2040

by Lela Oswald

  2040

  By: Lela Oswald

  Author Bio:

  Lela Oswald is the author of the Dream Jumper series, which includes 2040, as well as the forthcoming publication, Through the Shattered Mirror, which is the prequel to 2040. She lives in San Francisco with her husband Ryan. Aside from writing and reading she enjoys musical theater, swing dancing, ballet, piano, being a hardcore Disney nerd, aspiring to live on Mars, and looking forward to the singularity when we can back up our brains and live forever as cyborgs. You can find her on twitter at @lelaoswald and instagram at @lelaoswald.

  Dedication:

  I dedicate this book to the people of 2040, the people of the 22nd century, the AI who will one days read all of these books on Amazon, and most of all to Ryan, the Oswald to my Ortensia.

  Chapter 1: Magdalena Orvile

  Chapter 2: Future Memories

  Chapter 3: Mommy Laney

  Chapter 4: Time Jumping

  Chapter 5: Martin Orville

  Chapter 6: Rex Orville

  Chapter 7: Melody Orville

  Chapter 8: Milo Orville

  Chapter 9: Time Jump Future

  Chapter 10: Time Jump Past

  Chapter 11: Time Jump Present

  Chapter 12: The Mission

  Chapter 1: Magdelena Orville

  Magdalena Orville brushed back her long curly hair into a ponytail as she finished packing her suitcase. She was tall and slim like a ballerina, had smoothly whimsical curly hair, the same ocean blue eyes as her father Rex and Grandmother Carmela, and a graceful yet nerdy elegance of innocence and sparkle. She was lankey but toned, with a mix of elegant with a dash of awkward.

  Magdalena was used to packing in a hurry, since she had done this already many times. An adrenaline filled alertness passed over her. It was a motivated and focused alertness. It was time to move to a new county again and stay at a new hotel for the next few months. It was time to leave the Hong Kong Ritz Carlton where her family had been the past few months, and go to South America. Buenos Aires this time where they would stay at another hotel. They would leave in a few hours to go to the airport.

  The year was 2040. Magdalena was 15 years old. She was the oldest of 4 children. Her brother Martin was 11, her sister Melody was 7, and her brother Milo was 3. As the oldest child, she was the sister-mother of the group, or at least that’s what her mother Laney would call her. Magdalena was always on alert at all times, since for the past two years the family had been in hiding. Magdalena’s father Rex was a software engineer at Google in a team that had developed a new generation of artificial intelligence technology that allowed for automation of robots, cars, planes, trains, and transport drones. Before this technology millions of people per year died in car accidents. After this technology started to become commonplace in the 2020s and 2030s, car accident deaths around the world dropped significantly to only a few hundreds deaths per year. Despite the massive technology achievement and the win for human life, the political tide had turned in the United States.

  While humankind was going through a technological renaissance such as curing cancers and other diseases with new medical breakthroughs and solving world hunger by drone delivery of food directly those in need (thus eliminating the element of political corruption), the United States had been taken over politically by a military backed conservative authoritarian regime that sought to stop the technological breakthroughs of Google and other tech companies. This anti-technology platform started with the growing animosity of truck drivers who were not happy about being replaced by driverless cars.

  The truck drivers were not the only ones pushing against technological advancement. As robotics technology advanced, more and more American workers at the lower end of the economic hierarchy began to be replaced. Many countries implemented universal basic income aka UBI, and welcomed a creative renaissance of a post-work era where more people were free to pursue their creative dreams while all their economic needs were met. This was a privilege previously only had by those who inherited money or saved enough to retire young, as was common with Silicon Valley techies who reached “Fi” or financial independence by age 30 so whatever other goal they set for their early retirement. But in the US the Traditionalist Party had arison. The traditionalist party, or TP, pushed a return to what they saw as “old American values”.

  Supporters of TP argued that the best of America was in the past and there was a need to return to the past. However, opponents of TP saw this view as regressive and argued that science was the pathway to a better future. Opponents of TP formed what became the Idealist Party. Supporters of the Idealist Party argued that technological advancement and creative industry were always part of the American spirit, and TP was only looking at a narrow view of America, one that was stuck in the 20th century and had refused to advance to the 21st century.

  In the 2036 election, the Traditionalist Party gained control of the government. While many had projected the Idealist Party would win on their platform of UBI for all and double the funding for science research and a cure for aging, the Traditionalist Party ran an anti-Asian campaign that drew out a hostile support base. The following few years they closed the borders to all immigrants, country by county. First they started with what they called “hostile countries”, and then it spread to eventually encapsulate all foreign countries. This harmed the ability of top tech companies to attract the world’s best talent, and it was followed by even further anti-technology policies that inhibited innovative thought and new ways of operating in a world where technology was rapidly changing the world, and any country that wasn’t open to innovation was left behind.

