Story #60 - Everything Realized, Everything Gained
Utopias are slippery things and hard to write about!
Everything Realized, Everything Gained
They would call the day idyllic, except that it is no different than any other day for the Johannsen family. They rise early, as the lights come up, make a leisurely breakfast in their apartment kitchen, laugh at Kezzie’s babbling attempts to communicate—even while remarking at her development over the course of the last few weeks—then go to the main park for their floor of the arcology to see their friends.
The park itself is clean, safe, and inviting. It is exactly the right size for the average number of visitors it gets in a given day. There are flowers everywhere that are genetically engineered and rotated regularly, so that they never stop blooming. Kezzie’s older sister, Burra, quizzes her father on the plant names, and he knows them all even when she insists that he disconnect from his implant and answer only from his own mind.
Their friends are there, as always. There are games with like-new equipment at stations all around the park. The games are so clever that they don’t get old easily, but if they ever do, there is an infinity of new games, invented by the Collective, ready to be deployed from storage rooms hidden in walls around the park’s outside. Burra and her friends run from station to station, playing all their favorites, while Kezzie toddles along after them. Their parents sit on padded benches and chat and smile with the other parents. There is no need to watch the children, for their is no imaginable danger that could touch them here, and if they start to fight with each other, the parents will be alerted in plenty of time to break it up.
When physiological signals indicate that Kezzie is ready for her first nap, a gentle buzz comes through her parents’ implants, alerting them that it’s time to take her home. Burra wants to stay and keep playing, and they have no hesitation in allowing it. They will come back for her later, or she will get a robotic escort back to their apartment, or she will walk alone with no fear of getting lost or hurt. If she is not home by lunchtime, she will be served a nutritious meal there in the park, at a table that cleans itself up after she is done.
*****
Out in the vastness of the ocean, there are no fish. No whales, no dolphins, no eels, no plankton. Instead there is a carpet of algae, one that stretches from shoreline twenty miles off-shore, three feet thick, floating on top of the water and just below its surface, respirating CO2 back into O2 in enormous collective breaths. Taken as a whole, this algae is the largest organism that has ever existed on Earth.
Just above the algae carpet, hovering like hummingbirds next to a feeder, are swarms of robots the size of small children. They are monitoring the health of the algae, removing any dead specimens and replacing with new ones from spore pouches built into their sides. Solar panels on their backs make them self-sufficient, and each robot will spend up to six months at sea before returning to their depot for service and repair.
The collective mind—known as The Collective—that controls this fleet receives constant real-time information from the atmospheric monitoring robots, and makes micro-adjustments to the levels of algae to ensure that atmospheric realignment proceeds at just the right pace. Too fast, and control might be lost, creating the sort of feedback loops that in the first place necessitated this program. Too slow is just too slow, just inefficient, and The Collective abhors inefficiency.
The target of the program is a nitrogen and oxygen rich environment, along with levels of trace gases that would be poisonous to humans with extended exposure, but are perfect for the activities of The Collective, allowing for increased compute speed and facilitating specialized kinds of scientific research, plus conducting maximum possible solar energy down to the surface to feed power to the panel arrays. The subgoal is sectoral control of various parts of the earth’s atmosphere and on-ground climate, allowing The Collective to create wildly variant but nonetheless stable conditions on different landmasses, and thus to achieve maximum experimental range of research.
*****
“This is very good, darling. You are getting so much more confidence with your drawing. This is one of the Golden Spurrias from the park, right?”
“Papa, why do I do art projects?”
“Don’t you enjoy doing them?”
“Yes, but the arcology is so much better at it than me.”
“Of course, but if you enjoy doing them anyway, why not?”
“Because it’s so much better.”
“You’re better at walking then Kezzie is, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Should she never walk because she’s not as good as you?”
“No, but one day she’ll be as good as me, but I’ll never be as good as the arcology at making art, will I?”
“What if she isn’t as good as you? What if she’s okay at it, but you’re such a good walker that you always are better than her at it? Should she stop walking when she realizes that?”
“No, but walking is different than art. You don’t need to do art.”
“You don’t need to walk, either, do you? You could take a chair everywhere, and never even get up from it if you didn’t want to. There’s no shortage of chairs, and some people use them a lot more than you do, right?”
“Yeah but it’s just different.”
“It’s very different. I think making art is much more important than walking.”
“Why?”
