Authors: Richard Gohl
Singularity
IT WAS JUST as well that Shane had little interest in history, because the first one hundred and twenty years of his life were a blur. Physically, he was fine: fit and healthy. He just couldn’t remember what life used to be like all those years ago, when people lived under a blue sky and ate and drank and had children and… died. He had lived through the period of change, when food ran out. Shane had been one of the affluent people who had chosen a new way of living in a protected above-ground mountain city. The rest tried to hang onto the old way of living and moved underground.
People had always wrangled with survival and many species of the human kind had lost the battle. One group of survivors accidentally created fire. Later, in the Stone Age, one of them envisioned a hewn blade in a rock; another solved the problem of metallurgy in the Iron Age. In the industrial age they mechanized production, buying profit and time to develop a new lifestyle.
And where the ancestors sat grooming one another for parasite morsels, the personal computer age brought us a modern equivalent in electronic social networking. But that novelty soon wore off, as the software was internalized. They called it Singularity. Meanwhile, the geneticists lifted a curtain, revealing the pulleys and levers of the human body: useful, but limited without electronic extension.
Ever since the invention of the boomerang, right through to the PC, the political movement of the human was toward a merger with the physical world by becoming one with the tool. Desktop, laptop, handheld, wrist-bound, sub-cutaneous, and deeper, where it then vanished and was gone: self-powered, auto—renewing and completely invisible; cellular machines.
Of course, Shane didn’t remember any of this. He knew that in 2200, a solar flare directly destroyed life on one side of the planet. 10:15 A.M.; Europe, the Middle East, India, and Africa had all been in the direct line of fire. Billions died. In these worst affected areas there were few survivors, people who, for some reason or another, had been underground during the forty-minute ordeal. But theirs is another story.
Indirectly, many others perished worldwide as the magnetosphere was temporarily disrupted. Without this protective buffer, much of the planet’s atmosphere simply blew off into space. Although the magnetosphere reestablished itself the atmosphere did not. Radiation baked the surface by day and deep space froze everything by night. The sun was just too strong; plants could no longer harness its energy. Panic took hold and a worldwide food shortage galvanized surviving nations into finding solutions.
If Shane could have remembered anything he learned at school, it would be the name of Australian geneticist Sydney Popper, whose work in the early twenty-second century on automatic cell maintenance started to be taken very seriously. He combined what he had learned about the human genome and disease inheritance with ideas—that he was accused of stealing—on the mechanical targeted delivery of enzymes. Using mice, Popper had successfully trialed a system of nano–cell therapy, which not only kept them healthy in the presence of any transmissible disease but seemed to extend their normally short lives. At the time, Popper was a media sensation who was said to have a fifty-one-year-old rat called Spencer who could allegedly read. Popper himself had been well into his hundreds yet had not aged over forty.
Normally, DNA evolved through genetic inheritance or mutation. Now Popper and his associates used the genes of one man and one woman, both of whom had been bred to be with a limited tendency toward cell mutation or disease. The first step in the process was to flood the body with artificial trojan lattice DNA, causing a chain reaction of growth over the existing chromosomes, transmutating the individual person into a copy.
Stage two introduced the enzymes to nourish, extend, and, where required, renew, every cell for that body type—without affecting the memory. Start taking the therapy and become either that man or that woman, living a life in a body that can be perfectly maintained without the need to eat. Nano-Enzyme-Therapy (N.E.T.) was nutritious and clean, whereas food was not only an inefficient form of nutrition, but also contaminated the body with a myriad of toxic by-products, clogging the circulatory system and causing dangerous mutations.
In his latter years, Popper worked with Shang Hai-based nano-technology innovator Chung Fun Wan, whose masterstroke was to put in place a method of digital chemical renewal of those nano “swimmers.” The human body could operate on a monthly, digitally transmitted, hunger cycle. Internationally the technology was banned, until rich survivors in Australasia and the Americas realized that living without food was not only necessary but emancipating.
