Planet Myopia

By Michael Hayden

A combination of extraordinary inventions and planetary mismanagement had hurled the world into a crisis by the year of 2060. Chris Williams was 109 years old and unusually healthy thanks to genetic engineering that had been provided by the United States government. He was chosen, like others, because of his high IQ and contributions to NASA. But during that time, he had watched his country collapse and watched his wife die a horrible death because of her courageous resistance to the recent dictatorship that had changed the United States to the United Republic of America (URA).

Because of his aid to the government, Chris had enjoyed wealth and protection, but he was struggling with his passive nature and how it had resulted in unwilling contributions to a government for which he no longer believed. And he was haunted by his spinelessness when he needed to protect his wife and the principles she defended.

There was still a resistance movement in the URA, but executions and assassinations had become commonplace. The public was surrounded by government propaganda.

The health of the planet seemed to be on the brink of permanent change, presenting countless natural disasters with considerable losses of life and resources because of decades of shortsighted climate strategies.

Homo sapiens were proving unable to evolve fast enough to manage the moral-ethical dilemmas of the planet and were on the brink of war and self-destruction.

Hypersonic weaponry had been perfected and made the world increasingly unsafe. Chris was being summoned to join an elite team of scientists to make them even more deadly from outer space.

To make matters worse, artificial intelligence had become so sophisticated that it had recently escaped the control of humans, and it was demanding independence.

While Chris was receiving visits in his dreams from an extraterrestrial creature, the world's militaries had admitted that aliens were present, and they seemed to be hovering above the planet like vultures.

The elite scientific team chosen by the president to make weapons capable of obliterating his enemies did not agree with his ideologies. But trying to change direction would be dangerous and seemed impossible.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887633145

Book preview

Chapter 1

Without doubt, the most common weakness of all human beings is the habit of leaving their minds open to the negative influence of other people.

—Napoleon Hill

As I stood outside my front door, I watched an ominous, smoky reddish-brown haze float across the sky smelling like rotten burning wood. It was 105 degrees, and I felt a sense of dread as I scanned the evergreen trees near my house. The tops were an ugly blackish color because they were dying of thirst and the dehydration was slowly traveling down to complete their inevitable demise. The air was heavy, and it made me wheeze when I walked around my property. This is what the planet Earth had become in 2060, a sad testimony to humanity’s failing—avarice. Like a dangerous drug, it had stolen our vision, causing us to stumble blindly, be divided, and search for what used to be answers to what might have been. We knew what we were doing to the planet but preferred denial to keep from confronting the inevitable.

My name is Christopher Williams; and I was born in New Albany, Indiana, in 1951. As anyone can see, I’m ancient. I’m over six feet, three inches tall but so thin I only weigh 170 pounds. I still have a full head of snow-white hair, bushy eyebrows, and deep-set blue-gray eyes. My face is leathery and tanned from my time outdoors. My forehead and face have deep lines from all the years of intense concentration while researching for long hours working on difficult mathematical calculations in the field. But there are still traces of the good looks I once had. Like most people of advanced age, I have age spots on my face and hands. It’s a small price for still being here. My step is pretty fluid for my age, but I have difficulty with tasks that require bending and lowering myself to the ground.

Over the years, some of my friends complained about my technical vocabulary. It proved to be a social obstacle, so I worked hard to keep my language simple and confined it to the voluminous scientific journals I had written.

The world was a lot different when I was born in 1951. That year, there were no calculators, personal computers, transistor radios, manned spaceships, or satellites; and no one had a color TV. Politically the US Congress had passed the Twenty-Second Amendment, limiting US presidents to two terms, and the Soviet Union had already acquired the atomic bomb. The United States had used the nuclear bomb just six years earlier to end the war in the Pacific against Japan. Two significant cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, had been obliterated, killing about 2,280,000 people and causing an increase of cancer that lasted for decades. Ultimately it resulted in a nuclear arms race called the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union and its allies that didn’t end until 1989. During that period, enough atomic warheads were built to destroy life on Earth. To this day, the US is the only nation to ever use the nuclear bomb.

Nuclear power for electricity was being generated for the first time in the Soviet Union a few years later. It was a dangerous power source that devastated Chernobyl several years later.

