by John Akers
The images of buildings and roads retracted and were replaced by ones of men pounding a strange mixture of rags, plant fibers, and tree bark in a large container filled with water.
“For 3,000 years,” said Alethia, “one of the biggest challenges involved in writing was finding a suitable writing surface. Palm leaves, tree bark, turtle shells, silk, and many other substances were used, but all had limitations in efficacy, availability, or cost. But 2,100 years ago, pulp paper was invented by people living in China. Using hemp, tree bark, old rags, and a great deal of manual labor, pulp paper would revolutionize the availability of the written word. Five hundred years later, people in the Middle East figured out how to automate the production process with water-powered pulping mills. Somewhat surprisingly, it took several hundred years more before knowledge of paper-making reached people living in Europe.”
The images of pulp paper receded and were replaced by large piles of black powder. “For the next thousand years,” said Alethia, “technological development around the world was limited due to an unfortunate state of constant warfare. But then, 1,100 years ago, alchemists in China inadvertently invented one of the most significant creations in the history of humanity.” She paused, as if waiting for him to ask the obvious follow-up question. He decided to humor her.
“What was that?’”
“Gunpowder.”
“Ah,” said Pax.
“It was a rather ironic outcome, given they were trying to develop an elixir of eternal life.”
At the phrase ‘eternal life,’ Pax flinched. He hoped Alethia hadn’t noticed, but when he glanced over at her, he found she was 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 most sought-after goals of almost all of them. The Chinese alchemists were, of course, unsuccessful. Their efforts instead led to the creation of a substance that came to be used for the exact opposite end as its inventors had originally intended.”
She gazed up at the piles of black powder for a few moments in silence, then added, “Perhaps this is a moment we will look back on as an example of the consequences of human hubris. Our attempts to circumvent the fundamental limitations of our natural state leading to the exact opposite of what we’d hoped to gain.”
“Hey, when life gives you lemons, make lemonades, right?” Pax joked. Alethia didn’t react to his attempt at humor. 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 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.’”
Now the stream of pictures began to move faster: a mechanical clock, a poleax, a large cannon, a musket, a pencil. Then 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.
Images of telescopes, microscopes, drawings of the planets, mathematical equations, projectiles, and microscopic objects floated by them.
“Starting less than 450 years ago, within a span of 100 years,” said Alethia, “the true scale of the known universe and the rules by which it operates became known to us. Galileo Galilei improved the design of the recently invented refractive telescope and revealed several previously unknown celestial phenomena, including the fact that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of our solar system.”
“Then Antony Van Leeuwenhoek did for compound microscopes what Galileo had done for telescopes, improving upon their design to unveil the world of the imperceptibly small. And 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 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 Prussian blue 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.
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.
Without bothering to pause the images as they drifted by, Alethia said, “In 1905, Albert Einstein published four papers that revolutionized humanity’s understanding of mass, energy, space, and time. In them, he proved the existence of atoms, the dual wave-particle nature of light, the theory of special relativity, and finally, how tremendous amounts of energy could be released from even atomic-sized particles.”
Pax was surprised Alethia didn’t pause the pictures to add some color commentary to arguably the most famous thinker of all time. But she didn’t, and a new stream of pictures pushed Einstein and the images around him off to the side.
rotary dial telephone, pop up toaster, escalator, airplane, municipal water purification, armored tank, bra, zipper, dishwasher, machine gun, chlorine gas, mustard gas
Alethia raised her hand, pausing the images flow on a bald man with a wiry, thick mustache and a pince-nez with circular lenses.
“Ever heard of Fritz Haber?” Alethia asked.
Pax shook his head. “Can’t say that I have.”
“Fritz Haber was a German professor of chemistry who, before World War I, developed a process for converting nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia. His synthetically produced ammonia became an essential component of modern fertilizers. To this day, fertilizers made with the Haber-Bosch process help grow the food that feeds more than half the world’s population.
“However, during World War I Haber’s humanitarian impulses took a back seat to his patriotism. At the outset of the war, he applied his expert knowledge of chemistry to create the world’s first chemical weapon, chlorine gas. In 1915, he personally oversaw the first deployment of chlorine gas in battle, when 6,000 canisters of it were used to kill 7,000 French soldiers in only 10 minutes, and cause lung damage or blindness to thousands more.
Pax shook his head in amazement. “Guy looks like an elementary school teacher.”
“After the war,” Alethia continued, “Haber became the founding director of a chemical company, where he created an improved pesticide using—remember Prussian blue?—hydrogen cyanide. Called Zyklon A, it was purposely given a distinctive, unpleasant odor to alert anyone in the vicinity to its toxic nature. But when the Nazis rose to power in the 1930s, they took Haber’s creation, removed the warning smell, and used odorless Zyklon B to kill more than one million Je
ws in the gas chambers, including members of Haber’s own extended family.
“He was Jewish?” asked Pax, surprised.
“Yes, by birth. But despite his conversion to Lutheranism as a young man and his demonstrated loyalty to Germany in WWI, his ethnic lineage was all that mattered to the Third Reich. Haber was forced to flee in 1933, and he died only a year later.
“During the first World War, Haber defended his role as the father of chemical warfare, saying, ‘death is death, by whatever means it is inflicted.’ Unfortunately, there is no record of whether his opinion changed after the ideology of his beloved country mutated into seeing him as the enemy.”
Alethia waved her hand, and the top of Fritz Haber’s chromed head disappeared as the stream of pictures resumed.
airplane, helicopter, fighter plane, television, vacuum cleaner, motion picture camera, submerged oil wells, electroencephalography, insulin, parachute, liquid fuel rocket, penicillin, chloroflorocarbons
Alethia paused on the image of another mostly bald man, who wore glasses over a pleasant, cherubic face. Nearby were images of refrigerators and aerosol cans.
“Ever heard of Thomas Midgley?” Alethia asked. Pax shook his head.
“Midgley was a scientist at General Motors Chemical Corporation (GMCC) in the 1920s and ‘30s. His first claim to infamy was leading the team that helped put lead, a known toxin, into gasoline as a cheaper way to eliminate the knocking sound that accompanied early gas-powered automobile engines. It took more than 50 years to scientifically prove any exposure to lead was dangerous to humans, and to get it removed as an additive to gasoline.