Halcyon Chimaera concepts

Near Future:

	Careless Friday: Allegedly a dirty bomb attack on an American city by the desperate Columbian FARC. This attack prompted a heavy handed invasion of Colombia and was the final nail in the coffin for American civil liberties. What the American people don’t know is that the attack was the world’s first example of nuclear terrorism. Blinded by focusing on Islamic terror threats, and the US southern border poorly defended because of political controversy over ‘migrant worker’s rights,’ the government was not able to stop the device from entering the U.S. until it was too late. The bomb in question was a uranium implosion device with a floated pit. Crudely built, the pit fell loose from its mounting, resulting in a fizzle that at first appeared to be a dirty bomb. The pit was ejected from the explosion like a wet bar of soap being squeezed in the hand, and so little of the HEU underwent fission that the explosion was only about double that of the McVeigh car bomb. The truth is the U.S. gov’t knew that it was a nuke the whole time, as the FARC was determined to use it for nuclear extortion. The government had time to evacuate citizens but didn’t because they believed that it would cause panic and that they could find the bomb before it detonated.

	America and civil rights: After careless Monday there was a paradigm shift in the way that society viewed its liberties. The US never became a dictatorship. Guns and free speech were never banned. But they are merely allowed. You are now given permission by the government to not be spied on and have guns and speak freely as long as you don’t do anything that’s out of line. Every right now comes with the tacit agreement that the government has the right to take your rights away when they become ‘harmful’ to others. In other words, instead of rights, we now have privileges

	Government internet surveillance: with public ire at programs like the NSA’s dragnet surveillance, the government turns to less intrusive, yet ever more encompassing methods of tracking people. One of which is NSA malware. It infects your computer, looks for things that would be illegal, and then reports that information up the line for further review. Back in the days of the Eastern Germany, you had something like 40% of the country spying on the other 60% No country can ever afford such onerous programs ever again, so the number of actual people spying has been reduced and replaced with ever smarter computer systems. Sure, a computer doesn’t care about your pillow talk, but it’s capacity to record every transgression you’ve made against the government is infinite and cheap. It’s hard enough to say your privacy is being violated by a computer, but even harder when it’s by a computer virus that is merely looking for crime without being able to record any of your personal data – there’s nothing to fear if you’ve got nothing to hide. Not to mention, if the compute you’re typing on knows your secrets, what’s so wrong about another computer seeing them too? These malware programs are named after the lymphocites and immune responses in the human body that they are analogous to.

	Next Gen fighter craft: Air superiority fighters have become entirely autonomous due to the g forces they experience, the necessarily low reaction times, and the simplicity of their task. Recon and loiter missions are usually performed by autonomous/remote controlled drones. CAS missions are performed either by manned aircraft due to the complexity of ground situations, or by remotely operated drones when the situation allows it (too dangerous for pilots, long loiter times, etc). The domain of multi-role fighters is a completely different air game, however. This is accomplished with fighter craft pairs referred to as an element. One of the crafts is manned, while the other is an autonomous drone ‘wingman.’ The human pilot allows the element to think outside the box and respond quickly to new threats, while the autonomous drone of the element serves to protect the pilot and execute the orders it receives from him. Each drone has its own personality that is cultivated by the pilot. The drone and the pilot practice together. The pilot must learn to be comfortable relying on a drone, while the drone learns the specific quirks and commands unique to its pilot. The relationship in analogous to a combat dog and a handler. Each drone also comes equipped with a an avatar that the pilot can interact with. In addition to humanizing the drone, these avatars serve to display data about the drone’s condition in the form of Chernov faces. Because humans evolved to read other humans faces, many different sets of data can be displayed by the human features of a face, and processed simultaneously, rather than trying to read a series of numbers, bar graphs, and pie charts one at a time. In this way, a pilot can tell almost everything he needs to know about his drone from a single glance at its avatars face and the emotions it appears to display.

	The Internet: streaming, streaming everywhere. Everything is online all the time. Being offline is considered as taboo as using a typewriter, and it’s considered criminally suspicious by the government to own too many storage devices at any one time. Ads are ever more intrusive, and no one really owns anything of their own anymore. Everything is rented. Everything is streamed. The internet is also responsible for another societal shift. Agriculture caused people to settle down. The Industrial revolution brought them into factories. The invention of the automobile meant that people moved to the suburbs because they could simply drive to the cities for work. With the death of American industry, the next shift is working at home via the internet. Some jobs of course, especially small business, require that you come into work. But for most wage earning ‘salaryman’ white collar office jobs, these can all be done from the home office.

	The American Beer Renaissance: The currently growing American craft beer market reaches its potential thanks to (John Doe).  At this time, the craft beer industry is a major employer and statistically significant sources of wealth for the US; in addition to domestic sales, exports rival that of France’s wine industry. One of the biggest companies is John Doe’s (Joe’s brewery), which ended up creating a sort of ‘beer empire.’ John was a scientist working in both Chemistry and Microbiology. His work was huge in helping to ease pain of the energy crisis by creating bacteria capable of fermenting fossil fuels. After this, he was given the offer to work on a new class of pesticides to kill mosquitos but turned it down fearing that his research could be used to make chemical weapons. He instead opted to work on a new cure for drug resistant malaria. The company he worked for, however, decided to sit on his research, as ordered by the U.S. government. The government believed that by saving the lives of malaria victims, it would do more harm than good as there would now be more mouths to feed. Disgusted, John Doe took what money he had, and invested it in beer.