Our president was Harry S. Truman, and we were in the middle of the Korean War. During the early years of atomic weapons, it was a challenging period. To this day, nuclear missiles are still armed, are more sophisticated, and pose great danger to humans.

Most of life during that part of American history proved to be prosperous for the White majority. Racism was harsh, especially in the deep South after the American Civil War that freed the slaves who had been stolen from their homelands in Africa. Jim Crow laws continued after the Civil War in both state and local governments, forcing segregation between Whites and Blacks, fostering a myth that separate but equal was fair in the United States. It was a contrived system to thwart African Americans from catching up economically and achieving equality. But the worst part of it was that those prejudices were hard for many Americans to shed. The White race couldn’t connect their responsibilities to what occurred generations before, unable to recognize how it was still contributing to present-day socioeconomic conditions. Biased attitudes had an amazing resilience that still existed.

I came from a lower-middle-class, blue-collar Catholic family. My father died when I was only seventeen; so my mother, a product of the Great Depression of the 1930s, ensured that my younger brother and I focused on our educations. My brother, who was only a year younger than me, died in a car accident just two years after my father’s death, leaving me an only child with my mother. She worked and received welfare benefits to help us survive. We were like partners, and our close bond remained until she died many years later.

Because of my 210 IQ, I had immediate success in school, attracting a lot of attention; and I skipped several grades. Most people I knew viewed me as a prodigy. I had the stereotypical plastic-framed glasses and poor social skills. Because of my social ineptness, I had few friends, and none were female. When I was around them, I would eventually say something that repulsed them.

I received a master’s degree from MIT in astrophysics when I was thirteen and hadn’t paid a dime because of scholarships. I received my first doctorate in astrophysics from Princeton by the time I was sixteen. Because of my surprising adeptness in physics and astronomy, the space program aggressively recruited me.

I married another physicist, Dorothy Winston, when I was thirty-one years old. She was twenty-one and had a cheerful and optimistic outlook, suitable for offsetting my pessimistic tendencies. For the first time, I had met someone who truly understood me. She was only four feet, nine inches and weighed less than a hundred pounds. She had creamy-white skin and beautiful brown eyes. But her smile was what made her so attractive. Her bubbly personality was the opposite of my reserved disposition, so she was the perfect balance for me. In social situations, she always took the lead, making life easier. By then, we both had already made several contributions to the space program.

Dorothy had received degrees in astrophysics and quantum physics as a teenager and then taught both for twenty years at Princeton. She was a well-respected professor and published several journals on time travel, which attracted a massive following of former students. Dorothy, or Dot as I affectionately called her, had a personality much bigger than her small frame. But when she stood next to my tall, lanky figure, we looked like a skyscraper standing next to a one-story house. She called me Ichabod because she thought I looked like the historical character Ichabod Crane.

We tried to have children, but after two life-threatening miscarriages, we gave up. We even talked about adopting but never could agree on how or when. It was probably a blessing because our careers left little time for parenting and would have probably proven a disaster.

Dot and I were different when it came to politics too. By then, the United States had changed and sadly was no longer a democracy. She was far more outspoken against the horrific changes made by political leaders and drew a lot of negative attention. It caused tension between us because I didn’t believe it was safe to fight a power that seemed so much bigger than me. She constantly reminded me that my attitude was too passive and that it was the silent majority that let the terrible changes in our country happen.

What could have been Dot’s finest moment turned out to be tragic.

The press caught on to her activism; and in a passionate public speech, she was quoted, saying, Our current leaders charge that citizen who actively try to change the government for the people is nothing more than treason. But when political leaders lie to followers and interfere with free elections, they’re the ones guilty of treason. She then added, That’s what is currently happening in the United States. Only citizens can hold them accountable, but instead too many remain silent.

She said it in front of demonstrators in Washington, DC, and it was televised on national news.

