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Quantum Dots
2021 never did come around after all.
Of course, we'd all taken it for granted. Especially once we'd made it past the asteroid in 2014, we figured we were pretty well on course to make it until the sun blew up in 3087, which is when those astronomers down in Peru had calculated a certain comet, I forget which, would come round one last time, knocking off a big enough chunk of the Earth to send it spinning either somewhere very very cold or very very warm, one direction or the other. I think they left the direction a question mark to let us retain some sort of mystery; after all, their version of the Apocalypse was significantly less impressive than dragons and horsemen and multitudes of things rushing around in the sky.
So we were prepared. We figured our kids, our grandkids, our great-grandkids, would be all right. Past that, it was all gravy, we told ourselves. Not many people had ever counted on knowing their great great grand kids, so the concern for their welfare, as ruthless as it may sound, wasn't as pressing. And no one could tell how geriatric science would progress, anyway. At the moment, it wasn't turning up any great revelations, but at the rate it was progressing, it looked like 10.6 or so generations would fit in before it all went hairy-looking and Earth split, literally, for a location to be named later.
With that predetermined date in mind, we could focus on other things: cleaning up the streets, developing new golf techniques, making better mousetraps, literally.
And it was those damn mousetraps that did it in the end.
They're what killed off the latter two-thousand teens and made what we were all calling the Great Wait until 3087 a lot shorter than we'd all been expecting.
It all started with a man named Klauss Heltman and an idea for, as you might have guessed, building a better mousetrap.
Klauss was an American software engineer consulting on a small project at a firm in France that sold hair products and perfumes. This is all pretty standard fare for early 2015, just about when the asteroid's leftern hemisphere dust was settling down in the skies of the Southern hemisphere here on Earth.
Ah, that's right.There was one minor casualty of the asteroid threat of 2014. The Moon had a small chunk taken out of it's dark side by the passing asteroid which had, indeed, missed Earth. Being from the dark side, and aside from quite a few coastal towns being unstable and untenable due to the waters that rose as a result of global warming and most of the ice caps melting, the fact that the Moon was that bit smaller in the night sky and the tides didn't rise as high as they used to didn't phase that many people.
So it was 2015, and life on Earth proceeded apace.
The information technology industry sector had leveled off sometime in the early to mid 2000's, and quite a lot of American programmers were working in France, or Turkey, or Croatia, or the Bahamas, just as a lot of French programmers were working in America, or Chile, or Tahiti, or elsewhere. And many other nation's programmers were working in nations other than their own, all for roughly the same wages, if you did the currency conversions, it just always seemed like you got paid more if you were receiving pay checks in a currency other than the one you were used to.
The only ones who got to stay home these days were the Free Software programmers, who, due to a few bad examples, had fallen under export restrictions in numerous countries, and weren't allowed to travel much.
With the settling of the asteroid's dust making for some beautiful sunsets, many people predicted the return of a good, healthy information technology recovery, finally, back to the hey-day of the late 1990's, when those people in information technology had plenty of cash to splash around in their fringe interests that had nothing much to do with technology.
This is where Klauss comes in.
To be continued...
disclaimer:
Thanks to all the people who voted for this week's Sane topic... you may even find some resemblance between what you voted for and what's appeared in the issue...
We may have special, very modern treat for you kiddies next week.
If you're lucky.
You may have noticed, in fact, some changes going on already... then again, you may not. It depends whether or not we actually did make any changes after all.
But if we did, they might be subtle, so subtle the naked eye couldn't detect them. Or they might be so obvious the naked eye refuses to detect them.
Either way.
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