd used those tests as the bait to get the research community to cooperate with our lawsuit's preparation. There were strict controls over the inconvenience and invasiveness of the experiments, which were set up at the local hospital or OSU, and were day-visit tests only.]

For the first of the above four valuation factors, it didn't really matter whether the transformation was genetic or externally triggered, as both causes could be identified and patented. When asked to put a value on the first factor, quite a few of the scientist argued for 99% or 100%. That may seem high, but damned near every bio-oriented scientist and institution in the world would've been clamoring to work on the project, so Mark would've been able to pick a very large team of the best people. We were happy to be conservative, so we used a value of 80% for the first estimate.

If the cause was found, then the resources that would've been put into reproducing it would've been overwhelming. Giving every human perfect health and a 120 point IQ boost would've been the world's #1 research goal. The only reason reproducing it might've failed was if it wasn't reproducible, for example, if my transformation had happened because God had blessed me (that was a commonly held public opinion. Fortunately even the religious scientists weren't stupid enough to give it any credence). The second estimate was given a conservative value of 90%.

Competitors wouldn't have had access to my body or my active cooperation, so the third estimate was 95%.

The fourth value was the key one. Individually, people would pay EVERYTHING they had for "The Mark Anderson Pill"; they'd even go into debt to finance buying it - most of the scientists had stated with utter sincerity that they would have. But we didn't want to get into calculations about individuals. That'd work, but it was too messy. Instead we decided to price it at the national level, as a percentage of each nation's current GDP per year for twenty years ("GDP" is Gross Domestic Product, the market value of all final goods and services produced in a country). Obviously there'd be legal issues to address, but we assumed they could be managed (perhaps by our hypothetical team of recently upgraded IQ 260+ lawyers).

We commissioned a team of reputable economists to estimate what percentage of CURRENT GDP a country would pay, per year for twenty years, for "The Mark Anderson Pill", assuming it had the same effect as it had on me, and assuming it worked on just 20% of the population of a country. The "same effect" assumption was conservative because if researchers discovered what had accidentally transformed me, then they'd almost certainly find ways to improve its effect (+160 IQ? +200 IQ?). The "20% of the population" assumption was conservative too, because if the number of potential beneficiaries was initially restricted, researchers would find ways to widen it.

The economists concluded that the value to a country was absurdly high. Even if my hypothetical company charged 100% of a nation's current GDP, having that many super-geniuses would, within several years, have raised a nation's GDP by far more than the total cost charged for the pill. Once the flood of technological innovations had doubled a country's GDP, the annual fee would essentially be free, and a few years later, all the earlier fees would have been earned back, making the whole thing cashflow positive for the country. It was hard to imagine how a government could survive saying no to giving its citizens near immortality and the quality of life my hypothetical pill would be offering.

The economists decided a fair annual price for my pill would be around 100% of current GDP, and they were prepared to stand up in court and justify it, as the economics of it were actually quite simple.

The world's GDP was currently US$48 trillion ($48,000,000,000,000), so the annual income of the main revenue stream to my business would have probably been 80% x 90% x 95% x $48 trillion, which is an annual income of $32.832 trillion.

Operating costs would've been negligible, so the value of the business would've been twenty years of $32.832 trillion, which at an 8% discount factor, NPVed (Net Present Valued) down to $322.35 trillion.

We were postulating that I would've owned only 75% of the business, so its value to me was 75% of $322.35 trillion, which is $241.7625 trillion.

The law allows Federal employees to be sued for breaching the Fourth Amendment, as per, Bivens v. Six Unknown Fed. Narcotics Agents, 403 U.S. 388 (1971), where the U.S. Supreme Court found the "petitioner is entitled to recover money damages for any injuries he has suffered as a result of the agents' violation of the [Fourth] Amendment."

The Anderson family filed suit against:

• Every DHS and CIA employee mentioned in the file.

• Their bosses for the next two levels up, because only negligence could've prevented them from knowing what their staffs were doing, and negligence is legally actionable.