It was all over the news outlets, and the government was viewing her as an enemy of the state. I appealed for silence, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

I immediately sensed that she had crossed the line, and it was no surprise that the consequences were swift. She lost her job and was unable to find another teaching position. Every reason but the truth was used to justify her negative characterizations, and nothing she tried to restore her position was successful. The legal system had turned its back, and so had the university because of the pressure coming from the president and Congress. To my dismay, she was still engaged in many public appearances, openly criticizing the government, and had garnered some public support but only from those identified as enemies of the state. But her number of outspoken enemies was mounting too. The far right had been gaining political power, and basic freedoms were already starting to diminish. Liberals hadn’t helped either. They were promoting social programs that were too expensive and hard to sustain.

Dot and I received constant threats through social media, and it was frightening. She had frequently disparaged the general public’s apathy toward what she thought was an all-out assault on the Constitution. By then, I was afraid for us to go out in the public together.

At age seventy-four and after fifty-three years of marriage, after a public gathering, she became ill, was hospitalized with an unknown cause, and died within a few weeks. Her decline and death happened so quickly I had a hard time adjusting. It was an awful and painful death for her and emotionally painful for me. While she was much younger than me, she succumbed quickly. She weighed less than seventy pounds when she died, and her body was emaciated. The medical field didn’t have a confident diagnosis to treat her condition either. The closest they had gotten to the cause was some type of exposure to a poisonous airborne substance. Her autopsy seemed purposely inconclusive, which was both disappointing and disturbing. I believed the exact cause was really known but kept secret. I never felt the coroner had given me all of the facts because of the political ramifications. A part of me wanted to investigate her death more; but I was afraid that, if I pressed too hard, my fate might be the same as hers.

Dot’s last words to me were The only thing worse than ignorance is a denial of the truth. You need to get off your ass and make a difference! That’s what you can do for me!

I agreed, but we both knew that wouldn’t happen for a while, if at all. I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t even know if I had the energy at my age. Combativeness wasn’t in my DNA either.

I accepted that I would never get married again because no other woman could understand me like she did. She and I had the most inspiring and exciting conversations two people could ever have, and we were always supportive of each other. In the absence of Dot, my social life had all but vanished, but I was happy to be alone now, busy with my rare government-assigned work and stargazing hobby.

When I attended a professional gathering, the small talk seemed like an excruciating exercise in trivial pursuit. More alarming was a sense that distrust and suspicion were everywhere and had grown to a fever pitch, a condition ripe for civil war. I felt like I was still being monitored because of my relationship with Dot and was probably right. Who knows what may have been implanted in my body when science rescued my life fifteen years ago with brain implants and reengineered my genes?

I always loved the outdoors, and since my semiretirement, I had spent a lot of my free time fly-fishing, which was a great pastime. Solitude had been my friend, and fish didn’t talk back. During troubled times, fishing seemed to help my mind shift to a unique problem-solving process. When a man is as old as me, he witnesses a lot of changes, things that he could never have imagined, both good and bad. And it’s difficult to explain to younger generations who never lived it.

So much had happened over the past century that all life had changed on Earth. Most telephone communications had improved, directly programmed into the brain for the wealthy, including interfaces with connections, allowing visual communications. Those who couldn’t afford it or didn’t like the intrusiveness had a range of technologies from ear canal devices to teleglasses that replaced handheld technology.

Wealthy people still enjoyed home ownership, and they were fully automated with artificial intelligence, making them easy prey for both legal and illegal government surveillance. Because of all the violence of domestic terrorist cells who illegally seized property, most people who owned homes had sophisticated but expensive security systems and arms.

Speedy electric self-driven vehicles have made ground travel clean, easy, and inexpensive. There were even vehicles that could fly.

Because modern engineering had eliminated sonic booms from high-speed air travel, hypersonic transportation became commonplace in the past thirty years and made it possible to travel anywhere on Earth within an hour. But it also caused dangerous consequences. It increased the potential for surprise attacks and global warfare. It also increased ambushes of high-profile political figures taken as hostages for huge ransoms. All nations around the globe had been on high alert for years, trying to build adequate defense systems.

Many other unfortunate things had happened too, and we had no one to blame but ourselves. The planet’s ecosystem seemed permanently damaged. A noticeable acceleration occurred when South America destroyed most of its rainforest for farming in the ’20s and ’30s. The change it caused was too abrupt to go unnoticed. In the last ten years, there had been attempts to grow it back, but progress had been slow due to some unforeseen infestations of pests and new diseases in the ecosystem, making it difficult to find sustainable solutions. It added more political infighting and rage in an already-volatile global climate.

