Visions of the Future (14 page)
Read Visions of the Future Online
Authors: David Brin,Greg Bear,Joe Haldeman,Hugh Howey,Ben Bova,Robert Sawyer,Kevin J. Anderson,Ray Kurzweil,Martin Rees
Tags: #Science / Fiction
The first seconds of her new life were utterly dark and silent.
The blackest of black where nothing existed.
The deep silence of outer space.
In this transition she was timeless, neither human, nor eHuman.
Just consciousness, just Lux.
She was traveling the void of the universe at light speed.
And then she opened her eyes.
The world was instantly blurry, a kaleidoscope of unfocused colors surrounded her in every direction. She shook her head, trying to see, to no avail.
But only for a moment.
Her new body’s operating system instantly detected the anomaly and adjusted her vision. The room came into view—crystal clear and brilliant. The eyes of her carbon body had never seen the world with such color and clarity. She could see the pores of the ceiling above her and the faintest detail of the previous coat of paint.
The silence remained. Gone was the drumbeat of her heart, the steady inhale and exhale of her breath, and the gurgling of her digestive system. She’d left her heart, lungs, and stomach behind in her previous body.
Only minutes prior she had been in the carbon body of her original birth—five foot two, dark hair, female, green eyes, twenty years of age. Sophia Castalogna had been her name. But that body lie beside her, dead, rigor mortis just about to set in. She stared at it, trying to make sense of what she saw. The body had been her home and for a moment she longed for its soft touch. Pale under the bright lights of the lab, it looked vulnerable and she considered grabbing it and fleeing from the room, as if to save it from its demise. Such sentimentality! Life would never again breathe in that body made of carbon, so prone to sickness and death. She turned her head from the frail thing and looked back at the ceiling.
She was an eHuman now! The experiment had worked! Her consciousness, termed the Lux long ago by scientists, had successfully Jumped from her carbon-based body into her new, perfect, eHuman body—a body designed for one purpose—to bring immortality and perfect health to the human race.
She turned her head and saw Dr. Neville, her creator. She smiled at his gloriously excited face. He raised his arms above his head and began to speak, his lips moving, but she couldn’t hear a word.
Once more her operating system noticed this disconnect and slowly turned up the volume. Dr. Neville’s victory speech sounded symphonic in hi-fi stereo.
“…let us begin a new level of human excellence!” she heard him exclaim.
Applause filled the room and the doctor held out his hand to her. She took it graciously and began to sit up.
“Please rise and meet us,” he said like a proud father at a beloved daughter’s graduation.
She stood, finding herself now at least eight inches taller than the doctor. Glancing at the audience, she noted that they were all dignitaries from around the world, including the President of the United States. The most important people were there to see her birth. They stared at her, clapping their hands with mouths slightly agape and a mixture of awe, trepidation, and revulsion in their eyes. She towered above all as she stood before them wearing nothing but her smile. It was no matter—her perfect, plastic size C breasts would never sag. She didn’t have any genitals nor hair of any kind, except the long, platinum blonde mane they’d applied to her head. She waved a graceful arm, noting how smoothly her shoulder joint worked. She admired her long robotic legs, covered in bronzed life-like plasticine skin. She was beautiful beyond measure.
Gazing at the crowd, she recognized the dark haired man sitting beside the President of the United States. Smartly dressed, he stared at her curiously, as if waiting for her to notice him. The crystal face of the golden watch upon his wrist reflected the laboratory lights as he slowly clapped his hands.
Edgar Prince. Her benefactor.
She glared at him, feeling a welling urge to rip him in two. As an eHuman she had the strength to do so. He was merely a carbon-based man. But did she hate him? Memories of her life as Sophia seemed to drift around her, each a bit or byte unstrung from the rest, like fireflies dancing around her head. Fragments of childhood—something soon to disappear completely from mankind—danced before her mind’s eye. Swinging on a swing, falling out of a tree, opening presents on her birthday. Loose teeth, skinned knees, the taste of vanilla ice cream on a hot day, the intoxication of a sip of stolen vodka and first kisses. All of these memories moved about her, as if outside of her, while her new mind of fiber optic nanotubes fired away, trying to make sense of this scattering of data.
