The Possessor Wars

The world that Jeff Bowman, Harriet Brightway, and Akio Miyamoto (whose name is pronounced AH-kee-oh MEE-yah-moh-toh) were born into is very different from our own. Time, as it always does, has made many changes. I thought you might be interested in how our world became their world.

The End
First came the end—the end of our world that is. Unfortunately, the late 22nd century saw a war unlike any before it. In the decade prior to the war, tensions between countries reached a boiling point. Nearly everyone hated nearly everyone else. The world was thrashing itself and throwing away all common sense in the process.

In the year 2188, on a bright, clear morning, World War III began as a barrage of nuclear missiles mysteriously rose from the desert of Nevada, crossed the world, and landed on several important Chinese cities. At the same time another group of equally-mysterious missiles launched from India and obliterated several cities in Russia.

It made no sense to anyone—especially the governments of the United States and India, who frantically tried to convince everyone that they knew nothing of these attacks.

No one listened. As you might expect, China and Russia responded with their own missiles. Other countries soon joined in. Nearly half of the world’s population died in World War III.

Then things started to pick up a bit.

The Beginning
After the war, people rebuilt, as they always do after wars. The most of the 23rd century saw a lot of struggle and hardship. During this period, there were few cities left. Most people were farmers. They had large families, and families tended to live close together. They needed each other for survival.

World society during this time placed a high value on moderation. Extreme viewpoints were seen as something that led to violence and hatred. So, for instance, racism never again reared its ugly head to disturb the peace. Basically, people finally figured out that they needed to get along with each other or they’d all die.

The Man Who Turned the World Upside Down
It was about this time that a post office clerk in an obscure village in rural Montana published some scientific papers on the nature of the universe. The clerk, whose name was Hubert Einstein, was a descendant of Albert Einstein and one of the finest minds that the world has ever produced. Hubert Einstein was admired forever after.

Centuries later, a couple who lived in the arcology this story takes place in had a son. The proud father was an admirer of Hubert Einstein, so he insisted on naming his son after the genius. That’s how Hugh Benson, whose real name was Hubert Einstein Benson, got his name.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to Hubert Einstein the postal clerk.

Both Hubert Einstein’s wife and his boss often accused him of being a dreamer. They were wrong. He wasn’t a dreamer, he was a thinker. Hubert Einstein often sat amid stacks of yet-to-be-sorted mail just thinking about why light behaved the way it did and why stars behaved the way they did and why gravity behaved the way it did. He thought about electrons and positrons and quarks. He pondered string theory and the origins of the universe. At least, he did until his boss came by and told him to sort the mail. Even so, Hubert eventually figured out many of the reasons the universe works the way it does.

Because Hubert Einstein was not a famous professor of physics at a famous university, he could not get his papers published in the famous physics magazines that most scientists read. Instead, his articles were printed in a little-known journal of science published deep in the heart of Norway. The year was 2239.

Fortunately, Hubert’s articles were read excitedly by a very young Norwegian physicist who was one of the few subscribers to the little-known journal of science. After reading several of his articles, Bernard Nelson, the Norwegian physicist, wrote a letter to Hubert Einstein containing a long list of insanely difficult questions about physics. To Nelson’s amazement, Hubert Einstein was able to answer them all.

For many years, the two men continued writing each other. This had a negative effect on Hubert’s ability to sort mail, and eventually he was fired from the post office. He got a job as the night watchman at the Museum of Rare Salt and Pepper Shakers. This turned out to be a good thing, because they paid him a bit more than the post office did. It also gave him time to do nothing but think. The letters he wrote to Bernard Nelson got to be chock full of the most unusual ideas about physics that anyone had ever seen. All of them turned out to be exactly correct.

After some years, Hubert Einstein passed away quietly. The letters he wrote to Bernard Nelson sat in a cardboard box unnoticed and unpublished.

The population increased, and so did the prosperity of the citizens of the world. Later generations often looked back on this time as something of a Golden Age for humanity. During this time, a lot of new language influences came into English. The result was a mish-mash of English and foreign words. So for example, people stopped using the titles Mr. and Ms. and instead used Sirsen and Mamsen. On the streets, the mixing was especially strong. By the time Jeff and his friends were born, people living in the arcologies, who tended to preserve the old ways of speaking, often couldn’t understand people living outside the arcologies.