  Despite the anti-tech attitudes, tech continued to be the top economic sector, and software engineers continued to be the majority of the billionaires, centimillionaires, and decamillionaires. Anti-technology sentiment continued to grow amongst those who had been displaced by technology. Extremist members of the Traditionalist Party launched terrorist attacks on Google and other tech companies. They sent bombs in the mail, assaulted engineers on the streets, and in one particularly horrifying day they had a team of snipers come shoot engineers at a conference. These attacks only fueled the fire of the racist Traditionalist Party, and as they gained new supporters, the party itself became more accepting of violence as a strategy.

  After multiple terrorist attacks on the Google campus and dozens of deaths by Google employee deaths, Google moved their offices out of the US. Their employees were scattered throughout the hundreds of google offices in cities around the world. This change meant that the United States had a massive brain drain of the top engineering talent.

  The loss of this talent had ramifications that trickled down to the US military, who wanted the latest autonomous technology for themselves for their tanks. They launched a CIA team to go hunt down all of the American engineers who had left the country and go bring them back to the US by whatever means necessary. Once back in the US, these engineers would be charged with treason. They were then given the option to rat out the location and whereabouts of other googlers they knew about. Doing so would result in a shorter prison sentence. While in prison the googlers were tasked with working for the US government and using their technological skills to help the Traditionalist Party gain military power through more advanced tanks that would then be sent to US military bases in other countries in order to threaten other nations into compliance with new US policies.

  Rex Orville was at the top of the top of the CIA’s list of most wanted ex-pats who had fled the country. There was even a reward for his capture or any information on his whereabouts that led to his capture. Magdalena was worried about him and worried about someone reporting their family. The whole family had fake passports with alternative identities. Before each flight Magdalena and her brother Marvin would
fly with Rex who would travel posing as a single dad, each of them using the fake identities of a real single dad with two daughters. Meanwhile Melody and Milo would fly with Laney who would travel posing as a single mom of two kids, using the fake identity of a real family who wasn’t currently traveling of using the identity. The identities were given by Google using a database of former googlers living as expats who had donated their identity information to help assist current googlers in hiding. Magdalena’s parents would check into two different hotel rooms and then later meet up in one of the hotel rooms and come together. Rex and Laney would share a bed with little Milo, and then Magdalena and Marvin, and Melody would share a bed. It was a tight squeeze, but at this point she was used to it. There was also something comforting about knowing she was safe in the same room as her whole family. During the day they would spread out to the two rooms and do their homeschooling and have more space to play. Technically they were on the run, but there was also a peaceful serenity in knowing that they always had each other. They were global adventurers, ex-patriot rebels wrongly branded as terrorists, and trailblazers of the future world where AI reigned supreme, whether the government was willing to accept it or not.

  Chapter 2: Future Memories

  In a way Magdalena liked moving to new hotels. She liked the adventure and imagining the backstories of the people who would come into the hotel. Sometimes she and her sister Melody would write plays and musicals about the people they would see in the hotel. She often felt like she was a character out of the American Girl Doll books or the Laura Ingalls Wilder books or the Dear America books, facing hardships but pulling through them with the help of her family. She and her three younger siblings had been urban-homeschooled by their mother all their lives, and during the past few years they had continued their homeschooling internationally while they used their fake identities and evaded the US government.

  Magdalena kept a journal of what was happening with her family on her Kindle journal. In her journal she logged their day to day journey, her thoughts and analysis, and also her projections of what the future may hold. She kept a running list called her “Future List” of events that she foresaw transpiring in the future both in her family as well as in the world as a whole.

  Magdalena sometimes got crystal clear glimpses of the future. They came to her both in dreams and in reality. Were they just her imagination? Were they visions from the gods? Were they just dreams? Were they signs guiding her in a direction she was destined to follow? Sometimes she had visions of what country her family was going to move to next, even though her parents hadn’t told her this information. She had been right the past few moves. How had she known? Had she heard her parents discussing it while she was barely conscious and falling asleep, and then it imprinted on her mind as a subconscious thought that she felt was her own? Or maybe because she read the newspapers online each day like her parents did, she just had the same intuition about which countries were currently safe to travel to?

  Lately she had been seeing visions in her dreams of her little brother Martin needing her help. She wasn’t sure if this was because he was in trouble with her parents, in trouble with the hotel staff, in trouble with the government, or in trouble with himself. All she knew was that she woke up scared that he was in danger. Then she rolled over and saw him there sleeping next to her, and realized everything was fine and he was safe, and it was all just a dream. Maybe she was overreacting. Maybe she was just an imaginative dreamer. Maybe it was just the result of the fact that Marvin was the person she interacted with most, and he was in her subconscious mind a great deal. Maybe the dreams were just Magdalena’s way to express her inner anxieties about her family's situation in a way where her mind knew how to process and try and solve by being the hero of the family, like the girls in her book series who step up and save the family in a time of crisis.