Her past was slipping away from her and she began to panic. This hadn’t been part of the deal. Dr. Neville had thought that her memories would survive the Jump and come with her into her new eHuman life. She had a family, brothers, sisters, parents. There were friends who would want to see her. Yet faces were losing their sharpness and names were suddenly hard to recall. Her eyes began to flutter and shift back and forth as she scanned her database for information, trying to piece together the days leading up to her Jump, but she came up empty. Hers was a life about to be rewritten, a clean slate. Yet she knew that there was something she had to remember, something important, that evaded her.
Her fierce anger for Edgar Prince continued to course through her. He boldly looked her in the face, wearing a slight smirk, challenging her to act.
“Is there anything you’d like to say dear?” she heard Dr. Neville ask, interrupting her desperate struggle to remember who she had once been.
She turned and looked down at him. In addition to his pride, a slight note of sadness was evident in the bright blue eyes that peered out at her from behind his wire-rimmed glasses.
Then she remembered.
Elijah.
Her beloved. Son of Edgar. Forever gone to her now.
Edgar had betrayed them both.
Once more her operating system noted her distress, and began to write new memories into her database, slowly erasing Elijah and the images of his smiles, tender kisses and laughter, like a four year old shaking her etch-a-sketch. In just a millisecond, their relationship was deleted as if it had never happened.
She shook her head as if to clear it. The update was complete. Gone was Elijah’s face from her consciousness, and with it, her anger for Edgar.
“Yes,” she replied while turning to face the crowd once more, this time filled with ease and grace.
She allowed her sea-green eyes to set upon Edgar’s deep dark ones once more, speaking directly to him. She smiled and noticed that he shivered—with fear or delight, she didn’t know.
“Let me introduce myself,” she said, her voice programmed to sound exactly like Scarlett Johansson, “I am The Dawn of eHumanity.”
Edgar rose from his seat, and everyone else followed suit quickly. He clapped enthusiastically, adoring his creation. Dawn smiled at the crowd in return as she was led out of the room to prepare for her integration with the world. It was the greatest moment of her life.
And the beginning of a new age on Earth.
THE WEATHERMAKERS
ben bova
Dr. Ben Bova, FBIS, FAAAS is the author of more than 120 futuristic novels and nonfiction books and has been involved in science and high technology since the very beginnings of the space age. President Emeritus of the National Space Society and a past president of Science Fiction Writers of America, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation in 2005, “for fueling mankind’s imagination regarding the wonders of outer space.” His 2006 novel
Titan
received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year. In 2008 he won the Robert A. Heinlein Award “for his outstanding body of work in the field of literature.” He is a frequent commentator on radio and television and a widely-popular lecturer.
Ben is six-time winner of the Hugo Award, a former editor of
Analog Science Fiction and Fact,
a former editorial director of
Omni
, and was an executive in the aerospace industry. In his various writings, he has predicted the Space Race of the 1960s, solar power satellites, the discovery of organic chemicals in interstellar space, virtual reality, human cloning, the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars), the discovery of life on Mars, stem cell therapy, the discovery of ice on the Moon, electronic book publishing, and zero-gravity sex.
The following novelette was expanded into the novel
The Weathermakers
available at
http://amzn.to/1xZwyLl
.
Ted gathered us around his desk, with the giant viewscreen staring down our throats. Hurricane Nora was howling up the mid-Atlantic; she was no trouble. But four tropical disturbances, marked by red danger symbols, were strung out along the fifteenth parallel from the Antilles Islands to the Cape Verdes.
“There’s the story,” Ted told us, prowling nervously along the foot of the viewscreen. Gesturing toward the map, he said, “Nora’s okay, won’t even bother Bermuda much. But these four Lows’ll bug us for sure.”
Tuli shook his head. “We can’t handle all four of them at once. One, possibly two, will get past us.”
Ted looked sharply at him, then turned to me. “How about it, Jerry? What’s the logistics picture?”
“Tuli’s right,” I admitted. “The planes and crews have been working around the clock for the past couple of weeks and we just don’t have enough—”
“Skip the flute music. How many of these Lows can we hit?”
