Chapter 4

Three months had gone by since I awoke to find myself ten thousand years in the future. Many things had changed, but many were still the same.

I searched in vain for any signs of prejudice, favoritism or intolerance. They appear to have been erased off the face of the earth. Good riddance.

Instead, people take pride in their accomplishments, their heritage, anything that makes them stand out from others. Not as something that made them better than others, just as something to be proud of. I didn't run into anyone who had nothing to be proud of.

We spent some time getting me used to having a 20 year old's body that hadn't been used for a while. Nurse had been my constant companion since I'd been released from the anti-gravity field I woke up in. She was there primarily to help me rehabilitate and to keep me out of trouble, but she was also a source for knowledge, letting me find out firsthand how people thought about different subjects. She was a very intelligent woman who had gotten in early on the Old Man Project, as they now called the plan to use me to repopulate the planet. One of the perks was she got to test out the equipment. I have to admit, it was most enjoyable to me, as well. I hadn't been laid for over 10,000 years, and I was ready. Nurse was about two and a half months pregnant with a healthy boy.

Another almost constant companion was Library. Library was a robot, for lack of a better word. Picture a silver football on its end with no seams, a totally smooth surface. Now double all of its dimensions. And picture it floating around with no sign of anything holding it up or propelling it and you've got an idea of what Library looks like. I was given the opportunity to personalize Library's voice. We worked at it for a couple of days until she sounded like my third grade teacher. I could close my eyes and see the bun and the glasses at the end of her nose. You notice I refer to Library as "she." She changed from an it in my mind as soon as I started working on that voice. Doctor and Nurse said they'd never heard of an information module being personalized, but were willing to go along with me and even started referring to her as she and her instead of it.

She was hooked into a centralized computer network that kept track of the whole planet. The Network (which is the way everybody referred to it) had a lot of functions such as weather control, power, water, air flows in populated areas, making sure there were people assigned to all the tasks mankind felt needed to be done. The Network also kept track of all knowledge known to mankind. If I wanted information on anything, past or present, all I had to do was ask Library.

Library worked in several different modes. She could talk to me as intelligently as any person around. If a question required some mass, she could project a hologram that looked totally real. And sometimes more than looked. For example, if I wanted to know how close to the real thing a synthetic steak made out of yeast was, she could project a steak on a plate, in three dimensions, sizzling so that I could see little bits of juice flying off it and hear the sound. It smelled like a steak and I could even feel the heat if I put my hand near it. The only thing she couldn't do was taste. (There was a synthesizer that could create food. That's what had been used my first day in the hospital.)

If I wanted to know what a woolly mammoth looked like, she put one in front of me, full size. I asked to see how the last ice age progressed and immediately felt as if I was in space, looking down on the earth as the line of ice moved further and further south until most of the planet was white. After a few weeks she asked me if there was a problem when she was in conversation mode. It took a while to realize I wasn't used to talking to a silver football. We then worked a couple of days to come up with the perfect hologram for Library. She was there in the flesh from then on.

I struggled for a while with how to refer to the two time periods. Of course, present was present and the past was the past, but I couldn't differentiate my membership in either one. And I didn't want to. I was proud to be a representative of the 20^th and 21^st centuries even though they had some crazy beliefs. And just as proud to be a member of mankind's struggle to survive. A rather important member, if I say so myself. I finally decided that both time periods were mine and mankind was mankind, no matter the year. What mankind did in the present would be referred to as "What we do", what happened in my first life would be "What we used to do." Simple enough. The transition from the old days to the present is actually when man realized he was dying and decided to do something about it. Of course, I wasn't around then but I've seen both sides of it. I just referred to that transition as the change.

When it became known that we were on the brink of becoming extinct, Man turned vigilant. In the old days, anyone who could raise his voice would find people to listen to him. Many would listen without question and that's the reason the whole Politically Correct movement began. Now, as a whole and as individuals, if someone said things weren't right, we said "Prove it." We took a look at a lot of the things that people were bothered with before and shrugged them off.

