The Rise of the Speaker

by Pete Driscoll

  The views were breath taking – albeit not for the faint of heart. If a person was standing at sea level, the horizon – due to the curvature of the earth – would never be further than 3 miles away, even on a clear day. From the top of the Speaker’s Tower, that distance stretched to 8 miles. But from up here, a third of a mile into the air, the horizon was an astounding 21 miles away and the lush Atlantian countryside could be viewed in all its splendour as it yawned out to the North of the Spire. It was magnificent.

  “You had just told us about the decision to extend the island and open it up to other people.” Jonathan answered plainly, his humility was one thing, but his grasp of the subtleties of storytelling still needed work.

  Penny cocked an eyebrow at him and laughed.

  “yes, thank you Jonathan…”

  A little over two years had passed since the decision had been made. The entire continents of North and South America had been ‘capped’ within a few weeks, after which we had turned our attention to some of the other big industrial nations. It had taken four months to cap all of India and another four months to make a significant dent in the carbon emissions of China but the amount of Carbonite being produced had skyrocketed.

  The three quarters of a million tonnes of carbonite being produced every month was ploughed almost exclusively into the building of our new home. Within 18 months, the tens of thousands of new Artisans had extended the island’s support structure and created a landmass a little larger than the state of Texas in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean – a little shy of 1.1 million square miles.

  My original Island had been left almost untouched, a few hundred yards of water allowed to remain between it and the new mainland, creating an island in the middle of an inland lake – a few miles northwest of the site that would one day become the capital - as the rest of the new landmass extended for hundreds of miles in every direction. The Island was breathtakingly beautiful.

  It hadn’t taken long – perhaps only a few months after construction started – for the world to notice the growing landmass in the middle of the Atlantic. Scientist has assumed that a previously unknown undersea volcano had become active and the steadily expanding island was a result of its eruption. It wasn’t long before boat loads of them arrived offshore to monitor the situation, they had been shocked beyond words when they were greeted by Spartans and a single holographic man and the real explanation given to them. They had stayed for a while, watching in amazement as the island was constructed around them, reporting back to their home governments regularly before most of them left. I was, however, surprised when a significant number of them had asked to stay – they had been as upset and disillusioned with their home countries as Alice has suggested and the prospect of a new start appealed to them. They set up shop some distance west of the Island and settled down.

  The founding blocks of the Hawking institute had been laid.

  Overnight, the population had gone from one, to twenty-four. As the island continued to grow, a vigorous debate was raging at the UN as various countries argued over who this new territory belonged to. When that debate ended in stalemate, no less than seven countries sent bureaucrats and special forces teams to lay claim to the Island; Alice and her Spartans were more than happy to correct their assumptions and send them on their way. Only Brazil persisted in their efforts, finally being driven off after a vicious – albeit non-lethal – firefight on the coast.

  Curiously, the US stayed out of the landgrab politics after the presence of the Spartans became known, Alice could never find evidence of any communications regarding the island in the higher government - other than the President being told of my location – and they stayed unsettlingly quiet after that. I was still the most wanted man in the country and yet not a single attempt was made against me. I wasn’t too concerned over my safety, the number of Spartans defending the Island – and me – had shot up from 50 to more than 5000 with condor dropships ferrying them to wherever on the Island they were needed. Defence was certainly not a problem.

  A year and a half after it had begun, the construction of the Island was completed. The scientists – who had started to refer the island as ‘New Atlantis’ – had been instrumental in the design of some of the Island geographical features, regularly making suggestions as to where mountain ranges should be placed and how they should be orientated to allow for more balanced rainfall or better irrigation of the surrounding countryside. They had plotted the best courses for some of the rivers which would later become iconic – the Whitesnake in particular – and had outlined the best layout of the coast to encourage wildlife to keep coming to the Island. Alice had been happy to accommodate, not only because they were excellent ideas, but it gave her somebody else to talk to.

  The scientists had also – almost single handed – solved our marketing problem as well. As the construction progressed, word of the new island spread through the media outlets and press offices of the world like wildfire. Almost every journalist that came to the island started their tour with – and were told about the construction process by – the scientists themselves. The first time that the concept of building and designing cities to house a new population was mentioned to a reporter, the press exploded with hundreds of thousands of queries being directed to respective newspaper and media outlets, the vast majority of which were asking how they could apply to live here.

  The scientist demurred from those questions and my identity as the architect and leader of this new nation was revealed to the world. Over the course of a dozen or so interviews, I laid out my plans for the new nation, its political system, its potential economy, the new technology that had been developed to build the island and the laws and rights that would govern the people who chose to come. It was during this time that the final name of the Island was born; one of the reporters had made a simple typing error – accidently replacing the ‘s’ in Atlantis with an ‘a’, making Atlantia – the name, somehow, stuck and the Island quickly became known as Atlantia, its inhabitants became the Atlantians and the name for this new conceptual nation was born.