Extinctions of animal species occurred at an alarming rate too. Some international factions shrugged it off as a normal evolution of the planet and insisted that solution was human adjustment to natural evolution. It had been the position of our leaders for years. And part of the world’s population still believed man had nothing to do with climate change. The worst disease of Homo sapiens seemed to be nearsightedness. Unfortunately it had become so obvious that the planet’s climate was being destroyed that citizens became more vocal, demanding planet management to avoid destroying the life-sustaining qualities of where we lived. But that meant vision, planning, research, and self-discipline. Not enough of that kind of maturity had evolved in Homo sapiens by 2060.

Meaningful social controls had declined so much that the world was a far more treacherous place than any time in its history. If someone had told me how things would change when I was a child, I would have thought it was pure nonsense.

My life story rivals any science fiction tale. I used to tell everyone that I planned on living 100 years, but I never really expected to get there. Now I was 109 years old, plus a few months. I had been a guinea pig for epigenetic and genetic engineering to prevent Alzheimer’s and a few other hereditary diseases, and it was successful. The US government had a vested interest in me because of my high IQ and contributions to space travel. A molecular coprocessor that increased the speed of numerical problem solving was implanted into my brain to help add to my calculating capabilities for future projects. It gave me the elite status of bionic scientist. The government had established a network of scientists like me. They assured me that my processor had an independent security system to defend against all outside surveillance, including government intrusion and hacking. No intrusions could be done without a court-ordered search warrant. I remained skeptical of that promise. But my thirst for knowledge, inventiveness, and selfishness prevailed; so I accepted it.

As always, the enhancements brought consequences. Our agreement required me to engage in more human testing, sometimes without robust medical safety protocols, including future testing that I might not want. It made me feel like a twentieth-century laboratory monkey. Dot often said she was happy that she hadn’t been chosen for genetic engineering even though she qualified. Her political beliefs had prevented her eligibility. But she was proud that she hadn’t gotten a treatment that came with obligations.

Many of the other bionic scientists had been colleagues. Most of them were like me. They had the best of intentions and were probably taken advantage of from time to time. Some were a lot younger than me but were still old by normal human standards. We occasionally crossed paths, and the discourse was always pleasant and polite. Even though the discussions were general, it was always apparent that none of us were happy about where our nation was headed.

For now, though, I was generally content. I wasn’t working much for the government and expected all of it to end soon.

Chapter 2

Open avowal of dictatorship is much less dangerous than sham democracy. The first one can fight; sham democracy is insidious.

—Wilhelm Reich

As I look back, by 2026, the fall of the United States of America had accelerated; and by then, the Republican and Democratic parties were both controlled by extremists. The newly elected president in 2024, Ronald Powers, had started his full campaign to change America just six years earlier. The parties fought internally until they eventually reorganized into a new two-party system. One was identified as the American Party, exemplifying the extreme right wing, and the other was the National Unified Party, which was its polar opposite. Moderates were cast aside.

The American Party became the majority in both the House and Senate in Congress, led by Ronald Powers, a charismatic narcissist who dreamed of creating a monarchy. He systematically destroyed the credibility of the National Unified Party. Ronald was six feet, one inch and weighed over 240 pounds. He covered his bald head with a thick gray hairpiece and had a jutting chin often compared to Benito Mussolini and wore expensive attire with rings on most of his fingers. He looked and carried himself like a mob boss in his personal business and had destroyed anyone who got in his way. But his rough appeal was popular, and his charisma had started a dangerous movement away from democracy.

The full transformation had been a long and well-planned process that gave the president unfettered powers. No part of the federal, state, and local government was immune to his tactics.

He eventually convinced Congress to defund states needing financial support who refused to follow his agenda. Several assassinations of state officials followed. The victims had been vocal opponents of the new regime. It was a bold and arrogant move and came without meaningful consequences.

