by John Akers
The images of pulp paper receded and were replaced by large piles of black powder. “For the next thousand years,” said Alethia, “technological development was limited due to constant warfare. But then, 1,100 years ago, alchemists in China inadvertently created one of the most destructive substances known to man, gunpowder.”
“What do you mean, ‘inadvertently?’”
“They were trying to develop an elixir of eternal life.”
At the phrase ‘eternal life,’ Pax flinched, just as he had when she’d mentioned telomeres earlier. He hoped Alethia hadn’t noticed, but when he glanced over at her, he found her looking right at him.
“Are you okay, Mr. Pax?” she asked.
“Yes, of course,” Pax stammered. “I, uh, was just surprised because I’d only heard of alchemists being in Europe in the Middle Ages.”
“Alchemy has existed throughout history in cultures all over the world,” said Alethia, “and finding a way to extend the human lifespan has been one of the goals of almost all of them. The Chinese alchemists were, of course, unsuccessful, but their efforts ironically led to the creation of a substance that came to be used for the exact opposite end as its inventors had originally intended.”
“Hey, when life gives you lemons, make lemonades, right?” Pax joked. Alethia didn’t seem to notice his attempt at humor, however. Instead, she looked stoically at the next set of images coming into view.
“Within a few hundred years, men had developed hand cannons, muskets, rifles, and pistols,” she continued. “In an evolutionary nanosecond, humans gained the ability to kill on an unprecedented scale. Yet this power to deal death from a distance didn’t come with any moral prerequisite on the part of the weapon wielder. No spiritual training was required to gain the ability to aim, fire, and effortlessly end another person’s existence.”
Pax watched as reenactments of early wars fought with guns and cannons began appearing on the walls. They were unsparing in their depiction of horrific injuries caused by the explosive new weaponry. Though diminished to perhaps a quarter of normal volume, he could clearly hear the sounds of men shrieking in agony. Some, lying on the ground with their insides spilling out, clutched at the legs of the uninjured, begging to be killed. Others lay with legs or arms blown off, helplessly rocking back and forth, eyes closed tight but mouths open, screaming. Feeling sick to his stomach, Pax turned away.
Relief came a moment later, in the form of a series of small wooden blocks pushed together to form a large rectangle. Nearby, a man was pressing a sheet of paper down on top of it.
Alethia continued. “Roughly two hundred years after the invention of gunpowder, the first printing press using movable type was invented, also in China.”
“The Chinese were really on a roll with the inventions for a while there, weren’t they?” said Pax.
“Indeed, although it wasn’t until Johannes Gutenberg made several improvements to the printing process some 300 years later that the printed word really began to spread throughout the world.”
“Shocking, a German improving on a manufacturing process,” said Pax.
Images of the first gear-and-weight clock, the first windmill, then a giant catapult drifted by. Alethia raised a hand, and the catapult paused in front of them.
“The counterweight trebuchet,” said Alethia. “The most powerful siege weapon ever developed. Some could hurl projectiles weighing more than 200 pounds up to a thousand feet. For more than three centuries, humans used them to lay siege to one anothers’ cities. But the most devastating application of a trebuchet came from throwing something its inventors most likely never imagined.”
“What?” asked Pax.
“Corpses.”
Chapter 50
Monday, March 19, 10:47 PM ET
Digital Virus Death Total Crosses 1 Million
The New York Times
Jacob Silver
New York, New York
The global pandemic caused by the Chaotica computer virus has now reached more than 150 countries around the world and resulted in more than 1 million deaths and 25 million injuries. The vast majority of the deaths and injuries have occurred in the U.S., where more 400 million firearms are legally owned by almost half of the population. Current estimates attribute more than 80 percent of the deaths in the U.S. have been the result of gun violence between people, rather than attacks on people by Chaotica-controlled devices. In other parts of the world, such as Europe, there have been fewer than 3,000 deaths, although the rate of interpersonal violence remains almost the same as in the U.S. The current total number of deaths all over the world currently stands at 1,048,577.
In an effort to curb the violence, Congress this evening voted unanimously to place the country under martial law. All branches of the armed forces are currently being deployed in an attempt to restore order. However, the sheer scale of the panic sweeping the country seems likely to overwhelm such efforts. Exacerbating the problem are new, unfounded rumors the government itself is behind the virus. Additionally, accusations are being leveled by Republicans and Democrats at each other, each blaming the other side for the crisis.
In numerous cities around the country, unauthorized armed militia groups are forming and attempting to establish their own rules of law, largely along party lines. In a rare show of solidarity, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Congress and across the country are condemning such actions, and insisting citizens respect existing national laws. But the virus seems to have ignited a powder keg of long-simmering resentment among members of the two ideologies, most of whom appear to be unwilling to focus on the bigger problem at hand.
In another sign of how seriously governments around the world are treating the problem, two major law enforcement alliances have been formed, one centering around the United States and western Europe, the other around Russia and China. Despite the enormity of the threat facing people all over the world, it has not yet been enough to bridge the divide between these two factions and allow them to share information on combating the new global crisis.
