One Billion Drops of Happiness (7 page)

‘Certainly we had thought of that,’ Reginald bustled in swiftly, ‘you would be very welcome to liquidate your assets and transfer your expertise to assist with Ophelium. It will be the biggest project in the history of the world.’ Almost as an afterthought he added perversely, ‘In fact, you will be very, very welcome.’

Wan nodded with pursed lips, completely ignoring Reginald’s most inappropriate allusion to the past. On the one hand her company was the most valuable thing she had to her name, but on the other it was true, even her Suppressitor had been malfunctioning lately. She could remember when she first got it, she barely needed to click to top up the effects; it had been so innately in-tune with her emotions. These days she was clicking several times a day and it was beginning to wear her thin.

‘And how do you propose this ‘happy gas’ will be distributed?’ Okadigbo contributed, feeling it was time to provide input. He was aware that it would look bad if his name did not appear much on the minutes of the meeting. Today he was wearing garments of the richest deep purple, magnifying the gold of his Suppressitor, ensuring that one simply could not miss it.

Henry turned to him. ‘I’m glad you asked this question. This brings us onto the next topic. Our scientists have thought this through meticulously and have come up with the following.’ He switched a button on the table and the wall behind him illuminated with a three dimensional image with arrows swirling all around.

‘Turbines. This turbine behind me is the prototype for the several hundred of its kind that shall be distributed throughout the country. It works by Ophelium and it scatters Ophelium. We will use liquid Ophelium to power the motors, providing an output of kinetic energy. This energy will in turn transform Ophelium liquid into absolutely odourless Ophelium gas. The turbine will release the Ophelium in gentle, timely wafts across many hundred miles. You won’t even be aware you’re breathing it. We will place enough turbines over the country so that they will all overlap in terms of the area they supply. Therefore if one happens to malfunction, the others shall compensate without causing any adverse effect at all. As I’ve said, we’ve thought this through scrupulously.’

‘This is magnificent,’ Edgar Ptolemy croaked. He was the one hundred and thirty year old President of the Space Exploration Committee. ‘But is this Ophelium a renewable source? Will it ever run out?’

‘No.’ Henry replied firmly. ‘Ophelium is made of entirely renewable ingredients. It is by no means a finite source. We can’t disclose exactly what it is made of for patenting reasons, but we can expect to use it for hundreds of years to come, or before they finally discover a vaccine.’

‘Oh they won’t do that,’ said Patel. ‘Believe me; they’ve tried for years and years. There is something intangible in the workings of the human body which will reject any permanent suppression of emotions. We can use a Suppressitor, we can take pills every day, we can breathe in the fumes of some powerful gas, but it is as if the body wants to retain the option of going back to the old days. There will never be a permanent one-off solution to this problem.’

‘Exactly,’ Henry agreed. ‘Which is why we must press ahead soon.’

‘We trust you implicitly,’ beamed Okadigbo. ‘After all, in this very modern day and age there are so many fields of expertise. We cannot possibly know even the elementary basics of a handful of them because they are so mind-bogglingly complex. That is why we, as New America, are proud to trust in the extensive knowledge of those more capable.’

There were a few in the room who privately wondered which field exactly Okadigbo would put his name to. But for once, he was right about one thing; the common thread that bound together New America was the endeavor for advancement and future brilliance. It was counterproductive for a person to have knowledge of more than one field of technicality. Being a jack of all trades but a master of none was as much use as a pet that refused to return affection.

‘And how much of this Ophelium will be needed?’ Wan enquired. ‘I can switch my workforce to production of the liquid….’

‘Well, we figured it out,’ Henry replied, ‘and once a year exactly, every turbine will require the grand total of one billion drops of Ophelium.’

‘One billion drops…’ came the collective murmur.

‘No more, no less.’ Henry confirmed.

‘You seem to have it under control,’ Okadigbo resumed, pleased at the progress. ‘When can we expect to have this in place?’

