2030

by Albert Brooks

  “Yes.”

  “Has he seen you undressed?”

  “What?” Kathy heard it but couldn’t believe this would be the time for that discussion.

  “I just meant…”

  “I know what you meant. Don’t worry about that. I’m the last woman on the planet that wants to bring a kid into this world.”

  Her father said nothing. It’s funny how an answer can relieve you and bother you at the same time. He knew she was saying that she hated the thought of being a mother and wouldn’t have a baby no matter what. And yet he didn’t understand her dark side and felt helpless that he couldn’t do anything about it. This was one of the big disadvantages of not having a woman in the house. But Kathy’s mother had never had a clue how to raise a kid, so neither Stewart nor Kathy were really surprised when she left. Someone else might have been nice, but her father had never met that person.

  At that moment the door announced who was there. Stewart opened it and looked at Brian Nelson. Another angry prick, he thought, but he had to admit Brian was not as bad as some of the others.

  “Hello, Mr. Bernard.”

  “Hello, Brian.”

  “Is Kathy here?”

  “No, you’re going with me.” Brian just looked at him.

  “What?”

  “That’s a joke, Brian.”

  “Oh. That’s a good one.”

  Before Brian had to think of something else to say, Kathy came out from the kitchen. “Holy shit!” was what Brian almost blurted out. Fortunately, all he managed was “Hi. You look very nice.”

  “What time are you going to be home?”

  “Late,” Kathy said. “And don’t track us. Please.”

  “Don’t be silly,” her father answered, but of course he would. GPS had been embedded for years into every gadget and appliance in the world. You had to make an effort not to know where people were.

  Brian put his Chinese sports car in “D” and floored it. The whine of the electric motor replaced the eight-cylinder growl of years back. These cars could do zero to sixty in under three seconds.

  After years of accident rates declining in America, the dominance of the electric car reversed that. They were so fast off the line that many of them came with governors on the motor to reduce speeds from a standing start, but guys would remove those for three hundred bucks. As Kathy was forced back into her seat, she asked, “What’s the difference between this and the Japanese one?”

  “Twenty thousand dollars.”

  “Jesus, so why would anyone buy the other?”

  “They’re not.”

  The difference between Japanese, Chinese, Korean, German, and the one American nameplate was negligible. You could still pay more for finer leather and real wood, but the basics were the same. The robots that built them were all alike and the parts were interchangeable.

  Parts in cars had been reduced from hundreds to just a few. One electric motor and one gear, and it either worked or it didn’t. It was really hard to distinguish what was under the hood anymore, although the very upscale car companies—Rolls-Bentley, for example—claimed they used gold wiring in their motors that conducted electricity faster and didn’t heat up as much. All a waste of money. But really rich people bought it, the same kind of people who paid thousands of dollars for gold speaker wire when that was still available.

  The one area where money did buy you something in an automobile was safety. Advanced materials, the kind used in jet fighters, provided better protection in a head-on crash, and you paid extra for that. But even the cheapest car was safer than anything made before, and although the accident rate was up because of excessive speed, more people survived.

  “I thought you were going to buy the one with the solar roof?”

  “This is all my dad wanted to spend. And as long as I’m living at home, I don’t give a shit about the electric bill, so this is fine.”

  “It’s a nice car,” Kathy said. “I wish I had one.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  For Sam Mueller’s fifty-fifth birthday, his wife was planning a surprise party at their house on Turks and Caicos. It was hard to fly in a hundred friends and keep it a secret and the fact is, she hadn’t, but Sam pretended he didn’t know. He told Maggie he was going to play golf and wouldn’t be home before six. The private planes had been arriving all day. The guest list was as prominent as one would imagine for someone who had cured cancer—a few longtime friends, but mostly dignitaries and senators and some entertainers. There was even a holographic message on the way from the pope.

  Dr. Mueller had never had another breakthrough that rivaled the cancer cure, but what would one expect? After the theory of relativity, didn’t Einstein basically putter around the rest of his life? Mueller did try some other combinations of aminos on mental illness, but came up short. With all the advancements made in medicine, there were still too many people walking around just plain nuts. When science thought they had solved one thing, like the miracle drug that helped cure schizophrenia, something else crept in. The newest malady was called “virtual dementia”; people who had it could no longer distinguish between what was real and what wasn’t. Scientists had known this was coming, they’d seen glimpses of it since the beginning of the new century, but no one realized just how serious it was. It was one thing to try to get someone to stop playing games and talk to the people standing in front of them; it was another when they absolutely couldn’t. People with this disease didn’t even seem to register when real people were there; it made them frightened and angry.

  Sam Mueller worked on a cure for that for years, but with no success. He still went to Immunicate’s headquarters every day, but mostly he was just a big celebrity, drawing huge crowds at speaking events, universities, and pay-per-view holographic presentations. He wished he had another big thing in him, but still, deep down, it very much pleased him that when he died, his obituary would read THE MAN WHO CURED CANCER. That always made him smile.