  As all of this was going on, the groundwork for a population was being laid. The sites for cities had been earmarked fairly early on – twenty-six new cities in all and hundreds of smaller towns and villages – but each of which would need a staggering network of infrastructure to make the city viable; power, water, sewage, refuse, communication, food, drainage, roads, transportation, all of this had to be considered before the first building was constructed.

  Most of this came easily, a number of massive reactor cores were built in the catacombs beneath each city, each providing more power than the city could ever hope to use. Water was brought in from the sea, purified below each city and pumped to the surface, sewage used the same process, only backwards. Waste and garbage would either be recycled in massive processing plants, used in the forges or burned down in the reactor, communication and internet access was provided on the same network as the power plant and the food production facilities could produce enough sustenance to maintain a population of millions before needing to be expanded. In a final homage to Maria, the entire country would be better than carbon neutral; absorbing far more carbon than it produced.

  What I was most proud of though, was the transportation links. Each city, each town, each rural village was connected by a massive and elaborate highway and train network, the overwhelming majority of which was contained in the uppermost level of the catacombs. Eight lane highways – for the newly designed lithium energy cell powered electric cars, the only type allowed in Atlantia - criss-crossed the island with access ramps being dug in at strategic points in and around each city and smaller rural communities being connected to other ramps by small surface service roads.

  Each city also contained a massive internal public transit system that connected every part of the city with every other part. Usually constructed on elevated rails above the road and roughly based on a monorail system, these enormous systems would make the relian
ce on cars for inner-city travel practically obsolete.

  Then there was the inter-city rail network. It would take a car – driving at 100mph – more than 13 hours to travel from one corner of the island to the other. To combat this, we installed a network of underground, magnetic levitating, vacuum sealed train tunnels; with almost no friction effecting the train – either from rails or from the air – these newly designed maglev locomotives could comfortably reach speed of more than one-thousand miles per hour and – being held in place with four magnetic rails, one on each corner of the vehicle – they were not only incredibly safe, but also extremely comfortable. Able to carry almost 2500 people on each train, they would quickly become the default method of travel for long journeys and commuting between cities.

  Hundreds of thousands of jobs – initially filled by the Artisans, but would later be filled by the population – had already been created just to maintain the massive infrastructure that would keep the new nation running, over a million more were created as the towering and spectacular cities started to rise from the ground and millions more became available as the service and production industries were launched.

  International political opinion wasn’t quite as straight forward. Many countries – the US and China in particular – flatly refused to allow any of their citizens to travel to Atlantia. The US may not have made much on an effort to apprehend me, but they had been very quick to point out that this new nation had been designed, built and would be led by a wanted criminal; any US citizen showing an interest in emigrating to Atlantia was labelled as a traitor and a supporter of terrorism. China and a few other regimes were a bit more repressive, not wanting their population to leave, they simply refused to let them go.

  Europe was less averse to large parts of their population emigrating – based primarily on a longstanding, albeit inaccurate belief that the continent was already massively overcrowded - as long as they didn’t take all of their wealth with them; each family being limited on the amount of financial assets that could be transferred to Atlantia. The vast majority of people leaving Europe, however, fell well below the financial limit set by their governments. The European powers did, however, make the actual transportation of our new countrymen a lot more complicated than it needed to be.

  Alice had planned to build a fleet of large cruise ships, each able to carry a few thousand people, send them to major ports all around the world and transport the immigrants back to Atlantia. The British, however – having not yet officially recognised Atlantia as a sovereign state – refused to allow any of these ships to either dock in the ports or even enter their waters; the rest of Europe quickly followed suit… something about international maritime law, details of which was even beyond Alice’s ability to find.

  In the end, we had to hire and pay pre-existing cruise companies to use their ships to transport our new people to Atlantia. Despite how expensive this ended up being, it proved to be a blessing in disguise. Anyone from the US or China who wanted to relocate to Atlantia against their government’s wishes, simply went ‘on vacation’ to Europe and hopped on one of these ships – with us paying for their use, the actual fare to the people on the ships was zero. Over a million US and Chinese citizens would use this method of emigration over the next few years, all of them arriving with only whatever belongings they could fit in their suitcases.

  There was nothing that the oppressive governments could do about it either. They couldn’t shut down the tourist trade for obvious economic reasons and didn’t want to risk damaging international relations by trying to force the European countries to stop the migration – freedom of movement was as much a right in the EU as it was in the US. China simply didn’t have the political firepower to make those kinds of demands.

