But now the problems are different. The world has changed again. Again there are two kinds of men in the world. But in this new age of plenty, it will not be the economy version of man who wins.
* * * *
THE LIMO DOOR slams shut. The vehicle pulls away from the grave. As we near the cemetery gates, the shouting grows louder. The protestors see us coming.
The police said that David’s murder was a crime of passion. Others said he was a target of opportunity. I don’t know which is true. The truth died with the shooter, when Tom crushed his skull with a single right-hand blow.
The shouting spikes louder as we pass the cemetery gates. The protestors surge forward, and a snowball smashes into the window.
“Stop the car!” I shout.
I fling open the car door. I climb out and walk up to the surprised man. He’s standing there, another snowball already packed in his hands. I’m not sure what I’m going to do as I approach him. I’ve gotten used to the remarks, the small attacks. I’ve gotten used to ignoring them. I’ve gotten used to saying nothing.
I slap him in the face as hard as I can.
He’s too shocked to react at first. I slap him again.
This time he flinches away from me, wanting no part of this. I walk back to my car as the crowd finds its voice. People start screaming at me. I climb back into the limo and they close around me. Hands and faces on the glass. The driver pulls away.
My son looks at me, and it’s not fear in his eyes like I expect; it’s anger. Anger at the crowd. My huge, brilliant son—these people have no idea what they’re doing. They have no idea the storm they’re calling down.
I see a sign held high as we pass the last of the protestors at the gate. They are shouting again, having found the full flower of their outrage. The sign says only one word: Die.
Not this time, I think to myself. Your turn.
* * *
Afterword
This story was inspired by my discovery during college that science can not only be wrong, but also biased. During my sophomore year, I had a three-hour gap between classes twice a week, and with nothing better to do, ended up at the campus library where I eventually found my way to the scientific periodicals. The library had issues of various scientific journals dating all the way back to 1906. So that’s where I started, 1906, and I spent the next two years reading my way up to the present. I read every single issue of one prominent scientific journal—nearly a hundred years worth. I’m not sure many people have ever done that. It changed my whole view of science. I learned that science is fallible, and that in the wrong hands, it can absolutely be racist.
I learned that scientists have always had a talent for proving that people who looked and acted just like themselves—who came from backgrounds just like themselves—were the smartest, best kind of people in the world. Don’t believe me? Go to the scientific journals; read the 1920s. You’ll find entire journal issues preoccupied with racial hierarchies; you’ll find several studies dedicated to helping readers perceive the vast universe of significance which can be inferred from racial differences in average cranial capacity that amount to little more than a few dozen ccs. (You don’t even want to see what science did with the US army’s helmet-size data from WWI). But these same scientists who made mountains out of 30cc mole hills are strangely silent on the subject of the Neanderthal—a walk of man whose cranial capacity is actually larger than modern man’s. In some cases, much larger. Another thing I learned about science from reading those periodicals is this: science is very good at ignoring facts which don’t fit the accepted paradigm.
Things are much better now than they used to be. Science is better at weeding out the biases of its practitioners—but you can still sometimes see those preconceptions bleeding through in spots if you look hard enough. I think this has been particularly true in the case of the Homo neanderthalensis. If you went to museums and looked at the old displays, a lot of what you saw, until recently, was just wrong. Recent DNA studies are proving that. What you see in those old museum displays wasn’t really science at all, but an interpretation filtered through a series of faulty presumptions which are indicative—if they are indicative of anything—more of the biases of the scientists who made the model than of any ultimate truth about the Neanderthals themselves. Why put dark hair, dark eyes, and olive skin on a Neanderthal? Yet again and again, that’s what you’ve seen.
Up until about five years ago, when new DNA data started rolling in, I would still see a fair amount of that same old arrogance I remembered from reading the periodicals. I saw scientists displaying a talent for proving that people who look and act just like themselves are the smartest, best kind of people in the word—and our lowly Neanderthal placed a distant second. There is one particular Neanderthal fossil that has always fascinated me beyond all others: Amud I. Amud I was a truly massive individual. He was tall, and not just for a Neanderthal. He was a shade under six feet, and had a cranial capacity of 1740ccs. (Modern Europeans average around 1410.) Until recently, in certain scientific circles, they were still debating if Neanderthals had language! What the hell was Amud I doing with 1740cc’s worth of gray matter, if not speaking? Brain tissue is metabolically expensive. All that muscle, all that bone, it has to be paid for.
What do we really know about Neanderthals? We know what their bones tell us. By the ratios of the carbon isotopes in their bones, we can reconstruct their diets. We can study the marks left by their muscle attachments. We can pour mustard seeds into their skulls and then empty those seeds into graduated cylinders in order to estimate their cranial capacity. So we know this: they had large brains; they had truly massive musculatures not typically found today except in elite athletes. They were hunters of big game. That they are no longer alive isn’t evidence of some intrinsic inferiority.