  He was also rich beyond anything he could have ever imagined. Unlike a product that would make billions for a number of years and then go generic, his cancer cure was a code. A combination of common substances that could never be used without paying a royalty. In 2020, Immunicate was offered $130 billion from a German-French pharmaceutical giant for forty-nine percent of the company. After everyone was paid out and all taxes taken care of, Dr. Sam Mueller walked away with $40 billion, and still owned the company to boot. He bought homes, gave to charities, set up foundations and scholarships, bought more homes, and was one of the first five people to own the Gulfstream 10A, the “jet that flies itself.” And that wasn’t just a slogan. This was the first private aircraft in the world not to require an onboard pilot. The plane could not only fly itself from start to finish, but as a backup it had remote pilots in Denver checking every minute of the flight and intervening if necessary, which it never was.

  Dr. Mueller’s two children—Patty, fifteen, and Mark, thirteen—did not attend his birthday party. Mark was at a fancy private school in Switzerland that the Muellers had learned about when they sold their company. They had made a lot of German, Swiss, and French friends and adopted some of their rich habits, including sending their child to an elite boarding school 140 kilometers from Geneva that the most privileged children in the world attended.

  Patty was in school in the States, but she didn’t want to miss classes. She was also a little embarrassed about being the daughter of the man who cured cancer. Normally that would be something to be proud of, but to many young people, the same kinds of kids Kathy Bernard hung out with, the cancer cure was a major factor contributing to the never-ending lives of the older generation. One of them even taunted Patty, saying, “If it wasn’t for your dad, my grandfather would be dead by now, but instead we’re paying for him to eat through a tube. Thanks a lot.” Patty was still proud of her father, and she certainly was not like any normal kid—she would never have to worry about money for the rest of her life—but she wanted to be cool. And the c
ool kids hated the “olds.”

  As the guests arrived from all over the world, they were impressed by Sam Mueller’s spread on the island. And these people had seen everything. There was a main house that was approximately twenty-five thousand square feet and two guesthouses close to twenty thousand square feet each. The Muellers could easily accommodate two hundred people in the type of luxury reserved for heads of state. Each private suite consisted of three bedrooms, a living room, a den, three bathrooms, and a butler. There were complimentary health screenings performed by doing nothing more than giving one drop of blood from your finger, although not everyone chose to do that. Guests were treated to any sport they desired and the meals were legendary. People would say, “What in God’s name is this guy going to do when he turns sixty? Buy Italy?”

  But what Sam enjoyed the most were the rousing discussions that took place after dinner on a large veranda that overlooked the Caribbean. This was where the movers and shakers told all: what the future held, what to invest in, doomsday scenarios—the whole damn thing. This was where Sam Mueller had first gotten the news of the biological attack that had taken place twelve years earlier.

  * * *

  In the summer of 2018 two things happened. A heat wave swept over the East Coast, unprecedented in the United States, and caused temperatures to remain close to 105 during the day for almost six weeks. Global warming was not challenged anymore, not after the Lambert Glacier in Antarctica melted three hundred years before anyone thought it would. Sure, there were a few scientists who would say man had nothing to do with it, but it didn’t matter anymore, it was happening. Sometimes during very cold winters, there were still people who pooh-poohed global warming altogether. “Look outside, it’s a blizzard,” they would say. But of course the terrible winters were a sign of even further erosion. And when the eastern seaboard had forty-five consecutive days above one hundred degrees, the skeptics melted away, along with everything else.

  And something else happened late that summer. The United States had always said that the likelihood of a nuclear or biological attack was greater than fifty percent. And people always thought about it the same way they thought about earthquakes: They knew something was coming, but what could they do? Well, it wasn’t a nuclear attack, but on August 15, 2018, people started getting sick with flulike symptoms in San Francisco. Before anyone realized it, a smallpox virus had contaminated the city. The government’s best guess was that five or six terrorists had come into the country already infected with the disease and worked their way through crowded streets, department stores, schools, supermarkets—everywhere it could be spread. Before it was over, twenty thousand people were sick, the city came to a halt, the stock market fell fifty percent, and the fear level increased tenfold.

  The government made a point of catching who they could and claiming it was an isolated incident, but it had happened nonetheless. Most of the country was relieved it took place in San Francisco, and not New York or Los Angeles, but they felt it was only a matter of time before it happened again, and this time in a much bigger city. The Department of Health and Human Services poured hundreds of millions of dollars into developing a new smallpox vaccine that could be given instantly to large populations. A new kind of delivery system.

  Immunicate was one company that was awarded an $80 million contract to try to come up with an idea. The smallpox vaccine had been around for over a hundred years, but since the disease was cured, no one received it anymore. Now that smallpox had reared its ugly head again, the government thought there must be an easier way to immunize people.

  Mueller’s company worked on several fronts—putting it in food, spraying it as an aerosol, using it in an eyedrop—but nothing took off. The old vaccine was as good as it was going to get, and as each year passed with no further attacks, the government stopped the program. They just went back to inoculating people the same way they had in the 1930s.

  * * *

  Brad Miller, after dropping off his friends, finally pulled up to the guard shack of his retirement community.

  “Good evening, Mr. Miller.”

  “Hello, Jose.”

  “Happy birthday.”

