“What communication lines?” I asked.
“Oceania wasn’t always isolated. Up until around one hundred years ago, we had constant contact with the above world. It wasn’t until the humans in the above world succumbed to the second insurgence of The Great Plague that we lost contact.”
Prying open my omniphone with a tiny screwdriver, Dylan opened the port to the motherboard. “So if we can simply find a way to connect with it, you should be able to do a search on the Network for anything you want to know, Dr. Wilcox.”
Pushing up on my tiptoes, I watched Dylan as he tinkered with my 20,000-dollar omniphone. The more nanotech he messed with, the more my heart started to sink. Just when I was about to cry out for them to stop dissecting my poor omniphone, Dylan reassembled it.
“Now, see if it works, Allie.” I cradled my abused, tampered with omniphone in my hands and swiped my fingers down the center. Thankfully, it came to life. “Well, it still works.”
“That’s always good,” chimed in Dr. Wilcox.
I opened up the Network and it showed up. “Oh, my gosh, it works!”
“Really?” Dr. Wilcox unceremoniously snatched it from me and started searching things right away, sitting down in his swivel stool and facing the workbench.
“Sorry, he gets really excited sometimes and behaves a little uncouth. I guess my spending time with him has made me a bit the same.”
I laughed. “Yeah, maybe just a bit.” Surveying the items in the workshop, I wondered, “What is all of this?”
“All of his inventions mostly. Some of them are works-in-progress, but others have already passed their testing phase and are just waiting to be placed on the market.”
Piled on every available inch of the table were all sorts of gadgets. Examining the pile carefully, I plucked one of them from the top, gently removing it as if it were a Jenga piece. In my hands was half a mask with two cylindrical tubes on either end. Behind the tubes were butterfly-wing-shaped pieces that were somewhat sticky. “Do you know what this is?”
“Yeah, it’s the next gen of masks for the Aquaball sports teams.” Dylan reached out for the object and I gave it to him. “The players were complaining about the face masks obscuring too much of their vision to play the game properly, so they wanted just an oxygen portion for their mouths, so they could both breathe and see well.”
“Allie,” shouted Dr. Wilcox, making me scream out in kind.
“What?” I spun around to see him standing behind me.
“There was a mass extinction event in the late 2100s and early 2200s?”
“Uh, yes.”
“But how? According to this Network of yours, the world went entirely green by 2150—no more fossil fuels, only hydropower, sun, wind, and the like. How?”
“Well, we had already caused too much damage. Oil was still used up until 2150; the oil crisis in 2096 only made using oil more difficult, not impossible. What that article failed to mention was before we went green, oil was drilled for in some of the most ecologically unstable places in the world. Rainforests were torn down. The polar ice caps are so reduced there’s basically nothing there and our coral reefs died out long ago too. The temperatures have risen too much and due to so much of the polar ice caps melting, the seas have risen too.”
“I know…I know…I read that it was a hundred feet or so in some places.” Dr. Wilcox ran his fingers through the three wispy pieces of hair still clinging to his scalp. “But between that and the number of people on the planet…astonishing!”
Dylan and I merely stared at him, waiting for him to finish.
“Sorry, continue what you were looking at.” Dr. Wilcox returned to his workbench.
Stuck underneath some scrap metal was a blank screen about ten inches across with handles on both sides. “What about this gadget?”
“Ah, it’s one of my personal favorites. Dr. Wilcox has been working on that one for probably twenty years or more. It’s a diagnostic device. You can scan any human being to determine which illness they have.”
“Wasn’t something like that developed long ago? I mean we even have stuff like that on land.”
“Ah, but does yours also map your genetic code, search for abnormalities in your chromosomes, and give you a map on how to re-grow nerves in a way that will eliminate any future phantom pain?” Dylan pointed to the device in my hands. “That will.”
“Wow.” I carefully returned the device to the table. “No, we don’t have that.”
“Allie, Allie…” Dr. Wilcox once again popped up next to me with my omniphone cradled in his hands. “Did you know that your world found cures for cancer, ALS, AIDS, Ebola, diabetes, and INFLUENZA?”
“Yes, I did, Dr. Wilcox. The only thing we still haven’t figured out is the common cold.”
“We did,” piped in Dylan.
I whipped my head around at Dylan. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah, about fifty years ago.”
I was rendered speechless by that statement.
“And Allie, your world has figured out how to regrow internal organs by up to eighty percent?”
“If that’s what it says, I’m guessing it’s true.”
“I’m on the CDC’s website, so it must be,” mused Dr. Wilcox, stroking his clean-shaven chin. “And is it true everyone is scanned before they enter into any public place?”
I rolled my eyes and sighed in exasperation. “Yes, every time you enter the immersion movie theater, a mall, a school, bank, amusement park, you name it. It gets really annoying if you ask me.”
“Scan for what?” wondered Dylan.
I opened my mouth to speak, but Dr. Wilcox beat me to it. “I can
