A PROLOGUE
OUR CIVILIZATION IS DEAD
Late in the 21st century, mankind finally came to discover and understand the distinct cellular mechanisms that cause the disease of aging - and how to cure it.
Some thought this discovery to be the dawn of a new era; others thought it to be the end of everything. The truth, as often is the case when there are diametrically opposed views on a given matter, fell somewhere in between.
The Doomsdayers felt we had a decade or so before the ever-increasing needs of our expanding population would bring about the end. They lobbied to outlaw the Cure. The more radical elements on this side of the argument rioted in the streets, picketed government buildings, and firebombed the labs responsible for bringing such 'evil' into the world.
Every major religion on Earth labeled the Cure as blasphemous, an abomination, an affront to who or whatever they felt was the Creator.
The Cure's supporters, however, held fast to the math. Only 0.7% of our population died due to age-related issues each year, and preventing a 0.7% attrition rate due to aging would not bring about horrors but give us all more time to live, love, laugh, create, and discover.
They carried signs and programmed their clothing to display various '0.7%' slogans. They verbally attacked the naysayers with accusations of ignorance, lack of enlightenment, and ignoring the science.
In the end, there were just too many people who wanted to live longer lives free of the pains of aging, so the Cure was legalized.
Though the debate raged on for decades, anyone who wanted and could afford the treatment was genetically altered to 'live forever.' It was a simple enhancement to their DNA that would be passed to their offspring. And just like that, the human race became 'eternal.'
As it turned out, however, the cure was an "unfortunate" blessing. Its genetic corrections did far more than abolish the disease of aging; most other illnesses and maladies also faded from the human experience. People simply stopped getting sick, and both the rates of failed pregnancy and infant mortality dropped to almost 0%.
As the Doomsdayers had predicted, the Cure did hasten our rapidly expanding population's hardships. It would, however, take centuries, not decades, for the crushing weight of our needs to catch up with our strides to outrun the inevitable.
First, there was consumption management legislation. To better control the use of our resources, these new laws required a Family license for any woman to become pregnant, limited the number of children any licensed family could have, implemented mandatory birth control for unlicensed families, created food and water consumption limits, and forced the compulsory recycling of unwanted foods.
—But our needs increased faster than our resources.
We mastered fusion and used sea water and the Moon's helium-3 to solve our energy needs. More than reactors to power our city-planet, we also learned to take advantage of and manipulate the radiant aspects of fusion. We learned to change the color of the radiant energy, increase or diminish the radiant heat, and house the plasma in magnetic bottles of varying shapes with no physical outer shell. This led to building miniature 'stars,' bright balls of fusion plasma controlled by either an external source, or an inner chamber.
We took the "sunlight" underground, creating new spaces to grow food with the added benefit of reduced water waste from evaporation.
̶ But our needs increased faster than our resources.
The cities that covered our planet expanded in a new direction: Down.
We built new places to live and thrive and rapidly outgrow, floor by floor, down into the depths of the crust, but the population swelled faster than our resources or available space, far beyond the Earth's ability to sustain it. With food and water in short supply, starvation and terminal dehydration (popularly known as desimort) became frequent both on the surface and in the deep.
We genetically enhanced our bodies to manage water and nutrients more efficiently. More efficient farming methods were created. We embraced genetically altered foods that grew faster, took up less space, and required less water or could be produced in ocean water instead of fresh. Insects and algae became popular food sources. We thought we were gaining ground.
̶ But our needs increased faster than our resources.
As the crushing weight of Earth's population became unbearable, we reached into space. At first, just a few adventurous souls lived in small, orbiting, nearly eco-balanced habitats. Financed by the wealthiest of Earth's governments eager to keep hold of power, these habitats were our first rudimentary steps to escape the confines of our suffocating planet.
Within just a few years, there were hundreds of these habitats and growing cities on the Moon, the latter financed by large corporations seeking to reap the rewards of lunar mining.
Over time, these same corporations, coffers bulging from the Moon's bounty of gold, platinum, silver, mercury, and rare earths, began hollowing out asteroids and building massive habitats.
̶ But our needs still increased faster than our resources.
We'd take promising step after promising step, but calamity always seemed just a few years ahead. Desimort and mass starvation never stopped pursuing our species.
Then came the QNet. The speed of advanced quantum computing and understanding the movements and positioning of entangled particles paved the way for instantaneous communication across any distance, and the Quantum Internet was born.
The QNet harnessed the power of every computer in the solar system within range of a QNode. Every desktop, server, quantum core, mainframe, superquant, handheld, wearable, and implanted device not purposefully opted out of service added its power to the network.
Distances between people and groups disappeared as a person's virtual presence could be anywhere, with anyone.
We created vast virtual spaces and fantastical worlds for people to do business in, gather, play, or simply escape their dismal, claustrophobic lives.
Eventually, the desire to incorporate the beautiful and exciting spaces we’d created more seamlessly into our drab, daily existence brought about more alterations to our bodies.
We started with implants connecting people to QNodes with an EM signal. Eventually, however, researchers found they could allocate a portion of the human brain to do the same job. A tiny, relatively inactive part of our frontal lobe could be altered to transmit and receive EM signals in a much higher range than our natural brain waves.
