by R E Kearney
ENDLESS FIRE
Future Furies
By
R E Kearney
This book is the intellectual property of the author and as such cannot be reproduced in whole or in part in any medium without the express written permission of the author.
Copyright © 2016 R E Kearney
To Barb, my loving wife, best friend and the Editor in Chief.
Without her encouragement and assistance I could not
and would not have written this story.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks and my sincere appreciation to Tim Flanagan and his associates at Novel Design Studio www.noveldesignstudio.com for their cover design, social media production and all of their other assistance coordinating the publication of this book.
My thanks to Chris Kennedy http://chriskennedypublishing.com for his assistance, encouragement and the guidance he provides in Self-Publishing for Profit.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Rarest of the Rare
Chapter 2. Pion and Tena
Chapter 3. All is Lost
Chapter 4. Revenge Shall Be
Chapter 5. Opportunity in Chaos
Chapter 6. Oh Canada
Chapter 7. Society Preserving Endangered Agriculture
Chapter 8. Dulles International
Chapter 9. Under Surveillance - US
Chapter 10. Head Start
Chapter 11. Up, Up and Away
Chapter 12. Venus
Chapter 13. Mugavus Komfort
Chapter 14. Night Sweats
Chapter 15. Dame Gutefrau
Chapter 16. Bad Deal
Chapter 17. Cyber Agony
Chapter 18. Purification
Chapter 19. Declaring Independence
Chapter 20. China
Chapter 21. On to Africa
Chapter 22. Addis Ababa
Chapter 23. Merkato
Chapter 24. Road Trip
Chapter 25. Jimma - Bonga
Chapter 26. Trekking
Chapter 27. AIDAS
Chapter 28. Ain’t Over til It’s Over
Acronym Definitions
About the Author
“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”
William Gibson
Chapter 1.
Rarest of the Rare
Science saves – superstition destroys.
The old ends so the new begins.
Robotic WASPs swarm the small girl, repeatedly stinging her with laser stun shots. Pion watches the girl struggle forward and then calmly, mentally increases the strength of the WASPs’ stun stings. The girl jerks, spasms rock her body, but she does not stop. She crawls forward, inching closer to the water pumping facility. Rocking slowly forward and back, Pion increases the WASPs’ stings again. Sitting alone in the silent, dimly-lit, bare room, Pion rocks and chants her work mantra in a flat tone of voice, “Science saves – superstition destroys. The old ends so the new begins”. Rocking and chanting without expression and without blinking, Pion’s brain-machine-interface controlled WASPs sting the girl again and again.
The girl collapses, stunned unconsciousness. Pion recalls her Winged Aerial Security and Protection system or WASPs and dispatches a retrieval robodrone. A few minutes later, the retrieval robodrone deposits the unconscious girl and a liter of THC infused, calming water on the doorstep of her shack in the Subsistence caste’s, or Sists’ shanty-town village. She will live. She will be sick and sore, but she will live.
Pion is a Protector of Endangered Agriculture or PEA for the Society Preserving Endangered Agriculture or, as she knows it, SPEA. She is just one of the hundreds of SPEA’s PEAs who secure and operate the corporate state’s plantations. In truth, Pion is a robot and drone programmer-tender. She programs and manages hundreds of robots and drones at the plantation while a quantum, super computer with artificial intelligence observes and monitors her and other PEAs from SPEA’s capital.
In the worldwide SPEA nervous system, Pion is a neuron cell. She is the human circuit breaker, the conscience, the failsafe link or emergency-off-button for the SPEA security system. Pion prevents singularity. Pion is as close to providing SPEA’s Artificial Intelligence computer with its desired artificial consciousness, artificial intuition and artificial thinking that SPEA has been able and allowed to install. Where autonomous robots too often kill, Pion engages restraint robots and drones to discourage human incursions. Pion is a robot tender tended by a robot.
Pion has encountered this Sist girl before. Almost daily, she challenges Pion and fails. But, failing never stops her. No, failing only emboldens her to endeavor again employing different tactics. Impressed by her determination and resolve, Pion calls her tenacious or Tena, just as she remembers her mother describing her, as being tenacious, when she was young.
