Refraction | Part 1 | Darwin's Steroids
23) Historical Phagophobia
General Wanamaker sat, a plate of exceptionally high quality food on the steel table in front of him, finding himself quite unable to eat. It was neither due to the intense scene of violence he had recently been witness to, (in his long military career he had lunched with corpses more than once), nor to the man across from him. Although it was truly distressing to the General’s gastro-intestinal system to simply be in the presence of Dr. Fook, let alone watch him eat, something else was keeping the General occupied and distracted from the feast that sat cooling and congealing in front of him.
Two generations of babies had been born, grown up, and made new little generations of their own since the official end of hostilities in the largest, most deadly, terrible, destructive war the planet had ever seen. The war had been started not as a means to end but as an end in itself. A method of control, a creator of jingoism, a propaganda machine, a tool against the citizens, a war against enemy unseen, a precursor to the most violent quarter century in human history. It had been started as a way to control vast fortunes in resources, the wrong resources, it turned out. Resources everyone wanted, resources that failed eventually and with them, came the Catastrophe. A world wide drought that had been the elephant in the offices of countless heads of state for too long. A long slow drying out of the planet’s fresh water resources. Loss of Arctic ice, pollution, over use, and general outright waste had claimed almost all the essence that gives us life. First world countries fell to civil war, revolution, invasion, treason secession, and siege; the third world became almost too hellish to imagine, nightmare landscapes of fatal destruction. Populations withered under the effects of bullets, bombs, disease, starvation, dehydration, fire, radiation, nanoweapons, blade, tread, gas, and fist. Death walked the earth with open arms, bringing the human race close to his hollow chest, letting us hear the silence of the end. In the span of a decade more than four billion people perished.
Massive, inexpensive desalinization and purification of marine water through the Breckenridge Process brought hope for salvation. The Breckenridge plants were small, solar, and created and unbelievable volume of fresh water. Upon their completion Breckenridge began informing every government, aid agency, police force, church diocese, and boy scout troop left on the planet as openly and candidly as she could about the construction of the device. She mailed blueprints, she shipped completed devices, she traveled tens of thousands of miles, spending over four years and all of her family’s vast fortune saving lives. More than that, saving life. Seeding hope, creating community, fighting despair. Her work, in effect, saved the human race.
She brought us back from the brink, and she never charged a dime, applied for a patent, or attempted a profit. She made her technology and knowledge available to anyone who would allow her to be heard, any state that would allow her to cross its borders. She found few closed doors. She was the mother of every survivor on the planet, bigger than Jesus. Everyone knew about her, and everyone loved her. She was killed when an improvised explosive device built to repel raiders detonated next to her Jeep outside a small town in Northern California.
Next >
