Prologue:
Context
The futurist Ray Kurzweil
essentially predicted some of the events of June 11th, 2037, several
decades earlier. He called the moment when we would no longer be the
ones in charge of technological evolution as “the Singularity”, because like
the physical event astronomers use the term to describe – a black hole – it is impossible to know
what lies beyond that point.
He actually coined the term at least
a half-century in advance, knowing through the process of exponential
extrapolation that it was coming faster than most people, even most computer people, believed was possible –
and even he had underestimated the speed of its arrival by several
years. But as the decades wore on, the basics of his argument were impossible
to refute…
“Narrow
AI”, a very task-specific example of artificial intelligence being superior
to man’s, began appearing in the 1990’s. Most famously, IBM’s “Deep Blue”
defeated the human world chess champion in 1997, and within fifteen years, personal
computers could run applications which were superior chess players to any human
who ever lived. The last ‘hold-out’ among board games, the oriental strategy
game ‘GO’, was finally conquered by the Japanese computer “K-Com” in 2019, and
similar apps to those playing chess were on the market for GO within four
years.
Once human beings began habitually
carrying miniature computers everywhere, ironically called
‘smartphones’, it was inevitable
that the vast satellite-based Global Positioning System would soon be guiding
their entire lives more efficiently than they themselves could. Satellite-based
wireless fidelity covered the entire planet by the year 2020. Indeed, by
the early 2020s, first-world citizens could scarcely do anything without consulting ‘Siri’, ‘Cortana’, ‘Alexa’, ‘Helen’, or
‘Leandra’ for guidance.
Driving
an automobile became a novelty in much of Europe, Japan, and the urbanized
portions of the United American States and the Russian Federation of Republics
by the year 2031, when the DPHA and its equivalent legislations around the
world became law. The “Drivers Prohibited
Highways Act” declared well over half of the 78,000 miles of UAS interstate
highway, plus another 31,000 miles of similarly high-speed federal and state
roadways, to be off-limits to human drivers, as the machine-driven
vehicles built over the previous decade were far more proficient and far
safer, even when travelling at much higher speeds than human drivers
could be trusted with. Even the freeways that allowed drivers usually
had at least one lane designated for self-driving cars, where the typical speed
often reached double that of the
conventional lanes. There were no gas-powered self-driven autos produced
in America after the 2022 Congressional session, and the solar-powered RECHARGE
strips which run the length of every lane of traffic covered by the DPHA meant
the vehicles never needed to stop to recharge batteries.
The average lifespan of first-world humans rose steadily, and their later
years were generally filled with significantly improved health as genetic
treatments, robot surgeons (far superior
to human ones), increasingly well-targeted medicines, and nanobots all
worked to improve the quality of life as well as its quantity for
everyone with access to them. For example, in the United States, the average
life expectancy nationwide passed seventy in 1968, and didn’t reach eighty
until the year 2022; but suddenly, in the last fifteen years, average life
expectancy leaped to 92.7 years of age, with those last ten years more
likely to be filled with ease of mobility and full mental capacity than ever
before.
[Before
charges of elitism leap to mind, understand that the changes were even more pronounced in third-world
countries. On the African continent in 1925, a typical citizen lived to be only
twenty-five, just as his ancient ancestors did. But by 1990, that typical
lifespan had doubled, to 52.9 – far short of the 70-72 experienced by
their European brethren, true, but
growing at a faster rate. African life expectancy passed sixty in the year 2015 and seventy
in 2029; by 2037, the gap between continents had shrunk to just twelve
years (78.1), and much of the remaining
discrepancy can be attributed to war casualties, something technological
advances only streamlined.]
Two of the most obvious
fields in which the paths humans and machines were colliding and merging were communication and entertainment. Video
gaming, for example, had progressed steadily from the hypnotic game of “Pong”
grandparents played in the 1970s to the hyper-realistic graphics of 2019 that
were almost indistinguishable from reality. VR headsets and sensurround
micro-speakers had made participation in not only gaming but movies and telecommunication
so immersive that the only step
forward would have been direct communication into the brain.
Enter
the Silicon Valley startup firm of HuskieDu. In the year 2020, they
took the brain-to-brain interface research of its Duke/U of Washington creators
and created the template for a decade-long explosion
of wireless “think-it” technologies. These ranged from gaming set-ups, where the
player’s thoughts control the action,
to the Skype-descendant telecommunication called Vype that used VR without headsets to more important
advances, like providing the ultimate
freedom for ALS, CP, and quadriplegic victims, who could finally
communicate without the restrictions their bodies impose. The technology,
pioneered at Johns Hopkins, allowed people like the late Stephen Hawking to
finally communicate at the speed of his thoughts after decades of imprisonment
in the shell of his body – he was able to spend the last three years of his life
doing tremendous work far beyond what he could possibly have done before.
Unfortunately, his condition was too far advanced to stop even with the
technology of 2025; the hope was that once the human brain could be modeled
completely, Hawking could actually be resurrected and reproduced in robotic
form.
HuskerDu’s technology brought about
a predictable transformation in the
Internet; with increased ease of use came increased use, and abuse.
There were some people who simply never emerged from it – “web ghosts” – but most people
managed to live with one foot in reality and one foot in virtuality at all
times. Someone having a public conversation in 2037 would very likely have one
eye looking at the person speaking and the other one moving almost
independently, following the “screen” in their mind displaying the news, a
conversation via Vype, or
experiencing virtual porn in ways his dad could have only fantasized about. Modern man had learned to actually
multitask the way his parents claimed to.
