2030_ The Real Story of What Happens to America - Albert Brooks [5]
Parts in cars had been reduced from hundreds to just a few. One electric motor and one gear, and it either worked or it didn’t. It was really hard to distinguish what was under the hood anymore, although the very upscale car companies—Rolls-Bentley, for example—claimed they used gold wiring in their motors that conducted electricity faster and didn’t heat up as much. All a waste of money. But really rich people bought it, the same kind of people who paid thousands of dollars for gold speaker wire when that was still available.
The one area where money did buy you something in an automobile was safety. Advanced materials, the kind used in jet fighters, provided better protection in a head-on crash, and you paid extra for that. But even the cheapest car was safer than anything made before, and although the accident rate was up because of excessive speed, more people survived.
“I thought you were going to buy the one with the solar roof?”
“This is all my dad wanted to spend. And as long as I’m living at home, I don’t give a shit about the electric bill, so this is fine.”
“It’s a nice car,” Kathy said. “I wish I had one.”
CHAPTER THREE
For Sam Mueller’s fifty-fifth birthday, his wife was planning a surprise party at their house on Turks and Caicos. It was hard to fly in a hundred friends and keep it a secret and the fact is, she hadn’t, but Sam pretended he didn’t know. He told Maggie he was going to play golf and wouldn’t be home before six. The private planes had been arriving all day. The guest list was as prominent as one would imagine for someone who had cured cancer—a few longtime friends, but mostly dignitaries and senators and some entertainers. There was even a holographic message on the way from the pope.
Dr. Mueller had never had another breakthrough that rivaled the cancer cure, but what would one expect? After the theory of relativity, didn’t Einstein basically putter around the rest of his life? Mueller did try some other combinations of aminos on mental illness, but came up short. With all the advancements made in medicine, there were still too many people walking around just plain nuts. When science thought they had solved one thing, like the miracle drug that helped cure schizophrenia, something else crept in. The newest malady was called “virtual dementia”; people who had it could no longer distinguish between what was real and what wasn’t. Scientists had known this was coming, they’d seen glimpses of it since the beginning of the new century, but no one realized just how serious it was. It was one thing to try to get someone to stop playing games and talk to the people standing in front of them; it was another when they absolutely couldn’t. People with this disease didn’t even seem to register when real people were there; it made them frightened and angry.
Sam Mueller worked on a cure for that for years, but with no success. He still went to Immunicate’s headquarters every day, but mostly he was just a big celebrity, drawing huge crowds at speaking events, universities, and pay-per-view holographic presentations. He wished he had another big thing in him, but still, deep down, it very much pleased him that when he died, his obituary would read THE MAN WHO CURED CANCER. That always made him smile.
He was also rich beyond anything he could have ever imagined. Unlike a product that would make billions for a number of years and then go generic, his cancer cure was a code. A combination of common substances that could never be used without paying a royalty. In 2020, Immunicate was offered $130 billion from a German-French pharmaceutical giant for forty-nine percent of the company. After everyone was paid out and all taxes taken care of, Dr. Sam Mueller walked away with $40 billion, and still owned the company to boot. He bought homes, gave to charities, set up foundations and scholarships, bought more homes, and was one of the first five people to own the Gulfstream 10A, the “jet that flies itself.” And that wasn’t just a slogan. This was the first private aircraft in the world