XIV. A.D.
AND IT WAS A BRAVE NEW WORLD FOR IT HAD NOT STOOD STILL during his year in the clinic, nor indeed over the prior decade, now a distant blur in his mind, obscured by the mountain of pills that had kept him awake along the endless white-water ride of double-shifts, all fed by the lake of cachaça he had drunk to get him through the shadowy nights, all haunted by the victims of the bloody swathe he had cut through their ranks.
According to what the media had since turned into legend, his father's small startup, Nuronics, had gone on with his mother at its helm to eventually decode the extraterrestrial communiqué that had so enraptured the world when he was a child yet had so deranged his father for the last few years of his life, eventually sending him to an early grave at his own hand.
Nowadays, as far as the media and the masses were concerned, his mother might as well have been the new Messiah. By cracking the communiqué at the beginning of the new century, she had prized open a bottomless treasure chest of ultra-advanced schematics for which she also had the foresight to negotiate the exclusive global licensing rights in the canniest business deal since William Gates III cut his operating system agreement with IBM in the late twentieth century.
Holding back the bulk of the decrypted file from the United League, his mother never divulged more than an 'executive' summary (itself running to over quarter of a million screens) but even with the technical specifics omitted, it was enough to send heads spinning at the Scientific Institute in Paris, bastion to the greatest academic minds on the planet. With the corporation's licensing deal paving its way, Nuronics then took just seven years to become the planet's largest and most powerful corporation, unseating Applebook from its number one spot in both sales and profitability along the way.
His mother had pretty much unlocked the secrets of the universe and, as such, she had been christened by the media as the savior of humanity. If their 21st century forefathers had thought technology was advancing at an exponential rate in their time then they couldn't possibly begin to fathom the quantum leaps made by Nuronics during the first decade of the 22nd century. She had barely begun to scratch the surface of the priceless jewels contained within her alien treasure chest and yet, over the course of those ten short years, she had used her initial findings to completely transform the earth's surface and skies.
Before her decryption, much of the world's population had needed to adopt to a nomadic existence, regularly re-migrating at the whim of the solar winds which dictated the shifts of the atmosphere's vagrant ozone holes, rendering vast swathes of land — including much of North America — barren and barely habitable.
Those people who eventually grew tired of relocating across the planet's surface had chosen to settle in the windowless retirement conurbations springing up around the world, their subterranean roads and public areas covered to protect them from the sun's scorching radiation, creating an artificial cave-like existence, albeit with the luxury of scrubbed air and electrical light.
Curious anomalies had included Patagonia and regions covering a few of the planet's larger cities (most notably Paris and St. Petersburg), which had remained protected by an acceptably constant level of ozone, although a severe lack of local rainfall meant that these areas still depended on a desalinated water supply that was piped from ocean-side plants, making convenient targets for the rebels' repeated attacks. As much of Patagonia's ozone-covered landmass had long-since been requisitioned by the United States of Latin America to support the sprawl of its own defense camps, any claims to a privileged lifestyle were almost exclusively restricted to the military and their families.
But after his mother's discoveries, the world was provided with far greater stability thanks to the 'ZonePatches' constructed by Nuronics and now populating the heavens.
Designed to alien specifications, these expansive micro-thin sheets of carbon-nanotube composite stretched out for tens of thousands of miles like gigantesque umbrellas with hundreds of Nuronics' low-orbit geosynchronous satellites taking up the slack, equidistantly spread around the material's circumference and following the rotation of the planet hundreds of klicks below so as to provide fixed shade in the 'radiation-shadows' cast onto the earth's surface.
It was true that the underside of these alien patches emitted an unnerving Brownian pattern of light—something akin to the rippling reflections from the surface of a swimming pool at night—but this was considered a small price to pay by the dwellers of the city zones; areas that had been made habitable and which quickly grew to stratospheric heights beneath the patches' footprints thanks to Nuronics' patent-protected 'CrystalTecture' technology — yet another jewel from the corporation's alien treasure-chest, this time accelerating the organic cultivation of towering crystalline superstructures from atomically engineered blueprints.
As far as the average zonies were concerned though, they were just grateful that the patches' alien light didn't fry their chromosomes the way that raw sunlight did if you found yourself under a hole for a protracted period.
