Manna

by Marshall Brain

  “The credits simply make sure that everyone gets equal access to the resources. There is a finite amount of power that can be generated on any given day, for example. Things like that. The credits make sure everyone gets an equal share of the total pool of resources.”

  “Holy shit.” I said. I was looking through the catalog again. Page after page after page of products. There were thousands of different types of housing, for example. And they all seemed to fall in the range of 100 to 500 credits per week. Clothing cost nothing. Food cost nothing.

  “I’m not getting this.” I said. “I’m not sure I could spend a thousand credits if this catalog is right.”

  “Many people don’t spend a thousand credits.” she said. “If you are working on a project you might, but that’s about it.”

  “So how do I earn the credits?” I asked.

  “Earn?” Linda asked back.

  “No no no…” said Cynthia.

  “Do you give me a job? The reason I am here is because I have no job,” I said.

  “No. You see, it’s all free. By being a shareholder, you already own your share of the resources. The robots make products from the free resources you and everyone else already owns. There is no forced labor like there is in America. You do what you want, and you get 1,000 credits per week. We are all on an endless vacation.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How did the robots get you to come here to talk to me?”

  “We choose to do this. This is what we want to do. Just seeing the look on your face now, and seeing all the looks you’ll have as you go through orientation, makes this an incredibly fun thing to do. I mean, we remember exactly what it was like sitting where you are sitting right now. It’s a joyous experience to introduce people to the Australia Project. Cynthia and I have done this once a year for four years now. It’s a different kind of vacation for us.” Linda said.

  “This sounds totally unbelievable. But you said at the beginning that this is all true.” I said.

  “It is all true.” Linda said. “I didn’t completely believe it either. But it is all true. And it gets better every day.”

  “You said that I could leave the terrafoam system today. Did you mean that? Can we leave now?” I asked.

  “There are two minor things we have to cover first.”

  “There’s always a catch.” I said. I had a sinking feeling.

  “No. It is not a catch. The first thing is that you have two shares in 4GC, Inc. Your father probably purchased one for you and one for your wife. You can use only one of these shares. Is there someone else you would like to bring with you? Obviously you are not married. But is there a friend or a relative you would like to give your other share to?”

  “Can I bring Burt?”

  “Who is he?”

  “My roommate. The guy I came in with?”

  “Certainly. You can bring Burt. Can you find him now?”

  “That’s easy. He is two doors down. What’s the other catch?”

  “You have to agree to the core principles.” Linda said.

  She pulled a sheet out of my catalog and handed it to me. It only had about 50 words on it. The title was, “The nine core Principles of 4GC.”

  “By signing this sheet of LC,” Linda said, “You agree to abide by Eric’s core principles for 4GC. The only way for the Australia Project to work is for everyone to abide by the core principles. They will go over these principles in detail in the orientation, but this is the high level. Within a week you will be able to recite these from memory. Do you agree with these principles?”

  I read down through the principles. Each one was very short:

  - Everyone is equal

  - Everything is reused

  - Nothing is anonymous

  - Nothing is owned

  - Tell the truth

  - Do no harm

  - Obey the rules

  - Live your life

  - Better and better

  “That’s it?” I asked. “You must be kidding.”

  “That’s it. You will be surprised how all-encompassing those 27 words can be.” Linda said. “That’s what the orientation will help you with.”

  “Can I ask two questions?” I asked.

  “Surely.”

  “How can I do anything besides living my life?”

  “Well, you are living your life now…” Linda said, “and personally I have to tell you that it leaves a lot to be desired! Those three words are very important. Live Your Life means that you are able get the most out of your life, as opposed to the least. Instead of dying in Terrafoam, or dying in some job that you hate, you live your life in the Australia Project in freedom and prosperity. Live Your Life means that you are in control — again, the emphasis on freedom of choice. You decide what you want to do, and then you are able to do it. You reach your full potential. Live Your Life is the idea of thinking about your life as a whole, as something that you get to design and control. Does that make sense?”

  “More sense than you can imagine.”

  “What is your other question?” she asked.

  “Better and better?”

  Linda replied, “That is a declaration of innovation. The goal is to make things continuously better and better for everyone in the Australia Project through constant innovation. We are constantly looking for problems, identifying them and solving them. We are constantly looking for and implementing new ideas. Things get better and better every day. Terrafoam is, by contrast, ‘Worse and worse.’”

  “Sign me up!” I said.

  She handed me a marker from her pocket and I signed the LC. “Now press your thumb on the square to authenticate it,” She said. A black thumbprint appeared in the box when I lifted my finger.

  “Congratulations!” They both said in unison.

  “Can I go get Burt?”

  “Yes. If you don’t mind, you can sit with us as we explain 4GC to him, and then we will leave.”

  I found Burt in Mike’s room, brought him down, and in 20 minutes he had signed on as well. He was as incredulous as I was. We went down the elevator and as we walked through the first floor of the building, Linda spoke to the robot that approached her. Burt and I put on headsets and signed out of the Terrafoam system with her. We walked about a quarter mile to a waiting bus.

