DFrank

What If?

Congress cuts taxes in good times to stimulate the economy.

Congress cuts taxes in bad times to stimulate the economy.

Neither worked. Debt load increased.

Rich richer, poor poorer.

The US decides to enter the 3000-year-old war in the Middle East in the name of democracy. In this case to preserve their democratic right to the ocean of oil under these countries.

They kill 40,000 Iraqis by their account. 140,000 Iraqis by the Iraqi count. 40,000 families (by US count) now hate the USA.

In retaliation for the Iraqi invasion, 15 Saudi Arabian citizens, 2 from UAE, 1 Egyptian and 1 Lebanese, bring down the World Trade Center.  In retaliation for the World Trade Center, US invades Afghanistan.

US elects President who threatens to revoke Chinese access to US market. He doesn’t.

Military spending now larger than social assistance to citizens.

Congress reduces social assistance programs and further cuts taxes on rich.

National health status rated at 53rd in the world.  Down from 21st at turn of century.

The US then elects President who says he wants free trade but instead revokes Chinese access to the US market and imposes heavy tariffs on Chinese products.

The Chinese – the second largest owner of US bonds – declined to purchase more and begin liquidating.

Japan – the third largest owner of US bonds evaluates future and decline further US bonds. Japan begins liquidating.

US bond market destabilized.

US seniors, the largest holder of bonds through their retirement plans, now hold worthless paper.

US Economy collapses.

China assumes world leadership.

All 38 countries hosting US military bases suggest they leave. The US withdraws. Drastically cut military as they can’t meet payroll.

In a surprise vote, Hawaii secedes from the union. Immediately applies to Transpacific Trade Union for economic ties.

All countries with Pacific coastline, with the exception of US, are now members of Transpacific Trading Partnership. China is the coordinating chair.

The US threatens both Mexico and Canada with trade embargoes if they join.

Both countries point out they’ve been members since it was founded in late 20–teens. Both countries also point out it was the USA that withdrew from trade partnerships with NAFTA that encouraged Pacific trade as well as trade with world’s largest trading block, the E.U.

When the President killed the North American free trade deal in response to Canadian pressure, both the Mexicans and Canadians had a plan.

32 states counted both countries as their largest trading partner.  These states took an immediate economic hit as both countries set countervailing tariffs on specific states and products for the maximum political and economic impact. The home state of the President was a prime target.

But, it’s true both countries took a hit with the tariffs on automobiles for a year and their economies stuttered badly in the transition.

The Canadians had a free trade deal with the European Economic Union. They also had a free trade deal with the United Kingdom after Brexit and were part of the TransPacific Free Trade Union. They also joined the Chinese Indo-Pacific Free Trade Union.

The Mexicans stopped purchasing US corn and bought exclusively from South America. They worked towards a South American free trade zone.

The President assumed the auto trade between the two countries would continue because, after all, Canadians needed cars. But the Canadian population decided Korean, Japanese, German and Scandinavian cars were just fine. With the border locked down for auto parts due to US insistence on all manufacturing being done in the U.S., the Mexican and Canadians adjusted. Their parts manufacturers retooled to provide parts for those manufacturers who assembled cars in Canada.

There was also an assumption that fresh fruit and vegetable shipments from Florida and California would continue being shipped to the frozen north. Under the tutelage of the Dutch Flower industry with their mastery of shipping perishable flowers, fresh vegetables quickly began arriving at less expensive prices from Africa and Asia. Canadian greenhouse growers expanded.

China established a moon colony.

The US defaults on debt.

United Nations votes to disband. All countries then form the Assembled Nations headquartered in Switzerland.  The US declines membership invitation.

Assembled Nations votes to decline economic assistance to US.

Hard times.

#####

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The coffee shop was a small one but the storefront was all glass allowing passers-by to see the gleaming coffee urns and espresso machines ranged along the back wall. It only had 4 tables inside and 2 outside but the lineup seldom went under 7 people from 5am when it opened to 8pm when it closed. The owners had small fans blowing the addictive fragrance out onto the street whenever a sensor alerted the system to a person walking by. If they were coffee drinkers, this subterfuge seldom failed to bring them into the shop. And once inside, the full, penetrating fragrance of freshly roasted Columbian beans hooked them completely.

Original artwork from the nearby art school hung from shoulder height to the ceiling on the two side walls while the wall behind the counter contained menus and pricing information written large enough that even unchipped eyes would be able to see.  Naturally, the information was also available online for easy access. Smart regulars ordered their drinks to be ready at a preferred time and merely showed up to pickup the cups. Payment was, naturally, full automatic.