  A smaller fleet of our cruise ships was eventually built and sent off to countries with no objections to the mass migration; South Africa, Japan, Australia, India and – curiously – Brazil all allowed our ships to dock and their people to leave unmolested. Within six months of the completion of the construction phase, and as massive cities were completed around them, a population of 3.8 million people settled into their new home.

  Each new resident passed through Sanctuary Island – a small body of land located off the northern shore of the mainland and connected to the rest of Atlantia by a massive white suspension bridge. Based on the same principle as Ellis Island in New York, it was the primary entry point to the new nation where each citizen was subjected to a full medical screening and an extensive security background checks, only a handful were turned away and all of them for reasons involving violent criminal records. Any migrant requiring medical care was provided it in Sanctuary Island’s very own hospital.

  Lincoln city – the closest urban centre to Sanctuary Island – quickly became the most populous city in the country as residents moved in, assessed the other residential options in other cities and moved on, only to be replaced by the next intake of citizens.

  This process would continue for the next few years. With almost 30 million citizens passing through Sanctuary and settling in Atlantia before we gained international political recognition – three years later - and people could make their own way to the Island without reprisals from their former governments. It would take another decade for the last of the politically oppositional governments – such as Russia – to finally reverse their opinions on their population moving to Atlantia.

  Any country that didn’t automatically allow their people to relocate to Atlantia became the recipient of ‘sanctions’; Europe was a special case as they technically allowed the process, they just made it very difficult. Sanctions from such a new and relatively small nation would usually have been a source of amusement in the halls of the UN, but our technological superiority – and our willingness to share some of that technology with other states – caused them to take note.

  One of the first manufacturing jobs to become available to the unskilled workers of Atlantia was the creation of carbonite micro-processors. Each chip was relatively simple – at least in terms of the incredibly complex, multiple core chips currently being used in computers – but being made of carbonite, they were significantly more powerful that their silicon-based counterparts. Computers containing our new chip became the new benchmark by which speed and computing power was judged.

  Another early job was in the manufacturing of commercially usable power cells. Initially designed for the electric car market, they quickly expanded to fill all manner of power production and storage roles. Both the microchips and the power cells were sold to friendly governments and corporations after being covered in a solid carbonite shell, making access to the new material impossible.

  The conditions of use for any technology released onto the open market – akin to the licensing agreements we had used at Itek - was that it was not sold in or given to any country on the current sanctions list. Any country or company breaking this rule was added to the list, and anyone who found themselves the recipient of sanctions was quickly left behind by the global economy who were now becoming increasingly reliant on the new technologies. When the London Stock Exchange, German Chancellery, the Japanese automotive industry and the Indian finance ministry all converted their systems to use this new technology, it became a matter of time before losing access to these resources became more important to the respective nation’s infrastructure than annoying the countries who still oppose Atlantia’s existence.

  The US – for their part - was placed on the sanction list almost by default and would remain there for years. They in turn placed sanctions on Atlantia for goods we were more than capable of making ourselves. When that didn’t work, they tried to implement a trade embargo – attempting to force other countries to cease trading with Atlantia - but, as their national standing was nothing like the level it had once been and their President not wanting to risk a war with his few remaining international allies – not to mention the growing reliance on Atlantian technologies - the embargo was flatly ignored. />
  The revenue that these – and other – technologies brought into the treasury was more than enough to power the entire economy, an international trade relationship that would later be taken up by Atlas. Any Atlantian who worked on the infrastructure of the country or who worked in one of the manufacturing plants that directly fed the nation’s international trade, was paid directly by the state, which was, in turn, swimming in the cash that the rest of the world was paying for their products. In the early days of the nation, this employment status covered almost everyone. But as the more entrepreneurial minded citizens found their footing and a dizzying array of private companies started opening, the ratio lowered to just a point where just under half of the citizenry worked for the government in one way or another. Given the pay and benefits that we provided, the Atlantian state was one of the best employers in the county, its jobs highly sought after and job satisfaction within those roles remain at the top of the charts.

  One thing that I always found odd – as I skimmed the statistics of people entering the country – was the high number of people emigrating who were part of the ‘middle classes.’ I had always expected the majority of migrants to be from of the poorer demographic, coming here looking for a fresh start - and millions of them did – but I had always assumed that the middle classes would be harder to attract. Instead, they flocked to Atlantia in their millions. Huge amounts of skilled and professional citizens were flocking to our new nation, many of whom were perfectly happy to continue their trade here. Doctors, nurses, police officers, firefighters, teachers, former military personnel, bankers, engineers, business owners, scientists and every other conceivable profession was accounted for. Alice – as usual - had been right, the population quickly started creating its own workforce and employment economy with almost no guidance – if the infrastructure was there - hospitals, police stations, banks and so on - the people would fill the roles themselves, all I had to do was keep up with demand. It was incredible.