• The DHS and CIA organizations because the file made it clear that they had not only condoned their employees' illegal behavior, but had actually ordered most of it as well as kept careful records of it.

A $242 trillion lawsuit got the media's attention. The annual Federal budget is about $2 trillion, so losing the suit would cause a problem or two. It'd also make the Andersons nearly 5,000 times richer than Bill Gates, so the press loved it.

There were ten DHS Portland defendants, two and a half dozen from DHS's S&T Directorate, and five dozen CIA defendants, so a hundred people in total who'd participated in my abduction or the experiments on me, plus the two agencies themselves. Thanks to some snooping by yours truly, the documentation accompanying our suit listed the current residential and employment addresses for all the defendants. More than half of them were currently working in what immediately became bottom-secret bio-'defense' establishments, which the press loved reporting on.

Two groups of people didn't love that AT ALL:

1. The sites' neighbors, who had been under the impression that the establishments hadn't been developing substances that would kill tens of millions of people if they leaked. There were HOWLS of very public protests, picketing and even barricades. Bio-defense labs, despite their new politically correct categorization, hadn't been demonstrating a good safety record lately, and members of the public were horrified when they found out they were living in the same neighborhood as another one.

2. The Government, who was horrified that their bioweapon security had been blown WIDE open yet again. They couldn't accuse my family of espionage because there was a clear trail of emails showing that the information had been sent from various Government offices to the email address of a federal employee who was on vacation, and from there, to our large law firm the evening before the suit was filed. The international exposure of the US Government's STILL running MULTIPLE bioweapon labs ruined what credibility the Government had left (i.e., it made very little difference).

Another reason the Government didn't like the suit was because it spelled out that Mark Anderson had intended to make everyone in the world perfectly healthy, immune from disease, have lifetimes measured in the hundreds of years, and give them an additional 120 IQ points, but the Government's causing his death had stopped that happening. The people who believed that crap - which thanks to all the sensational TV shows was very many people - were NOT happy with the Government.

And there was an even worse reason why the Government didn't like the suit: they were guilty. We didn't have to prove the Government had killed Mark. We only had to prove Mark had suffered "injuries as a result of the DHS agents' violation of the Fourth Amendment."

Mark had "suffered injuries" all right - he was dead! (so people believed). Was it "as a result" of the Government's actions? Mark would hardly have been in an underground, top-secret CIA lab otherwise. And the Government had already admitted their seizure of Mark Anderson had been in breach of his Fourth Amendment rights. Not to mention that there was no legal authority for his being handed over to the S&T Directorate and then the CIA for human experimentation. The Government had no defense whatsoever. There'd been much discussion in the press that when the Andersons sued, the Government would have to pay. Legal expert after legal expert had given exactly the same firmly expressed opinion. The only uncertainty was over the amount of damages we'd go for.

The amount of the damages was the only issue the Government could argue. Unfortunately for the Government, a civil lawsuit only requires "the balance of probability", and the mathematics of those probabilities was pretty straightforward. Of the four factors, the last term - how much people would pay for 'The Mark Anderson Pill' (as we called it, to make it seem easily obtainable) - was virtually inarguable. Everybody would pay more than everything they had, and it was nonsense to try to claim otherwise. Countries would pay more than 100% of their GDP. That they couldn't afford to pay that much up-front just meant the Anderson family business would've had to give them "easy payment terms", spread over even more years. If that changed the NPV, it'd actually increase it because we'd charge a rate of interest higher than the NPV's discount rate.

The penultimate term - the 95% estimate that no one would beat me to the discovery - was also a pretty safe number. Maybe it could be argued down to 90%, or even 80%, but those values made zero practical difference. The lawsuit was 120 times more than the Federal budget, and reducing it to 90 times made no difference whatsoever, because neither of those figures could be paid.