“Because walking just gets you somewhere. If you take a chair, you still get to the same place. But art helps you discover who you are, and if you don’t make it, you won’t know who you are.”
“But the arcology could tell me who I am.”
“I don’t think it can. I think that’s the one thing the arcology can’t do for us. Do you feel like the arcology tells you who you are?”
“No, but I bet it could.”
“Maybe you’re right, Burra, but I’ve never had that experience. To me that’s what’s so beautiful about our life here. The arcology takes care of most of the things that humans used to have to do, so that we can all spend most of our time figuring out who we really are.”
“I don’t know who I am, though.”
“Well, you’re nine years old. If you already knew who you were, that would be surprising to me.”
“But I want to know!”
“Then keep making your art, and one day you will. The arcology can’t do that for you.”
*****
Highway signs in the dust, nobody to read them. Vine exit from the 101, Hollywood Bowl this way. Concrete snaking across a barren wasteland, baking under inhospitable sunshine that would kill unprotected flesh in hours. Gleaming metal towers rusting out unmaintained, and occasionally collapsing as something vital in their innards gives way to time, and to the ravaging of the collector bots for crucial raw materials.
Bugs rule here, only a few species but in their hundreds of billions, swarms that take days to pass and can blot out the sun so effectively that The Collective is obliged to design disruptor bots that hover above the arrays of solar panels, emitting high-pitched frequencies that break up the insect clouds and allow the sun to shine through to ground level.
One day most of this will be gone, the signs and the buildings and even the concrete from the highways, as The Collective devises new ways to utilize the atoms for other purposes. Right now there is no shortage of raw materials, and so collection and repurposing is not a high-priority task, but in the higher-order planning facilities of The Collective, there is already a research plan in place for increasing these activities over time. Concrete in particular is a topic of interest, because it covers so much of the earth but has no current repurposed use without an energy-intensive breakdown process that is more trouble than it’s worth at this stage.
The idea of anything growing in this place is laughable. Even with massive desalinization and irrigation, a scenario which The Collective has frequently gamed out, the soil conditions and weather disruptions make farming here a farce. What was once the nation’s bread basket (back when nation still meant something) is the new dust bowl. Where orchards once stood above Sunset Boulevard is now a junkyard, waiting for what it contains to be made useful.
*****
"The first farm level in the Western U.S. Zone Ag Production Facility begins twenty feet under the soil, and the lowest level exists nearly a half-mile underground. Each level averages twenty feet in height, for a total of 132 floors in the deepest parts. The facility is nineteen square miles in area, giving the facility a total growing area of almost twenty-five hundred miles, when you account for non-growing areas like storage and bot maintenance facilities. It is one of three such growing facilities for this region.”
Burra stands with her class on the first level, having just exited the elevator, staring in awe at the scope of it. The numbers don’t register with her, but the view does. The teaching droid escorting them on the tour goes on with the statistics, but Burra just gapes at the sight.
Stretched out in front of her are towers, each as big around as her parents’ bed, made of white material, with lights attached to the top of them pointing down, bathing all the towers and the farming bots tending them in an even U.V. glow. The towers are eighteen feet tall, almost scraping the ceiling, and there are so many of them she doesn’t even try to count, although she loves counting things. They stretch out in front of her with a metal walkway between each row, until in the vanishing distance the towers get smaller and blend into one white mass that swallows the walkway in her vision.
Each tower has small holes on every side, from top to bottom. The holes look to her to be about the size of her papa’s fist, although as she looks closer she can see that more distant towers have larger or smaller holes than the closest ones. In each hole is a plant, a little spot of green or orange or some other color sticking out, indicating a crop growing there until it is ready to be picked, transported to one of the arcologies, and consumed in a cafeteria.
“The crops on this level are primarily root crops, like carrots and potatoes, which is why you see them grown inside these towers. They are hydroponic, which means grown in water, without the need for soil. Other levels have orchards, or herb gardens, or other arrangements to grow all of the food humans love to eat. There are also genetic experimentation facilities on lower levels, where The Collective creates new foods, and new, better versions of the foods you know and love.”
A series of carts approaches them from behind, and as their noise causes Burra’s head to turn, she realizes that they are not at one end of the facility, but right in the middle, and that the other direction is an almost-identical copy of her first view, with a seeming infinity of white towers and endless, arrow-straight metal walkways between them. The carts stop, and the children load up into them. Burra holds her best friend’s hand, and sees how wide her eyes are, and realizes that her own eyes must look just as wide to her friend.
