The Plan

Roy and his sons greeted Betty outside as she was returning from her tour. They soon were surrounded by survivors.

"Folks, it's time to plan for the future. We can exist here for quite some time, but that cannot be our sole purpose. In my business, I need to have a finished picture in mind before starting work. Since working with Habitat for Humanity, I have been thinking of a community design that will allow people to be self-sufficient, but the idea is still in its infancy. Like any construction project, I have to know the elements required to make that structure come to be. Before work starts, I have to take inventory of the resources we will need to complete the project."

He continues:

"Although we have lost our infrastructure, that doesn't mean we have to revert to the pioneer days. We can make use of what we have available when we get some power grids back. That will allow us to reestablish communication with other survivors. Since commercial television is dead, the logical replacement is the Worldwide Web. John tells me that all facilities used for the Web have stand-alone power supplies. Once power is available to us all, we can keep our smartphones charged and start using our computers again. We can then communicate our plan to others. I am certain that many others will have similar thoughts and, the more we communicate, the better the final picture will be."

From the group:

"What if the ruling class tries to regain power?"

"I doubt they will. There may still be some lunatics out there, but they will not survive for long. If the shock of this experience has not brought them back to sanity, they will have no support. People intrinsically know what is right and blind obedience to tyranny will not last."

People began sitting on the lawn as they listened, clutching and stroking each other. Betty speaks:

"I have learned more from the children I tend than from any Psychology class. This event we just shared has made all humans equals in the truest sense of the word. Man is a social animal and has very specific needs to maintain a sense of well-being. I can readily see from this group that you have already realized that love and companionship are shared among us all. Those children I worked with blossomed because of love, compassion and kindness -- just like my bees. Our duty to our children and future grandchildren is simple -- tell the truth. Also, it is not for us to teach them to do things that do not come naturally to them. What we must do is teach them HOW to learn, not WHAT to learn. We are all born with a purpose and our objective should be to find that purpose and apply ourselves totally to that purpose. We recognize it when what we do is no longer considered work. It becomes play. Any of you with children know the joy on their faces when they play. It is the most natural thing we do." She continues:

"The society we have emerged from is gone. The decadence, vanity, rampant egos, power struggles, money and all negative vestiges of the ruling class have died along with it. We are free to rebuild based upon common sense. There is no personal ownership, no borders, no politicians and -- no crime. Without money as the driving factor and recognizing the value of our lives as we do now, the thought of hurting someone else will also vanish from all minds. We have a new ism. Rather than Communism, we can call it Communitism. It's not that we don't own anything; it is that we own everything."

"Truth always wins, no matter how long it takes for it to surface. Truth is, we are all connected and dependent upon others. That's not limited to humans -- everything is connected. That realization has come because our blindness has enabled us to see. Our new world will help us synchronize and harmonize our actions with Mother Earth. No other life form on earth takes more than what it needs from her. No other life form pollutes or destroys her creations. If we had all died from our experience, she would restore the Garden of Eden that she was before humanity despoiled her. Our task is to help her do it."

Roy rejoins:

"Mike, John and I talked a bit last night about the community design. Those of you that accompanied Betty this morning saw the beehives. There are very few insect colonies that cooperate as well as bees. We can take our first lesson from them. My initial design is based upon the way they build their honeycombs. That, combined with Bucky Fuller's geodesic concepts, has given me a good idea of what the physical community of the future will look like. Each community can be adapted to its environment easily because each cell of the honeycomb can be separate."

"Ideally, communities would be limited to grow to between six and ten thousand residents. That would allow for neighborly attitudes and be enough to supply the needed skill sets for chores and maintenance. When growth is projected to be near overflow, new communities can be built as needed and linked with the same communication systems. Our new society will grow just like Betty's hives."

"The Fox River bisects an old farm I acquired at an auction last year for the purpose of building a small prototype community. Once we organize properly, we can all get to work there. We don't have enough manpower yet, but I'm sure others will join us. For now, we will concentrate on gathering the equipment and materials we need to start building and take them to the farm. Betty -- you wanted to say some other things?"

"Yes, Roy, thanks."

"Folks, we are faced with an opportunity of huge proportions. I think we can all feel the kinship of the group. That is one feeling that we must nurture and pass on to our descendants. Nothing is more important to an individual than loving and being loved. This love is not limited to our immediate family or this group alone -- it is agape, love of all life. We can leave all our mistakes behind us and begin a new way of life -- a sane way of life. The past is the only thing that dies, so let's bury it and get on with building a good future."

"After more than thirty years of tending to children and doing countless hours of research, I can tell you that every problem surfacing in relationships is caused by breakdowns in communication. I can also tell you that all pain and discomfort is caused by the human ego. If we are to succeed in our new society, we must become aware of our words and actions. Mahatma Gandhi said that, once we strip away the vestiges of lies from our minds, the only thing remaining is the naked truth. I know this to be true from working with children. Prior to their being bombarded by indoctrination, training, propaganda and the like, they are curious, playful and innocent. It is not ignorance that is bliss -- it is innocence. Ignorance is hell."