Yes, Tena is desperate for water, but so are hundreds of millions of other parched Sists around the world today. Nevertheless, it is Pion’s duty to prevent her and all of the other Sists from reaching SPEA’s water supplies or entering its Arabica coffee plantation. So, she does. Without prejudice. Without empathy. Without sympathy. Without hesitation. Just as she had programmed and fought robodrone battles as a Coalition soldier during the Nordic War. Except that Pion enjoys this more than when she created algorithms and programs for the Coalition, because it allows her to focus and concentrate on Tena – another human.
Scanning the visuals from the two-thousand acre plantation’s environment-climate control security system, Pion fixates on the bright, red-colored, coffee cherries. Pion does not realize or care that in days the coffee will be ripe and ready to harvest. Pion only sees the red round little balls - the pretty round, red marble-sized balls.
She smiles. Seeing all those red balls tells her she is successfully guarding SPEA’s treasure. She is doing a good job. She knows she will be praised. She likes being praised. Contentedly, she intuitively rocks to and fro, her long, tangled, blond hair fluttering about her watchful eyes. Unaware of her significance, Pion does not comprehend that she is protecting far more than just SPEA’s coffee. In her simple way, she is safeguarding and saving Arabica coffee for the world.
Thanks to genetic, bio-engineering, SPEA grows the best Arabica coffee in the world. Actually, SPEA grows the only commercially available Arabica coffee in the world. Climate changing heat, drought and disease has destroyed the majority of the world’s native and natural coffee plantations.
As the earth’s temperature increased, a plant-choking fungus called la roya coffee rust swept across the coffee farms and plantations of South America, Central America and parts of Africa. The coffee rust spread far and fast, driven by the heat that allows the fungus to thrive. But, the worst and most extensive spreading of coffee rust occurred through an act of bio-terrorism executed by Colombian revolutionaries.
The revolutionaries isolated the most virulent and contagious coffee rust strain. Then when their demands for a political prisoner release were not met, they dispersed it, infecting Colombia’s coffee. Within weeks, rust decimated Colombian coffee and started an unstoppable, exterminating march through the coffee growing regions of the world. The disease was unsparing, reducing rows of coffee trees to lattices of gray twigs.
SPEA bio-engineers raced to develop a coffee rust resistant variety of Arabica coffee plant through genetic modification. But, although they succeeded, they failed. In most coffee growing regions SPEA plants arrived too late. Most of the coffee growers had already abandoned their poisoned land or were growing cash crops of marijuana or cocaine. In other nations, governments refused to allow SPEA to plant g
enetically modified coffee plants. After these rejections of its bio-engineering, SPEA decided to take advantage of the profitable potential of climate change and developed its protective plantation system for endangered agriculture.
Working alone and isolated, Pion is unaware that coffee is not the only food SPEA rescued and protects. On similar plantations in other nations, SPEA also grows the only commercially available tea and cacao in the world. As with coffee, bio-engineers cultivated a variety of tea plant resistant to hotter-temperature generated stem disease and leaf disease. They also developed specific recommendations and actions for how to cope with these climate impacts in the future. But for the smallholder farmers that produced about a third of the world’s tea the cure is too expensive. Only SPEA possesses the genetically modified plants, expertise, resources and funds necessary and capable of producing tea in this changed climate, which it now does.
These same increasing temperatures posed a variety of different problems for SPEA’s bio-engineers struggling to conserve the earth’s cacao plantations. Higher temperatures cause evapotranspiration where more water evaporates into the air from cacao leaves and soil, leaving less behind for cacao trees. Higher temperatures also invigorated and spread a fungal disease called frosty pod, which ravaged the world’s cocoa production. Witch’s broom, another fungal disease, devastated Brazil’s cacao plantations. Once the world’s second largest exporter of chocolate, Brazil is now its biggest importer.