It was also true that it rained like tracer fire from a plasma-turret most of the time under the new patches but this was considered a blessing and something that—like the strange ripply light—zonies just got used to.
<A bit like living in England before the ozone crisis I should imagine,> his mother observed with a wry smile following her activation ceremony for the first zonepatch which was positioned in geo-static orbit above the abandoned city formally known as New York but re-christened as Dancsville in honor of its savior.
No, the rain and strange lighting were not an issue for most. What was far more important was that sustainable farming and forestry were now possible again around the edges of the zones; something that had been lost to mankind 300 years earlier when the Great Ozone Crisis had first blown up as a result of the industrial CFC abuses that had spread like wildfire in the 21st century from Russia through China and Asia then eventually across Latin America and Africa.
While he had been finishing his campaign and then sleeping obliviously in his coma, Nuronics had gone on to patch many of the world's major cities and so, in recognition of her great achievements and unprecedented contribution to all of humanity, the Nations League had passed an unprecedented Honorary Resolution whereby his mother was elected Governor of Latin America and all of civilization's historical archives were reclassified in relation to the year before her birth-date, or 'Before Dancs', whilst the 'A.D.' suffix was redefined as meaning 'After Dancs'. Accordingly, the world's calendars were then reset to zero from her birth-date so as to mark the new Dancian times for future historians and scholars and to signal to the planet that lives were once more worth living.
In one broad stroke of law it was, the Pope protested, as if Christ and the church had never existed but Governor Dancs nevertheless went on to adopt the latter part of the resolution's wording for Nuronics' new corporate slogan: 'For a Life Worth Living'.
The reality on the ground though was that there was a significant proportion of zonies who were having their lives made hell by the unrelenting acts of aggression and terrorism perpetrated by the rebels after being denied access to the zonepatch technology so had even greater reason to despise the rest of the world, venting all their frustration and rage on the zones springing up in the former capitals of the world; capitals that only reminded the mutes of the countries that had once treated them as lab rats; countries whose former boundaries were now meaningless.
From time to time, the rebels backed by their mutant air-force would even be successful in penetrating the military defenses of a patched capital to drive the zonies out of their homes, forcefully occupying the city until its patch was inevitably relocated by Nuronics to another geostatic orbit to shield whichever zone the Nations League would next elect to reclaim from the sun's radiation. The newly patched city-zone would then become quickly inhabited by migrant zonies who would be left in peace for a while to establish a functioning city and replenish its larders, often to have the whole process repeated if the rebels thought the freshly reclaimed city was a prize worth fighting for.
It was as if the human race had become embroiled in a totally futile and self-perpetuating game of chequers which had generated gargantuan profits for both Nuronics - who were paid handsomely by the League each time a patch needed to be shifted - and by the property developers who embraced CrystalTecture technology for the rapid and highly profitable deployment of their modern office buildings and luxury condominiums.
BUT FRANKLY, HE COULDN'T HAVE CARED LESS about the success his mother had made of his father's company and the untold wealth she and her real estate partners were amassing for themselves and their shareholders. All he now cared about was his Gab-ri-el-la and how he was going to win her trust back after a decade of total neglect. Sighing, he repeated her four syllable name to himself with his own breath. It was not going to be easy but he was going to make it up to her if it was the last thing he did before joining his Puziashka. And at the speed he was aging it probably would be.
His first step towards reconciliation (although he didn't know if you could call it that as they had never been 'conciled' to start with) was to introduce himself to her - the very thought of which seemed to require almost more courage than this particular World's Greatest Warrior could muster.
Fortunately, because of his blindness, his days as a SlayHawk were now over so it was a relatively straightforward matter to get himself assigned a teaching post at the campus where Gabriella had been posted when her time had finally come to join the Academy's cadet program on her tenth birthday.
A birthday he had missed.
Just like all the others.
And so he found himself once more walking the Academy's hallowed corridors, only no longer with the fearless stride of a real-life action hero but instead with the slight limp of a rapidly aging flight instructor in the process of breaking-in his titanium implants and an iVisor that had him twitching for his plasma-trigger every time a cadet's warm-red silhouette rushed past his field of vision.