by Jae Hill
Like most little kids growing up on the Pacific coast, we stared up at the stars whenever we could see them. Dad taught me how to point out constellations and navigate our boat by the stars before I was five. The boat drove itself, based on buoys and satellites and a lot more interesting technology than just sparkles of light, but I thought my dad was amazing for all of his knowledge and power. He made the boat move. He brought fish home. He loved me. I never doubted his word on anything and in times of trouble I always reassured myself by the soft smell of the sea soaked deep into his hands.
I spent whatever time I wasn’t in school out on the boat with Dad. The smell of the sea air was incredible and rich. Salty-sweet and musky. Liberating. When I would talk about the smells, Dad would smile and tell me how much he loved the smells when he was a boy too, but everything smelled different when he grew up. His sense of smell was so much more powerful than mine. He could smell the fish and steer the boat right over the top of the halibut or ling cod or whatever else he knew was down there. He’d press a few buttons and let the mechanical rods and reels of the boat set to baiting, casting, and reeling hooks. The boat hauled in tons of fish, processed them, and then froze them on the spot before heading back to port. Every once in a while, Dad and I would set out some “old-fashioned lines” and do it the hard way…just for a while. Just him and me. I looked so much like him, even as a little boy, and I always hoped I’d grow up to have his strong jawline, striking blue eyes, and strong hands.
Mom is a different sort of person. She is a librarian, a keeper of all the knowledge of our society. Expeditions from all over the galaxy would report their findings to the central library in the capital where the head librarians would analyze, compile, and index the documents, photos, and videos. My mother, as a branch librarian, is a collector and distributor of the vast sums of information and a consultant to the political leaders and schools on the happenings of the universe. She is immeasurably smart. Bookish. Beautiful. Her blonde hair drapes over her shoulders and her eyes shine like gemstones in a rich green color I’d never seen an adult’s eyes gleam. I was more like my dad in so many ways, but I admired her for being everything I wasn’t.
Our government, as far as we know, is the only human government left in the universe. It’s called the Cascadia Republic, due to its location in the northwest corner of the North American continent—home to the Cascade Mountains and the Cascadia tectonic subduction zone. When referring to our government and ways of life, most people just use the eponymous term “society,” because we’re the only one.
Our home is typical of those in our society. It’s large, bright, with lots of open spaces. All of our homes are sparsely decorated: most of the walls are simply windows looking out onto the water or the mountains. The wood-paneled interior keeps itself clean with an army of small robotic janitors that scrub the floors and toilets and windows. All of our society’s buildings are smart buildings—computerized controls automatically open and close blinds to optimize light, privacy, and ventilation. Most buildings are self-sufficient for generating their own power and recycling their own water. Because our buildings take care of themselves, we’re left with more free time for our own desires and pursuits. Art. Music. Learning. Occasionally, we went camping in the forests in tents, just to remind us of the ancient ways before man finally gained dominion over all of nature. As far back as I remembered, I loved spending time out in the woods, away from the clean lines of our modern homes. I loved learning about the natural world.
Despite my love for learning and exploring, I didn’t enjoy school. Our education is organized into twenty-six tiers, one for every five months of education from our fifth year of life through our seventeenth year. There are very high expectations that we’ll excel from the first moment in Tier A. Most kids could learn the material they needed just in time to pass the exams and progress to the next tier with their age cohort. I passed my first three tiers in the same time my original cohort passed only one. The administrator of the academy always beamed about me when sending home my quarterly reports and my parents were so proud. I was now in classes with kids more than a year older than me, and while I liked the challenge, the bigger kids seemed jealous of my success. They teased me when the teacher wasn’t looking and did all the horrid things that big kids do when they feel threatened.
I started to dumb myself down in the hopes that my cohort would catch back up to me. I let one tier slide and my parents knew what was happening. They talked with the administrator and found that one other child from the school was also an exceptional student, so they put the two of us in a special class together every afternoon with a part-time teacher.
Semper Graham was a pale-skinned, dimple-cheeked goofball who was only eleven months older than me but also very bright and needed to work at his own pace. It was a small town, so our “gifted program” was all the administration could do to accommodate. My parents talked of moving to the capital to be closer to universities for me to attend if I graduated the academy early. I was excited about the thought but didn’t want to leave my best and only friend in town, so Semper and I made do with our afternoon special learning sessions. I was at the academy from 0800 to 1700 with only a few breaks for lunch or snacks. At night, after dinner, I spent most of my time reading or building models or playing whatever instrument my parents sought to assign that week. Learning to play various instruments is considered essential in our civilization. Building fine motor skills is essential to the transformations we undertake later in our lives, and the glorious sounds of the symphonies satisfy one of the few senses of the adults that still bring them pleasure.
