Epilogue: A Tale of Two Futures

Chapter Footnotes and Hyperlinks

2056 - The Enhanced Future

204. BNIE – Brain Net Interface Enhancement – This device was surgically implanted in Patrick’s brain just days after he was born. Patrick was the second generation to receive BNIEs at birth. Most of the initial bugs with this technology have been worked out. The first generation went through enormous trials that resulted in many deaths. It took years for people to learn to deal with the immediacy of the net. There are still people in institutions who did not learn to control the interface. Most BNIEs are still engaged with a tap on the side of the head. The thought on/off interface still causes some problems during sleep.

205. WakeGo is a medicine that allows someone to avoid sleep for 72 hours. It stimulates the portion of the brain that regulates the need for sleep and fuels it with endorphins and dopamine.

206. HIM – Holographic Image Messaging - Most homes have come with some type of built-in HIM system for the last 10 years. The sitting room will usually have a couch and some wonderful décor on three of the walls. The remaining wall is similar to the Wall Video Interface of the last three decades which is still found in some older homes. The HIM wall projects a 3D video image that, for all in the room, seems to be right there with them. The recent upgrade of HIM to work closely with BNIE technology has opened an entirely new art form of thought imaging.

207. Portfolios have replaced the standard grading systems for the last 25 years. Students are judged by teams assembled by educators around the world. It became necessary to shift the focus away from standardized testing when the last traditional classrooms became obsolete in the early 30’s.

208. HCOS - Heritage Christian Online School is a Distributed Learning School that still values the parent as the primary educator.

209. BUBtech Inc. has been the leading University/Corporation of Biotech in the world for the last fifteen years. It requires a portfolio mark of 98.23% or better for admittance.

210. Net-credit level – Since the great net-crash of the early 20’s, all other forms of currency are abolished. Paypal undermined the entire banking system and forced the takeover of Visa and Mastercard. Their plan backfired when net-terrorists hacked Paypal and stole trillions of dollars. This thrust the world into a three-year depression that ended in war between India and the Paypal ally, The European Union. The world emerged from this with its present global economic and political structure. Corporations and countries have become much closer political allies.

211. Google Archives – This is known as the center for all human knowledge and thought. Google finished the indexing of known print material in 2019. They almost lost everything in a surprise attack by net-terrorists during the Paypal war. The terrorists assassinated Larry Page in an effort to extract the server keys. Sergey Brin escaped and was in hiding until three year ago when he emerged and announced that Google would now begin to catalog all of mankind’s thoughts by linking their BNIEs.

212. Workout center – Somewhat resembling the gyms of old, workout centers insured certain human functions such as lifting, running and swimming did not atrophy in the digital world. The genetic enhancement debate was still raging in some parts of society. Why exercise when we can alter DNA? Was the argument – so far the old-world bioethics were still holding on to a few non-enhancement views.

213. The people distributor – It somewhat emulates the old-fashioned conveyors seen in airports combined with glass elevators. Because everything continues to build upward in most cities, the distributor transports people to their individual destinations as safely and efficiently as possible. In most cases all you need to do is step on the next available distributor disk and let it interface with your BNIE. With a tap and a thought you are on your way. The distributors can move people up to 100 kph throughout a big city. So far the only known deaths from distributor accidents were suicide-related when a passenger jumped out of their distributor.

214. Wireless divide – This term refers to the parts of the world that have not been plugged in to the net because of a lack of technological human interfaces. There are two main causes for the wireless divide: countries are still operating in an old-world economy and cannot afford to provide the digital technology necessary. The company states have tried to merge but old-style politics still prevent the alliances. Secondly, there is religious resistance to connecting to the global net, particularly in some Islamic regions of the world.

215. Digital thoughts – This is the clearly distinguished inner voice of the BNIE. Early models did not differentiate between the thoughts sufficiently so that people became very confused about what their mind was speaking versus the “mind” of the net. A new personality disorder emerged known as Net Identity Syndrome.

216. Digital self – is the term given for the virtual image of oneself as you travel the net. In the development of BNIE technology, developers transformed flat web pages into 3D websites. A person can “go” to a website now and virtually be there in their mind. The resulting picture is halfway between a vivid dream and the normal non-net world. In the latest BNIE upgrade you can view your digital self from 12 different vantage points. Most people still opt for the normal view through one’s eyes.

217. Hallways of hyperlinks – Like the ancient webpages of the last century, hyperlinks are still the way to get from one place to another on the net. In the Google Archives, the links appear as rows upon rows of buttons under various category headings, not much different from shelves and shelves of books or drawers in an ancient library.

218. Net-search – This phrase was fast replacing the old-world word “research.” Since Google had indexed all print information, research changed from a field of discovery and scholarly rigor to a skill-based discipline. It became a compulsory study just like language arts and mathematics in education. Search Bees (named after Spelling Bees) became an everyday part of children’s educational experience. Patrick was a Provincial Champion Searcher-Bee when he was nine years old.