Chapter 51
“Corpses?” said Pax. “That’s disgusting, but I don’t see how it could be all that devastating.”
“Seven hundred years ago,” said Alethia, “the commander of a Mongol army named Jani Beg, wanted to take over an outpost of Genoese settlers in the Crimean city of Kaffa. Several of his soldiers became infected with the Bubonic plague and died. Beg came up with the idea of launching the infected corpses over the city walls to force the people inside to surrender. However, some of the settlers managed to escape and fled back to Italy, unknowingly carrying the plague with them. Within seven years, the Black Death killed roughly 100 million people, including half the population of Europe.”
The images on the wall began showing the horrors of the plague. Soon there were hundreds of dying people surrounding them, writhing on the ground, their fingers, toes, or entire arms and legs blackened with gangrene, their faces grotesquely contorted by pain. A few even projectile vomited blood.
“Oops,” said Pax as he turned his head away.
“Indeed,” said Alethia. “That’s one of the things about humans and our technology. No matter how hard we try, inevitably there’s an ’oops.’ Then again, human nature being as full-spectrum as it is, perhaps Beg would have done the same had he known in advance what the outcome would be.”
The plague images receded, and what looked like a miniaturized guillotine slid into view. Instead of a giant blade, however, there was a giant wood screw connected to the center of a wide rectangular board. The board was poised over a table with a rectangular pan filled with tiny letter blocks arranged neatly in rows. A man covered the pan with a sheet of paper, then pulled on a large handle connected to the screw, pressing the board down on top of the paper.
“As I mentioned a few minutes ago,” said Alethia, “six hundred years ago Johannes Gutenberg made several improvements on the movable type printer. He invented a new kind of metal for the type—to this
day called ‘type metal’—that was much more precise and durable. He also invented a method for mass-producing the type, as well as an oil-based ink that was much more resistant to fading than earlier water-based inks. Combined with the new paper-making techniques which by then had reached Germany, Gutenberg’s press led to an explosion of written knowledge. Fifty years after he built his first press, there were more than 20 million books in circulation. A hundred years after that there were more than 200 million.
“An example of the power of the printed word came soon after with the publication of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. Luther, a German priest and theology professor, used the new medium to spread awareness of the many clerical abuses of power at that time, such as the practice of papal indulgences. Within two months, the Theses had spread throughout Europe, eventually becoming the spark that ignited the Protestant Reformation.”
Now the stream of pictures began to move faster: a mechanical clock, a poleax, a large cannon, a musket, a pencil. There were diagrams depicting physical and biological systems such as the theory of blood circulation. Pax felt a bit woozy as he remembered what the funnel had looked like from the outside, how impossibly top-heavy it had seemed. He looked down at the platform and saw it had somehow managed to continue widening as it rose, and still spanned the entire vast area from one side of the funnel to the other.
Portraits of three men with elaborate powdered wigs moved in front of them. Alethia held up her hand in the same palm-up gesture one used to signal ‘pause’ to a Univiz. The man on the left looked more like a longshoreman, with a rough, scruffy beard at odds with his high collar and ruffled shirt. He was surrounded by images of telescopes and drawings of the cosmos. Diagrams of projectiles, planets, and calculus equations slowly orbited the imperious-looking man in the middle, while images of microscopes and hand drawings of cells and insects were clustered around the man on the right, who wore a long brown wig filled with tiny ringlets.
“In a span of less than 100 years,” said Alethia, “these three men revealed the true scale of the universe and the rules by which it operates.” She pointed to the man on the left. “The first was Galileo Galilei, who 400 years ago dramatically improved the design of the recently invented refractive telescope. He revealed several previously unknown celestial phenomena, such as the imperfections on the surfaces of the moon and the sun, the never-before-seen moons of Jupiter, and the fact that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of our solar system.”
“Elena and Angelo and I had a brief chat about this on the trip over here,” said Pax. “It sounded like his biggest revelation might have been how far the leaders of the Catholic church would go to cover up their ignorance of how God’s universe really worked.”
Alethia smiled briefly. “You may be right about that, Mr. Pax.” Then her smile faded as she pointed to the man on the right.
“Similarly, 300 years ago, Antony Van Leeuwenhoek unveiled the world of the imperceptibly small. Like Galileo, his main achievement was in the technical improvement of a lens, only in this case that of a compound microscope. Leeuwenhoek revealed the world of the imperceptibly small through his drawings of bacteria, blood cells, and muscle cells. Even the Royal Society of London at first ridiculed his claims. But being scientists, they eventually confirmed his findings.”
Then she nodded at the man in the middle. “In between, Sir Isaac Newton revolutionized our understanding of both nature and mathematics. He articulated the laws governing light, optics, and the movement of physical bodies, both on Earth and in space. He also invented a new branch of mathematics, the calculus, and used it to demonstrate the transcendent power of mathematics to predict the existence of natural phenomena even before they had been observed.”