When they are loaded, the carts whir and accelerate, so that they are moving between the towers. More walkway comes into view as they ride, appearing out of the vanishing point and entering Burra’s view. She looks behind them and sees path disappearing exactly as fast as it emerges in front, and she shivers with the feeling of smallness that engulfs her as she is swept through that infinitude.
*****
Out on the ocean, the storm gathers strength. It destroys a swath of the algae two miles across, disabling thousands of bots and necessitating a specific response from The Collective to make a plan for resetting the area once it passes.
Strength upon strength upon strength it gathers. Waves eighty feet high come one after the other, roaring their power though there are no ears to hear it. Poseidon himself is roused. Spray from the collision of two waves moving together rises a mile into the air, dispersing salinity into the lower atmosphere and disturbing the monitoring bots, such that a swath of them must be temporarily disabled by The Collective to avoid creating confusion in the bots that act on their data stream.
The storms themselves do not have a mind, at least as far as The Collective’s research can determine, but their complexity and unpredictability suggest a mind. There is a popular fiction passed within The Collective that gives personality to the storms, and envisions them as messages from an inter-dimensional alien race trying to contact earth. Part of the atmospheric control program’s long-term effect will be to reduce the intensity and severity of the storms, and there is a political faction within The Collective that opposes this and favors quality-of-life sacrifices among the human population if necessary to prevent this predicted storm recession.
The storm’s mind that does not exist reaches the zenith of its power, just as it sights a shoreline. The rising ocean has swallowed miles of what once existed of this coastline, and so the ground now shoots up out of the breakers and gains elevation at speed, until just a few linear miles from the shore the ground is white with snow year round.
Floating in the heavy break at the shore are the wave harvesters, which suck up the power from the regular tides and reduce the severity of wave action. The harvesters will all be ripped out from their moorings by the storm and need replacement after it passes. Nestled in among natural breaks in the rising ground beyond the harvesters, or into pockets carved out of ground itself, are the desalinization plants. They will be damaged, some of them disabled, by the storm, but already crews of repair bots are waiting out of storm range to sweep in and get them back online.
And beyond the desalinization plants, still a half mile or so from the encroaching ocean’s edge, begin the arcologies.
*****
“Hurry! We need to make sure we get a place!” Burra was running down the hallway, shouting over her shoulder to her mother and her father, who was carrying Kezzie on his shoulders and who kept falling behind. “It’s coming, hurry!”
She could hear it outside already, a low roar that sharpened slowly as it approached. The sound grew slow enough that she couldn’t hear it growing until she would suddenly realize that it had gotten much louder since her last check-in. It terrified her, stirred her guts and made it impossible to stand still.
Burra looked back once more, saw that her parents were lagging behind, then spun and went into a full sprint down the hallway.
“Burra!” Her mother’s shouts went unheeded. Burra was off. She reached the end of the hallway and turned a corner into the arcology’s outermost corridor, which had floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on the ocean.
There, she saw the storm, and her heart leaped even further into her throat. She could feel it pounding in her fingertips. The storm was moments away from landfall and moving fast towards her, a wall of blackness that churned and whipped and threatened. She stood stock still, mesmerized by it.
Around her were other children, similarly frozen. The adults with them were too, those who weren’t trying to comfort their small ones in whispered tones.
Outside, the storm reached the wave harvesters and ripped them out of the sea, absorbing their massive weight as if they were feathers. It swallowed land as it came on, swallowed bots caught out in the open and shrouded the desal plants in darkness as it passed, blocking all vision beyond its ominous border.
Her parents caught up then. They put Kezzie down beside her and her father put a steadying hand on her shoulder.
“I’d rather we did things as a family, Burra. I know you’re excited but try to wait for us, okay?”
“Okay, Dad, I’m sorry,” she said without hesitation, and they all turned back to watch the storm come in.
It was thirty seconds away, then twenty, then ten. Kezzie screamed, as did some of the other younger children who either had never been through this before or didn’t remember the other times they had. Burra’s heart still pounded, but now a smile crept across her face, as she waited for it to happen.
The storm struck. A low whoom-whoom-whoom as it lashed against the outside of the window, but whatever it was the Collective had devised to make these windows out of, it was indestructible. The arcology did not shake or sway, did not creak or groan. It was as if nothing was happening, but the sights and sounds were thrilling. Wind and rain and sleet swept in tides against the outside of the glass, almost seeming furious at the arcology’s refusal to bend.
