Tomorrow- Love and Troubles

by G M Steenrod

  “Is wood not used in construction anymore, Alfie?”

  “Wood is used in building items, like furniture. That wood is cultivated in tanks and grown in thick sections of planks. Housing construction is done robotically. It is more efficient for robots to use pourable foams and modular components. The houses also have a much higher structural integrity. Of course, sir, I am referring to industrialized areas.”

  It was technology that had come from Mars. As the technology matured, it became a faster, cheaper, and more efficient manner of meeting the housing needs on Earth. As it progressed through another iteration, robot construction became favored because it also provided superior quality.

  “Tell me, Alfie. Is this room used often?”

  “No, Sir,” Alfie answered.

  “Has it ever been used?” asked Mike.

  “No, it hasn't. It is well-maintained and quite comfortable.”

  “Ahh,” Mike responded.

  Mike removed his suit, placing it neatly on the floor. A breeze, generated by the internal climate control system, blew lightly from the window, and enveloped his skin. He could smell a slight odor of meadow flowers. He didn't realize that the breeze he felt was unscented, and the flowers were a product of his mind.

  “Alfie, could you draw me a bath, please?

  “Yes, Sir.” Water poured from the faucet into the tub. Mike was curious as to how much daily activity could be done automatically.

  “Are you able to retrieve and post the information regarding water use in households in the local area for me to review?”

  Mike was sore and tired from his day so far. His natural curiosity was starting to dominate, however.

  He entered the bathroom. The walls were screened with a tasteful marble tile. The floor seemed to be topped with a membrane cover that had been imprinted with a highly-realistic, marble tile pattern. It yielded slightly to his step, and the light spray that inevitably came from the tub was thirstily absorbed by it.

  He sat in the bath, half-full, and let the water rise up along his body.

  The information he requested came up on the wall. He pointed at it with a motion of his entire arm. It was a crude gesture for the modern era, and the screen behaved as if he had struck the image.

  “Oops,” he said. He pulled his arm back, and used just the tip of his index finger to indicate the area of interest. The information responded quickly and intuitively to his gestures. The layout of the house's water system popped up before him.

  About 90% of the water was recycled. It was an unnecessary level of conservation given the plentiful water in the northeast. Waste was likely the concern. With another gesture, he pulled up the laws surrounding water conservation.

  This house was not on a water/sewer infrastructure. The Troubles had seen a collapse of most municipal services. The history of legislation showed a tremendous distrust emerging of municipal services as they failed. With the decline of services, local governments were discarded in most areas. Of course, large metropolitan areas still had centralized infrastructure.

  Cassie's house followed the general trend. The house gathered its own rainwater to meet the need for fresh input. Waste material was picked up by an automated cargo bot for processing. Her home was unusual in that solar didn't meet her energy needs, because of her quantum. The nearby location of an industrial power line, buried discreetly, had been a major consideration in the choosing of a home location. A line ran from it to her house.

  World-wide, the trends had been the same. The Troubles had provided a willingness to cast aside the old and bring in the new. At the same time, Mars had provided a dream to Earth about what could be. There had always been an planet-wide suspicion that even a modest expectation for an improvement in human culture was a pipe dream. Mars broke the back of that pessimism and created an intolerance for it. Linked by the screens and the Great Quantums, changes were implemented swiftly to try to curtail the environmental and social catastrophes of the Troubles. As Mike browsed overviews of the changes, it was clear that most of the changes had been driven by overwhelming necessity. They were revolutionary only in that stasis and decay had gripped the Earth for a century, and that stasis made any action seem revolutionary.

  Mike laid back in the tub as the filling water came to a stop. He closed his eyes, breathed deeply and slipped into a meditative calm. It was definitely a post Troubles time. A lot of work had been done to adjust the trajectory of the human future in the last twenty years. It was encouraging to see.

  Mike released his observations into the deeper reaches of his subconscious and let his neural routines work on them. The inner machinery of his mind, like all minds, continued its ceaseless work no matter what the conscious portions of him worked on.

  In that calm, with his thoughts and expectations silenced, a nagging, unexpressed suspicion became clear, and floated up before him: something was wrong, and horribly so.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Old Mother

  Leera stood by Fillmore on an overlook. The Caribbean continued to provide them with highly successful venues. Kumar had said the demographics indicated a strong correlation between the geographic location and the success of the venue. They would be putting that idea to the test with next stop on the tour, Pangaea, a new city founded in Antarctica, on land revealed after the melting of the ice sheets. For now, they had the show in Grenada in two days.

  Taking their cue from Cuba, Grenada had invested very heavily in raising their coastal areas, and building tidal power systems. The overlook the two of them occupied had been constructed as part of that construction push. From it, they could see a large platform floating on the water offshore. It was roughly in the shape of a four leaf clover, and in the middle of each lobe there was a tower. Over the top of the tower, there appeared to be a large, floating building.