But there’s a change coming. We’re at a point when some very difficult questions about cloning need to be addressed; and by addressed, I don’t mean just creating more laws against it which most of the world won’t be bound by anyway. It’s not enough to create laws against certain procedures because the truth is that man has proved again and again that when a new technology becomes available, it will be used—somewhere. We’ve cloned dogs, and sheep, and monkeys. At some point in the very near future we’ll clone humans. It will happen. But the bar won’t stop there. That bar will keep moving, and I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing, because it’s what we do, as humans—we keep moving that bar; that’s our specialty. But there are a lot of different ways things can go. And while we’re out there practicing the art of being who and what we are, it might be worth considering what will happen if we bring back something that’s better than us.
THE FUTURE BY DEGREES
Jay Lake
IT’S A SIMPLE concept, really.”
Grover hated public speaking. Which was ironic, given his job in sales development for Quantum Thermal Systems. A half-empty church basement full of metal folding chairs was a special nightmare. He could hear his voice echoing off the metal half-moons topping each vacant seat, so that there was a metallic ring just a fraction of a beat behind his words. Debris punctuated the scuffed linoleum floor: candy wrappers, folded over flyers, and—improbably enough in the function room of the Second Methodist Church—a torn condom wrapper.
The chairs were mostly empty, the rest populated by a bored collection of farmers, ranchers and small town businessmen. Most were already nodding off, the rest sat in exaggerated poses of doubt, like a particularly truculent line of Hummel figurines. Salt of the earth, his mother would have called these men. Salty old bastards, more like it.
There were no women present this evening.
Grover held up his model. It was built from styrene sheets bought on sale at Hobbytown, glued to a styrofoam core with a few strategic wires dangling out of one end, simply because nobody ever believed in a prototype without exposed copper. The whole thing was spray painted matte black, with a bit of silvery duct tape for added effe
ct. Any engineer knew what a casing was — skin for the reality within, bearing no more relationship to performance than the line of an automobile’s fender did to the drive train.
People, though, regular people who went to work every day and drove pickup trucks and had trouble balancing their checkbooks . . . they needed to see the semblance of a thing before they could understand the reality beneath the skin. Farmers knew their nitrogen from their phosphates, but physical chemistry was as foreign to these people as Russian literature or Indonesian rijsttafel.
Damn it, he thought. His mind was wandering again.
“This little device,” he said, then stopped to clear his throat. Try again. Pale, pasty and too fat to look authoritative, Grover had to rely on the words. He didn’t have the convincing manner of a born salesman like Brody in the San Mateo office, and he’d never mastered the art of dressing his inconveniently round belly to look anything but sloppy-pudgy.
“This little device will save you more trouble and money than you could ever have thought possible.”
He spun the prototype in his hands.
“The production model will weight about twenty pounds. It will cost you about a hundred dollars. It will store about 18,000,000 joules of heat.”
Grover paused, took a deep breath.
“That’s one day of peak thermal output of a cubic yard of fresh horse manure as it begins to compost. The equivalent of almost 800 kilowatt hours of electricity, the energy an average American household uses in a month. All of it with a loss of less than one percent efficiency per month.”
The collective yawn was palpable. Chair legs scraped as some of the men gathered their weight to walk away. But he could see two or three chins tilted, two or three thoughtful looks.
Two or three people who understood what this thing would mean!
“It’s called thermal superconductivity,” Grover told them. The real details were a closely guarded secret, but the idea . . . the idea was priceless. “The future is here in our hands, if you can just imagine what this will do. The world has never seen anything like it. Not since the discovery of fire.”
* * * *
“THIS MATERIAL HAS two states,” said Minnie. “Balanced and gradiated.”
Grover shifted in his chair. The PowerPoints were either overly detailed or mysteriously vague. Or maybe it was just Minnie. He could imagine her hair undone from its bun, floating in wiry curls around that sensuous face.
Who knew Puerto Rican girls were so hot? Especially physical chemists.
“We’ve got the gradiated state working now,” she went on. “It’s in the form of a textile, for ease of manufacture and use. In the near future we’ll have rigid forms with high ductility for applications requiring shaping or specific topologies. Transfer rates aren’t optimal, but even now we can keep up with domestic uses. We’re not far from internal combustion engine temperature ranges.
“As for the balanced state, I can’t tell you much more than to say we expect it to be stable and replicable before the end of the next fiscal quarter.”
As an engineer, he was lost among the sworn-to-NDA money men in the room. Grover’s job was sales development for the product. Minnie’s job was product development itself, and the high level sell of the concept.
And, well, to finish inventing it.
“The gradiated state moves heat. It’s that simple. Flow direction, intensity and maxima are governed by extremely low voltage electrical inputs which realign the channeled carbon nanostructures.”
The room was quiet, with the intensity of a dozen pairs of ears straining toward the biggest payoff in the history of venture capital.
“She means we can turn it off and on,” Grover offered in a quiet voice. He’d taken a few yards of the lab castoffs home to play with, on the Q.T. Sales development, after all. Plus maybe a meaningful prototype, if he could get clearance for that. And it was cool as hell, even if the thermal gradiation was uncontrollably locked into place on the stuff he had. “Like a faucet. Hot, cold, trickle, flood.”
