Negative Energy

The Solar Forest

Matt passed through the door of the examination room and followed the hallway to a landing pad with transport pods lined up in a row. Large enough to fit one person, the pods were round and clear as blown glass. Four rotors sprouted from the top of a cradle arm that was attached in back to a charging rod. A clear door slid open in the side of the nearest pod. Inside was a seat and backrest made of the same transparent material. When Matt sat down, it conformed comfortably to his body.

"What now?" he said aloud, then felt awkward for doing so. The answer was obvious. The pod would detach from its charging rod, the rotors would whir into motion, and it would lift off. And that's exactly what happened.

Where am I being taken? Once more, the answer revealed itself at the speed of curiosity. This, he realized, was what it meant to quest. It was like having a search engine in your head, only you didn't have to articulate the question. You just opened your mind and let the knowledge flow in as naturally as breathing.

The pod was fast approaching the glass gridwork ceiling of the rebodification center. Just when a collision seemed imminent, a portal irised open to the sound of orchestral fanfare. Harsh sunlight blinded him, but his eyes adjusted in an instant. The music, which he found loud and over-dramatic, subsided pleasantly into the background. Matt felt the onset of queasiness as the crescent-shaped building dropped away beneath his feet. Then the floor turned opaque, and the feeling passed.

Although he was not far from the Dallas suburb where he had lived for the last twenty years, the scene could not have looked more foreign. The sky was hazy and urine-colored, owing to a fine layer of mesospheric dust left over from the Fever Decade. Lightning crackled in the distance despite the absence of clouds. The temperature outside was a scorching 103, and it was only March. Gone were the trendy office parks and brick and shingle suburbs of his day. In their place, city-sized geometries rose from a forest as black as freshly poured asphalt. Clusters of skyscrapers could be seen in the distance toward downtown. No longer a sprawling metropolis, each structure was a self-contained habitat, or arcology. The contrast of the gem-like arcologies against the black forest under the urine sky created a visual dissonance, as if the scene had been processed through an inversion filter. A bolt of lightning struck nearby, startling him.

Not every arcology appeared as pristine as a gemstone. A terraced pyramid had one of its sides blasted away, exposing a charred and twisted interior. When he wondered what had happened to it, there was no flash of insight. Apparently, not everything was questable.

A gust of wind buffeted the pod and sent a shimmering ripple through the forest. Its blackness was no optical trick. The leaves were biological solar panels. They were black because, unlike natural green leaves, they absorbed the full spectrum of visible light. A portion of the energy went to growth and repair while the remainder fed into an electric grid. The branches could also harvest wind energy and even the vibrations produced by rain, which was infrequent but tempestuous.

Stretching to the horizon, the solar forest was an impressive sight, but Matt couldn't help feeling that there was something disconcerting about it. North Texas was a pretty barren place to begin with. Still, there should have been prairies, scrub trees, and, at this time of year, lots of postcard-worthy wildflowers. Where had they all gone?

Extinct. Or as good as. Over ninety-five percent of species now existed only as data in a gene bank. While global warming had already been well under way in Matt's time, the Fever Decade took it to an apocalyptic level. Global temperatures spiked eleven degrees Fahrenheit. The weather went haywire. Ice sheets melted away like warm frosting, raising sea levels and inundating coastlines. Desertification consumed the world's bread baskets. A third of the world's population was left homeless, destitute, and hungry.

It looked like the writing was on the wall for humankind. Then came the Big Fix, a bona fide technological miracle made possible through human-level AI. There was no global super-mind or master plan. Rather, countless smart systems worked out local solutions to vexing problems such as refugee resettlement, pollution, food and fuel shortages, clean water, and sanitation. Most of the solutions were not new but had previously bogged down in political in-fighting or just lacked enthusiasm and funding. The Fever Decade created an existential crisis that broke down barriers. With humanity's survival on the line, no plan was too bold or too big.

The plans were bold indeed. Refugees were placed in a voluntary dream-state until they could be permanently resettled. Women were sterilized. Children were conceived by algorithm and parented by lottery. Food staples shifted from grains and poultry to hydroponic kelp and protein cultures. Submerged cities were refitted for aquatic habitation, and suburbs were covered over and turned into self-sufficient arcologies. Forests were converted into energy factories.

Matt wasn't sure how to feel about the decades of history streaming into his head. It was disheartening that governments had time and again failed to heed the warnings of scientists. Yet mankind and his AI angels had rebounded with extraordinary ingenuity and resilience. Global warming had done its worst, but the human race had emerged on the other side. Or had it? People lived on Earth the way they might one day inhabit the Moon or Mars, sheltering inside glass enclosures.

The pod approached a large arcology with a pinwheel base and a spiny dome sitting at its center like a giant sea urchin. Matt felt his anticipation rising as he entered a portal in one of the pinwheel arms. Having left the rebodification center in haste, it was his first good look at the inside of an arcology. In its own way, it was even stranger than the world outside. Massive structures with seamless, semi-metallic surfaces curved and warped around each other like stretched bubblegum. They took on a variety of waveforms: sails, whale flukes, and rippling curtains, some the size of entire city blocks. One building resembled a roller coaster, another a vertical stack of golf courses. There wasn't one ground level but multiple, interleaved spans and terraces. Without familiar reference points like roads and windows, Matt found it difficult to judge scale, and his perspective flipped between the gargantuan and the microscopic. One moment he pictured himself soaring hawk-like among wind-carved glaciers, and the next as a molecule drifting through alien bone marrow.

There was no traffic, and Matt only saw a few other bubble pods whisking about. Upon deeper thought, that wasn't surprising. Congestion, like the pollution it produced, had been solved for. The pod approached a docking cluster resembling a hornet's nest and backed into an empty cavity. The door slid open, and Matt got out and entered the building. Somehow, he already knew where he was supposed to go.