In writing the conclusion of the Stefan Szekely Trilogy - which began with my medically accurate vampire novel A DRY PATCH OF SKIN, set in 2013-2014 - I had to imagine the future of a vampirian society in 2099. Book 2, SUNRISE, was set in 2027-2028, when the problems of our current time were seeing fruition in a world in chaos.In Book 3, SUNSET (coming in late February), we see order restored but at a heavy price: oppression at home, wars on the frontiers. Imagining the future, whether utopian or dystopian, is always an exercise in cause and effect.
In Book 2, human-led society in the Hungarian Federation made use of the latest technologies. However, in Book 3, the vampire-led society of the Empire of Europa, has railed against modern advancements, decrying much of what we take for granted today and in its monstrous transformation by 2028. By 2099, at the centennial celebration, and the council of governors meeting that follows, we learn what has happened in the interim.
Excerpts from SUNSET,
Book 3 of the Stefan Szekely Trilogy
Case #1: surveillance
[His Holiness speaks:]
“Perhaps you are too young to recall when citizens were monitored at all times, forced to sign their names hourly, compelled to indicate their approval or disapproval on trivial matters by pressing a finger to a painted icon on their monitors. That was not freedom. Fail to sign in and police would hunt them down, examine them for cross-thought or bio malfunction. If found disabled, they would have their amusements suspended. Likewise, if the amusements consumed too much of their nightly tasks, the amusements would be suspended. Yet we learned it was these amusements which compelled many to rise at all upon the dusk. How great the inventions of the past! How the imagination of the Most High corrals us, mends us, makes us into obedient servants despite our best efforts to rebel. How we must free ourselves from the tyranny of technologics! The answer, as we now know, is only in a determined return to the past, to our traditions, to our heritage, to a new society based on the best of the old.”
Case #2: making a world more vampire-friendly
“Every day our factories are pumping out millions of cubic meters of dark matter to feed the Black Storm. We have managed to blot out the sunshine an average of three-hundred-seventeen days each year, days with seventy-five percent of more darkness. As you know, the natural wind pattern continually blows it eastward. Thus we must continually replenish it. The Russians complain instead of welcoming our efforts to contain the sunshine. Look at what we have wrought on our own soil. The empire is now sixty-two percent fallow, a great improvement over the past decade. Some of the bloodlings complain. They beg for plants, for their crops, for pretty flowers to beautify the yards. Yet fruit and vegetables do not satisfy the vampirian palate. You cannot get blood from a turnip.”
Case #3: artificial intelligence, surveillance
“Indeed, I recall the electric days of my youth—when everyone was monitored and conditioned and manipulated into all sorts of behavior not ordered by their own minds. The mindless youth, we called them, assembling in hordes to rain destruction upon whatever target their electric masters deemed worth destroying. A violent age. All of their petty demonstrations arranged locally by electric messaging! Yet we have extinguished the grid and freed the masses. Is that not a worthy goal? Cameras everywhere. Spying on us all. Drones flying the skies, often so thick we could not know exactly which of us they surveilled. People deigned to stay indoors to avoid official cameras—and privately commanded drones, too, snooping into windows, reading over your shoulder from kilometers away!
“Yet even there, in our own homes, we were constantly watched, our choices on the electric venues noted, our searches for information captured and used against us in the political correction courts and re-education camps. They did not know what they had created, nor did they surmise how their lives had become not their own but merely tools in a government toolbox, each of them put to use as needed, when needed, and put aside when no longer needed—given over to pointless games, animations of birds and puppets and pieces of candy, not to mention the shooting galleries and bat games, all to satisfy an abhorrent need for constant stimulation. While I endured thirteen years with only some books.
“That was not living—meaning in the old sense of existing inside a prefabricated society that considered us as bits and bytes in a program designed by ‘artificial intelligence’. Oxymoronic drivel! It was called ‘A.I.’ in those days. Do you understand what I say? The electric boxes we now outlaw were common fodder in those days. Ubiquitous. We used to communicate through those machines. Without a machine we could not communicate. And without a code number, we could not use those machines. Predictably, all our communications were checked and double-checked for correctness and compliance with standard norms, and when out of parameters a friendly drone would knock on your door, zap you to unconsciousness when you opened the door, and off to re-education camp you went.
“No, I mean the term ‘artificial intelligence’—a machine acting like a human brain acts, the machines and the instructions to operate them independent of human thought, in essence a self-operating machine, much like the vehicles designed to carry us about our nightly tasks.
“Yet such automated machinery can also bring about our demise. Hence we outlawed them. All the A.I. machinery. You may not recall that incident—it was famous, notorious as an example—where the English's prime minister sent the image of his sexual organs to the queen through this electric system—quite by accident, he insisted. It was the work of this artificial intelligence, certainly, yet the queen was not amused. That prime minister had to lose his personal parts to make amends. Pity. Yet we see what can be accomplished without our knowledge or our will. Embarrassment is the least of our concerns...."
Indeed, the opportunity to create a new world, regardless of its positive nature or hideous transformation, is one of the reasons I got into this author business. I liked imagining and stepping into a new situation, an escape from the mundane reality of junior high school or, as it is now, from the workplace. And some of us still enjoy playing God - or at least Emperor!
To be continued...
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(C) Copyright 2010-2019 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.