  When we got on, the bus was nearly full. It was easy to tell who was who. Every terrafoam resident was wearing a brown coverall like me, while all the escorts were dressed like rainbows. Everyone was looking through the catalogs and talking.

  Linda and I sat down on one side. Burt and Cynthia sat down on the other, and the bus pulled away. Like everyone else I was looking through the catalog, reading and asking Linda questions during the whole drive. We were on the bus for about three hours, but it seemed to go by in 10 minutes.

  This had all seemed something like a dream, but it started to become very real when we arrived at our destination. It was an immense airport, with dozens of jets waiting at the gates. There were dozens of buses dropping off passengers, and hundreds of people moving through the facility. Every jet was painted bright green and marked with a blue 4GC logo on the tail, and all of the buildings were painted the same way.

  We got off the bus and it really hit me as we walked into the first part of the building. “This is our first stop,” said Linda. “We’ve got to get you out of those dreadful coveralls.” She and Cynthia guided Burt and me into a room on our right, which opened up into an immense store. It was filled with racks and racks of every conceivable kind of clothing.”

  “Once you get to Australia, the way you order clothing will be nothing like this. But this is what you are used to right now, so it is easier. Let’s pick you out some decent clothes.”

  Linda and Cynthia picked out clothes for Burt and me. The robot sized us, and we went to the dressing room and changed. Just that one thing — putting on real clothing for the first time in a year — made such an impact on me.

/>   It was when we walked out of the store and got on the plane, however, that I knew for sure we were not in Kansas any more…

  Chapter 6

  Linda and Cynthia seemed to know exactly where we were going. We simply walked through the airport, then through a wide door with a large group of other people. It was as though we were heading into an auditorium, but instead we were on the plane.

  This airplane was immense. It had to be able to hold a thousand people at least, and the entire cabin was appointed with the most opulent first class features I had ever encountered. Every seat was a recliner that was also able to fold out into a bed. They were arranged in pairs, 14 across at the point where we entered, and there were at least 5 other doors that I could see with people streaming in. Linda took us to a pair of seats and said, “This pair is for us. You take the far seat.” Cynthia and Burt sat in the next pair over.

  There was something odd going on, so I asked Linda, “How did we get here?” Thinking back, I had realized something. There was not a single sign anywhere in the building. There were no announcements over any sort of PA system. Linda had never talked to anyone besides Cynthia, Burt and me. The seats did not even have numbers on them. Yet she had walked straight through the building, onto the plane, straight to our seats and we sat down. So did everyone else.

  “That is one of the many things that you will learn during the orientation.” She said. “Now make yourself comfortable. It’s a bit of a flight.”

  “Can I put my seat back?” I asked. I had seen that several other people had already turned their seats into beds.

  “Sure.” She said. She did not touch anything, but the seat unfolded automatically and I had myself a very comfortable single-size bed. She opened a drawer and handed me a blanket.

  I lay down, and I fell asleep immediately. It had been an incredibly long day…

  I felt someone squeezing my hand as I came back to consciousness. I opened my mind, and then my eyes, and it took several seconds for things in my head to snap back into place so that I could realize what was going on.

  We were still on the plane. Linda was still beside me, and she was the one squeezing my hand. I looked at her and she looked at me. My seat was raising itself slowly. All of that was normal. What was abnormal was the walls of the plane.

  I had not really paid attention to it before, but this plane had no windows. Instead, the walls, ceiling and floor had turned completely transparent. Or so it seemed. I reached down and touched the floor and apparently it was some kind of screen. The entire interior of the plane was covered with this screen material, and it was displaying a view that made the plane appear transparent. Overhead there was a brilliant blue sky with a few puffy clouds. Beside us in the distance were other planes. Below was a remarkable city and we were flying right over it.

  The scene was absolutely amazing. An entire section of the landscape was covered with the structure of the city, but it was entirely different from a U.S. city. In the U.S. there would be rows of buildings intersected by a grid of roads jammed with cars. Here the structure was designed with an entirely different intention. The amount of glass was the most impressive part. You could see huge glass bubbles with lakes and parks inside of them. Tall buildings that looked like apartment towers with an amazing variety of shapes sprouted everywhere through the glass.

  Up ahead I could see the airport. It was immense, with dozens of planes parked next to terminal buildings. To the far right of it were several immensely tall black structures. With the plane transparent like it was, I could see how tall they were, and apparently they did not have tops. I asked Linda, and I was not the only one pointing to them.

  “Those are the space elevators,” she said, “You can ride them if you want. They are just starting to be fully operational. There’s even an orbiting hotel and you can stay there for several days if you like. It’s a very popular spot for couples, but lots of people go simply for the novelty of it.”

  “How can you have space elevators built and operational already? Last I heard they were still 50 years off in the U.S.” I asked.