Shane was one such individual. He started his military career as security officer at the Port wharfs, had later become a bodyguard for the prime minister (a time when Australia used a political system from one of the ill-fated Euro nations), and had also inherited hills real estate, which had proved to be valuable turf in the following years.
He had always been a gadgets man, and had become something of an expert in personal electronic defense systems. So it was that Shane, after selling off some land, had the money to be one of the early converts to N.E.T. He felt such freedom and optimism that he became a spokesman for the new technology. His combination of innocence and strength drew people to him; he could be the butt of a joke, have everyone laugh at him, but then shrug it off with a smile. He could take a hit and have a laugh, but he also had the gift of the gab—all qualities that would make him a strong leader.
No one expected just how successful N.E.T. would become, not even the developers. Who would have believed that millions of tiny machines swimming around the body could keep you young and alive?
The language of science was never a compelling one, so when it came to “important details,” no one was listening. Great problems were solved, incredible devices invented, with only a few individuals being in possession of the knowledge. The knowledge of how things actually worked. These small few developed a very great power.
This power only increased when international production of N.E.T. materials went into overdrive. Those scientists became an elite class of billionaires who formed the various bureaus called “The Peoples’ Service.”
At the time of the disaster many of the old world elite vanished and their riches were “taken over,” almost as if to say “finder’s keepers,” usually by those with the information, power, and money to simply stake a claim. It was the same old story: surviving wealthy players simply collected assets, commodities, and shares that weren’t actually for sale, just by being in the right place at the right time. Only the rich could afford the new therapy. They cashed in and became the Nano-peans or Napeans, forever altered. They set up mountain cities with walls to keep out the others, and a jagged roof to keep out the sun.
This population had already assumed ninety percent of the world’s wealth and, in paying for the implementation of the expensive N.E.T., most of that wealth had gone to a very small percentage of the world’s population: Service Officials. These elite who understood and managed the new therapy couldn’t, or wouldn’t, explain it to the rest of the world. On this account many survivors rejected the Napean N.E.T. proposal and went underground out of the sun, to eat and grow hydroponically, living and dying as humans had always done.
The Napean population, denied reproduction, soon reached a plateau or, with the euthanasia option, went into a slow decline. But those that had settled the underworld continued to reproduce, refashioning their culture in a subterranean existence.
Relations between the two groups were kept to a minimum, but resentments bred resentments. On one hand, Napeans had made all the sacrifices and embraced the future; the “subs” were just a burden and a drag on the environment. On the other, Napeans were unnatural: one individual using up multiple lifetimes while keeping “real people” as an underclass for slavery and child theft.
Humans had always been good at holding those different from themselves in contempt.
From Shane’s Window
THE LOFTY MOUNTAIN city was one of only sixteen Napean cities on Earth. It was as far south as possible to avoid the northern heat, while staying above water level. The foothills on the Western side of the Range were the high tide mark, and the city extended east from the mountain ridge. In Asia and the Americas there were some thirteen other Napean cities.
Shane lived with his wife Mia, in the Spiral precinct in the southeastern section of the city, adjacent to the Belair Gate. From the upper window of his house he had quite a view. The incandescent white haze of the sun bled out its pale fury onto the already over-baked hillside landscape to the east. The environment was still quite beautiful in its decrepitude.
The random structures of the city were enclosed by huge jutting, sloping, terraced, three-centimeter-thick “Lunatex,” a type of silicon, glass. From a distance the city looked like a giant amalgamation of crystal made from smoky topaz. This glass prevented the people from being burnt alive, yet provided light and a view out to inhospitable terrain, a golden sky, and the unpredictable weather. In reality, the sky was white, but from behind the smoky glass, it looked golden brown. In this light the occupants were suspended like insects in an amber time capsule.
A company called Intelava revolutionized architecture with laser projection building. To build, a laser blue print of a structure was beamed onto a location. Then molten moon dust was drawn up into the blue print, from the bottom creating a solid, strong, and detailed frame onto which other layers of the building were projected. Digital designs of any nature could be projected into the air, forged into reality by running high tensile molten Lunatex along the lines—any shape, anywhere.