Shrugging, I answered, “Two. Maybe three, if we really push it.”
Barney was standing beside me. “The computer just finished an updated statistical analysis of the four disturbances. Their storm tracks all threaten the East Coast. The two closest ones have point-eight probabilities of reaching hurricane strength. The farther pair are only point-five.”
“Fifty-fifty for the last two,” Ted muttered. “But they’ve got the longest time to develop. Chances’ll be better for ’em by tomorrow.”
“It’s those two closest disturbances that are the most dangerous,” Barney said. “They each have an eighty percent chance of turning into hurricanes that will hit us.”
“We can’t stop them all,” Tuli said. “What will we do, Ted?”
Before Ted could answer, his phone buzzed. He leaned across the desk and punched the button. “Dr. Weis calling from Washington,” the operator said.
He grimaced. “Okay, put him on.” Sliding into his desk chair, Ted waved us back to our posts as Dr. Weis’ worried face came on the phone screen.
“I’ve just seen this morning’s weather map,” the President’s Science Adviser said, with no preliminaries. “It looks as if you’re in trouble.”
“Got our hands full,” Ted said evenly.
I started back for my own cubicle. I could hear Dr. Weis’ voice, a little edgier than usual, saying, “The opposition has turned THUNDER into a political issue, with less than six weeks to the election. If you hadn’t made the newsmen think that you could stop every hurricane…”
The rest was lost in the chatter and bustle of the control center. The one room filled the entire second floor of our headquarters building. It was a frenetic conglomeration of people, desks, calculating machines, plotting boards, map printers, cabinets, teletypes, phones, viewscreens, and endless piles of paper—with the huge viewscreen map hanging over it all. I made my way across the cluttered, windowless expanse and stepped into my glass-walled cubicle.
It was quiet inside, with the door closed. Phone screens lined the walls, and half my desk was covered with a private switchboard that put me in direct contact with a network of THUNDER support stations ranging from New Orleans to the Atlantic Satellite Station, in synchronous orbit some twenty-three thousand miles above the mouth of the Amazon River.
I looked across the control center again, and saw Ted still talking earnestly into the phone. There was work to be done. I began tapping out phone numbers on my master switchboard, alerting the Navy and Air Force bases that were supporting the Project, trying to get ready to hit those hurricane threats as hard and as fast as we could.
While I worked, Ted finally got off the phone. Barney came over with a thick sheaf of computer printout sheets; probably the detailed analysis of the storm threats. As soon as I could break away, I went over and joined them.
“Okay,” Ted was saying, “if we leave those two farther-out Lows alone, they’ll develop into hurricanes overnight. We can knock ’em out now without much sweat, but by tomorrow they’ll be too big for us.”
“The same applies to the two closest disturbances,” Barney pointed out. “And they’re much closer and already developing fast…”
“We’ll have to skip one of ’em. The first one—off the Leewards—is too close to ignore. So we’ll hit Number One, skip the second, and hit Three and Four.”
Barney took her glasses off. “That won’t work, Ted. If we don’t stop the second one now, by tomorrow it will be—”
“A walloping big hurricane. I know.” He made a helpless gesture. “But if we throw enough stuff at Number Two to smother it, we’ll have to leave Three and Four alone until tomorrow. In the meantime, they’ll both develop and we’ll have two brutes on our hands!”
“But this one…”
“There’s a chance that if we knock out the closest Low, Number Two’ll change its track and head out to sea.”
“That’s a terribly slim chance. The numbers show—”
“Okay, it’s a slim chance. But it’s all we’ve got to work with.”
“Isn’t there anything else we can do?” she asked. “If a hurricane strikes the coast…”
“Weis is already looking through his mail for my resignation,” Ted said. “Okay, we’re in trouble. Best we can manage is hit Number One, skip Two, and wipe out Three and Four before they get strong enough to make waves.”
Barney looked down at the numbers on the computer sheets. “That means we’re going to have a full-grown hurricane heading for Florida within twenty-four hours.”
“Look,” Ted snapped, “we can sit around here debating ’til they
all
turn into hurricanes. Let’s scramble. Jerry, you heard the word. Get the planes up.”