ennedy leaned forward and placed his elbows on his knees.
K Hands clasped together in front of him, looking down, he closed his eyes and attempted for the first time to express in words the image of the future to which he’d been privy.
“The 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union won’t remove the threat of nuclear weapons, Casey. Russia will continue to exist as a country, and it will retain nuclear devices within its borders. No one will know how many such devices the USSR had scattered around in its satellite states, how many newly formed governments in those 96
states secured those devices, or how many disappeared. We’ll know even less of the whereabouts of nuclear material not yet made into weapons.
“Man will walk upon the surface of the moon in 1969…”
“What you asked for in your speech,” Casey interrupted.
Kennedy opened his eyes and looked up. “Yes,” he said. “But I can’t take credit. We were already headed there. I just focused attention, funding. It will be a great day for America. The world. I neither knew nor cared, back when I made that challenge, what the downstream results would be.”
“Come on,” Casey scoffed, “you’re not about to tell me putting a man on the moon will lead to problems?”
“Indirectly, yes,” Kennedy said. He stood and stretched his back, then walked around his chair and leaned on the back again.
“The best minds in the nation are hard at work this very minute, designing elegant solutions to the problems involved with a soft landing on the moon. They will succeed, and the technologies spawned by their inventiveness will lead this nation and the world into a technology revolution. The remaining three decades of the twentieth century will see more technological breakthroughs than in all human history before.
“By the beginning of the 21st century we will enjoy the use of instant, worldwide, mass communication. It will sweep the globe in a frenzy, including modernized and backward cultures alike.
Words, thoughts, ideas, will zip round the globe in an instant, from anywhere to anywhere, or to everywhere, if we like. Through devices held, worn, or implanted, humans will enjoy connectivity to a unified collective that offers unfettered access to knowledge, news, education, social connections, commerce, publishing, almost any form of human interaction imaginable.
“So much more will be possible than ever before. That’s why it’s so sad that, with so much to unite us, with so much we could accomplish, our governments, and the cultures that define us, will continue to dwell on our differences. Different races, ethnicities, ideologies, politics, religions, countries, classes, cultures, ways of 97
“High technologies and instant communication will serve everyone equally well; the forces of good and evil alike. Transnational criminal organizations will accumulate enormous wealth and power through drug and military armament smuggling. They will form sub-alliances with hate groups and religious fanatics, melding the motivations of greed, hatred, and power into a relentless force of chaos. Such groups have always existed, but they will become so powerful that even the mightiest armies will be ineffective in stopping them.
“Before the twentieth century expires, anarchists will exploit easily targeted civilian populations across the globe. Bombs will become the weapon of choice, planted, thrown, or strapped to the chest of a zealot. Airliners, airports, busses, trains, events of mass attendance, will all become easy targets. Anarchists will place no value on innocent lives taken in pursuit of radical goals. They will even believe those slaughtered for their cause will receive special recognition in an afterlife. Convincing them otherwise will be impossible.
“There will be no soldiers in uniform committing these heinous acts. There will be no single nation to hold responsible. America, and several other nations, will attempt to fight back, bombing or invading suspected anarchist camps in a hodgepodge of third world nations where the fanatics will hide, train and plot. They will have some success, but they will also kill many innocent civilians by mistake. This will enrage local populations, as well as others who already resented America for throwing its weight around far too liberally for the last half century, making it easier for the anarchists to find sympathizers and supporters. Anarchist actions, and well-intended efforts to stop them, will kill millions, all at the hands of men acting in the name of good.
“Biological weapons will also become part of the threat. The information explosion will enable small groups or even individuals to inflict enormous harm by infecting water supplies, or the air we breathe, with deadly chemicals or mutated disease viruses for which 98
there will be no known antidote or cure.
“As legitimate governments spend more heavily to rebuild infrastructure destroyed by anarchists, and to develop new technologies and methods in attempting to protect its citizens from anarchists, taxation will rise. When it rises to the maximum that working classes are willing to pay, they’ll acquire additional revenue by cutting funding of social programs that help the poor and downtrodden, creating class resentment that rises to the level of war in some nations.
“The very Earth we live on will soon begin to work against our efforts to maintain an orderly civilization. The atmosphere and oceans are already warming through natural processes, but our modern way of life will hasten the advance of climate change. Glacial ice will melt and sea levels will rise. Coastal cities worldwide will flood. Storms and hurricanes will become more severe and more frequent in some areas, while severe droughts will devastate other areas. Conflicts over refugees and resources will become the norm, as the capabilities of the developed world to respond to catastrophic disasters will fall woefully short.