Internal cavities were filled the same way. Bombarded by meteorites for millions of years, the extremely dry, fine lunar soil was made up of rock particles, mono-mineralic fragments, and various kinds of glasses, including
agglutinate
particles—all perfect for laser projection building. Moon dust had been harvested over a century for that express purpose. Using the power of the space vacuum, moon dust was hovered up in bulk and carried across to half a dozen of the space stations above those cities that had taken to this form of building. The man in the moon had been sent into early retirement. The mining company was quick to recognize a wonderful advertising opportunity. The moonscape now featured the company logo: a colossal “I,” for Intelava.
A problem with this method of building was that subsequent building layers did not always fuse sufficiently with previous layers. Molecule integrity scans determined where this had happened, and Subs performed the dangerous task of laser welding buildings where fusion had not occurred sufficiently.
Shane could see in the distance today’s selection of Subs coming up from underground and in through the Belair gate below and to the east, to begin their daily work.
Most Napeans occupied themselves in the virtual worlds of information, entertainment, spirituality, or extreme pursuits. Shane worked closely with the Peoples’ Service in security. He was proud to say that he’d killed many Subs attempting to steal, hijack, or perform various other acts of terrorism on the Napean population. He used a laser bolt pistol. Forty-eight hours of shooting before recharge. Not that this was required, of course. In the unlikely event of a “flat battery,” an emergency charge gave the user an extra twenty-four hours of solid use. The last twenty years had seen the end of laser “beam” weapons. Although more destructive, they posed a greater risk to the wielder. Beam guns shot a continuous arc of blistering laser energy capable of cutting concrete. Unfortunately, they had a tendency to “lock” and fuse with a target, causing meltdown at point of origin. In other words, the person holding the gun melted.
Shane watched Subs as he had done nearly every day for a hundred years. He felt sorry for them; it was too late for them to change now. They were trapped in a subsistence underworld. But there was no humility in them; they all shared the same stubborn outlook on life: “Napeans are unnatural!”
What’s natural anyway?
thought Shane.
It’s natural to want the human race to survive. Some of us will and some won’t. That’s why I’m here and they’re there. Evolution.
Shane yelled out to his wife, bringing up an ongoing moral debate: “Y’know, darling, you wonder why I have no problem sleeping at night…”
“I never said that!” she yelled back from the atrium.
“Well, that I’m not consumed with guilt over the things I’ve done…”
“It’s your job and I respect you for that!” answered Mia.
“Yeah, but… I mean, it’s the hypocrisy I can’t stand.”
“What are you talking about?” she demanded. “They…”
“Subs?” Mia clarified.
“Yes. The attack on Friday was all about our lack of care for the Earth… but I don’t see what they’re doing to help.”
“I know, darling. They have old-fashioned beliefs,” he agreed.
Shane was a dog with a bone: “How can they not want to help find a new world?”
“Don’t pretend you care about any of that!” said Mia.
“Well, they still need help from us. We made all the sacrifices.”
“Tell me about it!” said Mia.
“Look at them streaming in here like insects asking us for help!” He waved his arms out at the window as he looked across to where the real workers were coming in.
“Leave them alone, darling –they’re not hurting anyone. They come in here to do our dirty work!” Mia replied.
The Peoples’ Service had long taken the credit for “tolerating” different responses to the environmental change. The Service suspected that Subs might play a role in the evolution of the species yet.
“All right. I’m going to Belair Gate; what are you doing?” Shane asked her. Mia was a typical Napean-looking female without the usual augmentation or body sculpting: a hundred and seventy centimeters tall, well-built, brown hair, hazel-cultured eyes, and a strong nose.
“Try not to kill anyone today, darling,” she said with a wry smile. They kissed. “You know me—only the naughty ones,” said Shane.
Shane arrived at the Gate and sat up high, observing the entry of the Subs in electro telepathic communication with his guards on the ground. He was the Captain; if he saw anything untoward, he let them know. As one of the earlier Napean converts, Shane’s experience made him a highly valuable employee. There was nothing he hadn’t seen.