The Future of Humanity - A Novel by @venuspcs -- Chapter 1
Chapter 1: Becoming More Than I Was! - January 25th, 2172
Slowly I rise out of bed, preparing for the glorious celebration of my 200th birthday which is also my 100th year as President. It seemed like any other day as I walked to the screen door and stepped out onto the back porch to watch the sunrise over the Gulf of Mexico. The roar of the waves crashing ashore and the birds chirping in nearby trees brought joy to my heart. Sadly it was not to be enjoyed for long.
Before I even had a chance to sit in my rocking swing I heard a knock on the front door. As I reached for the door knob I heard "Mr. President we have a situation!" and upon opening the door I was surrounded by secret service agents and rushed to a near by car. Where I was rapidly flown to the New White House in Corpus Christi, Texas from my estate on South Padre Island. Yes my car also flies, in case you missed that.
There had been some murmurs and rumors lately of a growing faction of American's who no longer saw me as "human" and wanted me to step down. It had been just a few voices and for the most part had been ignored. Apparently, while at my estate those few voices multiplied exponentially and they chose my birthday to demand my immediate resignation.
To truly understand we need to go back, way way back to the year 2018. I was a 45 year old truck driver working a dead end job. I had managed to save a few hundred thousand dollars and found someone in Texas with all the tools and machines and workspace I needed to try and build one of the many inventions that had been rattling around in my head for decades. So I quit my job, packed my RV and headed to Texas from my then home near Robertsdale, AL. The next day I arrived in Venus, TX where I had lived and worked years before. The guy owned a metal fabrication shop that made stainless steel kitchen equipment but had lost most of his work to Mexico and China and had shut down the business. The shop was all mine to do with as I wished for a 10% stake in anything I developed.
For 6 months I toiled away 24 hours a day in the shop with an hour or two nap here and there. Designing, building, testing and then scraping and starting over. Then I did it. I built a successful Fully Electric Self Powered Generator that produced 10,000 times the power it used. It was the size of a Smart Car, ran on electric DC motors that used about 1kwh of electricity but produced 10mwh of electricity. I immediately applied for a dozen patents and while waiting on them I refined the machine. I had used mostly off the shelf parts in my initial prototype so I set out to have custom parts manufactured by a couple dozen different companies so no one could figure out what I was doing. By the time my patents were granted I was on the 5th generation prototype and had the thing half the size and producing almost 100 megawatt hours of electricity. This thing was going to make me famous and rich and I knew it.
By the time I invented this Generator there was a growing push into alternative energy sources and less and less dependence on Fossil Fuels like Oil and Coal. I still would face an up hill battle trying to get my generator to market as it was going to put many many businesses and people out. For years I fought regulators and politicians trying to bring this magic power machine (as they put it) to market. Finally, in 2020 the State of Texas Supreme Court ruled in my favor and ordered the states regulator agencies to allow the immediate sell, distribution and installation of my technology without and Power Grid connectivity or oversight.
By the end of 2020 I was providing 100% of the power for the State of Texas through my generators. To piss off those who fought me I gave them away and provided FREE ELECTRICITY for life to every person, business, industry, charity, church or home in the state of Texas. Well this made me many many enemies and also the most loved and revered person in Texas history. A holiday was named after me and shortly there after statues went up all over the state in my honor.
By 2022 the Federal Government had granted me full and exclusive rights to sell, distribute and install the Generators anywhere in the 50 US States and it's territories and I had signed contracts with every branch of the Military to equip all US Bases world wide with these generators as well as all air, land and sea vehicles with them as well.
At some point in 2025 I became the world's richest person ever when my net worth exceeded 1.1 Trillion US Dollars and by some twist of fate I had almost single handedly resurrected the US Dollar and made it the most valuable and sought after currency once more.
Riding the back of my success I decided to turn over operations of my now global Colbert Industries and begin a couple new projects. First was to build a massive Private Research and Development center stock full of the latest and greatest minds, technology and equipment. By the end of 2025 it was near completion 100 miles off the coast of South Padre Island, Texas.
As it was nearing completion I bought all of South Padre Island and turned into a large private estate where I would work in private and in peace. By the end of 2026 the R&D center was in full swing with nearly limitless funds and an ever grow list of talented people wanting to join the center. My estate was also complete and I had begun work on my next project.
In the year 2030 I finally succeeded in building Prototype 1 of my IFD (Intrastellar Flying Disk). It was built from a composite metal that took me nearly 3 years to perfect and powered by 5 of my largest generation 10 Generators. It was capable of speeds (inside Earth's Atmosphere) of almost Mach 100 with no sonic boom and was able to fly from Earth to Mars and back in a few hours. It had a Capacity of 100 Tons plus 8 passengers/crew. On the maiden flight I took an entire colony worth of equipment and people to Mars and returned to Earth in 12 hours time.