By taking advantage of the failures of others to adapt to climate change, SPEA now earns hundreds of billions of dollars growing genetically modified coffee, cacao and tea in its environment-climate-controlled plantations scattered around the world. As climate change continues its relentless expansion, opportunities for SPEA increase. Bananas and citrus are two foods suffering due to increasing temperatures and heat related droughts that SPEA may soon protect under its bioengineering umbrella. SPEA is optimizing its domain expertise.
SPEA plantations are huge, self-contained, enclosed biospheres where no humans, only robots, work inside their atmospheric shells. Even the bees and butterflies required for plant pollination are robotic. Humans carry disease. Humans steal. Humans make mistakes. Humans waste. Humans are only necessary as consumers. Where each pound of coffee beans sells for more than one-hundred dollars, humans cannot be allowed. All of SPEA’s plantations are human free, except for their PEAs, like Pion, who rarely leave their control room-life stations and never enter the biospheres.
Pion’s brain-machine-interface holohelmet’s heads-up-display shifts to external scanner drones and the Sists’ shanty-town village scanners. Tena no longer lies on her doorstep. SPEA’s High Altitude Wing Kite or HAWK drone gains altitude and orbits above the Sists’ village. Below, squats forty-three, rusting-tin roofed, scavenged-wood, ramshackle hovels hugging two meandering, rutted, dirt roads.
In the center of Tena’s village stand two newer, well-constructed buildings. One had been a SPEA built and furnished school. The other was a SPEA constructed and supported medical clinic. But, radicals from another village attacked and ransacked both facilities killing the teachers and the nurses. Now, the buildings sit empty. Just two more broken promises and destroyed dreams.
Here and there a mangy, skinny dog wanders. Behind Tena and her father’s shack, goats sprawl inside a crude, tree-limb, fenced pen. Goat pens speckle the village, but only Tena’s hold more than two or three goats. Outside their cluster of shacks, Pion spies Tena and her father working in their field struggling to scratch a living out of the dry dust where SPEA had resettled them. No matter how hard the Sists work the ground they have been allotted, they will barely be able to survive on what food they raise in the dead dirt SPEA left them after scraping off the top soil. SPEA left them dirt poor.
The forty-three small acreage farm families of Tena’s village had once owned and farmed the SPEA coffee plantation land, but when SPEA moved in, they were moved out. These once proud farmers are now Sists standing one step above beggars. Their government sold their land, or, in actuality, their soil was sold from beneath them. Ethiopian soil is the secret. In its plantations, SPEA can reproduce or genetically manufacture the coffee plants and the climate, but Ethiopian soil cannot be reproduced or manufactured. The soil exists only here and now. Fertile soil has become a rare earth mineral.
Through political maneuvering and some properly paid bribes, this rare soil now belongs to SPEA. The United Nations bestowed upon SPEA this Ethiopian soil and the thousands of acres of soil for all of SPEA’s other plantations under the auspices of its World Wide Food Salvation Act. Although, the UN’s World Wide Food Salvation Act sounds highly principled, honorable, and necessary it has become a license for SPEA to appropriate. SPEA flourished into an extremely profitable corporate-state selling SPEA coffee, cacao and tea under its brand name, “Amare Terra”.
After one-hundred and eighty seconds, Pion’s holohelmet returns to receiving the plantation’s boundary scanners’ visuals. Her computer tender is timing and recording her every thought through brain-machine-interface and neural implants in her holohelmet reading her brain. When she watches the scanner screens, micro cameras in her helmet watch her, observing her eye pupils and facial expressions and noting any emotions or increased interest. Pion may be a woman, but she is expected to act as emotionless as her robots. After a predetermined amount of time, Pion’s tender forcibly engages her in another observation by abruptly changing her scanners’ scene.
Pion protests. She resents being forced to constantly monitor different areas and not being allowed to study Tena and her father as long as she desires. Left alone, Pion could become lost in perseveration; intensely and obsessively focusing on Tena and her village. She fantasizes them as characters and scenery in one of her videogame worlds. When the scene changes away from Tena, Pion begins rocking, making high-pitched squeaks, and repetitively flapping her hands. Her remonstrations shatter the room’s silence. She continues her frustration demonstration for several minutes until she finally returns to her trancelike state of monitoring.
