2030_ The Real Story of What Happens to America - Albert Brooks [6]
Dr. Mueller’s two children—Patty, fifteen, and Mark, thirteen—did not attend his birthday party. Mark was at a fancy private school in Switzerland that the Muellers had learned about when they sold their company. They had made a lot of German, Swiss, and French friends and adopted some of their rich habits, including sending their child to an elite boarding school 140 kilometers from Geneva that the most privileged children in the world attended.
Patty was in school in the States, but she didn’t want to miss classes. She was also a little embarrassed about being the daughter of the man who cured cancer. Normally that would be something to be proud of, but to many young people, the same kinds of kids Kathy Bernard hung out with, the cancer cure was a major factor contributing to the never-ending lives of the older generation. One of them even taunted Patty, saying, “If it wasn’t for your dad, my grandfather would be dead by now, but instead we’re paying for him to eat through a tube. Thanks a lot.” Patty was still proud of her father, and she certainly was not like any normal kid—she would never have to worry about money for the rest of her life—but she wanted to be cool. And the cool kids hated the “olds.”
As the guests arrived from all over the world, they were impressed by Sam Mueller’s spread on the island. And these people had seen everything. There was a main house that was approximately twenty-five thousand square feet and two guesthouses close to twenty thousand square feet each. The Muellers could easily accommodate two hundred people in the type of luxury reserved for heads of state. Each private suite consisted of three bedrooms, a living room, a den, three bathrooms, and a butler. There were complimentary health screenings performed by doing nothing more than giving one drop of blood from your finger, although not everyone chose to do that. Guests were treated to any sport they desired and the meals were legendary. People would say, “What in God’s name is this guy going to do when he turns sixty? Buy Italy?”
But what Sam enjoyed the most were the rousing discussions that took place after dinner on a large veranda that overlooked the Caribbean. This was where the movers and shakers told all: what the future held, what to invest in, doomsday scenarios—the whole damn thing. This was where Sam Mueller had first gotten the news of the biological attack that had taken place twelve years earlier.
* * *
In the summer of 2018 two things happened. A heat wave swept over the East Coast, unprecedented in the United States, and caused temperatures to remain close to 105 during the day for almost six weeks. Global warming was not challenged anymore, not after the Lambert Glacier in Antarctica melted three hundred years before anyone thought it would. Sure, there were a few scientists who would say man had nothing to do with it, but it didn’t matter anymore, it was happening. Sometimes during very cold winters, there were still people who pooh-poohed global warming altogether. “Look outside, it’s a blizzard,” they would say. But of course the terrible winters were a sign of even further erosion. And when the eastern seaboard had forty-five consecutive days above one hundred degrees, the skeptics melted away, along with everything else.
And something else happened late that summer. The United States had always said that the likelihood of a nuclear or biological attack was greater than fifty percent. And people always thought about it the same way they thought about earthquakes: They knew something was coming, but what could they do? Well, it wasn’t a nuclear attack, but on August 15, 2018, people started getting sick with flulike symptoms in San Francisco. Before anyone realized it, a smallpox virus had contaminated the city. The government’s best guess was that five or six terrorists had come into