BUBBLENEST Chapter 1 of a Science Fiction Novel [ other chapters via the tag eggie ]

BUBBLE NEST

CHAPTER ONE
PRELUDE

Dawn broke gently, but brilliantly. In minutes the dazzling light poured through the high windows of Piers’ loft, to bathe his still sleeping form. His eyelids were no match for the cascade of light, and reluctantly he scrunched his eyes, and then still sleepy, but somehow already heartened by the sun’s promise of a glorious day, he rolled on to his side to avoid the full enthusiasm of the deluge of light.
The loft was his dearest possession, indeed the only one of any real value. It had been left to him by his parents. It was at the top of an ancient (but now reinforced) low-rise warehouse that had been converted to residential accommodation in the early days of the Crush seventy years ago. That had been when the population explosion had really made everyone, not just the savvy few, sit up and take notice. The world population had reached 22 billion and there was nothing like enough living space, in fact not enough of anything. People were dying like flies from starvation, disease from overloaded sewer systems, and the growing numbers of homeless who used the streets as public toilets, very public toilets. Not only that, but this was aggravated by the growing effects of the Warming, and population was still growing. It took extreme measures to check population growth and to stabilise it at 22 billion. It had been stable now for better than half a century, but it had come at a great price. Virtually every country in the world had cooperated to enforce draconian measures to halt the hitherto almost uncontrolled breeding. Human rights had gone by the board. Mass sterilisations had become the rule, reversable only in the developed countries. Still even in these there had been universal rioting, which played nicely into the hands of the authorities who quickly instituted martial law, and their extermination programs right there on the streets in the name of crowd control. Had it not been for the advances in science and technology, the damage already done by exponential human growth would undoubtedly have brought us down, would have ended civilisation, and sooner rather than later. It had been a close thing, but the human race had recovered albeit with scars and deep trauma. Most people were superficially optimistic about the future because we had come out of the crisis in many ways richer and stronger. However, everybody who had not buried their heads in the sand of wilful ignorance knew perfectly well we were all still balanced on a knife edge. Annihilation was no longer certain, but it was still a significant possibility. After all, just how long could the world support a population load which was still more than four times the viable maximum?

One of the loft’s advantages was that it was close enough to the sea to provide good views, and still be far enough away to be more or less safe from the storm surges and such, that put the closer buildings and their residents in constant jeopardy. The miracle was that the huge park between Piers’s building and the shore had somehow survived the post-Crush development boom, when kilometre-high residblocks had sprung up like a plague of etiolated mushrooms. At the time, there is no doubt that the city fathers had in corrupt sentimentality hoarded their park like a miser’s treasure, but future generations of this suburb constantly blessed them for the inherited bounty, whilst it goes without saying they were roundly and rightly cursed in their own day for the same deed of deprivation.

But the superb view was not the only good thing that proximity to the sea bestowed on Piers. It also provided him with access to one of his favoured pastimes, or more accurately two such leisure activities. The ostensible one of the pair was swimming, for the sea was now pristine – pristine, but changed and more treacherous than ever. You could, since the clean-up-or-perish laws of the post-Crush years, delight in pure water and pure air, enjoy the best sea bathing and diving in living memory. Of course, it was very necessary to pay careful attention to storm and surge forecasts, and to swim with a suitably waterproofed mophone to pick up emergency broadcasts, but that was a small price to pay for the delights the seashore provided.
The other less obvious advantage, was that for Piers the shore was one of the best places for hitting on girls. Or for being hit upon by girls, if he were patient enough, because surely if he didn’t make a move, then the girls were bound to. Now that genetic medicine kept everybody young-looking, healthy and basically attractive, and universally acceptable genemod eugenics was the cream on the cake that made them not only attractive, but actually beautiful (not to mention more intelligent, athletic and emotionally stable), there was a banquet of flesh everywhere. There was a feast for everyone be they male or female, and the chase was open and enthusiastic with few rules other than good manners and consideration. This new openness was probably mostly due to three factors; the first being universal reliable mandatory contraception (reversable temporarily only when a couple obtained the rare privilege of a breeding licence for a single child).
The second was the eradication of all of the sexually transmitted diseases. So complete had been the eradication, that now there was no actual term for such diseases, be it social disease, venereal disease, sexually transmitted disease, or whatever. These and half a dozen similar synonyms would only have been known to pedants interested in historical medicine or such.
The third was the eradication of what Piers saw as a still worse plague – religion. To be more exact, religion had not actually been eradicated, but rather changed to such an extent that that superstitious practice, as many called it, could now no longer be considered malign, but rather an innocuous affectation of many nostalgic for the past.