“Right.” Minnie made a face at him, somewhere between sweet and prissy. “That’s very, very useful, but it’s only a form of transference.”
“So . . . ” said one of the money men in a thoughtful voice. “We could remove the car’s radiator, but the block heat still has to go somewhere.”
“Right.” She smiled, warming Grover’s heart. “That’s where the balanced state comes into play. Think of it as a really big sponge, storing that block heat until we want to let it out again.”
That elided a lot of detail, but the real nut and bolts of this process were still burn-before-reading secret.
“What do we do with the heat later?” asked the money man.
“Anything you want,” Grover said. “Heat is power. Power is everything. The entire energy production and consumption system begins to feed itself, increasing our efficiencies dramatically across the society. Hell, this thing could have a net effect on global warming. It’d be nice to have Key West back, huh?”
There was a scatter of nervous laughter. Someone behind him stage whispered, “The Caymans, too. I had money there.”
“Gentlemen,” said Minnie in a tone of voice that made it clear that Grover’s role as a shill was done. “What Quantum Thermal Systems does is all about the money. Saving the world is just a bonus.”
* * * *
GROVER’S IPHONE PRO rang. It took him a minute to disentangle from dreams of fire alarms and swimming pools filled with warm Kool-Aid, but he managed to slap the phone off the table onto his mattress and mash it to his ear.
“Grove, it’s Brody.” The sales manager sounded panicked. “Is that you?”
“Me?” Grover wasn’t sure who else it would be. He was supposed to have been in Cleveland, but Wei Ming had taken that trip because Grover’s allergies were acting up. Still, he never had a house sitter.
Brody’s voice caught. “Take your prototypes and get out. Drive. Away. Borrow someone else’s car.”
“Wha . . . ?”
“The office just got whacked. Dorsey says it was a Blackwater contract job. Whole building’s in flames. Somebody ran Minnie off the road, snatched her, and took everything she had in her vehicle. Wei Ming’s hotel room got tossed in Cleveland, he’s in the ER there beat all to shit. There were two guys trying to break into my place just now, but I got out.”
Shit. Allergy meds or not, Grover was suddenly very, very awake. They’d joked about this around the office, called it the Silkwood Scenario, after that poor woman killed by the nuclear power industry back in the 1970s for blowing the whistle. What if Exxon came gunning for us? What if Con Ed sent out the utility ninjas?
It wasn’t a joke any more.
He scrambled out of bed, dragged himself into sweats, and stumbled down the short hall to his office.
Someone was standing in there, silhouetted in the streetlight glare through the window overlooking Circular Avenue. The figure’s hand came up.
Grover’s next thought arrived with utter clarity. I’m going to die now.
“Get in here,” Minnie hissed.
A hard, nauseating ripple of shock twisted through Grover. “What?”
“I thought you were dead in Cleveland. Then I heard your damned phone ring.”
“Dead? Me?” He tried to grapple with the obvious question. “What the hell are you doing in my house? Brody says—”
“Brody’s working for them.” Her breath heaved, ragged and rough on the edge of collapsing from stress.
“Con Ed?”
She blinked. “What?”
“Sorry, sorry.” He sneezed. “Allergy meds.”
“Shut up.” She picked up a satchel which had been on the floor by his desk. “Let’s go.”
Grover grabbed her arm. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for that prototype battery you like to haul around. That, and your laptop.”
Something wasn’t adding up yet. Actually, everything wasn’t adding up yet. “Did yo
u find them?”
“Yes. Now let’s go.”
In the other room, his phone began ringing again.
“Minnie, if you believed I was dead in Cleveland, why did you think my laptop would be here?”
The phone rolled to voicemail, then started ringing again a few seconds later.
“Desperate times, Grove.” She slugged him hard, then kicked him in the nuts as he collapsed. “Good luck with your house fire.”
* * * *
HE FOUND HIMSELF on his hands and knees. The damned iPhone was still ringing in the other room, with that digitized jangly 1960s payphone bell he used to think was so funny. Grover smelled smoke.
The alarms weren’t chirping, though.
Painfully, he looked up. His vision was swimming in doubled circles, but that was enough to see that the smoke alarm in his office had been yanked out of the ceiling.
Where’s the fire?
Minnie had left him for dead. He wasn’t walking out of here, that was for sure. Weren’t you supposed to crawl in a fire, anyway?
Grover slid over to the office door and peeked underneath. There was flickering orange light in the hallway. His office window opened onto view of rose bushes and a spike-topped iron fence at the back of the condo complex. Better than being burnt to death, maybe, but not much.
I am going to die now.
He was tired of that thought already. He keeled over onto his side, tried to keep from crying, then wondered why he cared if he cried. His eyes were running freely with the burn from the smoke.
Instead Grover thought about Minnie. What the hell was she doing? Brody had thought she was dead. QTS was gone in a night of murder and flames.
She’d said it was all about the money. Someone must have offered her a ridiculous amount to take the product and disappear.
An amount so ridiculous she’d kill for it?
Seeds of Change Page 3