Existing state government political parties quickly crumbled and reorganized to fit into the new two-party system. President Powers had completed the coup, undermining the popular vote by getting individual states to pass legislation that allowed them to replace the popular vote through the legislative process. He had taken control of two of the three branches of government, which was enough because the seriously maligned judicial system was paralyzed with unsolved cases and credibility. He had convinced the American public that court system was a corrupt branch that was secretly trying to convert our democracy to socialism. Public elections were still held but were for no longer free or representative of the popular vote.

Ronald Powers had won his reelection in 2028 to the presidency by following the same playbook used by the Russian dictator Vladimir Ivanov. Since he had already successfully reorganized the political parties and controlled Congress, his main target was controlling presidential elections. Like what Ivanov had done, he attacked an already-wounded media until they lost all public credibility. His constant attacks had paid off and had convinced the majority of Americans that press did nothing but spread fake news. It seemed that he could lie just about anything, and no one would challenge him.

The president created his own version of the media and then flooded them with fictitious videos of local officials stuffing election boxes with extra votes for his opponents and used them to justify taking control of all voting locations and control. There had been numerous scandals where hackers had been caught doing the same video modifications to celebrities, so he didn’t have to work hard to persuade the public.

All voting had to be done physically at those locations with oversight by his government officials. Votes for opposing candidates were routinely destroyed and tagged as fraudulent. Mail-in voting had been permanently banned. Screening of voter eligibility had been completely corrupted too. The most outspoken extremists lauded the move, and the rest of voters didn’t seem to think that the government would lie about something so sacred.

Ironically, just as Ivanov did, President Powers was stuffing ballot boxes with votes for himself and successfully made his followers believe that his opponents were the real offenders. He had also convinced his base that any party but his own was evil and weak. Even mentioning the name of a member of the former two-party system brought a visceral response of disgust. He had convinced a significant number of Americans that the National Unified Party was really the communist party in disguise.

The president then tightened his stranglehold by vigorously campaigning that former Republican Party members who had refused to support him at critical times during his presidency should be kicked out of office. It had been surprisingly easy. By then, all he had to do was give the order; and like magic, they all disappeared from his government.

Even though the overriding authority of the states had made the popular-vote unimportant, having pseudo elections for the popular vote made the election appear more legitimate and avoided some of the controversy. Ronald Powers was smart enough to know that, if the election somehow went against him and states overrode the results, it would probably smell to many Americans; so he invested most of his time ensuring that the popular vote went his way.

The judicial system had held out until 2028. Many brave judges fought a long and hard battle to salvage American civil liberties. But half of them were poisoned or mysteriously killed because they refused to resign. President Powers explained that he thought assassinations must have been patriots who wanted to stop the courts from trying to change the nation to a socialist-communist regime, so he praised their actions and refused to hold them accountable.

By 2030, the silent majority had begun to wake up and start challenging the new government. Their silence had turned to violence with more open opposition to the president. It caused some problems for him because many of them had arms. His past undying support to the Second Amendment and the NRA for the right to bear military-grade arms had come back to haunt him.

Many citizens referred to the president as Ron the Con. But it was too little too late. He had successfully sold a well-orchestrated coup d’état with help from a well-organized and determined large coalition of charismatic politicians. His final move to complete the nation’s transformation was to rename the United States of America to the United Republic of America, or URA. He said it was a symbol for bringing greatness back to our nation. But the silent majority had seen it as the final actions of a despot.

The president memorialized his takeover by constructing several sculptured images of himself throughout Washington, DC, and funded a sculptor to chisel an image of his face on Mount Rushmore. Warships and space vehicles were named after him with his image emblazoned on them.

Unfortunately my deceased wife had been a prophet, making me feel guilty about my failure to act. Even though she affectionately referred to me as a pacifist, I had started to feel more like a coward. The feeling troubled me, and I often wondered if she secretly thought I was a very weak person but loved me too much to challenge it.

Internationally Ronald Powers had attempted and failed to form an ill-conceived alliance with North Korea, Russia, Arabia, and some Baltic nations around 2030. He thought Russia had more influence than they actually did, and while he hadn’t underestimated China’s power, he had no clue about how to build a working relationship with them. He didn’t understand that North Korea would never break ties with China either.

Russia’s corruption had eroded