Maybe no other generation had had it so good, as far as the eternal dance of the sexes went, but the new conditions made things more difficult in some ways. Basically, no matter that the hormone-saturated young will claim in their boasting, sex is about more than mere lust, which is merely a means to an end. In these times lust is easily satisfied, but the real but unacknowledged game is choosing the optimal mate and companion. Everyone at some level wanted more than just another beautiful body to copulate with. What they wanted was what to their eyes was a beautiful mind, personality, and nature to spend time with at least, but probably to spend a lot of time with, perhaps even a lifetime, and maybe have a child with.
Do you see their dilemma? Everyone is almost equally beautiful, so how do they find those other now less obvious characteristics? Well, not only is everyone now more physically attractive, and genetically near perfect, albeit in great variety, but people are universally well behaved, that is civilised. And that is not just because people are better human beings. Just as many of the apples in the current barrel are as rotten, or in various stages of rot, as they always were. One of the subsidiary problems being that now, truly bad people (remember the two percent of psychopaths just for a start) must behave well, even if they don’t want to, since the penalties if they don’t are just too great. Well nobody wants to consort or romp with a sociopath or psycho, but how do you spot them? And worse yet how do you spot that angelic nature hidden amongst all that angelic behaviour. Or for that matter the soul with a spark that matches or complements your own? Or that perhaps unique spectrum of intelligence which your intellect longs for, so that you may fulfil each other in that respect. Ah, there’s the rub, or rather the whole bunch of rubs!
Well, it’s not that difficult, but it certainly takes effort. Just as always, if the chase is worthwhile, then so is the necessary effort. The one consolation is that the consolation prizes are always generously available. Nowadays there’s an awful lot of consoling. The solution is to get close enough to one’s quarry to pay attention to non-verbal clues and behaviour, at that deep level that even a gifted actor can’t fake. So everyone consciously or subconsciously develops these skills of reading the non-verbal. But it doesn’t come easily. It takes time and diligence, so the older you are (as long as you’re still young, and youth lasts better than a century now that life expectancy is currently about 150) the better you are at the game, and the greater are your rewards. So age, even though it’s hard to recognise, is almost universally respected. The old have good judgement, and now that they have excellent physical and psychological health, they no longer burn out or become saturated and very seldom even jaded.
You notice I stated “almost universally respected” – so who are the exceptions in this respecting of the aged? They are the psychopaths and their ilk. An oldster spots these masters and mistresses of deception, these prodigies of camouflage, more easily than anyone. If you’re a psycho or such, maybe your best bet is to consort only with others of your ilk – but of course these flawed beings want victims not companions. The garden is still full of snakes.

Some of Piers’s friends started their day with exercise or meditation, but his own priority was always breakfast. However, since the day looked so promising he decided that checking it out was number one on his list. Yesterday had been warm and muggy, today was sunny with only a few wisps of unthreatening white cloud, but that was no guarantee that it would not be a bitterly cold day. Now that the weather had become so chaotic, only the experts, acting very locally and not just over vast areas, had any hope of making a reasonable forecast. Inside the loft as always the temperature and humidity were optimised – an eternal warm spring. He checked his weather dials. The exterior temperature was already 26 celsius, so a hottish day was likely, humidity was less than yesterday at the same time, so it would be comfortable enough, and as for barometric pressure, that could be ignored. The days when an amateur would dare rely on his barometer for any sort of prediction were long gone.

So Piers made straight to the commpanel. “Oopeekew,” he said to alert the panel, “weather, local, home, forecast.” He read the resulting display without even thinking consciously of what he was doing, cuing it for detail, as he wanted it. Weatherwise, locally it promised to be perfect – not that he would dare venture out without his mophone for ermergency warnings; the predictability went only so far; a flash event was an ever-present threat.
“Oopeekew, sea, coastal, local, home, forecast,” he instructed. The marine info he wanted appeared instantly and was equally promising. This could be the perfect day for a swim. But -- first breakfast.