Steven Nowicki , one of the lucky ones to get a seat at a shared table (no seat was ever empty for very long) sat drinking his coffee and watching those in the lineup. Nowicki was one of those handsome men who had no trouble attracting women with his blond curly hair, brilliant blue eyes, and a slim body topped off with an air of total trustworthiness.
He stopped looking at those in the lineup. At the moment, everyone in the line was male and their back ends held no allure for him. He focused his eyes on his work pad and the seemingly endless loops and doodles he was unconsciously tracing over and over again.

Nowicki wasn’t using a stylus but rather controlling the line drawing with his eye chips. In this case, he was simply doodling as a way to meditate on a problem without having to engage with it in a conscious way. The lines disappeared on his tablet and he created the word “WHEN” in all capital letters.  He then deleted that and put a large question mark to fill the screen.
He didn’t feel any different this morning than he had last night after he’d injected himself in his lab. Injecting himself was the hard part as he’d never done that before. He’d always had a tech team do injections or implant chips and he’d decided early on in his biological-tech career this was far better than doing surgery on himself. This time it was different.

Over the years he had injected rats, mice, and even goldfish but he’d never stuck a needle into his own arm before. He took four tries to find a vein in his arm and he shivered when he thought of having to stab himself again. He glanced down at the arm even though he knew he wouldn’t see the small puncture marks or bandaids because of the long-sleeved shirt he wore to hide the needle tracks.

A hot flash surged over his entire body without warning. The doodling stopped as he focussed on relaxing. He took two deep, calming breaths trying very hard through the sudden pounding in his inflamed head to focus and remain calm. The heat increased and a nerves-gone-to-sleep, pins and needles moved from his head down to his feet in a wave. Behind the wave, he felt his heart thump faster in his chest. It was a strange sensation as he’d never been an athlete and he imagined this must be how a runner feels after a long sprint. The room spun, he became light-headed and his heart thumped even harder and faster.

A touch of panic threatened to take over his response, and he calmed himself. He focussed his eyes on his surroundings to see the three other people at his table were staring at him. One, a total stranger, asked, “You OK?”

Nowicki took a deep breath, regained a small bit of voluntary chip control, and managed to say, “Yeah, fine. Just had a small moment there after a possible eye chip interface issue with the shop’s server, but it seems like its rebooting now. I should be fine in a few seconds.”  The stranger nodded. This kind of interface issue was less common now but it still hit now and then after a system upgrade.

Over the next twenty minutes, while all three of the men who’d shared his table during the initiation phase left and were replaced by others, Nowicki’s systems slowly rebooted. The pins and needles feeling left his limbs one by one and his heart slowed down to a regular beat. The flushed feeling remained however as his body’s infection defense system wasn’t yet convinced the newcomers were benign.  Nowicki noted the timing and physical effects in his tablet.  He sneezed.

After a few minutes of regular sneezing and a growing sense of fatigue, Nowicki decided he’d take the rest of the day off to allow his body to acclimatize. Still sneezing he walked to his spacious loft apartment, kicked off his shoes and laid down on his black, leather couch. Turned all systems to do-not-disturb and a minute after doing this, he was sound asleep.
The only thing that moved for the next 48 hours was his chest as he breathed deeply and regularly.

One minute he was sound asleep. The next he was fully awake and functioning without his normal wake up period and need for coffee.  He pushed himself up and supported himself on one elbow as he looked around the apartment.  His mind turned to morning coffee and the resulting wave of nausea put him right back on the couch.

He tentatively reached out to his household server. Said, “File structure” out loud and watched as that menu appeared in his eye feed.  Nausea threatened to return. He said, “On the holo.”
The data on his eye chip appeared as a holograph in the middle of the room. As he looked at the holograph, the system reacted to where his eyes focussed to either scroll upwards or down.  This morning, it scrolled downwards to the disc storage system readouts.  “Yes!” he said, punching his arm forward in celebration.  His head swirled, and the nausea threatened to return.
“Relax,” he said out loud. “Just take it easy for a second.” He listened to the sound of his voice and decided it was deeper than it had been…  He wondered how long he’d been out of it, and said “Time/Date.”  He took a startled deep breath when the readout showed he’d been down for two days.

