NEW WORLD TRILOGY (Trilogy Title) (36 page)

While the world watched on, forests and other natural areas were regenerated with mathematically diverse, healthy and sustainable ecosystems that proliferated outside and throughout urban areas; the vertical forests of apartment complexes and the multiplicity of environmental, architectural and infrastructural diversity in urban environments saw cityscapes take on a new shape, complexity and scope for the lifestyles of inhabitants.

Moreover, food production practices changed markedly.  Although experimented with on a minor scale prior to this, vertical farming complexes were established in zoned areas and became part of the urban environment, thus excluding weather and the limits of arable land as a variable to productivity.  There were two main forms of farming: 1) quick-growth crops that were cultivated hydroponically with the help of nano-accelerants; and 2) nano-manufactured ‘laboratory’ crops and meat that were grown and/or assembled into a mature form from raw materials.  The latter obviously bypassed the need for industrialised animal farming but was also particularly useful for crops that traditionally required a large amount of surface area, such as the various grains.

These developments were aided by a fusion energy revolution, which was nurtured to fruition after those working in the related fields were brought under the umbrella of the state’s Energy R&D Facilitation Programme.  A variety of energy generation technologies had been developed and brought into wide use over the first half of the century, some of which Henry had been involved with years earlier, albeit only through his consultancy and funding service for emerging companies and start-ups since it was such a competitive and fund-thirsty area, and it was ultimately ancillary to his main expertise and strategic positioning with synthetic oil; his activities did prove to be quite lucrative and facilitatory, however.  These technologies included massive space-based solar farms, which provided power to space stations, the covert space metropolises of the pre-revolution space programmes, shuttles and the surface-to-orbit ferries; further, on Earth, in addition to the increasingly powerful niche areas of solar, wind and ocean power, the main developments came from geothermal and fusion power due to output potentials and reliability.  Although the most powerful, the fusion generators prior to the energy revolution were large, unwieldy and expensive facilities, so their proliferation was generally limited to a select group of developed cities and regions around the world.  As a result, much of the underdeveloped world was still struggling to meet energy needs with old-fashioned technology, such as nuclear and coal.  Even though there had been many well-intentioned attempts to provide alternatives over the years, the outcomes were quite limited and fell well short of total coverage and the growing demand.  The advent of compact fusion generators, however, was game changing in that they circumvented the limitations and the cumbersome complicatedness of the global energy situation: economies of scale associated with the new nano-tech, mass-production capabilities, combined with the political will of the World Representative Democracy, enabled the swift distribution of these light-weight units around the world and the extension of the proliferation of mid-to-large-sized fusion generators to meet the infrastructural needs of built-up areas.  This massive eighteen-month undertaking resulted in the world’s energy supply far exceeding future demand trends by thousands of years and also provided an effective solution for the World Space Programme.

Despite the augmentation that the technologies provided, the new developments weren’t received without significant resistance or complaint, both publicly and privately from individuals and groups, such as anti-trans-humanists of various kinds, including religious and secular varieties.  Although there was no hope of stopping the systematic restructuring of society that was occurring all around them — which caused a small percentage to become isolated survivalists — several hundred million citizens either refused to take up the mind and body augmentations, due to ideological commitments or mere fear, or ceased experimenting with them after a short time, choosing instead to go it alone … perhaps until falling ill; otherwise, some chose to rely on primitive healthcare provision that found a niche beyond the apparatus of the state, while others avoided anything other than basic treatment inside the home.  Further, apart from the millions of the people who refused to take up or severed the link with the soft perception-modulation programs, there was a small suspicious yet curious minority who were able to take adequate precautions and use the augmentations with the aid of defensive programs that allowed them to explore with a clear head the particularities and the limitations of the available AI and infrastructural technologies and speculate about the reasons for them and how they might be overcome; some of these agents were in a position to attempt to make technological progress on their own terms and in the direction of their own choosing…

Eighteen months after the distribution of the first wave of the augmentation technologies, the policing apparatus of the World Representative Democracy had identified and incarcerated nearly five thousand underground networks of cyberterrorists and scientist-technologists in their underground science labs and technology workshops.  All were working on high-level technology projects with the ambition to surpass the level of the state’s technology.  The well-founded fear held by the establishment was that there were more yet unknown.