Minutes drift into hours. The sun slowly disappears and the darkness of night blankets the plantation. The coffee plants rest in the moon light. Shielded exterior lamps automatically begin rotating and shooting light into the brush surrounding the plantation. It is daylight bright along the plantation’s boundary. Drone Overland Guard systems or DOGs, robotic ground guard vehicles equipped with night-vision cameras, forward looking radar, side looking radar and stun guns, circle the plantation. The plantation is locked down. Nobody enters. Nobody leaves.
Pion pulls off her holohelmet. It is her time to eat and sleep. Twenty steps by her long legs and she will enter her compact, four-room life-station. Her nineteenth step hits the switch tile activating the lighting and robo-appliances inside her life-station, and opening the door. When Pion steps through the door, her service robots and companion robots energize to animated life.
“Good evening Pion,” her animatronic humanoid mother companion-bot greets her as she enters. Every night, Mother-bot greets Pion in exactly the same manner.
“Your dinner will be ready soon,” her Mother-bot continues in a monotone replica of her deceased mother’s voice. She repeats this statement nightly, as well. The consistency and predictability of her Mother-bot provides Pion with the constant reassurance she craves.
“Thank you momma,” Pion responds, just as she does every night. She appreciates having her mother with her. Pion recognizes that the humanoid companion-bot bearing her mother’s open, fair-skinned face, blue eyes, and graying-blond hair is not her human mother, but she is familiar and comforting and that soothes her and allows her to relax. And unlike her human mother, Mother-bot never becomes angry or impatient with her, and never yells at her. Her Mother-bot consistently, calmly and patiently sits in the same place waiting for her to talk about anything or nothing. Her red colored lips always faintly smiling, Mother-bot forces no expectations and requirements upon her, and she never
demands, “Look at me!” She is the mother that Pion needs - logical, consistent, and not prone to moods.
With a whispering whirr, the Chef-bot slides a tray containing Pion’s dinner onto the table. Having a sensitive stomach, the food set before her is bland, although loaded with protein and vitamins. She immediately starts eating the two cricket-flour protein bars, one of her favorite foods. She also delights in the various types of cricket flour cookies and cakes her Chef-bot 3D printed for her. Pion does not enjoy the meal worm fried rice served tonight as much as the protein bars, but she still eats it quickly and completely, so she can have cricket cookies. Her drink tonight is orange flavored, vitamin infused, recycled water. Another one of her favorites.
Animal proteins such as beef, pork, chicken and mutton are rare foods for Pion and other SPEA citizens. As a small, artificial-island state built on a twenty acre metal platform, SPEA has no room for raising grazing animals. Out of necessity, SPEA is a state fed well by entomophagy, or bug eating. Millions of crickets, mealworms, grasshoppers, locusts and other tasty insects can be grown in closed labs measuring a few hundred square feet in area enabling SPEA plantations to be self-contained, self-sufficient and autonomous.
“Pion, tomorrow program the harvester bots to begin harvesting the coffee cherries,” directs the brunette-haired, blue-eyed, female humanoid-bot, sitting next to Pion’s Mother-bot, in an expressionless voice. “Be certain to program the harvester-bots to only pick the red balls and not the green balls,” the brunette humanoid-bot continues directing.
“Yes, Magus, I will program the harvester-bots,” Pion responds to the humanoid-bot representation of her Estonia-born, human neurotypical supervisor, Mugavus Komfort, or as she calls her, Magus. She renamed Mugavus, Magus, when she learned Magus means sweet in Estonian, for she is always sweet to her. Human Mugavus Komfort is a psycho-therapist, who monitors Pion’s mental and physical health from SPEA’s capital through her replicant, Komfort-bot. Pion’s Komfort-bot serves as Mugavus Komfort’s eyes, ears, voice and presence in the plantation.