With a wave of his hand, he directed the file structure to scroll downward. His eyes opened as wide as possible with the shock of seeing the size of the new storage system. He took a deep breath as he realized the numbers on that new drive continued to scroll upwards. And not only scrolling upwards but seemingly faster and faster.
“System, how large is this drive right now?” he asked.

A young female voice answered, “New drive currently at 2 Petabytes.”

“Projected size?” he asked.

“Not known but in multiple Yottabyte range,” said the computer’s voice.

“Current state of integration with hard storage systems,” he said.

“Integration with hard systems operational,” said the computer.

“Sheee-it!” he said. “Any complications known?  Any restrictions?”

“None,” said the computer.

“Input or output issues?” he asked.

“Negative,” said the computer.

Nowicki pushed himself up, swiveled his feet off the couch and gingerly put them on the floor. He remained motionless for several minutes as he ran through a checklist of his internal systems himself. Not that he didn’t trust the computer’s analysis, but he wanted that extra assurance. He couldn’t see any issues.

What he didn’t know was that even when he himself was long dead and his story and history forgotten, this would be known as the “Nowicki moment”.  He’d just solved the ultimate storage problem and integrated his personal DNA into a computer storage system. His body contained almost as much storage by itself as the rest of the world’s servers did within their billions of hard drives combined.

He smiled to himself. His dream of hooking up the world had just become possible. Humans would be their own storage systems and slowly but surely the rest of the world’s organisms, from the smallest blade of grass to the largest whale would be incorporated into a worldwide network of DNA information.

He leaned back on the couch, looked around the room, wondered what things he could do with all this storage.  But then he wondered how he could input new things into it and that thought took him to how he could share information… His brain sped up even further as the new storage systems integrated themselves into his existing input and output chips.

“That’s what we need!” he said out loud. “We need to standardize the input/outputs and then we can chat with each other and with whales seamlessly. I wonder what they’ll say when they can chat directly with us? And what will trees tell us?”  He stopped. “And we need faster chips.” The last wasn’t news, everybody always wanted faster chips. “We need them for every species.” He thought for a moment. What we need is a translation program to tie all the different species together.  He smiled at the thought of turning the entire planet into one huge communication system.

This is a game-changer he thought, nothing will ever be the same. He chuckled, and the thoughts poured through him. He paused for a second. Homeland security is going to have a shit fit about this.  Solution. Don’t tell them until I release the software into the system. They won’t be able to stop it or control it after that, he thought.

Nowicki had just made the worldwide net truly worldwide and accessible to everybody and everything on the planet. Homeland Security and the politicians would ensure he’d pay a personal price but the Nowicki Moment would not be stopped.

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1) Do not teleport naked anywhere other than home and then only with caution.

2) Do not teleport unannounced.

3) Do not teleport into anybody’s bathroom.

4) Do not shave any part of your anatomy while teleporting, it will be a mess upon arrival.

5) Do not teleport pets. They can not control their bowels.

6) Do not teleport holding hands (or anything else living)  The results will not be good for one of you.

7) Do not teleport into Security areas unless you intend to remain there.

8) Do not carry batteries or electric sources with you. They will explode.  (Remove batteries from hearing aids and heart pacemakers and leave behind.)

9) Do not attempt to teleport into the past or future. Only part of you will reach these goals.

10) Hold your hands tight to your body and remove all objects from pockets. Understand the system works on your body’s chemical and nerve systems so clothing and foreign objects may or may not travel with you.

11) Be prepared to arrive several inches to one foot above the ground.

12) Do not teleport with a filled glass as the liquid will arrive approximately .5 seconds after you do.

Do you have suggestions for more rules?  Tell me in the comments.

You can read other short stories here as well as right here.

He hesitated rounding the Confederate monument in Forsyth Park, leaned against the freezing iron picket fence in front of the bust of native son, Colonel Barstow. Looked it squarely in the eye. Pulled his pea-jacket collar up to cover the multicolored woolen scarf against a biting wind driving the foreign snow. Turned his back to the man who’d led his great-grandfather to his senseless death. Shoved his bare hands into his coat pockets in a vain attempt to keep them warm.

Every tourist he’d ever known came to this city to avoid this kind of snowstorm and they’d be snuggled deep in guest beds under their down comforters in uninsulated historic homes. Or, maybe they were closing the bars with his friends down on River Street. He stared down the empty, broad live-oak thoroughfare to the most iconic sight in Georgia. [Read more…] about An Urban Fantasy Short Story: Fountain Lady