New Problems for the World
Time passed. The year was 2306. More than a century of prosperity and peace brought a new challenge. The world’s population grew to nearly 8 billion. Food shortages were common, and so were power outages. Neither food nor electricity could be produced fast enough to keep up with demand. There were those who proposed laws limiting population. At the time, such answers were seen as an extreme point of view. As a result, no real action was taken on the problem and the population continued to explode.

There were those, however, who saw spreading the human race to other planets in the Solar system as the answer to the overcrowding problem. For the first time in over two hundred years, people ventured back into space.

Unfortunately, the technology they used to get into space was not much different than ours. World War III and the period of rebuilding slowed down the pace of progress tremendously. Therefore, the rockets they used to blast small numbers of astronauts into space were very expensive. In a time when nearly everything was in short supply, this wasn’t a popular way to solve the population problem.

The Return of Hubert Einstein
About that time, a young physicist named Erica Liefson got a job teaching at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. She, like many scientists of her time, often puzzled over the problem of finding less expensive ways to move people into space.

One day Erica received a letter from her mother saying that her grandfather, Bernard Nelson, had died. She flew home to Norway for the funeral, and stayed on a few days afterward to help her mother and grandmother go through Bernard’s old things. While cleaning her grandfather’s study, Leifson found a box containing letters from someone in Montana.

What first caught her attention first was the name of the person who wrote the letters—Hubert Einstein. She wondered if this man was any relation to the famous physicist Albert Einstein.

What caught her attention next was the contents of the letters. They were chock full of the most unusual ideas about physics that anyone had ever seen. But as she read them, she found that Hubert Einstein did a far better job of explaining the way the universe works than she could. She took the letters back to the UK and showed them around to any scientist who would pay attention.

Hubert Einstein Saves the World
Hubert Einstein’s theories quickly became widely known. His ideas led to many discoveries. Here are just a few.

Nuclear Fusion 

Using Hubert Einstein’s ideas, the world was able to very nicely solve the problem of electricity shortages with nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion, which was invented in the year 2324, is a clean way to generate electricity from almost anything. In fact, it’s exactly how the Sun works. Fusion quickly became the primary means of power generation across the entire world.

In fact, by Jeff Bowman’s time, every arcology used fusion generators as their only power source. All of the garbage that was dropped into the many garbage chutes in the arcology was moved straight into the fusion generators. In other words, people in arcologies got free electrical power every time they threw something away.

Molecular Recombination By a new process called molecular recombination, which was made possible by Hubert Einstein’s ideas, many new materials were invented. Most of them were new types of plastic. These plastics could be made as strong as steel and as light as plastics are today. The new superplastics came in very handy as the world’s population grew. Over the next couple of centuries, buildings made from superplastics grew taller and taller until the first arcologies were built.

Computers also benefited from molecular recombination. They became smaller, lighter, and more powerful. The datapads, databands, and datacrowns used by Jeff and his friends are good examples.

In our time, plastic is made from oil that we pump from the ground. However, they don’t use oil in Jeff’s time. Molecular recombination can be performed on many types of molecules. It works especially well on molecules have lots of carbon in them. The best molecules for molecular recombination are produced by you every single day.

What’s that?

Yes, it’s true. The stuff you flush down the toilet each day is made mostly from hydrogen and carbon, along with some other types of molecules. Even now we can process sewage into a sludge that is very much like oil. That can be used to make plastic.

If that’s true, you might ask, why don’t we recycle our doo right now?

The reason is that it’s cheaper and technically easier to pull oil from the ground and make plastics out of that. As oil becomes more expensive, that may change.

In any case, virtually all of the things in Jeff Bowman’s world are made from sewage and other waste products with molecular recombination. That includes Jeff’s clothes, shoes, furniture, and even the arcology he lives in. That’s also why even poor people in the arcology get datapads. They’re made cheaply from garbage and the residents’ own poo.