After academy, and between extracurricular activities, we’d go play “Robots versus Zombies” with the other neighborhood kids who didn’t ostracize us. Let me explain that, growing up, we always were led to fear the zombies. Our parents told us of these supposedly-real creatures that lived far beyond the mountains. They were human once, but had given up all their science and medicine and education to become mindless, wandering animals who were ravaged by the Plague. They snarled instead of spoke. They oozed blood and pus from every pore and wound. They attacked without warning, killed without provocation, and believed in space gods who were all powerful. They had no regard for the environment. They had no care for anything but themselves. They were murdering, plundering, savage, degenerates. When we played our games, no one ever wanted to be the zombies. Usually the biggest kids got to be the humans and we were forced to be the zombies, if we wanted to play at all. I never minded…it meant that at least I was allowed to play. We’d chase the big kids and pretend to eat their brains or hearts if we caught them. They’d pretend to blow us up.
I was never envious of the bigger kids though; I was jealous of the sick kids. A long time ago, illness meant suffering and a physical handicap. Now it was a glimpse at the future glory of the enhanced form of adulthood. Once a girl had her eye pierced by a stick when falling out of a tree, and she received bionic eyes superior to anything we other kids had. One boy shattered his legs in a rock-climbing accident up in the mountains and he received robotic prostheses. Even the girl who caught a bizarre bacterial illness received an injection of nanobots that hunted down and destroyed every pathogen in her body. The sick and wounded, who historically were pitied for being less able than their peers, were the recipients of some of the most advanced technology of our time. I was sorely punished when Mom once caught me trying to break my own arm so I could get a stronger throwing arm installed.
Despite our advances in medicine, we couldn’t prevent disease, but we sure could heal any affliction. Cancer was screened quarterly and a host of drugs could cleanse your body of the disease in days. Organ failures, like diabetes, simply required the lab manufacture of an organ, from stem cells harvested at birth, and a quick surgery to install the new part. Repairing the boat wasn’t as simple as the doctors made medicine look.
The original cybernetic enhancements were simple affairs. Replacing damaged eyeballs and eardrum
s and legs with barely functional equivalents was standard practice in the early 2000’s. By 2050, humans had begun elective surgeries to replace weak and failing organ systems with new ones. Telepathic devices were invented and installed in a greater number of the population. Over time, the wealthy—who underwent elective surgeries, and the sick—who needed life-saving improvements, essentially gave rise to a race of cyborgs. Still having mostly natural bodies, they were as susceptible to any disease or trauma that a normal human could endure. Eventually, some humans became more machine than flesh and blood, which led a few scientists to embark on the greatest advancement in human evolution since our monkey ancestors first used tools: enhanced forms.
These robotic bodies had the owner’s original organic brain, fed by pumping maintenance fluids and chemical packs instead of blood and organs. Every replicated organ system was made efficient and triply-redundant. The first few pioneers didn’t survive the process for long afterwards, but their sacrifices had long-lasting effects that survive to this day. Eventually people stopped having elective surgeries to replace limbs or organs and simply bought a new body.
Somewhere around the year 2097, as the Plague ravaged the world, the government of the United States collapsed under the weight of the catastrophe. The former American states of Washington and Oregon became the Cascadia Republic, and soon welcomed Alaska and the Canadian province of British Columbia to join. The capital was cited in the recently-formed city of New Vancouver—the metropolitan area that remained above sea level.
After first accepting any outsiders who exhibited no Plague symptoms, the population of the region became unsustainable. The government eventually closed the borders to outsiders in 2103 at the height of the Plague outbreak, brutally massacring Plague-stricken refugees who arrived from across the continent, simply seeking a new life in the stable and mostly Plague-free Cascadia region. The Plague effects were not as severe in the Republic due to the government’s quarantine, but remorse by the government for its actions has long been documented in the annals of Republic history.
Eventually, the Plague peaked. Refugees came fewer and farther between until they stopped arriving entirely. Venturing east of the Cascades meant running into road gangs and Plague fiends. The strict isolationist policy protected the people for a century until the Plague had run its course on the colder, drier West Coast. It persisted in the humid Southeast portion of the continent. And only later would we know it had evolved.
EXPLORING YOUR WORLD
The Academy Tiers were five-month segments, leaving a one-month gap between Tiers in the winter and the summer. During those times, we had to choose a research fellowship. Even as early as six years old, we were encouraged to peer through microscopes in biology labs or pick away at rocks in field geology camps. Semper was particularly obsessed with the Yellowstone Preserve, a research outpost far beyond the Cascade Mountains. After his third summer there, I decided to go with him. My parents protested because of the distance and the location of the region in zombie-held territory; the camp had actually repelled two separate zombie attacks just a few years prior. Semper’s parents assured mine that security around the volcanic ecolaboratory was flawless now, and we zipped off on a train ride to one of the most far-flung parts of our society to study various natural phenomena.
Our summer was spent with some volcanologists measuring the swelling ground under the supervolcano. We saw shooting geysers and brightly-colored geothermal paint pots. We watched the expansive roaming herds of bison and one day I even saw a lone wolf. What I enjoyed most, however, was the bright, cloudless nights under the full moon, staring up at the stars and the glowing swath of the Milky Way.