The Media world wide was calling me "Humanities Salvation" and "The Smartest Man to Ever Live" by the time I returned from that trip. There were ticker tape parades in every major city on Earth in my honor. Only focusing on business I immediately started a new division of Colbert Industries called Colbert Aerospace and began manufacturing IFD V1 ships for anyone with a billion US Dollars each. Yeah I know, even by 2030 standards that was a fuck ton of money but there was nothing else even close to these ships in the pipelines for at least another 30 years so every company on Earth with any aspirations of doing business in of any kind in space started ordering them. As did the majority of the world's governments and militaries. By 2035 Colbert Aerospace had built and sold 10,000 unites at $1,000,000,000 each and most of them also carried an additional $500,000,000 10 year maintenance and support contract.
Unbeknownst to me the R&D Center had been making breakthroughs as well but I had been so focused on the IFD project I hadn't even checked in with them in years. They had been left to their own devices, almost cut off from society but with unlimited money and resources. When I finally visited the center in 2035 they were all giddy to beta test their "Greatest Invention in Humanities History" and wanted me to test it. I was now 63 years old and had been suffering from numerous health problems so when they told me they had developed nanotechnology that could repair any damage to my body as well as cure any known illnesses and diseases I was all to eager to be their ginny pig.
Less than an hour after the injection of Nanites V1.5 I looked and felt 21 again. However, within hours they all shut down and after a few weeks most of the repairs they had made started to break down and I began to rapidly return to my 63 year old broken bodied self. Never being one to give up I joined the R&D team working on the Nanites and provided them with the specifications for the alloy I invented for the IFD's. That combined with a seriously minaturized version of the Generators I had invented did the trick and by Nanite Version 2.1 I was a vibrant, healthy and energetic 21 year old again. This time it stuck.
After two years of careful monitoring and near constant testing and analysis the Nanites were approved for Human Trials so in 2037 10,000 Terminally Ill people were given a small batch of Nanites 2.5 which were programmed to repair all damage then shut down. The idea was to see if the repaired damage would break down again or if it was due to a design flaw in the way the earlier Nanites repaired damages.
Almost immediately all 10,000 patients were younger, healthier and more energetic. All the Nanites had terminated and even after months of observation the repairs held. In 2038 Colbert Medical was granted full regulatory permission to sell and distribute as we saw fit our Nanite Technology, the only proviso was that the had to be a one-time only Nanite. We couldn't have everyone going around fearless knowing that anything they did would be repaired almost instantly. So we decided to package and sell pre-programmed Nanites V3.0 in an Epi-Pen style self injector through pharmacies and grocery stores as an over the counter ONE SHOT FIXES ALL solution. For $19.95 USD you could walk, crawl or be pushed to the register to buy your Nanite-Pen and then walk out as the healthiest most energetic person you have ever been. But by the end of the day the Nanites would shut down and work their way out of your system.
Needless to say this changed the world in both foreseen and unforeseen ways. Within months hackers had figured out how to reprogram the Nanites while they were still in the pen and were selling hacked versions online for upwards of $1 million a dose. By 2040 the population on Earth had nearly doubled from just under 8 trillion to just over 15 trillion and the vast majority of the planet was facing water shortages, food shortages and a plethora of diseases raging through the world.
As a temporary measure Colbert Aerospace, which by this time had a fleet of nearly 1,000 of it's own IFD's ranging from Version 1 to version 5 units, began building massive Colonies on the Moon, Jupiter, several of Saturn's Moons and Mars. Anyone willing to live Off-Earth received Free Passage for their entire Family, Free Health and Medical Care for Life, Free Homes and a good paying job once settled into their new homes. Almost 2 trillion people signed up in the first year.
While Colbert Aerospace was tackling the growing population problem via relocation the R&D Center was rapidly developing new desalination technology, rapid growth crops as well as new building technologies. By 2042, my 70th birthday, we had developed the technology to build and furnish entire skyscrapers 100 stories tall that could house 10,000 families in a single day. Each skyscraper was equipped with multiple micro gardens that were tiered. Each story of the building could grow enough food to sustain the entire population of that story. Each building also had water recyclers, rain water collection and filtration systems as well as a direct connection to a Desalinated Water Supply which was piped in underground from the nearest Ocean Desalination Plant.
By the end of 2042 Earth's population had stabilized at 14 Trillion but the whole Human Population of our solar system had skyrocketed to over 20 trillion across 6 planets or moons and 15 massive space stations around the solar system. However, all fears and concerns over Clean Water, Healthy Food and rampant disease had been eradicated in the entirety of human civilization .
The next 10 years were relatively uneventful with most of my time spent traveling around visiting the every growing (seemed like daily) human colonies, mining outposts, research space stations and space-based manufacturing facilities that were every where you looked in our Solar System. I had tasked the R&D Center with developing a way to reach distant stars in as little as a few weeks and left them to their work.
Then near the end of 2052 I received word that World War III had broken out on Earth with the world's 15 largest corporations and 125 different countries fighting over Earth's dwindling land and resources. I immediately returned to High Earth Orbit and began negotiating a temporary cease fire to get any civilians who wanted to leave out of the numerous war zones that had sprung up. By this point Colbert Industries and it's subsidiary companies controlled almost 50 % of all commerce on Earth and nearly 40% in our Solar System. We were the only large corporation that wasn't fighting with anyone but we were being attacked from all sides and most countries. Upon successful negotiation of a cease fire for 30 days we rapidly began evacuating anyone on Earth to one of our Space Colonies and also removing all our technology and infrastructure from the planet.