"One thing that differentiates us from other animals is our imagination. We can envision something in our minds that does not yet exist and make it manifest through our efforts. That's what Roy is trying to convey when describing the community from his imagination. We all work the same way. My son John has been describing his intelligent software and how it would serve the community. I consider that software to be an electronic ombudsman. He will describe how it works soon."

"Everything we do as a society is based upon our agreements. In order for us to agree on any topic, we have to communicate, resolve differences and then, bring up the next topic. In truth, it is not our words that carry truth -- it is our actions. In our small group, we probably don't have much to say right now, save to discuss how we arrived at this place. There is no television, no movies, no sports, no news, and no weather reports -- what a fantastic situation! We have to communicate with each other. We should be thankful."

"One of my favorite studies is the human brain. It is a wonderful tool for the real us to use, but many, if not most people, are unaware of how to maximize its potential. I don't have all the answers yet, but I know we can align our thoughts toward restoring our beautiful planet. On that basis, until we start building, I would like to lead discussions on one topic per day to attune ourselves to the same communication channel. It will not be uniform at first, but, as we go further into discovering our true self, the understanding will eventually come for all."

"On that note, I'll let John describe how our communities will be linked. John?"

"Thanks, mom."

"We probably all come from varying occupations and experience and, as my mom said, we should attempt to align our thoughts towards the same goal. My vision is to have technology serve us, rather than using it to make wage slaves of the population. Before the virus, you may know surveillance systems were being installed everywhere by the ruling class under the reasoning that they were to provide security for the population. In truth the aristocrats wanted to protect themselves."

"When I learned of the president ordering the manufacture of two billion rounds of ammunition and letting the military distribute rifles and war machines to selected towns around the country, my skin crawled. When are people going to react to these insane moves? Ben Franklin's words rang in my head: 'Those that would give up some liberty to gain some security deserve neither.' We all deserve both."

"Dad gave me some idea about his physical layout for the honeycombs. Before the virus, I was trying to come up with ideas about just one local community, but that has changed. I've spent the last couple of days thinking about how to use the intelligent module worldwide, so I had to resequence my thoughts. First, let me give you some background about today's technology."

"I could go farther back than the mid-1800s, but that is the time when the power of technology began developing. It was created by the works of Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, Leonardo da Vinci and other great thinkers. The mid-1800s through the mid-1900s was a century of awesome discovery. George Boole, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace created automation. Babbage worked on the idea of a physical Differential Engine, Boole worked on defining the process(es) that would operate it and Lovelace was, in effect, the first programmer for the machine. It would take a hundred years or so for their vision to manifest."

"That is also when industrialization reared its ugly head. Fulton's steam engine came onto the world stage and opened up huge new opportunities. Railroads came into being and manufacturing facilities opened. People began coming off farms and rural communities to work in factories as wage slaves -- much like China is doing today. The ruling class, born from the feudal lords of old, needed to maintain control to grow their empires. They knew how to exploit others' labor and skill. Best example is the glorification of Thomas Edison -- Nikola Tesla did most of the inventing and Edison took most of the credit (and money.) Tesla was probably as great a mind as Einstein and Newton, but never sought the limelight."

"The first computers were crude, nothing more than adding machines with printers attached. The ideas that created today's technology came from George Boole's 'Laws of Thought,' "Boolean Algebra," (which is as insightful as Newton's Calculus,) and the binary system. Late in the 19th century, Hollerith created an 80-column cardboard card that could contain twelve vertical punches in each column. Any letter of the alphabet and zero through nine could be represented in a column. This system was used primarily for accounting purposes and lasted into the 1970s in some locations. The card was commonly called an IBM card by then."

"Scientific computers could never use such a slow system. The huge amount of data required for scientific analysis needed access to it to be much faster. Devices were imagined to speed access - magnetic tape, then disk drives, now a virtual cloud -- all in about fifty years. Quite an accomplishment, really."

"In the late 1930's, thinkers like Noam Chomsky, Alan Turing and others began discussing Artificial Intelligence. Many people I've discussed my module with want to call it that. This is true intelligence represented in zeroes and ones. The only artificial intelligence that exists is what we call the ego, personality or identity. Artificial means man-made. Intelligence was not made by man. Some skeptics may even say that it isn't much used by man."

"Quantum Mechanics was born from Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. If anyone has doubts of everything being connected, just consider the most famous equation of the twentieth century -- Energy equals Mass times the speed of light squared. What that implies is that everything we can behold is forms of Energy. Relativity is connectivity."

"When studying the Laws of Thought, it became apparent that we all think the same way; we just think about different things and assign different values to our experiences and knowledge. There is no deviousness in our thinking process, only in our egos. The beautiful function about my module is that it is based on facts, not fantasy or fiction. Because it learns from experience like we do, it improves accuracy from having groups participate in feeding its knowledge base. Our knowledge base is called memory, same for the module."

"The biggest breakthrough happened when the wave/particle theory surfaced. Proving that all existence is a dual existence could now be replicated in Boole's binary numbering system. Zero /one is wave/particle. That's why you had to talk to computers before ever reaching a live voice when you needed help or support. There is nothing a human being communicates that cannot be replicated by software and robots. If we are to create heaven on earth using technology, we have to be united as humanity."

"For now, that's enough. We'll get together again soon."