The only two terms that could be reduced significantly were the first two. Specifically, that finding the cause of my transformation might be far harder than the at least 80% chance agreed on by the two dozen renowned biology experts we'd asked to estimate that value, and that commercializing the process might not be 90% doable. Science knows that what has already been found once by accident (as I'd apparently done) is usually very easy to reproduce, especially if damned near every scientist in the world is working on it, as would have been the case for this. Even if those two percentages got reduced to 8% and 9% (which was laughable) then the damages would still be $2.4 trillion, and still far more than could be paid.

The Government had four choices:

1. Stall. Drag the case through as many courts as slow as possible. Unfortunately for the Government, ours was a very easy suit to argue and every law firm in the country would rush to help us fight it (ESPECIALLY if they got a slice of the pie!). Stalling would just spread out and increase the pain, because everyone in the world knew the US Government was guilty. It was such a simple case that the Government would have difficulty finding ways to stall without being so obvious about abusing the legal process that the judge would lose patience.

2. Change the law so it couldn't be sued. Trying to give itself permission to kidnap citizens - which is what we obviously would accuse it of doing - would've cause riots, and it wouldn't have gotten passed anyway. They could try other retroactive legislation, but every possibility stank too much or was clearly unconstitutional and would therefore be overturned. The Democrats would love the Republicans to try.

3. Drastic solutions were unfeasible. The world's media spotlight was already on the case, so the Andersons suddenly disappearing wouldn't be a good idea. Plus our law firm had set things up so that even if my family disappeared, the case would still proceed. It'd get worse for the Government.

4. Negotiate a settlement.

The last option was the ONLY option and everyone knew it. The Government was taking major punishment over this, and they especially hated that their secret information was still being made public - who knew how far that might go! So it wanted the suit settled as quickly as possible. The Government's lawyers contacted our lawyers to start the negotiation. Our lawyers invited them to a meeting, lawyer to lawyer - except it was "lawyers to lawyers" because there were at least half a dozen of them on each side of the table. Apparently lawyers can only work in REALLY expensive packs.

We'd already drawn up our shopping list. That'd been a GREAT deal of fun for all of us, and a topic of many enjoyable dinnertime conversations. Some families talk about what they did at school today; our families talked about what else to extort out of the Government. At the lawyers-to-lawyers meeting, our senior partner gave our list to the baddies' lawyers, telling them the brief rationalization for each point, then, "Our clients have instructed us that there will be no negotiation. Come back when you've signed it. The suit will proceed in the meanwhile."

Our list of demands, with explanations provided, was as follows (I've paraphrased, to give you the core of each demand without the dozens of pages of legalese):

(1) If Mark Anderson is found alive or dead, The Government is to exert its maximum effort to ensure his health then speedy return to his parents; or to leave him free to make his own way if he chooses. No member of The Family or any part of their bodies are to be subject to The Government's instigated or performed medical experiment; all records deriving from that to be destroyed upon request from any member of The Family. All records and samples The Government is holding concerning The Family's biology to be destroyed forthwith and no more sought (non-Government organizations, such as our local doctor and hospital, weren't affected by this contract). All DHS and CIA records of any nature about The Family are to be destroyed forthwith. The Government will not question or investigate any member of The Family for any activities prior to the date of execution of this Agreement.

Regarding (1). Our lawyer's stated rationalization for this clause was to block any attempt of the Government to pursue any more illegal medical experimentation, with or without the transparent pretext of "suspected terrorist involvement". He told the Government's lead lawyer, "It is deliberately worded to be all-encompassing because your client has proved itself to be treacherous while our clients have proved themselves to be blameless." In reality, it was written to give us much greater freedom than the stated rationalization, for example, the first sub-clause ("If Mark Anderson is found alive or dead...") implied it referred to my body being found inside the underground lab's ruins, but the wording had no termination date. It meant that Mark Anderson could legally never be restrained against his will by The Government. Not legally anyway; the Government could act illegally of course, but it gave us what might be a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card if we could get a court to order my release on the grounds that the Government had breached this Agreement.