‘We can’t just spring this on people!’ spluttered Sophia Magnet, Chief Executive Officer of the Vapour industry. ‘We can’t just expect them to agree to go cold turkey on their Suppressitors. Some people have never known life without them on their neck!’

‘Which is why we’ll ease them in.’ Reginald soothed. ‘I’ve tried it myself in the gaseous form; it’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. Total calm. My work output that day was phenomenal, no interruptions, nothing! But ultimately we’ll all have to have trust in our intellectual superiors. The first day we switch on the turbines people can be allowed to have their Suppressitors at hand, that is, if they’ve not completely conked out by that time. After that, we can destroy them all forever. Destroy the evidence that we ever needed such devices. Oh how we’ll laugh in a few years time!’

‘These turbines will surely be very expensive,’ postulated Ptolemy, ‘how long will they take to build?’

‘They won’t take long at all,’ Henry explained. ‘With the diligent workforce of New America and our extremely advanced building materials, they can be up in no time at all. Say, a few months tops. But of course we will need to pay for them. We will negotiate some sort of tax which everybody can contribute towards. It should cover the outgoings.’

‘But, ladies and gentlemen,’ Reginald continued, ‘in light of the dizzying costs of building and considering that there may be some public backlash from those particularly fond of their Suppressitors, we will have to put New America to a vote. We are a democratic, forward thinking civilization after all. And if the majority of people are in favour of the reform, we shall go ahead and change the landscape of the country forever. No more clicking, no more emotions. Pure uninhibited plain-sailing. Merely felicity in a billion drops.’

‘A billion drops.’ Henry repeated. The meeting was over.

* * *

‘Good morning, people of New America!’ Okadigbo boomed across the nation. He appeared in millions of mirages in front of every person in the country, no matter what they had been doing. The President could not be blocked from cell phone access.

‘I come before you on this fine day to inform you of a wonderful invention that will vastly improve the economy and change this glorious civilisation forever…’

The sound of tumultuous applause erupted into the background of his speech. Okadgibo liked to add that effect; it was a sure-fire crowd pleaser. It was easy to delight the people these days; the entire nation had come around to the ideology of living as futuristically as possible, shunning the attachment to former times in favour of progress for the current era. Possibly the use of Suppressitors meant that people gave him less resistance; he had been accused of brainwashing but quite simply he simply believed that the old adage of ‘live and let live’ had made a creeping comeback.

It had not always been this way. As the new society was officially inaugurated in 2080, millions of people worldwide had watched horrified. To a certain extent, the rest of the world had been developing at an equal pace to the former America in terms of technology. Telephones had universally come on leaps and bounds. The internet was widely used to help create a three dimensional virtual image of the person conversing and teleport it to the receiving end. Cell phones were literally that, a small cell embedded into the body wherever you so desired. Most people had it in their forearm. It was only required to transmit signal, otherwise the mirage did the rest of the work.

However, the President at that time, Friedrich Umberto, had been a rather an avid scientist, playing around with drugs and potions that could calm his fluctuating emotions. He had struggled with them for years; they had singlehandedly contributed to the worst events of his life. The last straw had been when his mother had died. The depths of his grief knew no bounds; he found it impossible to concentrate on his presidential duties, impossible to concentrate on anything but the gnawing indefinable pain inside him.

In his lucid moments he began writing a thesis describing how emotion was wholly unnecessary in the modern age; how it was a vehicle of obstruction to future progression. How it was an outdated form of chemical signalling that was only useful when humans dwelled in caves and hunted hulking beasts. The influence of this paper was phenomenal, helped greatly by the fact Umberto that was President. It soon went viral on the internet; very quickly everybody had read the crib notes of his thesis. Some people disagreed vehemently; some people laughed it off as controversial badinage and some people took it quite seriously.

It just so happened that the people who took the paper most seriously were high in authority. In a short space of time the issue of human emotions was being dropped into serious debate from courtrooms to Congress to coffee houses. At the same time an earnest college friend of Umberto’s, a scientist named Zebediah Voss, was dabbling with simple devices that could solve his friend’s little problem when he was trying to concentrate on his Presidential work.