Alethia waved her hand and the visages of the men moved back to the wall. They were soon replaced by what looked like a giant blob of blue paint, and she held up her hand again.
“Although adherence to the newly defined scientific process led to many discoveries, many continued to be made inadvertently, as with the creation of gunpowder. She pointed at the blob in front of them. “For example, around the same time as Leeuwenhoek was inventing microbiology, a German paint-maker named Diesbach was working on a cheaper alternative to the very expensive pigment Lapis Lazuli. He succeeded, inventing a paint that came to be known as Prussian blue.
“However, 50 years after its discovery, a French chemist named Pierre Macquer discovered Prussian blue could be decomposed into iron oxide and a volatile new acid that turned out to be the deadly poison now known as hydrogen cyanide.”
As she waved her hand to the left and the images resumed their carousel, Alethia said, “We’ll come back to the story of hydrogen cyanide in a bit, but for now we’ll look at some of the other inventions from this time.” The images were moving faster than Alethia could name them, so labels specifying what they were now appeared below each one.
rifle, steam engine, yarn, spinning machine, sextant, vaccination, cotton gin, hot air balloon, bleach, food preservation, theory of neuron communication, coal-powered locomotive, sewing machine, germ theory of disease, electric battery, atomic theory, bicycle, revolver, silver chloride photograph, fountain pen, limited liability corporation, telegraph, mechanical computer, chloroform anesthetic, vulcanized rubber, theory of evolution, transatlantic telegraph cable, oil well, theory of electromagnetism, internal combustion engine, typewriter, gas oven, TNT, dynamite
Alethia held up her hand again. “We are now less than 200 years from the present,” she said. Near a picture of several sticks of dynamite was an image of a man with a thick brown beard and doleful face. “Have you ever heard of Alfred Nobel?”
“I’ve heard of the Nobel Prizes,” said Pax.
“He was their founder,” said Alethia. “Do you know how he made his fortune?”
“No idea.”
“He invented dynamite. He patented it in 1867 and marketed it as a safer blasting powder than either gunpowder or nitroglycerin. Eventually he earned more than $250 million.
“Later in his life, when his brother passed away, a French magazine that mistakenly thought it was Alfred who had died published an obituary referring to him as the ‘Merchant of Death,’ for inventing and profiting off a substance of such destructive power. Nobel understandably became very concerned with how posterity would view him, leading him to commit his entire fortune to founding the Nobel Prizes.”
“Quite a rebranding effort,” said Pax.
“And quite a successful one,” said Alethia, as she waved her hand for the images to continue. “Sadly, it’s often the case that inventors don’t attend to the possible negative repercussions of their inventions until after they’ve achieved their own claims to fame and fortune. Or if they do, they often cling to fanciful fictions that validate their efforts and deny the possibility of things going wrong. For example, Nobel convinced himself that his invention would actually end all wars, once people saw its destructive power and realize the choice to wield it as a weapon could only end in mutually assured destruction.”
“Another story of unintended consequences lies behind the invention of trinitrotuluene, known as TNT. TNT was inadvertently invented by a chemist named Julius Wilbrand, whose real goal was to develop a yellow dye for clothing. After its explosive properties were discovered 30 years later by another chemist, Wilbrand vehemently opposed its use as an explosive, but the horse was already out of the barn. Although less powerful than dynamite, TNT was much safer to handle, and its power was still great enough that even in today’s era of nuclear energy, one ton of TNT is still used as the standard unit of explosive power.”
Alethia gestured for the images to resume their flow, but almost immediately held her palm out once more, pausing on the picture of a man with kind eyes and an unruly brown beard, surrounded by several long, complicated equations.
“At almost the same time, the theoretical physicist James Clerk Maxwell extended the work Isaac Newton had done two centuries earlier to show
how electricity, magnetism, and light were all related to the same underlying phenomena, which he called the electromagnetic field. Based on experimental work done by Michael Faraday, Maxwell extended the language of vector calculus to define a new branch of mathematics, called differential equations, which he used to precisely express the interrelationships of these phenomena. Maxwell’s work laid the foundation of modern physics and an astonishing range of technologies, including radio, television, satellite communication, microwave ovens, mobile phones, and WiFi.”
“Well, hello, Mr. Fancy Pants,” said Pax. Underneath, however, he felt a pang of jealousy.
Alethia waved her hand again, and the images resumed their streaming.
Gatling gun, phonograph, light bulb, carbon microphone, polyvinyl chloride, steam turbine, automobile, solar cell, ballpoint pen, Kodak Brownie camera, radio waves, x-rays, plastic, electric oven, radio, aspirin, quantum theory, neon lighting, robot, frozen food, drum brakes, movies with sound, gas turbine, special relativity, mass energy equivalence, general relativity
The familiar visage of a man with disheveled white hair and a wry smile hidden beneath a bushy white mustache appeared, and Alethia paused the flow of imagery once more. The man was enveloped by dozens of equations as well as images of light rays, and bodies in motion. Above them all floated the image of an early atom bomb.