  It only appeared so, because the cables of the elevator it anchored were not visible from the overlook. It was arguably the greatest feat of mechanical engineering of the era. The tubes were magnetic accelerators that would launch payloads toward the building floating overhead to be caught by nets. From there, they would be queued and sent up the elevator.

  Grenada provided the power for the sea platform. Its early investment in power technology had made it a potential candidate for the space elevator during the Troubles, since it was one of the few remaining areas in the tropical belt that had a bountiful surplus of power.

  Clever political maneuvering within the Caribbean Consortium insured that funds from Barons would be drawn to a build at Grenada. It was a perfect combination of independence, needed assistance, and political acceptability that allowed the Baron investment to be framed as both a charitable act and wise-investment.

  “Nothing like this back home. Everything on Earth has such a grand scale to it,” Leera said.

  Fillmore nodded. Earth at a state of rest was a different experience than when he was here as a young man. “Look! It's almost ready.”

  Leera pointed her wrist band at the lobe tower closest to them to magnify it. A large ring had been creeping to the top of the tower, and was just reaching its apex.

  It hovered for a moment. Then released, letting gravity pull it down with sudden acceleration—rapidly exceeding the normal gravity of Earth. The ring hit the base with a light clang. Even the energy normally dissipated into sound was redirected, creating the silence.

  “There!” Leera shouted.

  A large metallic globule hurtled from the top of the tower with a spray of stray sea water mist enveloping it. It followed an arc up toward the building floating overhead. The globule arced to descend after rising above the base of the building, fell briefly, and hovered in the air.

  “They have it now,” Fillmore said. An earlier search on the Ether had revealed that a net, not visible at their distance, had caught the payload. It would be placed into a cargo capsule by a robotic crane, and dispatched via the elevator cables when the queue allowed. Most of space-borne commodities passed by this system
to an orbital port. Grenada controlled the cheapest pathway to space for goods. While the fees earned from delivery were significant, the fees from power sales, and tourism magnified the wealth of Grenada many times that of the elevator.

  The venue at Grenada was exceptional. The blimps in the sky over the island were reminiscent of flocks of birds. Cargo ships proceeded steadily toward the sea platform like lines of ants marching to the hill. Most had been queued on the deep sea for weeks before getting clearance to approach. Grenada was not only a shipping destination, but a place to put in for shore leave.

  “Hooo! Hooo! Hooo! That was outrageous,” Leera exclaimed. “It's a shame that we can't take the elevator when we leave.”

  “Right, right! That would be an adventure!” Fillmore responded. Both knew that the cargo system wasn't able to safely or comfortably move large animals up the cables. The idea was commonly searched by people looking to enter orbit cheaply. The very thing that made cargo operations cheap, however, were the things that precluded moving people in volume.

  Fillmore looked at his wristband. He needed to organize the final setup for the next day's performance. It was a big venue and Kumar had indicated some tension in his last message about needing the event to go well. They all needed to go well. That was a matter of form with Kumar. Fillmore had spent 25 years in surveillance. He could easily feel the heightened tension in the last message. Not alarm, but heightened.

  “Leera, I have to go. You coming or staying?” Fillmore asked, as he walked toward the autocar they had taken there.

  Leera looked over at him, “I think I may stay here awhile. I feel a song coming on.” Leera's popularity was increasing, because she was producing songs that had lyrics more oriented to the experience of Earth. Her music was Mars synth, but with Earth as a subject.

  Fillmore nodded and tipped his large brim hat at her. The autocar opened a door as he approached. With a finger swipe he passed the destination to the car's computer, entered, and was off.

  Leera looked back to the sea platform. The ring was climbing up the lobe tower again. She giggled to herself. It was a huge sexual metaphor, and she had to admit to herself that it was mildly arousing to watch.

  “The sea fucks the sky.” Leera arched her body, and drew her hand through the air on an imaginary synth, making the noise. She mimed some of the other synth motions and made their sounds as a composition formed.

  She sang some of the lyrics to her wristband and, using a finger, drew parts of the accompaniment.

  “Pass it,” she said to the unit. Her preliminary arrangement passed to her band mates. As they came online, they would add to it, and suggest changes.

  The beauty of Earth, the tragedy that was around Leera, apparent in the sea change and the restructuring of a whole island, the human struggle to overcome the past—it was all not Mars. Mars was small, controlled pockets of life. Rich, complex, growing, perfected.

  Earth's history was one of false starts, abysmal failures, pettiness, and triumph. It was not perfect, nor was it ever likely to be. It was Earth, though.