The Preserve had been one of the first attempts by the Cascadia government to restore biodiversity to the shattered planet beyond the borders of the Republic. Much of North America had become a barren wasteland due to rampant wildfires caused by climate change as early as the year 2090. By around 2200, the climate had begun stabilizing when most of the humans were dead and not producing fossil fuel emissions anymore, but the soils of Yellowstone had become acidic and hostile to life. For almost two hundred years, scientists had been restoring life to the Yellowstone Preserve in the hopes that the wildlife would spread downriver and across the plains. They cloned and reintroduced dozens of species of plants and animals to the region. We were tasked to go out and plant seedlings of tiny trees that would one day grow into habitat for the reintroduced species. Of course, there were machines that probably could have done the work, but the government scientists wanted us to take personal responsibility for the regrowth and care of our “new world.”
That summer fellowship month of my ninth year went by quickly. Semper was fascinated by the geothermal power station at the laboratory and spent less time with the geologists and more time with the engineers who kept the station running. It was around this time that he decided to go into mechanical engineering, and we’d come back to this place for the next few summers. I explored a lot of different careers at the outpost, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career until I went to space.
The most amazing part of my childhood was probably the same as everyone else my age. When I was nine, we took a trip on an airplane to visit the space elevator. Since most of the world was uninhabited (or inhabited only by zombies), we never had need to travel anywhere by plane and even the capital was only a hundred-kilometer train ride. As they taught us in Tier F, a space elevator has to be built near the Equator to maximize the physics needed to move the cars into space and maintain orbital stability. The original builders chose an island group in the Pacific Ocean called the Galapagos, which was isolated from the zombies and provided near-perfect orbital physics. The supersonic plane flight to the islands took only a few short hours and when we exited the aircraft, giddy and enthralled, we were stunned by the humidity and the heat. We’d never been to the tropics before. As we toured the campus, we were shown turtles and birds and all manner of exotic wildlife we’d never seen in real life, but we kept craning our heads skyward, trying to see the space station suspended above our heads.
The natural archipelago to the south was where modern biological science had begun with Charles Darwin’s observation of the finches. A man-made island was dredged from the sea floor south of there. The carbon-fiber cables, cooling apparatus, and nuclear power station were all anchored into the sea floor several kilometers beneath the surface of the waves. A tall tower reached from the island to the sky, and two dozen cables stretched upward to a point we couldn’t see…but that’s where we were going.
Compared to the other space elevators in the galaxy, ours was the smallest and oldest. It was relatively ancient, actually, having been built in 2092, but it was kept in impeccable shape by teams of engineers and scientists. Our destination was LEO, the Low Earth Orbit station, just one hundred-fifty kilometers above the Earth’s surface. It would take a half-hour to get there. Other passenger and freight elevator cars would pass LEO on their way to GEO, the Geostationary Earth Orbit station. This upper station was where the big deep-space freighters and research vessels were built and docked. Supplies from Earth were sent 40,000 kilometers up the cable to the GEO station, which was essentially built inside a massive hollowed-out asteroid captured by rockets and gravity a few hundred years ago. Almost a hundred thousand people lived in zero-gravity at the end of that cable, but ever since enhanced bodies became mandatory for spaceflight, the GEO base no longer had air or water facilities for visitors. LEO, however, still had low gravity and oxygen and was the perfect place to get kids excited about space travel.
We were told that there are only a few million humans left on Earth now, between the Plague and the Great Exodus to the stars that followed it. There are scattered pockets of humanity all around the galaxy—including some real humans who left Earth before the robot bodies became necessities for spaceflight. Once ships no longer needed oxygen, pressurized environments, or water and food to support our organic forms, most spaceships be
came small and fast, ripping holes in space-time and spreading humanity across the known cosmos. Along with all of the research stations and far-flung colonies, there are eight billion people living somewhere beyond the far end of the cable. Some had never even seen Earth.
From our vantage point at LEO, over one hundred kilometers above the Earth’s surface, we could look down on most of the Western Hemisphere. Affixed to the observation deck at LEO were all manners of digital telescopes and video screens which pointed at specific points of interest. Some peered off into the cosmos, toward amazing galactic phenomena like quasars and novas. Other telescopes pointed down toward the planet’s surface. We could see the ruins of the old cities. The guide showed us one city called Miami which had been flooded when the sea levels rose at the end of the 21st century, and only a few badly damaged skyscrapers poked their heads above the waves of the Atlantic. Many other cities had befallen the same fate, and from the telescopes we could look down on the crumbling buildings standing like tombstones over the water. Entire countries had disappeared, like a place called Bangladesh and a country called (appropriately) the Netherlands.
Our ancestors, according to our guide, had been so fixated on a carbon-based energy system that they allowed increasing greenhouse gas concentrations to melt the ice and glaciers; the result was the flooding of most of the fertile farmland and populated areas of the planet. Most of the human population was forced into ever closer quarters, and the Plague spread quickly. There have been many plague epidemics since the dawn of humanity but only one is now called “The Plague” by our society. This refers to the drug-resistant variant of Chikungunya, an exotic viral disease which had been held at bay by modern sanitation for centuries.
When over four billion humans became refugees from the rising seas and pervasive droughts, they cramped into cities across the globe. Exotic diseases ran rampant. Medications were overprescribed and became irrelevant as soon as they were invented. One particular variant of Chikungunya became highly resistant to the antiviral drugs of the era.