In anticipation of these emerging circumstances, Henry and Samuel relocated to a purpose-built orbital research facility several months earlier.  As a necessary security measure, the facility was essentially isolated from all connectivity on the ground and the rest of the network of space stations and space metropolises, most of which had been constructed before the revolution.  Facility 7, as it was plainly called, soon became home to nearly four thousand scientist-technologists and their immediate families, a population totalling 10,236 at its peak.  The primary purpose of the operation was to develop the covert space programme that had been established nearly twelve months earlier by Henry and Samuel after they had decided that it was necessary to diverge significantly from the direction of the official World Space Programme.

• • •

Reflecting on the state of their programme and the situation down on the surface, Henry and Samuel stand alone looking out towards Earth through the long windows of a hallway in Facility 7.  After a long silence, Samuel glances at Henry, who now looks to be around forty years of age.  “I’ve been obsessed with Earth for so long — most of my life, really — that I think I missed the big picture in some ways.  I really am sick of trying to contain things — I was much happier working towards our objectives in the pre-revolution days; it was clear and kind of simple back then.  Containment is tiring, I have to say…  I think I’m ready to hand the job over.  Actually, I’m really looking forward to exploring new territory and getting out of here … at least for a while.”  He points with his head towards Earth and continues, “Leave them to their own devices to work it out for themselves.”

Henry nods in understanding but responds on a tangent, “When I think back to my wildest dreams as a kid, I didn’t seriously believe that we would actually see and do the things we have over the past few years … and, ironically, I was into speculative fiction.  But this path we’ve been going down for some time now … it may look like we changed directions with the revolution and augmented the world system into another dimension, if you will — in some ways we did, of course — but, as you well know, some of the big things, some of the intractable things have still stayed the same, like the general direction of the progress of science and technology, and the dynamics of social change, persuasion and resistance … and also the set of phase transitions.  It’s these types of qualities that have not only helped us achieve what we have but have also severely limited us at the same time.”

“Yeah, I remember thinking early on that the kinds of changes we’ve made recently would have more of an effect than they seem to have … then I realised where I was.”

“Apparently, we just have to keep walking the tightrope while hoping we make it to the next level in the game … without really knowing if or how or when we’re ever going to get there.”

Samuel thinks about the agenda of the World Space Programme.  “It’s certainly not just spreading out widely to ensure adequate levels of redundancy and the survival of a few, although that’s part of it.  I really didn’t realise until after we met just the extent of the massive changes in just about everything that are really required in order to make it to the next level.  When I think about what I considered a large-scale change to be in the pre-revolution days compared to now … it’s completely different … completely different scales and unimagined concepts about what’s possible … and required.”

“You’re right — it’s been clear for a while that we need different rules; new rules can only come with a radical new set of conditions, though.”  Henry points casually towards Earth.  “Convincing them of the need for that is another thing.  It must seem like we’ve done a lot already — perhaps, too much even — but really we’re still only part way there.”

“A small fraction of the way, actually … but the leap may be quick.”

“True.  Very quick,” agrees Henry with a grin.

Samuel stays quiet for a moment.  “You know, I was quite surprised when I did the modelling that it’s apparently so difficult to get through the turbulence…  You know, we may not have even paid the heavy costs yet, Henry.  I just wish I could feel like I knew Earth was in good hands and would develop in a manner that … well, that was healthy.  We’ve played with development plans and have factored in umpteen key components, and we still can’t get an adequate probability out of it.”

“Yeah … you did take your obsession with that to the limit there a few times.”