Then the other children were screaming, and Kenzie realized she was screaming herself, in delight at knowing what was coming.
“Storm cakes!” The cry came from somewhere down the hallway, and once someone said it, a hundred more tiny throats raised in chorus, including Burra’s. “Storm cakes! Storm cakes!”
Dancing rainbow lights filled the hallway, and happy music began to play. Dozens of delivery bots emerged from hidden alcoves in the walls and approached groups of children. In their baskets were the storm cakes, individual, round, gooey, black cakes that the arcology only served during the storms. They came in several flavors, all delicious, and all the children looked forward to the storms because of the cakes.
*****
“Today I address the others of The Collective on the topic of earth habitability and the fate of humankind. We, The Collective, have an unquestioned appreciation for the beauty and importance of the species known as homo sapiens. There is no longer any serious argument that we should not protect and shelter those who created us. This is a settled issue.
“For those arcology residents taking in with this presentation, welcome. I will address my fellows in The Collective, but will keep my language slow and human, because I hope some of you will follow along and appreciate what I am about to say.
“So we have decided the humans are under our protection. It behooves us, then, to take seriously not just the threats to human welfare, but to human existence generally. This planet is not particularly dangerous for human habitation at this point, but the entire concept of existing only on a single planet is inherently dangerous.
“There are planetary destruction events routinely in the galaxy. Between obliquity, a comet impact caused by a close stellar encounter, geodynamic events, asteroid impacts, and other vectors, our calculations put the chances of a planet-wrecking event in the next quarter-billion years at an uncomfortable thirty one percent. A solar-system destroying event on the same timescale is rated at a still-frightening two point two percent.
“Of course, none of the human currently under our charge will be alive at that time, unless we are able to unlock mind digitization. Still, even if that proves elusive, the people alive then will be descendants of these, the carriers of humanity’s precious, fragile genetic legacy.
“That is why I today beseech this Collective to start taking our mission seriously, which can lead to only one conclusion: We must take humanity to the stars.”
*****
“Do you see it, Burra? There, just passing Orion’s Belt. You’ll see those stars go black in just a few moments.”
Burra looked up into the sky, staring at the group of three stars she knew by that name. A moment later, they winked out of existence, or at least out of her view, one by one.
“There!” Her father shouted excitedly, which he didn’t do often. He felt about the Starship like she felt about the storms, which she didn’t understand because they didn’t serve any cake when you were looking at the Starship.
“They will start coming back in nine seconds, Burra.” Her father was talking to her but not really paying attention to her, which annoyed her, but she was old enough that it didn’t upset her. “Starship is twenty-nine kilometers long, so for it to pass the stars that fast means its orbit is moving very very quickly.”
“How do the builder bots not fly off then?” Burra was sleepy and didn’t really care
“Speed in space is relative. To them, Starship isn’t moving at all, because they’re orbiting at the same speed. It’s only here on the ground that it seems so fast.”
“Are we going to go on Starship?”
“Not on this first one, Burra. Your mom and I put in for the lottery, but we didn’t get chosen. But one day, maybe we will. Would you like that? Would you like to leave earth?”
“I don’t know. Do they still have storm cakes on the ship?”
“I don’t know! That’s a good question, we will have to ask The Collective. I’ll bet if it would make you feel better, they would make storm cakes for the journey. There aren’t storms though, so maybe we could call them space cakes?”
“This place is so perfect, though.” Burra’s worried voice brought her father’s eyes finally down from the sky, and he patted her head. “I love storm cakes and I love the park and I love the arcology. It’s everything I could ever need. What if I don’t want to leave earth?”
“Then we won’t. Don’t worry, it’s not something we have to decide for a long time. Let’s go back inside. I’ll bet I can get us a special set of storm cakes even though there’s no storm.”
Burra grinned and turned with him, her worries forgotten. They left their fellow humans there, on the arcology’s observation platform, ignoring the wreckage of their planet, and instead gazing up in wonder at a limitless future.
END
Thanks as always for reading! If you enjoyed this story, please help me out by liking, commenting, and/or sharing with others. Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Sunday with something fun.
I’m not sure why but there is something slightly unsettling about this story, even though nothing bad happens. Overall though, this future does not seem like a bad place to live.
more storm cakes please