  Leera sighed. When she left it after this tour, she hoped she would return at least once more.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Creator

  Cassie sat in her living room with a cup of black tea with cream and sugar. It was a taste cultivated by teas with her mother.

  Last night's solstice ceremony had been poignant—as one would expect a remembrance to be. It was also liberating. She felt unburdened. Freer.

  She was also having tea in her living room for the first time. When she had been there with Mike, she realized that it had gone largely unused since the house was built. Their post-hot-dog-gluttony rest had been the first use of the room other than as a quick stop to put on shoes or a coat.

  It was a nice room. She had designed the overall structure, but left the service to rotate the interior as it saw fit. Letting go now and then was a good way to stretch herself.

  She took a sip. Regardless of her grandfather's miraculous appearance, she needed to move ahead with the glyph. He seemed highly capable. His mind was much like her mother's. With a small amount of prompting on the use of Alfie and the Ether, he had begun making anonymous searches and queries. Some to determine what had happened with him. Some to learn the fine points of what had happened in the last twenty years. She had no particular expertise that would lead to a better examination than he could perform.

  She had to find the right place in herself to work on the glyph. As she had worked on the glyph, the unproductive areas to occupy in her mind became obvious. When she could stay away from those areas, she moved closer to what she was seeking. She prepared by letting her mind drift in the productive regions.

  “Cass? Cassie.”

  Cassie looked up, surprised by the appearance of her grandfather beside her.

  “Gramps! Do you just magically appear now everywhere?”

  Mike chuckled, and held up his hands in a gesture of submission.

  “No, you were meditating. I tried to enter loudly to avoid startling you, but it seems to have not worked.”

  Cassie looked at him suspiciously. His words were plausible, but she found it to be unlikely. Or she didn't want to admit that she had been unaware of him entering the room.

  He sat on the sofa beside her. He carried a mug of black tea as well. Cassie felt a surge of fondness for him, and forgave him his transgression.

  “I'd like to see you work today, if you don't mind.”

  Cassie hesitated. She didn't care for interference in her process.

  “I promise to stay out of the way, and leave early rather than later,” he said answering her objections before she voiced them.

  “I married an artist. I am familiar with the needs of the process,” he said, again answering her question before she said it.

  Cassie thought to herself, “That got annoying fast.”

  Mike smiled at her, but said nothing. She smiled back, realizing he had already predicted the course of the conversation and her thought response.

  “Gramps, I would love to have you join me.” She smiled back at him. It was a generational smile. He had seen it with Mary, Ada, and now Cassie.

  “What are you working on?” Mike asked, deftly redirecting the tension.

  “Mom developed the emotive glyph, which is the foundation of the scenes. It's kind of a primal emotional trigger system,” Cassie started.

  “I read a little bit about it, and what Ada built. I remember her talking about her initial thoughts on it.”

  She nodded and continued, “I started to feel limited by what the glyph could do, and felt it could be much more. I've been working on the much more.”

  “Do you know what the much more is?” asked Mike.

  “Not fully. I've been moving toward it.”

  Mike was familiar with the intuitive process.

  “Good,” he said, “I would love to see you in your process.” Cassie had fully expected to have to explain the impulse that she followed. She could hear the sincerity and comprehension in her grandfather's voice. The reluctance she had about having him in the process evaporated and turned to a desire to have him present.

  The two left the living room, mugs in hand, and went to the development lab. The screens were set on a flat white. It was an unremarkable room. Cassie took her calligraphy kit from a panel in the wall, set the mug on a small shelf by her console, and adhered the kit to her jumpsuit at the hip.

  “Handy,” Mike said.

  He was wearing a brown jumpsuit, cut tight and thin to his body. To Mike, it was a nearly nude look. Its precise fit and the cloth it was cut from managed to eliminate binds and friction points. He had to admit that, in comfort, it seemed like a second layer of skin. It didn't seem proper around his granddaughter though. Her jumpsuit, worn like one wears a work uniform, was equally revealing. Her comfort with it quickly disarmed the sense of it being taboo, however.

  “Alfie, power it up, please.” Alfie complied, activatin
g the battery terminal. The hard rectangular case of it pulsed a spectrum of colors softly while Alfie ran diagnostics. It was part of a security and pre-check policy that Cassie and Ada had introduced after she started working with the new glyph.

  “That's quite fetching,” Mike said in response to the display. Cassie had grown used to the display, but it did have a strange, organic look to it. He walked over to it to touch it.

  When he made contact with it, Cassie heard a dull irritating hum come from it.

  “Not this again,“ she said. The humming had disappeared with Merrick's upgrade.

  Mike flinched. “Is that noise typical? That is incredibly irritating,” he said. Mike backed away from the battery terminal. The hum subsided.

  “It's a lot like a defense response by a living creature,” he continued, “I might have to make friends with it.”