219. Search assistant – This is a personalized virtual assistant for doing anything in the net. This net-bot is tailored to your personality and helps you to find things specific to your needs. It learns everything that can be known about you from your ancestry, education, family patterns, habits, previous searches, likes or dislikes. Recently they have been able to collect a database of your thoughts and dreams through the upgraded BNIE.

220. Classical Interface – Since the advent of upgrade BNIE 2.3, people have been able to customize their view of the Google Archive and other BNIE interactive sites.

221. HCI - Home Computer Interface – This technology began in the early part of the millennium in the home of the legendary Bill Gates. Computers were literally embedded into every aspect of the home and networked by the HCI. Nowadays HCIs only run the video component in the home as everything else is managed by BNIE technology.

2056 - The Deprived Future

222. Enhanced is the name given to those who have had genetic enhancements in their family lines. There weren’t any genetic labs in operation since the Camp wars began twenty years ago. Many of the survivors of the wars were the offspring of those who had been enhanced from 2010 to 2040. These children also carried their parents’ genetic improvements. The Enhanced were in every major level of leadership in society.

223. Clone 24-000098 – This is the 98 th Clone in the 24 th generation. There were thirty generations of Clones created, one for each year from 2010 to 2040. It was very unusual to see a clone with a 24 designation. They were starting to die off. Perhaps that is why this particular clone was given a simple clean-up task. There had been 9 million clones in the 24 th set.

224. Naturals were the non-enhanced humans that survived the Camp wars. There were about the same population levels of Naturals as Enhanced but numbers were declining. Some said it was evolution while others argued it was the lack of resources shared with them. Their lives were mostly spent doing grunt level work for the Corporations, some management and supervising of the Clones.

225. Christians were the reason for the Camp Wars or so that is how history now reads. The Camp Wars were fought between the Global Multinational Corporation Conglomeration (GMCC) and the North American and European Union Alliance. The wars lasted for twenty years with all sides losing some power. Biotechnical weapons of mass destruction killed four out of five humans and clones on the planet. The Camps were the excuse given for fighting the wars. Christians were the scapegoats for much bigger political shifts taking over the globe. Because they were associated with the terrorist movement that destroyed the internet in 2031, Christians were the likely people to blame for the world’s woes.

226. The Camps are where most of the Christians were sent after 2031. Something had to be done with these people who believed the way they did. It seemed that they were opposed to every advancement of technology: cloning, stem cell research, computer implants. But probably the main reason they were so persecuted was that they freely spoke out against the discrimination policies of the Enhanced leaders.

227. Clones are incapable of any high level of cruelty. It is now an established fact that Clones have no moral center. The Christians would say that they are body and soul without a spirit and that God never intended humanity to live this way. They would quote James 2:26 “for the body without the spirit is dead…” This fact was first established when researchers began to study the social behavior of Eve, the very first human Clone. By the time she was sixteen, the scientists became concerned that she was not normal. She lacked any will or desire beyond what she was told. She was completely amoral. When she died in 2023 at the age of 17, scientists, psychologist and even theologians were convinced that Clones had no central sense of personhood. They had no spirit. They had no sense of good or evil and only acted out of a sense of instinct and reward. Clone behavior was never a concern.

228. The Anti-Embryo-Destruction Campaign was the global movement against the selection process for finding suitable persons to clone. The process involved testing their stem cells through fertilizing multiple embryos before they attempted to clone them. This resulted in literally billions of embryos created and needlessly killed. The right to life movement took a stand that nearly every other religious and social group did not understand.

229. One of the conditions of closing the Camps was that Christians would not be allowed to recruit other followers. Proselytizing was considered a major offence and would result in years in prison.

230. A Christian “fundamentalist” group known as the Anti-Embryo Destruction League for Christ (AEDLC) were responsible for Christians all over the world being identified as terrorists. They had caused several minor problems in AjBiotech – the company responsible for the policy that resulted in the massive destruction of human embryos, bombing their labs and threatening their executives. The world responded by getting behind AjBiotech and supporting their position. The AEDLC felt that they had no choice but to “hold the world responsible.” They launched a series of attacks on the net. They were able to successfully load a self-replicating virus in the Google Archives. Within two weeks, the world’s information was mush. Next, they sent the same virus into the world banking system at Paypal Corp. Finally they unleashed an army of nano-bots that ate away the lining on the fiber optics that carried the backbone of the net. These three attacks, in the fall of 2031, brought the world to its knees and completely destroyed the internet. In the next two years, Christians everywhere were being sent to the Camps.

231. When the net crashed in 2031 nearly all research, scientific activity and genetic enhancement ceased. Without the Google Archives, most of the scientists were simply lost in the laboratories. The fiber optics had been eaten away and there really wasn’t the economic and manufacturing ability to replace the trillions of miles of wire. Sure, there was still wireless technology but it had no backbone to build on.