Earth's Ecocide: Hope 2147 (eBook)

Chapter 1
Let There Be Light

“Control tower, did you see that flash of light off my right windshield?” the pilot asked just as Sterling Airlines flight number forty-five took off.

“Yeah, I saw a flash of light,” responded the human air traffic controller at 2054 on October 18, 2147 at Bluegrass Spaceport in Lexington, Kentucky. With the radio interference, his words had a choppy cadence. “Autopilot, can you confirm?”

“Our instruments picked up a strong magnetic pulse of three hundred thirty-five tesla,” the virtual pilot said. “The electromagnet pulse interfered with our plane’s electronics for 1.27 seconds.”

The virtual pilot was a quantum computer hidden below the floor of the cockpit. In this plane, the virtual pilot spoke in an emotionless female voice. In 2147, airplanes required only one human pilot, though the airplane could technically fly itself—or fly remotely—from any place in the world. The safety record of automatic piloted planes exceeded that of human pilots, though three levels of encrypted codes were necessary before a remote pilot could take over.

“Control tower, can you confirm?” the human pilot requested while rubbing the back of his neck.

“Hell, if I know. But it’s gone,” the baffled controller said. “We have no radar images in that area. We had one anomaly-a short, powerful electrical disturbance.”

“Okay, let us know if you find out what’s going on.”

The plane continued its climb to a cruising altitude of eight thousand meters.

“Are all systems okay?” the pilot asked the virtual pilot.

“Yes, all systems are operating within design specifications.”

“Great. I’ll take a nap. Wake me if you see anything unusual.”

“Yes, sir, Captain.”

Down below, Tom Hickory sat on a sofa with his wife, Mattie. They owned a five-square kilometer farm in Bourbon County, twenty kilometers from Lexington, surrounded by pristine thoroughbred horse farms. Tom enjoyed being his own boss. He had never left the county because for him, he had everything he needed. An adored wife and his family and friends, and their successful farm operations made him proud.

Demand for their crops was continuing to increase. The rises in sea-levels in states like Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, and New Jersey were forcing people to higher ground, so a lot of people were migrating to Kentucky. The highest elevation in Kentucky was over 1,200 meters, and the lowest elevation was 78 meters. The mean elevation of the state was 230 meters.

Mattie had grown up on a local farm, and like Tom, Central Kentucky defined her world. When she was four months old, a family had adopted her. Now forty, she still did not know her biological parents. She adored farm life and being the mother of a wonderful young family. Though she had earned a college degree in education, she stayed home with the kids, ten-year-old Ethan, and eight-year-old Jillian. Skinny Ethan had short brown hair and brown eyes, and showed promise as a budding scientist. He was always watching science and educational channels. Jillian had short blonde hair, piercing green eyes, a couple of missing teeth, and a few freckles on her arms and face.

Other members of the Hickory family were a spoiled goat named Titan, who lived in the barn attached to a massive greenhouse, and two farm bots named Atticus and Ethel. Titan ate weeds while the bots focused on farm efficiency.

Atticus and Ethel managed the five-thousand-square-meter automated hydroponic greenhouse. The climate-controlled greenhouse used four levels of horizontal farming, and was powered by solar-powered shingles on the roof, which generated electricity. The greenhouse grew artichokes, strawberries, raspberries, basil, and parsley, and these hydroponic and bio-engineered crops went to regional markets. Sometimes the bots would help Tom plant and harvest crops in outdoor fields, but the torrid temperatures and violent storms prevented most of the outdoor farming. As a virtual farm manager, Tom managed much of the farm through this wall screen and their obedient farm bots. Their farm income was supplemented by communications-tower fees and natural-gas lease payments.

“Mattie, did you see that flash of light out the window?” Tom asked.

“No, I was reading.”

Mattie looked away from where she was reading her novel on their television. Called a wall screen, it was two meters high and six meters wide, and was created through light-emitting diodes embedded in the wallpaper. Such smart wallpaper cost about twice as much as regular wallpaper, but far less than the boxy televisions of the past.

“Daddy, did you see the lightening?” Jillian shouted from the top of the stairs.

Ethan came over to help his little sister navigate the steps. She had cerebral palsy and often needed assistance. He walked in front of her and she put one hand on his shoulder and one hand on the stair railing.

Parents always screened their DNA before conception, and genetic specialists would re-engineer DNA to avoid major birth defects. However, genetic engineering was not an exact science, and unexpected errors and side effects did occur. Jillian’s DNA had an unintended mutation, which caused her cerebral palsy. She had not learned to walk until she was three years old, her mouth and chin would twitch, and she walked with a slight limp, leaning to her left side.

Once in the living room, she limped over to sit on her dad’s lap.

“Yes, I did, sweetie.”

“Daddy, it was scary. I was putting on my pajamas next to the window, and when I looked up, the night sky had a white hole in it,” Jillian said, slightly slurring every other word.

At this, Mattie turned from her novel and, with a heavy sigh, stared at Tom.

“What do you mean? Like a hole in the cloud?” he asked, eyebrows raised. He wrapped a muscular arm around his daughter’s waist.

“Daddy, the flash of light made a hole in the sky.” Jillian clutched his arm, her face twitching more than usual.

“Jilly, there are no storms tonight. It couldn’t be lightning.”

“It could be an airplane or helicopter flying low with its lights on,” Ethan said, looking out the window, examining the evidence. “Dad, it’s a new moon, so there shouldn’t be any moonlight.”

“I didn’t hear any noise,” Mattie said, her voice full of skepticism. She picked at a button on her blouse absent-mindedly before resuming her novel.

Tom held Jillian comfortingly, and to keep her mind off what she had seen, he started an episode of The Mortals from another segment of the wall screen. Years ago, he and his father would watch this old television show together, and seeing it now brought back wonderful memories—as well as some that weren’t so wonderful. Like when his father developed a liver disease and he had dropped out of college to care for him. Doctors had tried to replace his father’s liver by growing a new one, using his father’s DNA and tissue engineering, but the body rejected the replacement liver. Tom managed the farm all the while, and when his father died, he eventually took over. This was all before he had married Mattie, fourteen years ago.

Tom’s father had raised cattle, but sweltering temperatures in the summer, up to forty-nine degrees Celsius, killed them. One summer heat wave killed thirty-two. Cattle didn’t sweat and relied on respiration to breathe and expel heat. Tom had been a young boy at the time, but he still had vivid memories of hauling away the dead, bloated cattle. To combat livestock losses, some farmers built facilities to provide shade, and later air-conditioned livestock pens, but the added infrastructure raised food prices and electric bills.

Tom and Mattie had left that business long ago because of shrinking markets and changing climate. The global demand for animal protein had decreased because of plant-based substitutes, which had the same nutritional value, and because forty-eight percent of the human population was now vegetarian.

They sometimes raised cotton, hemp, and soybeans in the outdoor fields, crops that were amenable to the hotter temperatures. The average global temperature was seventeen degrees Celsius, three degrees higher than it had been in the year 2000.

A precise two square kilometer grid helped Atticus, Ethel, and other automated equipment plow the fields and harvest the crops, and Tom monitored them from his living room wall screen. Automation allowed small farms and towns to thrive, for many industries were disaggregated, and no longer chained to economies of scale.

They watched The Mortals for a while until Tom’s curiosity got the better of him. “Mattie, I’m going outside to investigate that flash of light.”

“Can I go?” Jillian asked, jumping up from his lap and secure embrace.

“No, you need to stay here, young lady. Ethan, you lock the doors once I leave.”

“Dad, Titan is banging around in his pen.”

“I’ll check Titan out too. That flash of light could have scared him. Mattie, can you...