“The psychotic episodes didn’t help…  Well, they did, I suppose.”  Samuel laughs.  “Too much abruptly injected brain power…  ‘Oh, let’s just increase it by tenfold this morning and see if I can’t see past the horizon … bring that damned thing closer!’  Gee.”

“There’s an intensifying tension between facilitating optimally and pushing it too far and fast.  It’s a general upward curve, but it’s not exponential.  It’s more dynamic than we realised — it oscillates … sometimes intensely.  I just hope we’re getting close.”

“We know what we’re heading for, at least.”  Samuel reflects on this and asks, “Do you think we’ve made the right decision?”

“You mean experimenting with ‘New World Dynamics’ elsewhere?” asks Henry, guessing the context.

“Mm … at least until it’s defined, stable and broadly scalable.”

“Sure.  We’ve stabilised things here as much as we can for the time being — I mean, it was your model.  Once we’re ready, those who want to … well, they can come along, but, you know…”

“We can’t force them.  Of course.”

Henry places his hand on Samuel’s shoulder.  “No matter what happens from here, Samuel, we can be sure it wasn’t our decision to make.”

Samuel laughs bleakly.

Five days later

During a meeting in the main conference room, which has a direct view of Earth through a room-wide window, Henry stands staring out at the Pacific Ocean analysing the cloud formations while Samuel and one of their teams of research managers go over the finer details of their progress to date and their future timeline.  They all fall silent as their train of thought is interrupted by a cognitively represented streaming video of Earth flooding in from high-magnification cameras attached to a network of surveillance satellites that are solely connected to Facility 7.

Oh, no.
  Henry winces.

This is it, then.
  Samuel turns his head to face Earth.

All seventeen in the room fall silent and just stare out across at their home world, which is still hanging there so gracefully.

• • •

The attack began simultaneously worldwide when malicious code slipped through the panoply of defences of the semantic web, rendering them useless.  Targeting hundreds of millions of infrastructural control hubs nearly simultaneously, the code reprogrammed proto-nanoparticles in the production units, altering their structure and function dramatically to form an initial group of hostile nano-agents (HNA), which then communicated these transformation specifications to their immediate neighbours.  This transmission continued recursively through the extensive networks of infrastructural nanoparticles, thus setting HNA upon the surrounding environment.  In addition, once neighbours of nanoparticles had been transformed, the rapidly growing population of HNA targeted chemical structures of most kinds in their immediate vicinities, reducing them to their atomic constituents and then building more HNA where possible while discarding the unusable elements; this
modus operandi
enabled HNA’s destructive dissemination to reach a near-exponential rate around the world.  Throughout this, the human population was treated in an unbiased manner: they were merely targeted as the opportunity arose, at which time they were eaten away at in a few initially agonising and bloody seconds.

From their bird’s eye view from space, Samuel, Henry and the crew aboard Facility 7 could see none of the action with their own eyes in the early stages, but they were able to process a diverse array of images and video at various levels of magnification right up to the micro level; this provided them with immense detail of the action and the broader events as they unfolded.  Villages, towns and cities were often attacked from the inside out from various points; circular zones of destruction within urban zones expanded and merged, then continued to spread into the countryside, soon leaving whole regions dark, lifeless and razed to the ground.  In orbit, being connected to the semantic web, the network of hundreds of space stations, hotel resorts, shuttles and ferries, and the twenty-two space metropolises were all consumed in a matter of minutes once the infection entered their systems; thankfully, with a population of 1.2 million, the research colonies found on the Moon and on or around the other planets and their satellites in the solar system were protected due to the limits of their connectivity associated with the longer distances, which prevented HNA from disseminating intact — they too could only watch on once their surveillance cameras had detected the disturbance.  Down on the surface of Earth, the vanguard of the devastation kept disseminating: affecting everything natural and artificial except those elements and compounds that it found intolerably noxious — sometimes themselves being destroyed by them — HNA obliterated the flora and fauna, top soil, surface rocks, and the water sources, including entire oceans.  Within a matter of minutes, the whole surface of the Earth had been decimated.