His attempts were successful. Voss managed to mastermind a simple granite device, programmed entirely by himself, that his friend Umberto could wear discreetly around his neck as he went about his daily business.

The effects were unparalleled. Never before had Umberto enjoyed such an enormous work output. His efficiency went through the roof; he saw the world with fresher eyes and with a mind of the coolest logic. With the permission of Voss, Umberto made copies of the device for his friends in Congress. He fondly called it his ‘Suppressitor’; it quite simply suppressed his emotions. He was awestruck.

His friend Voss was perfectly happy to engineer more and more of these devices. With time he could enhance the deft programming behind the Suppressitors so that they could be more in tune with an individual’s personal fluctuations. The more that the Suppressitor was worn, the more attuned it would become. A constant state of serenity was achieved as the device fought to balance out every moodswing, every nuance of emotion. Occasionally, excessive sentiment would require a tactful click to boost the Suppressitor’s effects, but that was all.

Its popularity rocketed. Soon the demand for them outstripped Voss’ supply. He hired a few workers to take on the physical manufacture while he concentrated on developing the programming. Umberto was enthralled. He increasingly felt that his country was overtaking the rest of the world in its pioneering inventions. As the other countries slandered the ‘dehumanisation’ of America, spouting bromides about how the ancestors of such a great country would be turning in their graves at this desecration of history, Umberto gave birth to the idea that perhaps history, too, could be disposed of.

What was the use of clinging to the past? He questioned. We live our lives being burdened by civilisations before our time, adhering to their traditions and values without questioning whether they fit with our modern way of life. Why waste public money keeping old buildings erect merely because they are from an olden age? Sentimentality is like a speed hump in the road to progression. Everything in a modern society should have a function. Shells of buildings left empty but not demolished are no longer appropriate.

Construction had come on leaps and bounds since the early years of the twenty-first-century; old buildings were quite frankly a waste of space nowadays. And when it came to churches, why pray to aged gods when you had a Suppressitor? In its presence there would no longer be insecurity, pleading or even gratitude. Comfort, the mainstay of religion, is redundant when you have a device that soothes you every minute of the day without abating.

So yes, he concluded. America needed a rehaul. A new nation should be born in light of this groundbreaking new ideology. New America shall be born, and as a fledgling civilisation, it will have no history to bind it, no traditions to spare time giving a nod towards. It will exist solely to strive forwards into advanced humanity, entirely unhindered by emotion. So that one day if we were to meet life from other planets, we would be proud to display our journey through evolution.

And with that, New America was inaugurated in the year 2080, along with the three pillars of invention exclusive to the new nation: vaccinations against almost every ill, the Vapour, and the Suppressitor.

‘So to conclude…’ Okadigbo resonated, having trawled through his well-rehearsed speech with much gusto, ‘Ophelium is the aroma of serenity, the scent of the future. No more sadness, no more fears! But in the meantime, my people of this esteemed nation, you have until midnight on August the fourteenth to vote. Thank you for your time.’ And with a fizz he was gone.

‘Yes or no?’

‘Yes in an instant!’

‘…but what about this breathing tax?’

‘They’ll charge the moon!’

‘Of course they will, you only need to look at that Excelsior man…’

‘I’m voting no. I like my Suppressitor, it’s engraved.’

‘Me too. It seems a little drastic; maybe we should wait a little longer.’

‘But don’t you see, your Suppressitor will eventually break down now Mr. Voss has gone!’

‘Oh. Then can we opt in and then out for some months? I’m trying to save for a space tour…’

* * *

‘You want me to do what?’

‘Look, Xandria, I don’t mean to put you in an awkward spot, but I really need you to do this for me.’ Amethyst paced the bedroom trying to conceal her anxious face from her daughter. She had thought about blocking her mirage from being sent over via the phone but realised this might make her plea reek of shiftiness.

‘I can’t just rearrange a government appointment, you know that. There are protocols and passwords, and even if I could do it, I’d be putting my job at risk.’