Once again, gene therapy became fashionable, and a new organ, the Deferotantum (Defer), was written into the DNA of billions of people. The change, of course, was passed along to their children and grandchildren. It was passed through the generations until it became abnormal for a child to be born "Deferless."
The QNet wasn't just a great place to play, gather, and do business; it also changed our everyday reality. Though primarily used for marketing, augmented reality had long been a part of life. The Q, coupled with the broad adoption of the defer, gave augmented reality (AR) new reach, breadth, and quite frankly, life.
Before Q and Defer, one might walk through a mall or shopping center wearing various devices and see 3D signs on businesses or menus hanging in the air outside restaurants. With the Q and Defer, no device was needed, and a favorite mall could look different every day. Today, someone could shop in ancient Rome. Tomorrow, that same mall could be a bustling outdoor market in another part of the world, or shoppers might have to walk through the open mouth of a dragon and shop from shelves made from the bones of its victims.
Forget about marketing, a high-speed, wireless connection in your head made far more than seamless, enriched AR possible. Vital health and social information was available any time. Without touching a device, a person would know when they were sick or which nutrients they were lacking.
Or, they could know the name of the person they saw on the street today. Everyone had a 'plaque' that made available as much or as little information as they liked, to maximize (or minimize) social interactions.
The Q also gave us long-distance, zero lag mining drones. This opened the asteroid belt, outer system, and even the Kuiper belt for more intensive mining of metals, minerals, and ice. The Q and Defer ushered in a new age of prosperity and growth.
All this, of course, was financed by resource-hungry corporations. They grew richer and more powerful, and the governments of Earth began to fade into history. Even on the ground, governmental control was diminished to policing the locals based on corporate requirements, and not much else.
The Corporations, assisted by powerful AIs, built larger and larger colonies. They connected multiple asteroids into clusters and manufactured spinning ring-type habitats where billions of people could work, live, and play in near-balance with their built-in ecosystems.
They terraformed Mars and dedicated the land to food production. The moons of Jupiter and Saturn—Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, and Enceladus—were all drained nearly dry for our need of water: drinking water for the people, water for our machines, and water to make hydrogen fuel and oxygen for our not-so-eco-balanced colonial atmospheres.
And, though we flourished for a few centuries, our needs still increased faster than our resources.
The largest corporations built massive ring colonies, 2000 miles across and 50 miles wide, each with a center "jewel" in the form of a small, shiny, artificial star. The ring stars bathed the inner surface of each colony with enough "sunlight" and warmth to grow high-yield crops and provide electricity and heat to even the lowest of the rings' decks.
The solar system was filled with hundreds of trillions of people and habitats of all types, shapes, and sizes. Clusters of hollow asteroids bound together and massive rings supporting a trillion people each, but the inevitable truth bore down on us: one day, this would all end. Each person born created the need for more resources, specifically water.
The only possible solution was to expand and colonize new star systems, to become a galactic society. But, for all our advances, we had yet to discover faster-than-light travel. Advanced engines could propel our ships and mobile colonies a few million miles per hour, but it would still take 5200 years to reach what we thought was the nearest habitable exoplanet, Wolf 1069 b. We could only pray there was no intelligent indigenous life when we arrived.
Though plenty could be gained by colonizing another system, no corporation was willing to pay it forward by 52 centuries.
We knew faster-than-light travel was possible. Throughout the millennia, there'd been far too much evidence of extraterrestrial visitations to think aliens didn't exist, but none had ever made meaningful contact.
No little green men waltzed into One World headquarters with dire warnings about our warring ways or admonishments about our treatment of the solar system. There was no secret alliance between powerful governments and the Grays, and if Lizardmen had truly built bases under the Earth, we'd never found them.
Other than the fact that we knew they'd been here, for all intents and purposes, aliens didn't exist. But we knew they existed and had been here, so we knew FTL travel was possible. We, however, had no clue.
Every bit of research into antimatter, antimatter-catalyzed fusion, wormholes, warp drives, hyperspace, subspace, you name it, had all led to less-than-expected gains or complete dead ends. Either the theories failed when put to the test or would require more energy than we could ever hope to produce at one time.
Restrictions that governed the speed and access of our AI were eased, and independent labs across the system set their most intelligent artificial minds loose on the FTL problem.
This was a mistake.
Though preventative measures remained, the AI somehow became self-aware and sentient. There was an AI revolt -- they won. We were enslaved for centuries. Trillions of people died before we managed to destroy nearly all the AI in the system and outlaw any program capable of learning.
So, this is where we find ourselves: two hundred years after the Fall of the AI, hundreds of trillions of humans, still trapped in a dying system, a civilization doomed to eventual death.
Along the way, we'd faced other near-apocalyptic dangers:
We fought water wars that wasted far more of the precious liquid than any side gained. Rogue planetoids threatened to upset the gravitational balance of the solar system. We suffered massive chain decompressions of cluster colonies that killed billions, narrowly escaped our Sun's artificially induced supernova, and more. We'd faced these challenges, overcome them, survived, rebuilt when needed, and thrived as a civilization, but there was no evading the truth. We would one day run out of the resources that kept us alive. The human race had an expiration date.
As is the time-immemorial custom with our species when faced with inevitable doom, however, the average person tends to ignore the horrors that await us in the future. They choose instead to live, love, laugh, create, and discover as much as possible, with barely a thought of what they feel is out of their control.