Arcologies 

Arcologies are huge buildings that form mostly self-contained cities. Each archology has its own Governing Council. However, because arcologies are 3000 stories high (more than 9 miles!), they are also divided into sectors. Every sector has 100 floors. There are 30 sectors in an arcology. Each sector has a Sector Council that acts very much like a city council does in our time.

There are an average of 2000 people living on every floor of an arcology. The lower floors actually contain more people than that. But because the upper floors contain fewer people (the people up there can afford larger apartments), the average number of people living on a floor is 2000. That means that the arcology contains 3000 stories with 2000 people per story. That works out to 6 million people!

Synthpaste (Ugh!) 

One of the results of molecular recombination is that it became possible to produce organic molecules in factories.

Huh?

Organic molecules are what living things are made of. It’s also what food is made of. As the world’s population grew, it became harder to feed everyone. However, with molecular recombination, the WacDonald’s Corporation of Outer Ganymede Flats, Ganymede (one of the moons of Jupiter) began producing a synthetic food paste that, in the words of its sales procure, was “Fully Nutritious and Oh So Delicious.”

Well, the got the nutritious part right. Made directly from dirt, water, minerals, and similar stuff, the synthetic food paste, which they called “synthpaste,” contained all the nutrients that human beings need to survive. However, even the high-priced synthpaste was bland. The lower-quality stuff was downright awful.

But people were hungry, so they ate synthpaste.

Because synthpaste was produced in automated factories, it was cheap and there was plenty of it for many years. By Jeff’s time, it became the main food source for most of the people living in the Solar System. The only problem was that the population grew faster than the food supply. Those who lived on Earth in Jeff’s time often experienced food shortages.

Monopole Pulse Batteries 

Another result of molecular recombination was the invention of monopole pulse batteries. These batteries are able to store far more electricity than batteries we have today. A single monopole pulse battery of Jeff’s time was the size of one of today’s AA batteries. It could easily run one of today’s electric cars for a month.

Monopole pulse batteries in turn caused advances in many other areas. For example, robots were not commonly used until monopole pulse batteries because robots require so much power just to move around. The first monopole pulse batteries were the size of today’s garbage cans. It was nearly a hundred years after the invention of monopole pulse batteries that robots became common. That’s how long it took for monopole pulse batteries to get small enough for use in robots.

Gravity Mirrors 

About 368 years before Jeff Bowman was born, Hubert Einstein’s theories led to the invention of gravity mirrors. Many people make the mistake of calling gravity mirrors “anti-gravity generators”. Hubert Einstein would be insulted. It is plainly impossible to generate “anti-gravity”. Well, actually it is possible, but the amount of fuel it would require is approximately equal to the amount of material in the planet Saturn.

Gravity mirrors are much more practical than anti-gravity, and they produce the same effect. For years after their invention, gravity mirrors were not widely used. They required so much electricity that the mirrors could often not lift the generators that powered them. The invention of monopole pulse batteries and nuclear fusion changed all that. Because monopole pulse batteries provided a light, yet powerful source of electricity, the use of gravity mirrors spread rapidly.

How did this affect society?

As you may recall, the population problem became even more severe in Jeff Bowman’s time. Even with arcologies, cheap electricity, and the ability to make almost anything from sewage and garbage, the huge population boom made life on Earth very hard. Gravity mirrors made space travel cheap enough so that many people could now afford to leave Earth.

Of course, the Moon, Venus, and Mars were rapidly colonized long before Jeff and his friends were born. So were the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and virtually everywhere else in the Solar system.

Jeff and his friends lived right at the beginning of what historians call The Great Departure. This was a period when most of the human race left the Solar System to live elsewhere. Thirty years after Jeff’s departure from the Solar System, the Great Departure became a veritable flood of people spreading themselves out across known human space.

Artificial Gravity Fields 

Hubert Einstein wrote in his letters that the one idea he was most proud of was the artificial gravity field. He worked out an amazing way of generating gravity with relatively small amounts of power. Basically, he realized that if you generate a little gravity, you could use gravity mirrors to bend it back around so that it comes up again from the floor. You do lose some of the gravity’s energy in the process, but not much.