“The fatal mistake will happen around 2050. All organized governments on Earth will agree to a plan to disrupt connectivity for the entire world. After secretly partitioning off a subset of the communication network, the Redoubt, they’ll call it, to allow critical military and banking to continue to function, they’ll switch off the rest of the world. Architects of the plan will believe that, with their communications eliminated, criminal and anarchist organizations will cease to operate effectively, they will be more easily defeated, and the problems plaguing the globe will be reduced by two-thirds. You can probably see many flaws, but it will sound like a good idea, like a lifeline, in fact, to a desperate, dying world order.
“That world order will then realize how badly we underesti-mated our foes. As soon as the com outage begins, key portals of the Redoubt will come under fierce attack from dozens of criminal and anarchist cells, alerted to our plans by spies planted in our ranks.
They will see the event as an opportunity for world domination, by 99
gaining control of the only remaining com network, the Redoubt.
We will not be prepared for it. However, the engineers of the system will be prepared, or at least, they will believe so.
“They will have installed a doomsday defense subroutine, operating at the highest level within the Redoubt. When it recognizes various signs that hostiles have breached the system, it will divert high voltages to a master list of key electronic components in the Redoubt worldwide, destroying it, to deny its use to the enemy. The engineers will plan to use that master list to remove and replace each damaged component, one at a time, once benign governments have retaken the breached locations. They will expect it to take several weeks, but they will believe they will get the system back.
“But the engineers will miscalculate the speed at which we will abandon reason and allow chaos to take hold, when humans are deprived of the connectedness they will have come to depend upon for four or five generations. They will lose electric energy grids, an unintended consequence. They will attempt restoration. A few valiant groups will succeed in reenergizing isolated islands of electrical energy, and even in reanimating a few elements of the Redoubt. Some of them will hang on for several years. But with no connectivity, and no support structure, even they will join the remains of humanity, searching daily for enough to eat, trying not to be eaten. By 2060, the entire world will be dark. I wish I could give you a…”
Kennedy stopped speaking. For the first time since he began speaking, he looked directly at Casey, and he realized he had hit the kid with too much, too fast. Casey’s mouth hung open, an accusing look on his face, and a tear ran down his right cheek.
“We… We have to do something,” Casey stammered, anguish in his voice. “We have to stop it.” He stood and walked toward Kennedy as he spoke. “We can’t let it happen. What can we do? Your legal pads…”
There was a soft knock on the door. Kennedy looked toward it and said, “Yes?”
An agent who had arrived with the president opened the door a few inches. “We have two minutes, Sir.”
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“I’ll be along directly,” Kennedy said.
“Yes, Sir,” the agent said, and closed the door.
“Something I must attend, at 8 PM,” Kennedy told Casey. “I’m sorry if it upset you to hear the things I told you. There wasn’t an easy way to say it. But I want you to know something. The picture I painted just now is the one I saw a month ago, in Dallas. If we do nothing, this future will come. But I know, from things I’ve seen in the pads, the simple fact of my surviving has already changed our future. Subtly, not enough to reverse the result, but it gives me faith we have not yet written our future. We can change it, Casey!
“And there’s something else I haven’t told you. While I was on Elm Street in Dallas, while those images of our future were injected into my head, there was another image. A wonderful image, so beautiful I can’t even… shining emerald cities, air so pure it spar-kled… It, this image, was never fully formed, never fully there. It was just a tantalizing hint, like a carrot on a stick, showing me alternatives to the ugly fate headed for us. I believe we can attain one of those brighter futures. I’m not so naïve as to believe we could ever have a perfect world. We can have a better one. I’m convinced of that. I don’t know how, yet. It’ll take work, but we can do it. We can have one of those shining futures.”
Kennedy asked if Casey could stay in Washington and meet again with Kennedy late the following afternoon, Christmas Eve.
Casey, unable to speak, nodded his head.
“Good. I’ll have the plane stand by. I promise you’ll be on it thirty minutes after we finish. Dallas, or Marshfield?
“Marshfield,” Casey struggled to say.
“That’s best, I think. Families should be together for Christmas.
You have a room here, and there is a car with a driver. They stock new clothing and toiletries too. Take whatever you need.”
The president left, and Casey mourned for all the good people who were unknowingly racing toward their doom, in a future where chaos reigned.
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