Of course, technological advances of
this sort were taken full advantage
of by a society searching to fill more and more of its free time: many of the
high-paying mechanical jobs were gone, filled by narrow-AI robots, but there
were plenty of (lower-paying)
positions in both the service and the information fields. And with the
ever-decreasing cost of computing speed, the luxuries of the virtual world were
available to citizens of all incomes: even the homeless had their wireless
portals to the infinite invisible universe. In 2037, the ancient Roman rulers’ maxim
of governing via “bread and circuses” has finally returned.
With the growing worship of
technology came a simultaneous and drastic reduction in forms of traditional worship around the globe. In
2018, there was a huge movement in the variousProtestant Christian denominations
in particular that believed the End of Days was coming, a year which marked the
seventieth anniversary of the founding of the modern nation of Israel. (The four consecutive ‘blood moons’ in
2014-15 contributed to this theory, which lent the derisive nickname ‘Blood
Moon Hoax’ to the hyperbole.) When the End didn’t
come, there was a tremendous backlash from a world that already considered
religion a ‘counter-scientific cult’
and a divisive force in both politics and society. Most
of the smaller religions were killed off entirely; some strains tried to fight
back, often taking aggressive stands against the iniquities the new technology
brought, and were driven underground (or worse); the rest quietly went about
their business, sometimes adding the culture’s ‘advances’ into their
conversations and teaching, for better or worse. After all, many reasoned, God apparently allowed nanobots and
the like to exist, and nothing in Scripture specifically prohibited
them, so what’s the problem?
There were two exceptions. One was
Islam. To varying degrees depending on the sect, Muslim caliphates were defiant
regarding the world’s cultural expectations on religion: some simply refused to
acknowledge any changes, others fought back against technological hotbeds as
best they could. Outnumbered by a world who passively preferred to tag all
religions as divisive in a modern, web-united world, the swath of Islamic
nations from Egypt to Indonesia united into a loosely-bound collection of
‘emirates’ under the ironically-acronymed umbrella of the Islamic Emirate
Domain. While Sunnis and Shiites separated into distinct regions, for the most
part, Muslims hunkered down as one and separated themselves from the rest of
humanity, declaring their borders sacrosanct in 2028.
Israel,
therefore, was completely surrounded
on all sides by the IED, yet it was generally ignored because the
radical Islamic wings were pre-occupied with matters of their own
economic and political survival. The Russian Federation of Republics had made a
confederation pact three years ago with China, and was aggressively confronting
the IED on its northern borders. This allowed Israel to continue more or less
as it had: under Jewish control but not
particularly committed to its prophesied role in history. Its ongoing
Palestinian presence was coming to a head, and now, on the eve of the 70th
anniversary of the Six-Day (or “Yom Kippur”) War, a treaty was finally being
brokered to provide grounds for peace between the two diametrically opposed
factions. The leaders of both parties spent much of the spring of 2037
hammering out details in marathon bargaining sessions, not only in Tel Aviv but
also in Baghdad (with the help of the
IED, whose interests in the region were obvious), and in Brussels (with the help of the EU, whose interests in
the region may be less obvious). After multiple delays, the document
signing was imminent for a treaty which would finally give Israel at least a sense of safety within the full-time
shadow of the IED.
Meanwhile, the European Union became
the dominant political force in the world when three consecutive isolationist
American presidents pulled the UAS out of the police-the-world business. (The 50th American president, Willard
C. Smith, Jr., had been elected in the fall of 2036 on a platform of “more of
the same”.) While the Russian Federation of Republics had strengthened its
political and military might by allying itself with China (and its technological arm as well: the RFR had fallen hopelessly
behind the curve in the direct-to-brain communication market), they were
dealing with such significant economic difficulties that it prevented them from
truly challenging the EU dominance on the world stage. This came in large part
from their ever-present conflicts along its southern border with the IED, which
had precisely the same economic issues for precisely the same
reasons.
And
so the Catholic Church under Pope Francis II – the second exception – reasserted
its role in the political realm after a half-millennia absence by incorporating
itself more and more symbiotically with the government of the EU. With the
selection of a Catholic Italian as President of the European Council in 2035,
the Vatican’s alignment with the planet’s most powerful government strengthened
the church beyond any level since the Inquisition. In Europe, at least, it became
imperative to be Catholic if you wanted power.
And
just like during the Inquisition, the Catholic church flexed its muscle against
its fellow Christian denominations far more than any other group. Many of the
more fundamental or evangelical churches had to go underground, at least to the
extent that their members did not expose themselves as being Baptist or Pentecostal
or such. Other churches like the Episcopals and Methodists simply watered down
their services farther, to the point of being both inoffensive and ineffective,
often aligning their own doctrines with those of the ‘new’ Catholicism. (Following the trend started almost a
century before, Catholicism continued to move more and more towards the
‘cultural norms’ – abortion, post-coital birth control, homosexuality, and
recently even polygamy and ‘multi-species relationships’ – and away from
Scriptural accuracy.) The non-trinitarian churches – the ones who didn’t look
like the Catholics, who didn’t believe
in the “trinity” of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit – vanished as far as the public knew. Millions of Mormons and
Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, had to publicly disavow ties with their
church. (What they did privately, they
made sure the Catholics in power didn’t know about.)
True
believers were going to believe in the actual teachings of God the
Father, the presence of the Holy Spirit, and the lordship of Jesus Christ, no
matter what anyone else tried to say or do to them.
But those whose belief never ran more
than skin deep? They saved their skin from being buried six feet deep, by running from beliefs that they saw as being more
trouble than they were apparently worth.
Ω
So, when the Rapture actually happened, there were less than a few
million true Christians to leave with
Christ.
Ω
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