During my 10 year travels around the solar system I had secretly built a massive hidden city deep underground on Saturn. Only about a dozen people knew of it's existence and over 30 days of the cease fire we evacuated nearly 10 trillion people with most of them going to Saturn. For 18 years the war raged on Earth and by the time the Corporations made peace there was almost nothing man made left on Earth and vast portions of the planet's land and resources had been turned to ash.
Every single Government on Earth had long since collapsed and most of the corporations had fled the planet during the war. So when I returned to Earth with a few million people in 2070 it was almost like a blank slate for which an artist could build the perfect society. For 18 years I had been managing a 10 Trillion person population in a secret underground city on Saturn so I felt I was up to the challenge of rebuilding a society on Earth. For 2 years 2 million people and I restored the entirety of North, Central and South America to it's pristine (Pre-Human) glory. Any major cities that had remained largely intact during the war where spared and rebuilt and modernized as needed. As we rebuilt cities we scoured the planet looking for any and all humans that survived the war and brought them to one of the new modern cities to live and provided them with whatever they needed.
By 2072, my 100th birthday, there were almost 17 trillion humans that settled in The New America's which was the only part of the planet with Human Inhabitants as we had declared the rest of the planet a Sanctuary and set out to restore it to pre-human plant and animal life habitats. Due to my efforts rebuilding Life on Earth I was elected President of Earth in December 2072 and a new Earth Constitution was drafted by the people of The New America's that gave me complete control of the government, industry, business and military of Earth for as long as I wanted the job.
Sadly after 55 years of the Nanites repairing my body it had become obvious that they could only last so long and do so much before there was nothing left for them to work with. I began to age again and get sick. Thankfully, those who had only used the one-time-fix-all versions didn't seem to be suffering these problems as those nanites shut down and left the body after each repair so each time they got reinjected they also got a new supply of material to do the repairs with.
For a few years we tried to develop new nanites that could repair me, tried to find a way to feed new material to the nanites but nothing worked. Thankfully the R&D Center which had been relocated to Saturn then back to Earth had been working on a myriad of robotic technologies and had perfected most of them. They had near perfect humanoid robots that were almost indistinguishable from a real human being.
So as parts of me began to fail beyond repair they were systematically replaced with robotic parts. But by 2082, 10 years into my Presidency, I was showing the signs of my age and nearly all my body had failed. I was being kept alive by a dozen or so machines and was unable to move more than a few inches. That's when the R&D team came to me and told me that they had developed a radical procedure but that it would save my life and allow me to live a normal life for at least another 100 years.
Without hesitation or question I told them to do it. Three days later I was placed in a medically induced comma and had my cranium, spine and sexual organs all removed in one piece and placed in a fully robotic body equipped with artificial blood and real human skin grown in a lab from stem cells. A week later I awoke into a brand new body and spent a couple days working with engineers while the programmed all the sensors in the new body to receive messages from my brain and work the appropriate mechanical parts of me properly. This was all done in secret while I was on (Vacation) and the media was told when I returned that we had gotten the Nanites working again and they had repaired me. For 80 years no one was the wiser, then one day that all changed.
While giving a live Global Speech a suicide bomber detonated a bomb less than 5 feet away from me. The blast threw me over 200 yards away and ripped virtually all the skin off my 99% metal body. The camera's captured the images of my now naked body and suddenly everyone in the solar system knew I was almost entirely machine now. So by the end of 2162 many people wanted to know if I had been replaced by a robot and if not how much of the Human me was left.
After spending weeks having all the skin grown and grafted back onto my body as well as releasing my entire medical history and scans showing that I still had my human brain, spine and sexual organs the media moved on to other stories and I thought that was the end of the issue.
But slowly over the next 10 years more and more questions festered in people's minds until they began to revolt on my 200th birthday in 2172. Which brings us back to the beginning of the story. I had just arrived at the New White House in Corpus Christi, Texas and been informed of the 500 million protestors that were making their way into the Capital of The New America's to demand my ouster as President of Earth. They seemed determined to have a 100% human leading Humanity.
For most of 2172, at my instruction, the entirety of the government publicly and openly searched for a Human Being that was 100% organic who wanted the job. Guess what, 95% of Humanity had been augmented with some kind of non-organic technology and of the 5% who hadn't almost all of them were under the age of 18. In fact out of nearly 25 trillion humans on Earth only 100,000 were found that were Legal Adults and 100% Human and every single one of them flat ass refused the job.
By the end of 2172 the vast majority of Humanity has accepted me, once again, as their leader and I had worked with Humanity to enact laws so that No Artificial Intelligence (100% Robot) could ever hold any position of power, own any property, have any income or start any kind of family.
Check back often and make sure to follow me @venuspcs for subsequent chapters.