The results produced by the early VR systems were almost as crude as the first television displays, yet they were impressive enough to be habit-forming, even addictive. Three-D, wide-angle images could grasp the attention of the subject so completely that their jerky, cartoonlike quality was ignored. As definition and animation steadily improved, the virtual world came closer and closer to the real one, but it could always be distinguished from it as long as it was presented through such clumsy contrivances as head-mounted displays and servo-operated gloves. To make the illusion perfect, and fool the brain completely, it would be necessary to bypass the external sense organs of eyes, ears, and muscles, and to feed information directly into the neural circuits.
The concept of the “dream machine” was at least a hundred years old before developments in brain scanning and nanosurgery made it possible. The first units, like the first computers, were massive racks of equipment occupying whole rooms—and, like computers, they were miniaturized with astonishing speed. However, their application was limited as long as they had to operate through electrodes implanted in the cerebral cortex.
The real breakthrough came when—after a whole generation of medical specialists had declared it impossible—the Brainman was perfected. A memory unit storing terabytes of information was linked by a fiberoptic cable to a snugly fitting skullcap carrying literally billions of atom-size terminals, making painless contact with the skin of the cranium. The Brainman was so invaluable not only for entertainment but for education that within a single generation everyone who could afford it had acquired one—and had accepted baldness as the necessary price.
Though quite transportable, the Brainman was never made truly portable, and for excellent reasons. Anyone who walked around while totally immersed in a virtual world—even in familiar home surroundings—would not survive for long.
Although the Brainman’s potential for vicarious experience—especially erotic, thanks to the swiftly developing technology of hedonics—was recognized at once, its more serious applications were not neglected. Instant knowledge and skills became available through whole libraries of specialized “memory modules” or memnochips. Most appealing of all, however, was the “total diary” which allowed one to store and then relive precious moments of life—and even to re-edit them to bring them closer to the heart’s desire.
Thanks to her background in electronics, the Prophet Fatima Magdelene was the first to recognize the potential of the Brainman for spreading the doctrines of Chrislam. She had, of course, precursors in the Twentieth Century televangelists who had exploited the radio waves and the communications satellites, but the technology she could deploy was infinitely more powerful. Faith had always been more a matter of emotion than intellect; and the Brainman could appeal directly to both.
Sometime during the first decade of the Twenty-first Century, Ruby Goldenberg had made an important convert—one of the extremely wealthy but now burned out (in his fifties) pioneers of the computer revolution. She gave him a new reason to live and a challenge that once again inspired his imagination; on his part, he had the resources—and even more important, the personal contacts—to meet that challenge.
It was a very straightforward project to incorporate the three Testaments of the Latter-Day Koran in electronic form, but that was merely the beginning—Version 1.0 (Public). Next came the interactive edition, intended only for those who had shown a genuine interest in the Faith and wished to proceed to the next step. However, Version 2.0 (Restricted) could be copied so easily that millions of unauthorized modules were soon circulating: which was exactly what the Prophet intended.
Version 3.0 was a different matter; it had copy protection and self-destructed after a single use. Infidels joked that it was classified “most sacred,” and there was endless speculation about its contents. It was known to contain Virtual Reality programs that gave previews of the Chrislamic Paradise—but only from the outside, looking in….
It was rumored—but never confirmed, despite the inevitable “exposés” of disaffected apostates—that there was a “Top Sacred” version, presumably 4.0. This was supposed to operate through advanced Brainman units, and to be “neuorologically encrypted” so that only the individual for which it was designed could receive it. Use by any unauthorized person would result in permanent mental damage—perhaps even insanity.
Whatever technological aids Chrislam employed, the time was ripe for a new religion, embodying the best elements of two ancient ones (with more than a touch of an even older one, Buddhism). Yet the Prophet might never have succeeded without two other factors, wholly beyond her control.
The first was the so-called “Cold Fusion” revolution, which brought about the sudden end of the Fossil Fuel Age and destroyed the economic base of the Muslim world for almost a generation—until Israeli chemists rebuilt it with the slogan “Oil for Food—Not for Fire!”
The second was the steady decline in the moral and intellectual status of Christianity, which had started (though few realized it for centuries) on October 31, 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of All Saints Church. The process was continued by Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Freud, and culminated in the notorious “Dead Seagate” scandal, when the final release of the long-hidden Scrolls revealed that the Jesus of the Gospels was based on three (perhaps four) separate individuals.
But the coup de grace came from the Vatican itself.
17
ENCYCLICAL
“Exactly four centuries ago, in the year 1632, my predecessor, Pope Urban the Eighth, made an appalling blunder. He allowed his friend Galileo to be condemned for teaching what we now know to be a fundamental truth, that the Earth goes around the sun. Though the Church apologized to Galileo in 1992, that dreadful mistake gave a blow to its moral standing from which it never fully recovered.
“Now, alas, the time has come to admit an even more tragic error. Through its stubborn opposition to family planning by artificial means, the Church has wrecked billions of lives—and, ironically, been largely responsible for promoting the sin of abortion among those too poor to support the children they were forced to bring into the world.