There was a device called a TV in my day that broadcast what was then called entertainment. It was run by private companies which were entities designed to make money. But the government, which was supposed to be part of the general populace and guide the populace, but was and did neither, had determined that it was in charge of the few frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum that were used to transmit this TV. It was actually possible to use about 2000 times as much wavelength, but the "Pioneers" of TV, who had the rights to use them, "Proved" that these were the only frequencies that would work. Anyway, one of the companies would put something on TV and one or two out of the millions of people in the country would complain to the government. The government would then take money from the company, whether what was done bothered anyone else or not. Since this TV had many choices of programming on what were called "Channels", it was very easy for someone to move from one channel to another if he didn't like what was on the first one. Somehow this simple action was beyond the comprehension of the complainers. So, the expression "If you don't like it, change the channel" came to be known as the dying complaint of the person too busy living life for himself to try and force everyone else to change their life to please him.

I happened to tell this story to Nurse one day. Within six months, "If you don't like it, change the channel" became the equivalent expression of another we used to have - "Fuck you." Well, maybe a little milder equivalent.

Before I go any further comparing the old days with the present, we need to take a look at economy. Economy is basically the distribution of goods and services. In a small community, it's fairly simple. Some people are responsible for food, either capturing it or growing it. This was typically done by the men. Others were responsible for maintaining the community itself. That usually included raising of the youth, seeing that the food was prepared so it could be eaten, maybe some cleaning, supplementation of the food by growing small crops, etc. Basically all contributed in their own way and all survived. If one person decided not to contribute, he would probably be talked to. If he continued, he would be asked to leave. Or killed. Life was simple.

There were two things that prohibited the planet from surviving this way. Some guy decided that his contribution was worth more than the contributions of the others. And this decision was unfair. Let's take a look at the village that is having two or three of its children carried off by tigers each year. And there's one guy who figures out how to prevent the tigers from doing this. The rest of the village will be more than happy to build this guy a palace if that's what it takes to keep him there. It's when he starts getting greedy or demands the palace without really earning it that things go South.

Another problem is it just gets to damned complicated to run a large group this way. Even a small town isn't going to cook one meal for the whole town. Some people are going to want beans, others meat, others eggs. You can't just set up a barter system. What if you raise chickens and want some cloth for you and your family. And the cloth guy wants something else. They just isn't time to find someone who want chickens and has what the cloth merchant wants.

The solution to this untenable barter situation was to come up with the idea of money. An egg would be worth this much, a bolt of cloth this much, hell, even a blow job this much. If you had something somebody else wanted, you could get money for it.

This opened the door to crooks and the greedy. The highest paid people on the planet were actually in the process of tearing the structure of mankind apart. They grew and manufactured things called drugs that would prevent the user from experiencing life. They were supposedly chased after by the governments of the planet. Occasionally one of the people way down the chain of command was picked up and put away for a few weeks to prove to society that the government was protecting them from these wicked drug dealers.

There was a whole class of people who were given government licenses to enslave the public with other drugs. The top of the chain was the drug companies. There were about 5 or 6 of these on the planet, all owned by the same handful of men. They would have their distributors, called doctors and psychiatrists come up with diseases. For example, if a man got old and fat, instead of making him get thin, doctors would say that he had high blood pressure. The person would have to pay the equivalent of a week's food every month to buy his blood pressure medicine. The medicine was designed to cause real things to go wrong with the person's body. This gave the doctor more work and allowed him to push more drugs onto the person.

Psychiatrists had a complete made-up science that said that what made man what he was and what he used for thinking were combined in a two pound piece of meat in his head. They came up with the idea that chemicals in this meat had to be balanced. Any chemical imbalance was cured by taking special drugs that would kill a horse. As they gained more and more control, they "discovered" that these imbalances happened to younger and younger people. When I was scheduled to burn up in that fire, they had children under 6 months old on daily drugs. They had a program to have every school aged child on the planet under their influence and were actually ahead of schedule. There were no cures because people always came to them to late - even the 6 month old children. The president of our government had been working on getting legislation approved so these psychiatrists could examine all pregnant women for these mental diseases.