He had forgotten, as was often the case, to mix fastgrains and seeds with water the previous evening so that they might germinate overnight and yield a highly nutritious, filling and tasty breakfast. Well, nothing for it, he would have raw fruit, just about as good and almost as easy. No one had eaten animal products during his time of course, but his grans often reminisced about the old days when that had been the norm. In those days it was debatable just how healthy vegetarianism especially veganism had been. Even if healthy, one had required a great deal of knowledge and even more trouble not to suffer nutritionally, although the omnivores were generally even worse off, since in those days most people ignored nutritional advice and capito retailers advertised misinformation for the sake of profits.
Now, of course, genemod, had provided a bewildering variety of fresh vegetables with all nutrients readily available, some in the exact amounts needed, so that for hypothetical lazy persons with absolutely no gourmet bones in their unimaginative bodies, it would have been possible to subsist in perfect health by eating only one of several fruits, or vegetables during their whole adult lives.
Piers quickly selected a wide variety of small to medium sized fruits, knowing the right mix for his personal tastes from long experience. By not eating the larger ones, he could enjoy a greater variety. None of them would need to be peeled, washed or to have stones or pips extracted. Some indeed had stones or pips, but they were soft and pleasant tasting, as were the skins. He didn’t bother to dress, public as well as private nudity being acceptable, if rather monotonous, in most parts of the world. With a small bowl of fruits in his left hand, he made his way to the window wall that led to his large balcony patio and garden. He didn’t see any need to open the wall fully and exited through the smaller side panel to enjoy his meal in his favourite part of his home. He had eaten these fruits or similar ones most of his life, but he savoured each one, each day, as if it were the first time. He might not do as much meditation as his more dedicated acquaintances recommended, but he had learnt enough to treat much of everyday life, especially eating, as an almost meditative experience. For example, he preferred to eat with the minimum of conversation, or distractions such as info programs or music.
To his surprise, it was the fruit itself that distracted him -- he had bitten into a large hard fruit stone. It was his lucky day. Viable seeds were rarities in the genemod fruits, but the bioethicists insisted that a certain small proportion, around one percent, usually, have inedible seeds so that the plant unaided, would still be able to propagate itself. He placed the seed on a ledge amongst some flowering semi-succulents. When he had time, he’d plant it and grow it until he made the decision whether he’d find space for the plant in his already rather crowded personal jungle, or give it to a fellow enthusiast as a present.
He took a moment to enjoy the huge crimson blossoms of his passion vines. They flowered virtually throughout the year, and an additional advantage of the genemodding was that the fruits as well as being ornamental were edible, which apparently hadn’t been the case with the unmodified ornamentals from which these had been developed. Granfa said they tasted nothing like real passion fruit, and he missed the mass of small seeds in the pulp of the passionfruit he rememembered from his boyhood, but when pushed he admitted that it was just nostalgia, and that he enjoyed these more. Those had been the days before there was much genemod at all, and what there was was primitive and rightly viewed with suspicion by a nervous public. Most of it had been irresponsible and motivated by the profit rather than the benefit of mankind. In fact genemod could well have been stillborn and become just an historical curiosity had it not been for the twin effects of the Crush and the Warming. Without genemod humanity’s teeming billions could not have been fed. But new and better food plants were not enough, it had also been necessary to modify the plants for greater tolerance of the extreme conditions, such as unpredictable spasmodic bursts of intense UV solar radiation getting through the ozone shield, frequent devastating winds, and extreme sudden temperature variations. Of course virtually no plants were utterly impervious to such conditions even now, but the new genemods had stronger more robust stems, had the ability to recover more quickly and attempt to fruit again.
This same robustness and hardiness had also been imparted to the modern generation of ornamentals such as Piers’s beloved red passion vines. But as much as he loved his collection and for that matter, the ornamentals in the park below, as a plant-lover he was grateful that the old stock of plants and been preserved widely in protected enclosures all over the world. Wisdom dictated that the genetic resources of the planet be preserved.
Resting his hands on the balcony wall, munching on the rest of the fruit, he surveyed the park beneath and the sea beyond it. It was idyllic.

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