“This policy has brought our species to the verge of ruin. Gross overpopulation has stripped Planet Earth of its resources and polluted the entire global environment. By the end of the Twentieth Century everyone realized that—yet nothing was done. Oh, there were conferences and resolutions without number—but little effective action.
“Now a long-hoped-for—and long-feared!—scientific breakthrough threatens to turn a crisis into a catastrophe. Though the whole world applauded when Professors Salman and Bernstein received the Nobel Prize for Medicine last December, how many have stopped to consider the social impact of their work? At my request, the Pontifical Academy of Science has just done so. Its conclusions are unanimous—and inescapable.
“The discovery of superoxide enzymes that can retard the aging process by protecting the body’s DNA has been called a triumph as great as the breaking of the genetic code. Now, it appears, the span of healthy and active human life can be extended by at least fifty years—perhaps much more! We are also told that the treatment will be relatively inexpensive. So whether we like it or not, the future will be a world full of vigorous centenarians.
“My Academy informs me that the SOE treatment will also lengthen the period of human fertility by as much as thirty years. The implications of this are shattering—especially in view of past dismal failures to limit births by appeals for abstinence and the use of so-called ‘natural’ methods….
“For several weeks now, the experts of the World Health Organization have been networking all its members. The goal is to establish the often-discussed but never achieved, except in times of war and plague, zero population growth as quickly—and humanely—as possible. Even that may not be sufficient; we may need negative population growth. For the next few generations the one-child family may have to be the norm.
“The Chur
ch is wise enough not to fight against the inevitable, especially in this radically changed situation. I will shortly be issuing an encyclical that will contain guidance on these matters. It has been drawn up, I might add, after full consultation with my colleagues the Dalai Lama, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi, Imam Mahommud, and the Prophet Fatima Magdelene. They are in complete agreement with me.
“Many of you, I know, will find it hard—even agonizing—to accept that practices the Church once stigmatized as sins must now become duties. On one fundamental point, however, there has been no change in doctrine. Once a fetus is viable, its life is sacred.
“Abortion remains a crime, and will always be so. But now there is no longer any excuse—or any need—for it.
“My blessings to you all, on whatever world you may be listening.”
—JOHN PAUL XXV, EASTER 2032: EARTH-MOON-MARS NEWS NETWORK
18
EXCALIBUR
IT WAS THE LARGEST SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENT EVER MADE, because it embraced the entire Solar System.
EXCALIBUR’s origins went back to the bizarre—indeed, now hardly believable—days of the almost forgotten “cold war,” when two superpowers had confronted each other with nuclear weapons that could destroy the very fabric of civilization, and perhaps even threaten the survival of Mankind as a biological species.
On one side was the entity calling itself the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—which, as later historians were fond of pointing out, might have been a soviet (whatever that meant) but was certainly neither a union, nor socialist, nor a republic. On the other side was the United States of America, named with considerably greater accuracy.
By the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, the two opponents possessed thousands of long-range rockets, each capable of carrying a warhead that could destroy a city. Understandably, attempts were made to find counterweapons that could prevent such missiles from reaching their targets. Prior to the discovery of force fields—more than a hundred years later—no complete defense was possible, even in theory. Nevertheless, frantic efforts were made to design antimissile missiles and laser-equipped orbiting fortresses that could provide at least partial protection.
Looking back on those times, it is difficult to decide whether the scientists who advanced some of these schemes were cynically exploiting the genuine fears of naive politicians, or sincerely believed that their ideas could be turned into practical reality. Those who did not live in the aptly named “century of sorrows” should not judge them too harshly.
Undoubtedly the craziest of all the counterweapons proposed was the X-ray laser. It was theorized that the enormous energy produced by the explosion of a nuclear bomb could be converted into highly directional beams of X-rays so powerful that they could destroy enemy missiles thousands of kilometers away. The EXCALIBUR device (understandably, full details were never published) would have resembled a sea urchin, spines pointing in all directions, with a nuclear bomb at its center. Each spine would, in the microseconds before it evaporated, generate a laser beam—every one aimed at a different missile.
It needs little imagination to see the limitations of such a “single shot” weapon, especially against an enemy who refused to cooperate by launching his missiles in convenient bunches. Nevertheless, the basic theory behind the bomb-powered laser was sound, though the practical difficulties of creating it had been grossly underestimated. In fact, the whole project was abandoned after scores of millions of dollars had been wasted upon it.
Yet not entirely wasted. Almost a century later the concept was revived, again as a defense against missiles, but this time those created by Nature, not by Man.
The Twenty-first-Century EXCALIBUR was designed to produce radio waves, not X-rays, and they were not aimed at specific targets, but the entire celestial sphere. The gigaton bomb—the most powerful ever made, and, most people hoped, the most powerful that ever would be made—was exploded in Earth orbit but on the other side of the sun. That would provide the maximum protection from the tremendous electromagnetic pulse that might otherwise wreck communications and bum out electronic equipment all over the planet.
