Free New America by Jeremy Bates Page B

least in America.
    Maureen and I went to one of
the lounges scattered about and sat in claytronic seats that molded to our
bodies. Our check-in counter was K. It was so distant I had to squint to make
out the letter. “Shitty if you got your letters mixed up,” I said. “Might end
up in New China.”
    “Don’t joke about that,”
Maureen said.
    “You know that’s impossible,
dear.”
    “I don’t want to hear it.”
    “There’s never been—”
    “I don’t care!” she said. “I
don’t want to hear it.”
    I turned my attention to the
other people sharing the lounge with us. Blacks, Asians, Latinos, whites. Many
were a similar age to Maureen and I, mid-thirties, and many appeared to be
couples. Some were speaking softly to one another, while others stared at
nothing, their expressions ranging from frightened to excited to bored.
    My eyes drifted back to the
check-in counters, the queues. It was an efficient process, miniaturization.
According to the figures, more than two thousand American citizens were
miniaturized each day, fourteen thousand a week, more than fifty thousand a
month, or roughly six hundred thousand a year.
    New America had a current
population north of twenty million.
    The idea of miniaturizing
human beings had been around since the middle of the last century, yet until
relatively recently scientists had always believed the rules of quantum
mechanics prohibited the shrinking of organic matter. The problem had been that
atoms, the particles that composed the world and everything in it, did not
scale. They were a fixed size. There was no way to reduce the size of a proton,
neutron, or electron. Moreover, there was no way to reduce the number of atoms
in a human body, or the distance between them, without dramatically altering
the body’s chemical characteristics.
    Nevertheless, twelve years
ago Daniel Mathews, a British physicist and systems design engineer, proved
conventional science wrong when he successfully shrunk a dog by ten to the
minus two, or to half an inch tall, through a revolutionary process that
avoided quantum mechanics altogether, thereby allowing regular matter and shrunken
matter to interact in a symmetrical and invariant way.
    Matthews coined the process
dimensional shifting, and within the year a world body was convened to discuss
the possibility of miniaturizing segments of the human population to alleviate
overpopulation and humanity’s carbon footprint, which had been responsible for
the planet going to hell in a handbag over the previous two decades.
    China was the first county to
create a New City, followed by India, Germany, and The Netherlands. There were
already two dozen New Cities around the world before US lawmakers approved the
creation of New America—which, I should note, was a misnomer, as there were
only three cities up and running thus far: New New York City, which everyone
called NY2, New San Francisco, and New Los Angeles. NY2 and NSF were currently
at maximum capacity, while NLA was at close to eighty percent, though it was
scheduled to be fully occupied by the time New Miami opened its doors next July.
    I rested my elbow on the back
of Maureen’s seat and massaged her neck with my hand. She was stiff as a board,
though as I kneaded the knots from her muscles she loosened up.
    She wasn’t afraid of the
process of miniaturizing, I knew, which governments liked to tout was safer
than flying. She was more concerned with the fact shrinking yourself was a
one-way journey. That was the caveat with the technology. Scientists could
shrink you to the size of a cricket, but they didn’t know how to reverse the
effects, or supersize you, for that matter. Not yet, anyway.
    What this meant, of course,
was that if you chose to become a New Person, you had to say goodbye to your
old life forever. You could still communicate with friends and family digitally,
where size and mass were translated into ones and zeroes, but you could never
touch them in person, never see