  Magdalena was worried about her dad, she hoped he would be safe from detection by the American CIA. She wondered if he would be safe in the event he was captured. Would they hurt tim? Would they try to take Magdalena and her siblings and her mom too? Magdalena had seen movies about the American military and the CIA. Sometimes they were brave and went on missions saving people, but other times they would torture and harm people and cover it up. But surely they wouldn’t harm children, right? People didn’t actually kidnap kids these days, did they?

  This wasn’t the first time Magdalena had experienced “future memories”, as she called them. The future memories were often somewhat vague at first and then got more specific as the dreams repeated night after night. She went back to places she had only seen in her dreams that then came up in real life at a later date. It always freaked her out when that happened. She wasn’t sure if she was actually perceiving the future in her dreams or if maybe her memory of her dreams was just being replaced by the mental images of the new experiences and those new experiences resulted in the illusion of the dream predicting the future. Magdalena found it best to always keep a skeptical mind. An open mind but a skeptical one.

  Magdalena’s parents, Rex and Laney, told her to put all her dreams in a dream journal and turn them into stories. Magdalena loved writing. She hoped to one day write science fiction novels or movies or plays or musicals. She loved to dance and choreograph dances as well. Maybe she would be a ballerina while she was a young adult and then a writer later in life after she was a mom.

  If the US ever went back from dictatorship, Laney hoped to go to college at Columbia. Her mother was a Columbia alum who had gone to Columbia for graduate school, and two of her great grandparents were also Columbia alum, but legacy status was no longer considered by universities so that wouldn’t help her when it came to admissions. Magdalena wanted to attend the notable dance program at Barnard College, which was an all women’s college within Columbia. After that maybe she would go to NYC for a masters in fine arts in dance and perform on Broadway and maybe even write her own musicals and plays to perform in. Or she could major in English and minor in dance. She loved writing as much as dance. She enjoyed writing musicals, Disney fan fiction stories, and children’s book ideas. She loved children’s literature where the story offered moral lessons and takeaways, as they comforted her soul. Or perhaps she would major in philosophy and minor in dance. Her mother had been a philosophy major, and Magdalena had already read Plato and other old philosophy books of her mother’s. She loved Plato’s idea of the Philosopher-Kings being those who ruled the earth due to their ability to see the truth about the world around them.

  She was still deciding on her path and perfecting her future plan. She wouldn’t want to be too far from her family though, especially if they were still in hiding from the US government. Her siblings were her best friends. When she grew up she wanted ten kids. She wasn’t sure what kind of husband she would marry but she hoped he would be smart and reliable and trustworthy and good in a crisis like her dad.

  Magdalena hoped everything worked out for her in life. She wasn’t sure how much of life had to do with luck or with fate or versus planning and grit or talent or pure desire. She just knew she loved to dance and to write, and she wished upon a star that she would always be able to pursue those dreams. But for now she needed to focus on staying safe in hiding.

  She zipped up her suitcase after throwing in the last of her clothes.

  After fully packing her suitcase, Magdalena sat down to write her letter to the Creator of the Universe in her journal. She always did this on big event days such as before a big trip/move. She journaled every day but mostly to herself. However before major life events she figured it was a good idea to try and talk directly to the Creator.

  “Dear Creator,” she wrote. Thank you for coding me. Thank you for coding my family. Thank you for coding the universe. I am deeply and forever grateful to have been created. Please keep my family safe during our travels. Help us avoid detection from the CIA. Help watch over us. Thank you for everything you have given me in life and everything you have given my family. I know t
hat we have our struggles, but I am grateful for every day that I have been alive and for the blessings I have been given. I am truly and forever humbled by your creations. I will try to be the best version of myself and make you proud of me. Thank you. Love, your child/video game character, Magdalena Orville”

  Magdalena stared at what she had typed in her tablet and nodded. That was enough for now. She thought a lot about the creator of the universe aka God. She knew many people prayed to God and followed a religious tradition, but she saw organized religion and most versions of modern new age spirituality as dogmatic and superficial. She also wondered if the Creator of the universe ever got annoyed by people praying and asking for minor things. Maybe the Creator/God felt like the CEO of a company getting tens of thousands of emails from employees asking for help with things they should be able to hande on their own, and in response felt like “ugh you people are so annoying, can’t you figure out ANYTHING on your own, I programmed you to have brains! Stop bothering me with this dumb shit!”

  So Magdalena tried to be humble when writing to the creator, and tried to not take up too much of his time in deference to the people whose prayers may be much more important in priority. But maybe it was an insult to think that God didn’t have a system in place to prioritize the prayers. Surely he has multiple phone lines available. Or maybe it worked like hashtag system where anyone attempting to talk to God results in the ping to God’s social media page and he could just search the hashtags when he has a few minutes of spare time, and he could even search by prayer request topic or region or language or sincerity or strength of desire.

  Or maybe god had a whole team of other gods who were working on the prayer requests. Maybe god himself created our universe but another god created our god. And not just our god but other gods who went on to create universes of their own that existed in parallel to our universe.