  “Things have slowed down a good bit in the U.S. I’m afraid.” She replied. “The economy retracted quite a bit when so many people ended up in Terrafoam. Then you have the combined problems of egos, politics and lawyers in the U.S. There are immensely rich people in the U.S., but they all seem to have large egos. They would rather compete and bash each other than cooperate. They are constantly suing one another. And none of them wants to have anything to do with taxes. With all that happening, it is very hard to get people together to work on big projects. It makes it much harder to innovate in the U.S. You will find that things are streamlined here, and we are innovating at an incredible pace. It’s all part of getting better and better.”

  As if to illustrate her point, the plane was now landing vertically. There was no runway, nor any need for one. We settled next to the terminal building and the walls became opaque and normal once again. I suppose the walls could display anything, but they had become beige. The floor looked like polished marble.

  We stepped out of the plane through the wide doors into the concourse with about a thousand other people from the flight, and walked a short distance. Here we stood in one of about 100 short lines. 100 “cars” would pull up, their overhead doors would flip open automatically, two or four people would get in, the doors would all close automatically, and those 100 cars would depart. A new set of 100 cars would arrive and the cycle would repeat. We stood in line for less than two minutes and we were on our way. Inside the car, Linda and I faced Burt and Cynthia sitting across from each other in very nice reclining seats not unlike those on the plane. The interior was roomy and well-lit, but there were no windows.

  “We are only going 24.3 miles,” Linda said, “So this will only take 4.25 minutes.”

  Since the car had no windows, it was impossible to tell what was happening. But I could feel the car accelerate briskly. Three or four minutes later I could feel it decelerate. The door popped open and we stepped out, through an archway and into the lobby of an enormous building.

  From the lobby to the roof there was an open atrium at least 70 stories tall. The roof overhead was glass. Around the sides of the atrium were balconies with plants streaming down, and then off the balconies were thousands of rooms. It gave you an incredible feeling of light and volume, and with the plants it was beautiful.

  “This is where you’ll both be staying during the orientation,” Linda said to Burt and me. We walked a short distance and stepped into one of the glass elevators that ran up one of the corners of the atrium. There were no buttons inside the elevator, but it stopped on a floor and we got out. We walked a short distance to a door that had Burt’s name on it. The door opened and Burt and Cynthia walked in. Linda and I walked to the next room, which had my name on it, and entered.

  It was an amazing suite. As the door opened, I looked across a remarkably nice living room and out through a floor-to-ceiling window that showed a panoramic view of the landscape. To my left was a small kitchen, to my right a short hallway which opened into a bedroom. I walked toward the window to absorb the view. About a mile away was a line of glass buildings, apparently identical to the one I was standing in. On the ground between me and that line of buildings were forests, gardens, parks, lakes, trails, streams. I could see people riding bicycles, kayaking in a river, walking. Off to one side I could see what appeared to be an amusement park and a stadium.

  I looked around the apartment. It was hard to believe, but yesterday I was living in Terrafoam with no way out. Now I was living in what appeared to be a 600 square foot suite at a 5-star luxury hotel. Everything in the room was perfect. There was a basket of fruit and munchies sitting on the coffee table, and fresh flowers on the credenza. I opened the card in the flowers, “Here’s to your life! Love, Linda”

  Linda said, “The orientation is going to start in about an hour. Why don’t you take a shower and change your clothes. I’ll relax here.” She
sank into one of the chairs in the living room and closed her eyes.

  When I was through with my shower, I found my closet filled with clothes that all appeared to fit perfectly. I picked an outfit and put it on. Walking into the living room I smelled food, which was a good thing because I was starving.

  “How do I look?” I asked.

  “Fabulous!” she said. “Very trendy. I got something for us” It was a extraordinary meal, although I had no idea where it came from.

  “Today is going to be an interesting day for you,” she said. “It will also feel a little odd. You’ve got the time zone change. You are in a completely different country. There are many new things for you to absorb. I just want you to relax and let the day flow. If you get tired, let me know. But I doubt you will get tired today. You had a good sleep on the plane. Let’s get going.”

  We took the elevator down, past the lobby and then below it. We got off and entered a large auditorium with hundreds of other people streaming in as well. Linda led us to a pair of seats and Burt and Cynthia were already there. The presentation started about three minutes after we arrived.

  The first presentation was remarkable, and it kicked off a series of events over two days. These events combined 3D, sound, live speakers, musical performances, tours, and testimonials to create an extremely powerful production. It was one of the most inspirational things I had ever seen or heard. I learned a number of details. For example, I learned where we were located on the continent of Australia. I learned that we would be living here for six weeks during the orientation process. I learned that currently about 400,000 new residents were arriving in Australia every day. I learned about the daily schedule over the six week period. In orientation we would be learning about the credit system, housing, the robot culture, picking products - everything from food to clothing to vacation packages - interacting with other residents, volunteer opportunities, physical fitness, careers, the legal system, voting, etc. It would be a very busy six weeks.

  The first two days acted as a general overview of the Australia project as a whole, but spent a good bit of time covering three things — the history of the Australia project, the economy of the project and the core principle of “living your life.”