When the bomb exploded, a thin shell of microwaves—only a few meters thick—expanded across the Solar System at the speed of light. Within minutes, detectors stationed all around the orbit of the Earth started to receive echoes from the sun, Mercury, Venus, the Moon: but no one was interested in these.
For the next two hours, before the radio explosion had swept past Saturn, hundreds of thousands of echoes, becoming fainter and fainter, poured into EXCALIBUR’s data banks. All known satellites, asteroids, and comets were easily detected, and when the analysis was complete, every object more than a meter in diameter inside the orbit of Jupiter had been located. Cataloguing them all, and computing their future movements, would occupy SPACEGUARD’s computers for years.
The first “quick looks,” however, were reassuring. There was nothing that endangered Earth within EXCALIBUR’s range, and humanity relaxed. There were even suggestions that SPACEGUARD should be canceled.
When, many years later, Dr. Angus Millar discovered Kali with his homemade telescope, there was a general outcry to find why the asteroid had been missed. The answer was simple: Kali had then been at the far point of its orbit, beyond the range of even a nuclear-powered radar. EXCALIBUR would certainly have detected it had it been close enough to represent an immediate danger.
But long before that happened, EXCALIBUR had produced an awesome and wholly unexpected result. It had not merely detected a danger: many believed that it had created one, and resurrected an ancient fear.
19
THE UNEXPECTED ANSWER
SETI—THE SEARCH FOR EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE—had been pursued with ever more sensitive equipment, and over a steadily increasing band of frequencies, for more than a century. There had been many false alarms, and the radio-astronomers had recorded a few “possibles” that might have been the genuine article, and not merely random fragments of cosmic noise. Unfortunately, the samples captured had all been too short for even the most ingenious computer analysis to prove that they were of intelligent origin.
All this changed abruptly in 2085. One of the old-time SETI enthusiasts had once said: “When there is a signal, we’ll know for sure it’s the real thing—it won’t be a feeble hiss, almost buried in the noise.” She was right.
The signal was picked up loud and clear during a routine survey by one of the smaller radio telescopes on lunar Farside—still a fairly quiet place despite the local communications traffic. And there could be no doubt of its extra-terrestrial origin. The telescope that received it was pointing directly at Sinus, the most brilliant star in the entire sky.
That was the first surprise: Sinus was some fifty times more brilliant than the sun, and had always seemed a poor candidate for life-bearing planets. The astronomers were still arguing about this when they—and the whole world—received a much bigger shock.
Though, in retrospect, the fact was blindingly obvious, it was almost twenty-four hours before someone pointed out an interesting coincidence.
Sinus was 8.6 light-years away, and Project EXCALIBUR had taken place seventeen years and three months ago. There had just been time for radio waves to travel to Sirius and back. Whoever—or whatever—had received the electromagnetic explosion had wasted no time in returning the call.
As if to clinch matters, the carrier wave from Sirius was on exactly the same frequency as the EXCALIBUR pulse—5400 megahertz. However, there was one major disappointment.
Contrary to all expectation, that 5400 MHz wave was completely unmodulated: there was no trace of a signal.
It was pure noise.
20
THE REBORN
FEW RELIGIONS SURVIVE THE DEATH OF THEIR FOUNDER unscathed. So it was with Chrislam, despite Fatima Magdelene’s efforts at designating a successor.
The first disagreements occurred when her son, Morris Goldenberg, materialized out of nowhere
and attempted to claim his inheritance. He was first denounced as a fraudulent pretender, but when he demanded—and obtained—DNA testing, the Movement had to abandon this line of defense.
He next made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and though he was kept at a safe distance from the Kaaba, he thereafter insisted on calling himself Al Haj. How sincere he was in this—or indeed anything else—was hotly disputed. About his mother’s sincerity there was never any serious doubt, but after his death most people decided that Al Haj Morris Goldenberg was nothing more than a charming and plausible adventurer, making the most of the opportunity Fate had given him. Ironically, he was one of the last known victims of the AIDS virus—a fact from which many discordant conclusions were drawn.
As far as outsiders were concerned, most of the matters of doctrinal dispute that Morris promoted appeared trivial: were prayers at dawn and sunset the minimum requirement; were pilgrimages to Bethlehem and Mecca of equal merit; could the Ramadan fast be cut to a week; was it necessary to give tithe to the “poor,” now that Society as a whole recognized its responsibilities in this matter; how to reconcile Jesus’ order to “drink wine in remembrance of me” with Muslim aversions to alcohol… and so on….
However, after Morris’s death, the disagreements between the various sects were patched up, and for several decades Chrislam showed a fairly united face to the world. At its peak it claimed over a hundred million adherents, and was the fourth most popular religion on Earth, though it made little headway on the Moon and Mars.
The major schism was triggered, very unexpectedly, by the “Voice of Sirius.” An esoteric subsect, much influenced by Sufi doctrine, claimed to have interpreted the enigmatic signal from space by the use of advanced information processing techniques.