In any case, bending the gravity around and reusing it nearly doubles the amount of gravity while using only a relatively small increase in power. Bending it around again makes the same thing happen again. With the right amount of bending, you can create a gravity field that people are perfectly comfortable living in.

Hubert felt the idea was quite tricky. I agree.

Interstellar Hypergates 

Even with the colonization of the Solar system, the population problem on Earth persisted. In fact, the Solar system itself became quite crowded. As it did, people started building biodomes to live in. That helped for a while, but biodomes were so expensive that not many people could afford to live in them.

Hubert Einstein’s most amazing ideas had to do with artificially creating wormholes. As Jeff explained when they were leaving Earth, wormholes are like tunnels through space. Normally, nothing travels faster than light. Put another way, light is the fastest thing in the universe. That makes the speed of light a kind of cosmic speed limit. At the speed of light, it takes four years to get to the nearest star outside our Solar system and decades to get to the New York system. Wormholes provide a shortcut that gets us to other stars much faster.

It’s true that scientists knew about the possibility of wormholes for centuries, but Hubert Einstein was the first person to figure out how to actually make a wormhole. Not only that, his theories said that you could aim the wormhole you make so that you could go virtually anywhere you wanted in the galaxy. That’s the basic idea behind the hypergates.

The first hypergate was built more than forty years after gravity mirrors were invented, in the year 2375. Unfortunately, it was built in orbit around Mars, and it caused a major marsquake as soon as it was turned on. The gate’s builders quickly realized that they could not operate a hypergate near anything that had a large gravity field, such as planets, moons, and the Solar system itself. They moved the gate so far out of the Solar system that it takes light from the Sun four days to get there. By comparison, the Sun’s light takes about 8 minutes to get to the Earth (that’s a distance of 93 million miles!).

As you might expect, there are limitations on the use of hypergates. It takes huge amounts of power to create a wormhole. The longer the hypergate’s wormhole is, the more power is required to create it. As a result, the longest wormholes that hypergates produce in Jeff Bowman’s time is 300 light years.

When this story starts, there are five hypergates orbiting the Solar system. However, seven more were under construction or planned. By the time this story ends, there are nine hypergates in operation and three left to be completed. But of course, Jeff doesn’t know that because he’s lost somewhere in the galaxy.

Jeff Bowman's World
Jeff Bowman was born in the year 2701. By Jeff’s time, hypergates were built in several of the more populated star systems, and many planets outside of the Solar system were already colonized. There were about 48 billion people living in the Solar system, and about 10 billion spread through hundreds of star systems. Known human space was roughly the shape of a sphere with Earth at the center. It was ruled by a single government called the Federated Alliance. The planets on the edge of the Alliance were called the Border Worlds. Just outside the Alliance were inhabited planets there were not yet part of the Alliance. These were the Edge Worlds. Beyond that, in mostly unknown space, were the Frontier Worlds.

All of the countries of the Earth were members of the Federated Alliance. Most of the planets of the Solar system had become independent nations and then joined the Alliance after it was formed. Because of an Alliance law providing equal access for every country, all of the countries of the Earth had colonies in outside the Solar system by 2701. Larger and wealthier countries had more colonies and controlled a greater number of star systems.

According to Alliance tradition, the star systems were usually named after a state, province, or prefecture of the country that owned them. The individual star systems did not have the same name as their stars. For example, the name of the stars in the New York system are Capella A and Capella B. But the name of the system was taken from the name of New York State in the United States. Sometimes this naming tradition was not followed, particularly in the Border Worlds.

The Alliance gave names to the star systems outside its boundaries using the names of the stars. These were often the names of Greek, Sanskrit, or Chinese characters. So the Alliance name for the star systems tended to be things like Gamma Epsilon 21. Gamma and epsilon are letters in the Greek alphabet. The star is called Gamma Epsilon 21 because it was the 21st star discovered in the Gamma Epsilon nebula (a nebula is a cluster of stars that orbit the galactic center together).

I already mentioned that Jeff’s family leaves Earth just at the beginning of the Great Departure. When this massive migration ends, the Earth’s population will drop to just 1.5 billion people.

Oh wait. I’m getting ahead of myself again. Back to Jeff and his world.

