Three months later. January 2039. Joe’s life was indeed changed forever.
The new AI instructions did indeed work, and a special committee was set up to establish a worldwide governance protocol for AI and Robotics, all based around the notion of the Hippocratic oath. Joe was on that committee, and had worked with a huge cross-functional group of people from around the world, from tech, from medicine, politicians and even religious leaders being asked to input into the new ethical code that would govern the world’s technology.
Joe nervously looked in the mirror and adjusted his tie as he realised the enormity of what was about to happen. The ceremony to present him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, along with Stokes, Adams and Ethan, was due to start very soon.
Joe had indeed been promoted and was now a special advisor to General Adams, along with his buddy Stokes, and they were put in charge of the roll-out of the RO707s, and how best to use them in crowd control scenarios. They’d just come back from a trip to the NRRF where they’d spent a couple of weeks training the teams on deployment techniques, which was going to come in handy the world over as things settled down and citizens stopped trying to be so tribal and wanting to kill each other in the name of Left or Right, or Liberal versus Conservative.
He saw Monica enter the room behind him in a long flowing black dress, mid-cut but not revealing. A diamond curve hung beneath her neck and he noticed her smell and the dark brown of her eyes complementing the flowing curves of her soft dark brown hair as she sashayed her hips like one of those catwalk models they used to have back in the day before political correctness saw them replaced by AI animations. She smiled and came up behind him, kissing him gently on the back of the neck and also adjusting his neck tie.
‘Wow!’ he exclaimed and turned to kiss her once more. He would never get bored of that. Nor would he ever take it for granted again.
‘Look at this. I’ve been using the HIM to find some stuff while I was getting ready.’
He beckoned to the window on the far wall, which did its usual magic dance of first becoming opaque and then displaying the media that was programmed. A series of connected thumbnails appeared, all date coded as if in some sort of chronological order, and after a few prompts from Joe, a specific video appeared on the screen, the background noise coming to both of them from the ceiling above.
‘Hahahaha, Daddy. My turn. Run!’ A young Benji was sitting on the beach in a mismatched outfit of red shorts, orange T-shirt and a bright white sun hat. He must have been three years old at most.
The camera panned to Joe fake sprinting across the sand as Monica roared with laughter while Benji counted to four, missing out three and then staggered after his dad. The first-person view was compelling, with the sound of the ocean and the bright twilight giving the scene an almost magical feeling. She draped her arms right around Joe’s neck and down the front of his dapper ensemble as she kissed him again and simply said, ‘Thank you.’
Who was it that said, ‘You don’t appreciate what you’ve got until its gone’? Or was it a song?
They were both thinking and feeling about this old mantra, the beautiful memory of the family they had been. And the family they were going to become was the perfect send-off to this happiest of days.
‘Come on then, hurry up. Don’t want to be late,’ she whispered as she turned and left. And Joe couldn’t resist a peek at the rear view behind him of the beauty whose value he certainly had now remembered. And then some.
He thought back to that night of the unravelling.
Despite the president’s protestations, people did not leave the streets. Nor did they in Paris, or Berlin or London. Or Bangkok, or Sydney or Singapore. The world over continued over a month of running battles between the mass populace and the Government and the police. Finally, the governmental overreach of the past two decades had been brought to task by an exhausted but emboldened society. Governments were there to serve people, not the other way around.
Snap elections were called all over the planet, and new systems of governance were created, mirroring the work with the AI and Robotics and establishing back the old-fashioned values of the Hippocratic oath at the centre of all things political.
‘First, do no harm.’
Centrist political parties sprang up all over the world, neither full Left nor Right, but all of them firmly libertarian, if for sure not Liberal itself by any means. This was now a dirty word like confederate had been at one time in history – like when that country band had been forced to drop ‘Dixie’ from their name way back in the early 2020’s.
Freedom to choose, to vote, to live, to pay fair tax, to keep fair earnings, to help those in need but first incentivise them to help themselves. These factors all came to the fore in the new political world.
The winter had been mild, the storms had stopped, the most ferocious El Niño de Navidad system ever known was now over, and everyone looked forward to a dawn of a new era, one where wealth would be a shared, collective goal. New rules had been brought in regarding singular ownership of corporations, avoiding the distinct two-tier class system that had exploded from the late 1980s right through to the 2030s. Never again would oligarchs rule Russia, or technocrats rule the Western world, infiltrating governments and planting all sorts of nefarious seeds to make them ever richer. Just like the now well understood Covid debacle of the early 2020s, started and created by people with vested interests in the pharmaceutical world, and who stood to gain by recurring infections, masks and lockdowns, and repeated vaccines into arms year upon year.
‘First, do no harm.’
It was now more than a long-standing mantra for doctors and physicians. It was how the world lived their lives, how people governed themselves, and how their amazing technology also governed itself to serve all yet protect us all.
China hadn’t made landfall in Taiwan, and they had called off their attack just in time for the international community to gather together and discuss the consequences should they have done so. Work was still needed to bring the new ‘human first’ philosophy to all corners of the world, but hope was strong that humanity was finally uniting under a new way of governance.
‘First, do no harm.’
‘Come on, let’s go,’ said Monica as she grasped Joe’s hand. ‘There are a lot of people waiting to see you, honey, and we are so proud of you.’
Benji appeared at the top of the stairs, a mini version of Joe in morning suit and tails, as handsome as anything she had ever seen. They stood at the top of the stairs, as the HIM gave them final instructions for the car pick-up and the journey’s ETA. And they all smiled as the world at the bottom of the stairs was one that had finally unravelled, that had healed. And they had healed with it. Monica took a couple of steps, holding tightly to the handrail, and somewhat instinctively moved her hand to her stomach, which Joe clocked in an instant. Could it be?
As they stepped out towards the car dock, they all held hands and smiled at the sunshine. The ceremony was going to be epic, and Joe was so proud that he’d got his family back together, and he’d helped avert a disaster that could have been global, and for all humanity.
The future was now bright. The future should always be bright.