2030_ The Real Story of What Happens to America - Albert Brooks [77]
She and her party were met at the airport with dancing girls and beautiful flowers and taken to a private residence that was used for foreign dignitaries. Susanna had been to China more times than she could count. She even spoke the language fairly well, although on this trip everyone used the Nextron.
The Nextron was the breakthrough in translation that people had been waiting for forever. It made learning another language almost obsolete. Decades earlier, software was introduced that turned many devices, like cell phones, into translation machines, but they all had their share of problems. People had to speak slowly and carefully and do voice training, and the devices still made too many mistakes. The Nextron was the first stand-alone device that was error-free. People spoke normally, looking directly at the other person, and the small box, half the size of a paperback book, not only translated without mistakes but could project images, play music, record video, and do everything else one would need to do in a business environment. Travelers carried them around like a credit card, and in restaurants and hotels and meeting places all over the world one could hear the din of people talking in their native language, with one of six different voices that were available to choose from, translating perfectly.
When Susanna entered the meeting, along with her undersecretaries, the table was filled with Nextrons, supplied by the host country for those who didn’t bring theirs, but people never forgot. It was the one true “Don’t leave home without it” device. Susanna impressed her host by speaking Chinese in her initial greetings, but once the meeting started in earnest the Nextrons began whirring away.
After the perfunctory hellos and small talk, Susanna wasted no time. “I’m sure you have been following our great troubles in Southern California. Even you, who are used to earthquakes, can understand that such a magnitude in a city as populated as Los Angeles is something that can never be comprehended until it actually happens.”
Lanchoi listened sympathetically, but he was thinking, You should have been prepared for this; we are.
And the Chinese were. They had suffered massive destruction over the last century by several devastating earthquakes in their smaller villages, and even though fault lines were less likely to erupt in their big population centers, the Chinese initiated retrofitting of buildings to an extent not attempted before by any nation. Every structure over three stories high had rubber joints and bearings fused to the foundation. When retrofitted, a building could sway up to four times more than it could with its original design. The friction would eat away at the rubber and leave the building itself intact.
All Chinese skyscrapers erected after 2017 had foundations and floor joints that could twist and bend like straws. They were built to withstand a 9.0 quake, which was something that was never expected in Beijing or Shanghai, but they did it anyway. Lanchoi wondered why Los Angeles, which was on a known major fault, would not do the same, but then again, the two countries operated in a totally different manner.
As Susanna made her case, which was basically, “We need three trillion dollars today and more later,” Lanchoi smiled and nodded, and everything looked as if it were going to be a fait accompli. But when Secretary Colbert finished her “plea speech,” as one of her assistants called it, they were all shocked at what came back to them over the Nextron.