In Jeff’s time, the Earth’s population has grown to 18 billion. Another 3 billion live in an artificial ring of biodomes that orbits the Earth. There are 2 billion living on the Moon, 9 billion people on Mars, 6 billion living on Venus, and so on. Almost everywhere in the Solar system that people can live is crowded as it can be.

When Jeff’s family leaves Earth, there is lots of opportunity in the colonies and people there tend to live much better than those on Earth. New planets are being discovered faster than people can colonize them. But in all the hundreds of planets that have been settled, no other intelligent life forms have been found—until Jeff arrives on the scene.

One thing that’s significant about Jeff’s world is the effect of population pressures. The growing population in the centuries before the Great Departure led to many efforts to limit the birth of more people. As Kent Bowman reminds Jeff, it’s against the law for anyone under 16 to date. Even holding hands before age 16 can get kids into trouble. These kinds of laws were easy for politicians to pass because kids under 16 don’t vote.

Both boys and girls were discouraged from wearing revealing clothing. In fact, stores won’t sell two-piece bathing suits to girls under 16. Even boy’s swimsuits look like a combination of shorts and tank top. Unlike our time, boys are never allowed to walk around in public without a shirt on. You have to be an adult before you can do something like that.

Recall also that Kent Bowman mentions the Reproductive Allowance given to each adult. Each adult has a Reproductive Allowance of one child. So a married couple together has a Reproductive Allowance of two children. Having more children is against the law.

It is strictly against the law to have children outside of marriage. In our time, it would be almost impossible to pass or enforce such a law. Many people would say that such things are none of the government’s business. We see it as almost totalitarian interference with our basic rights. However, Jeff’s time is very different from ours. These extreme laws are seen as necessary for human survival, in spite of their more sinister implications.

The Reproductive Allowance laws were passed just five years before this story takes place. Although these laws seem extreme to us, the people of that time felt they were necessary to stabilize the world’s population. We may or may not agree with their solutions to the problem, but that’s what they chose to do.

When the Great Departure neared its peak, the Reproductive Allowance laws were largely ignored. Eventually, they were repealed completely.

One of the things that started the Great Departure was the decrease of jobs on Earth. As robots became more able to handle complex jobs, there were fewer jobs for people. Because most people who left Earth had lost their jobs to robots, there was a strong hatred of them in throughout the colonies. To protect their citizens’ jobs, many planets had laws against all but the dumbest robots. On Earth and throughout the Solar system, the use of robots was popular, especially among the rich.

How Do I Know So Much About the Future?
Well … um … I made it all up. That’s it. It’s all just a story. And any talk of me ever time traveling, either in the past, present, or future is just crazy talk. I have not ever in the future traveled into the past. Nor have I ever in the past traveled into the future. Or the present. I have never even been to the present.

Oh wait, that’s where I am now. But I’m not anywhere or anywhen else, except in the past and future as a result of naturally being there. Did that make sense?

In any case, I completely deny ever having been to the future in the past. I deny it because it is clearly impossible, in spite of the fact that Hubert Einstein’s theories say it can be done. Because Hubert Einstein is completely imaginary. That’s the ticket. I made him up. So time travel is completely impossible.

And if, at some unspecified time in the distant future, a large corporation builds a super-luxury spaceliner called the Gigantic, I will never ever have been anywhere near it because time travel is completely impossible. Any if, by chance, someone were seen sneaking onto the bridge of this super-luxury spaceliner called the Gigantic that highly resembles me, it’s just coincidence because I’ve never been to the future because time travel is impossible. And if that person who happened to sneak on the bridge of the super-luxury spaceliner happened to touch some controls that he shouldn’t and the super-luxury spaceliner happened to disappear completely, it would still have nothing to do with me because I’ve never been to the future because time travel is, as I mentioned, impossible. And the disappearance of that super-luxury spaceliner called the Gigantic would definitely have nothing to do with whatever hit the Earth 65 million years ago and killed all the dinosaurs. And the pictures circulating of me eating barbequed brontosaurus burgers are completely fake. Absolutely not real. I wasn’t there, no one saw me, no one can prove a thing.