Aurora(7)
“Whatever. Did she stay here?”
“You call her Caprice because you think she has a ‘Black’ name, so your brain picks Caprice, ’cause you think that sounds more Black, which is actually super racist. Seriously, Aubrey, you gotta work on that. Reflect on your privilege and shit.”
“Me picking a name that sounds ‘more Black’ would not be my privilege; it would be my racism. At least get it straight.”
“So you admit it.”
“You are exhausting, and I don’t like you.”
“Well, that hurts my feelings, because I like you.”
She took a breath and regained equilibrium. “How many pills did you take?”
He thought for a moment. “Four. Two at a time, four hours apart, in strict compliance with the instructions on the label.”
“Incredibly responsible.”
“Thank you. Are you mad because oxy is bad for me, or are you mad because they were your secret stash?”
“Both. They’re terrible for you, and I was saving them.”
“For what?”
“Situations of unmanageable pain.”
He nodded. “Well, I’m in one. They helped me.”
“Helped you with what, may I ask?”
Once again, he pointed a long finger at the TV screen. “We’re all gonna die.”
This time Aubrey turned and looked. It wasn’t cable news Scott was watching; it was network. But it wouldn’t have mattered what station he was on. The news was everywhere, and the headlines and chyrons and scrolling tickers were in a size of typeface generally reserved for the Second Coming.
Aubrey watched, stunned. She couldn’t immediately comprehend what the people on television were saying. This couldn’t be happening. Hadn’t we already gone through everything we possibly could?
Scott leaned over, picked up the prescription bottle, and shook it at her.
“Only eight left. Splitsies?”
3.
Mountain View, California
Thom Banning was on the move. He’d been briefed on the solar situation shortly after arriving at the Vida headquarters, on the periphery of Silicon Valley, and was pleased with how quickly he had adapted, how he had willed his mind into acceptance of this obvious threshold, this signal event in humankind’s technological history. Thom wasn’t just unsurprised by the impending disaster, he wasn’t just prepared for it. The ugly truth, furiously buried by Thom but obvious to anyone who knew him, was that he was looking forward to it.
Like many entrepreneurs, the mental exercise of trying to anticipate the future occupied Thom’s mind twenty-four hours a day. There was little cognitive difference, he liked to assert, between his waking state and his dream state, in that both were dedicated to productive thought on whatever was the task at hand. As a little boy, his family had stopped in Fort Myers, Florida, one sweltering spring vacation and taken a tour of Thomas Edison’s house and laboratory. The pilgrimage was planned largely as a paean to the boy’s budding technical genius, which his parents obsessed over from the time he was old enough to put Snap Circuits together. Edison’s house was a bore to the kids and the lab had seemed dusty and uninteresting, but what had stayed with Thom was the nap cot.
It was there—on a tiny six-foot-by-two-and-a-half-foot plank with a thin straw mattress tucked in a corner of the lab—that Edison had taken his famous restorative naps throughout the day. What dreams must have come from those naps, young Thom Banning thought. Not for the first time, he saw his given name as destiny. He decided two things, then and there: that his nickname would never be spelled without the H, lest anyone miss the obvious and appropriate connection with Edison, and that, when grown, he would never ignore the vital creative powers of his dream life.
He kept both vows. It was, in fact, in a semi-waking state that the idea for his robotics firm, Vida, was born. It’s harder to nap in your twenties, unless you haven’t slept at night, so as a post-graduate Thom would force himself to stay up ’til the morning hours for that very purpose. He wanted to enter his workday sleepy, so that he could drop into a REM state, which he had come to view as the most fertile of all states of human consciousness, at a moment’s notice. Vida began, one drowsy August afternoon, as a rather workaday bit of code Thom had literally dreamed up that would provide simple AI enhancement for auto-assembly robotics. Hardly the stuff of great fortunes, but the idea had the distinct advantage of being able to make money right out of the gate. Profit was built into concept. In the years that followed, Thom’s ideas, and, increasingly, those of the technological wizzes he hired and whose patents he came to dominate, blended unexpectedly with the emerging nanotech industry. Soon Vida penetrated every corner of the medical and surgical fields, and by the end of its first decade, it was almost impossible to have surgery at any major hospital in the developed world without at least one Vida-produced robotic tool poking around in your flesh.
Thom made his first billion just before he turned thirty-three and threw a lavish birthday party in Belize on Christmas Day. That was not the actual day of his birth—he was born on November 4, and the 25th of December already belonged to another famous historical figure—but Thom picked it to celebrate that year because thirty-three happened to be the age at which Christ died. Thom’s intention by this point, stated only to himself, was to live longer and have a greater impact than that guy.