February 27, 2024 Due to overwhelming medical and economic concerns, two lobbies form a joint petition to Congress, demanding extensive regulation of Nanocule Inc, and the creation and marketing of IANs.
The Medical Practitioners Lobby cites the current high cost and scarcity of medical grade IANs as being prohibitive for family practitioners. The Pharmaceutical Lobby claims that in the future, no drug company will be able to compete with the incredibly cheap and prolific IANs using conventional drug manufacturing methods.
October 20, 2020 Geoff Bugess, a student at UC Berkeley, creates the Line Standard, or LSTD. This internet protocol is an incredibly fast and secure method of allowing individual devices to connect to a single wireless signal. LSTD is released as Open Source for use in the Line when it is completed.
March 29, 2021 The first Zettabyte server is designed and built by the Bundestag of Germany in Pottsdam. Holding more than one trillion gigabytes of data, several prominent politicians demand this server be given to the people, providing one free web-page to every citizen of Germany.
February 15, 2015 Facebook successfully acquires Twitter in the largest tech merger in world history. Before the end of the business day, the number of Facebook accounts passes the two-billion mark. Researchers guess that of the two billion accounts, only 1.2 billion users actually exist. The rest are duplicates, dummy accounts, or inactive.
April 6, 2015 The Jericho Hack strikes the Internet. Two million people find their names, addresses, family trees, place of work, salaries, blood type, allergies, favorite foods, medical histories, and sexual preferences posted to the Internet.
July 2, 2012 MIT and University of British Columbia scientists develop a new method of treating disease using tiny capsules containing DNA and other biological machinery for making a drug. The nanoscale production units are tiny spheres encapsulating synthetic RNA like that found in living cells. The resulting nanoparticles produce active proteins on demand when the researchers shine a laser light on them.
August 3, 2012 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration grants approval for “ingestible sensors” invented by Proteus Digital Health.
7:31 am, October 3, 2055 It was raining hard as Jack Reed ran from the train station, heading further from downtown Chicago. The high-speed train had taken only four minutes to get to the northern suburbs, and from the station it was a three minute run to Erin’s office. Jack wasn’t sure why he had decided on Erin — had he even decided? Or had his body taken over, guiding his footfalls towards the north-bound platform while his brain was confused?
For the first half1 of my creative career, I was an actor. Still am, in some ways, and a great deal of my writing has the stain of performative dialogue.
What I mean by that is: a lot of my writing comes out on the page sans the tone or emphasis that it has in my head.
Sometimes this a wonderful thing. Good writers can convey the sound of their characters’ voices with just words on the page, while bad writers…well, compare any transcript of a Donald Trump monologue to its recording,2 and see how much information is lost without the pauses, the emphasis, the pitch of voice…