  “Thanks. When’s yours?”

  “Not until December.”

  “Well, make sure to remind me so I can get you something.”

  “I will, sir. There’s a package for you. I had it scanned and I put it in your receiving slot.”

  “Who’s it from, do you know?”

  “I know, sir, but it’s a surprise for your birthday. It’s safe, don’t worry.”

  “Thanks, Jose. See you tomorrow.”

  Brad continued the drive to his small condo, nestled among three hundred others in one of the more upscale retirement villages in the area. The garage read the info on his car and opened quickly. He drove in but still was surrounded by cement until the eye detector recognized him. Then a second door opened and he drove into the real garage.

  The one thing Brad had never liked about his home was the smell. It was too clean, like someone had just been there with deodorizer. It was the materials used in construction. Every item was stain proofed, which produced a chemical odor that was very hard to get rid of. Many older folks had lost their sense of smell to the point of not being aware of such things, but not Brad. He had always had a great nose.

  He went into the kitchen and checked the receiving slot near the side door. There was a package nicely wrapped, but he didn’t see a card. Was it from the condo association? Maybe one of his friends back east? He took off the paper, opened the box, and there was a blue sweater. He held it up to see what it would feel like. It was wool, which he hated. Wool made him itch, so it must be from someone who didn’t know him very well. Then he saw an envelope with the word “Dad” on it. Of course, who else?

  Brad had not spoken to his son, Tom, for almost two years. They had even stopped leaving their once-a-year recorded birthday messages. No big moment had caused it, at least not one that he could think of.

  Tom was forty-five, married with one child, with whom Brad had almost no contact. Even though his granddaughter lived in San Diego, he had only seen her twice in the last five years. Brad had never liked Crystal, his son’s wife, and she felt the same way about him. He made the mistake of telling Tom on his wedding day that he was marrying the wrong woman. That put a crimp in their relationship.

  Dad, the note said, I hope you’re well. Happy 80th, enjoy the sweater. Love, Tom.

  His father had mixed feelings. He liked the thought, hated the gift. He had complained about wool his entire life; did his son have no idea about that, or was this some sort of message? He decided to call Tom and thank him personally. When he told the refrigerator, the appliance where all central communications were located, to get his son on the line, it quickly told him that all the numbers it had for Tom Miller were no longer active. What a prick. He doesn’t even give me his right number. Brad put the sweater back in the box. It would be an early birthday gift for Jose. He hoped Jose didn’t hate wool, too.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Matthew Bernstein woke up at 5:35 A.M. He didn’t need an alarm. No matter what time he went to bed, he still got up within three minutes of the same time every day he was in the White House.

  President Bernstein was the first Jew to be elected president of the United States. The election of 2028 had been a contentious one. A woman, Margaret Sandor, was the favorite, but she did much worse in the mini-debates than anyone had predicted, and one time, when she was sure she was out of range, she said, “That’s a Jew for you.” Even though more people agreed with that sentiment than not, the remark revealed a dual personality and that turned off voters, who still would rather have someone they thought they knew, even if it meant that person was a Jew.

  Bernstein had always played down his Jewishness. His mother was Catholic, and he was never bar mitzvahed. He didn’t look, act, or seem Jewish in any obvious way. His friends called him Matt, and there was even a time in college where
he was going to change Bernstein to Barnes, but he didn’t. In the Jewish religion, if your father is Jewish but your mother isn’t, theoretically you are not a Jew. But if you’re running for president of the United States, even living on the same street as a Jew makes you one, so having a Jewish father was more than enough to get into the history books as the first Jew to hold the highest office in the land.

  Before he entered politics, Bernstein had made and lost a lot of money in the private sector. He founded a solar panel company that built new generation panels for home use and did very well for about five years. But he turned down an offer to sell and then watched an Indonesian company come up with a newer technology that overnight made what he did almost obsolete. He eventually sold his business for half of what he had turned down and took what money he did make, then ran for Congress in 2022. He won, rose quickly to chairman of the Finance Committee, and then became the first Jewish Speaker of the House. The first “Jewish” was something he was hearing a lot in politics, so why not try for the presidency?

  He met his wife, Betsy, in college. She was an economics major and both of her parents were Jews. Matthew loved going to her house; he loved her mother; she was the mother he always wished he had. “She’s so supportive of you,” he would say. “Are you sure she’s Jewish?”

  They married young and both of them went to work. They seemed like the perfect couple, lookswise. Neither was especially attractive. Betsy stood five foot four and had brown hair and brown eyes, which were closer together than she liked. She thought it made her look more ethnic than her friends, but Betsy had a very good instinct about what she could change and what she couldn’t, and spacing her eyes out was not an option.

  Her husband had no ethnic features. A very average-looking man, five foot eleven, a hundred and eighty pounds. Before he was president, people always guessed he was an accountant. His hair thinned out early, but he never lost it, and unless someone saw his bald spot first, they would think of him as a man with hair. Bernstein wore glasses, not because he had to—there were all kinds of options to see clearly without them—but because he thought they made him look smarter. And they did. He wasn’t handsome, but he did look smart.