WHITE MARS by Roger Penrose, Brian Aldiss Page A
Authors: Roger Penrose, Brian Aldiss
Tags: Fiction, General, Utopías, Science-Fiction, Science Fiction - General, Fiction - Science Fiction, Mars (Planet), Space colonies, Twenty-first century, Brian - Prose & Criticism, Utopian fiction, Aldiss
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Earth's finances were entangled with the vast EUPACUS enterprise. One by one, banks and then whole economies went bust.
Japan's Minister of Exterior Finance, Kasada Kasole, committed suicide. Four hundred billion yen of bad debts were revealed, hidden outside the complex framework of EUPACUS accounts. The debts stemmed from tobashi trading; that is, moving a client's losses to other companies so that they do not have to be reported. Chiefly involved was the Korean banking system, which had invested heavily in its own right in EUPACUS.
An equities analyst said that the Korean won, closely linked to the Japanese economic system, was now standing against the US dollar at 'about a million and falling'.
Recession set in, from which the EU was particularly slow to recover, as its individual members were forced, one by one, to close shop.
All round the globe were companies and manufactories that had relied on or invested in EUPACUS business. Many were already in debt because of delayed payments. The closure of EUPACUS Securities led to a collapse of the world banking system.
Shares fell to just over one quarter of their 2047 peak. Property values followed, leaving the PABS - Pacrim Accountancy and Banking System - with substantial bad debts and asset write-offs. The IFF was unable to muster a credible rescue package.
The deflationary impact was already being felt in North America. The situation, said one US official, was deteriorating dramatically as Asian speculators were selling off their huge holdings of US financial assets in order to try and meet their obligations nearer home. 'The US home market is going into meltdown,' an official said.
Only a month after this remark, the world's economy was in meltdown.
We sat on our remote planet and watched these proceedings with a horrified fascination. Bad went to worse, and worse to worse again. There came the day when terrestrial television went dead. And we were truly alone.
A fish stinks from the head. I'm told it's an old Turkish proverb. Despite the rigorous checks that had been set up by the UN, bad conditions and poor pay had made workers in the Marvelos Health Registration Department just as open to bribery as those at the top of the vast organisation.
So it was that Antonia Jefferies and her husband Tom were able to pass the Gen & S Health Test and travel to Mars on a CRT trip just under four years before EUPACUS collapsed, and the world economy with it.
Antonia suffered from a cancer of the pancreas, on which she had refused to have nanosurgery; it was a long while before I discovered why. Nevertheless, the gallant woman was determined to set foot on the Red Planet before she became too ill to travel. Her interest was in the Smudge experiment, which she saw as an extreme example of the interlinkage between science and human life, for good or bad.
She was a historian. Her boovideo, The Kepler Effect, had been a bestseller. Tom Jefferies had moved from employment as a theoretical physicist specialising in monopole research to what he called Practical Philosophy. His new profession brought him fame and the soubriquet the 'Rich Man's Tom Paine'.
Tom was in his early fifties. His wife was forty-eight. They had no children. He had married Antonia only after the cancer, then in her pancreas, had been diagnosed. The diagnosis had been in 2052.
Roused from cryosleep, disembarking from their ship, the Jefferies went to the R&A Clinic. Her cancer had not slept on the voyage. The diagnosis by Mary Fangold revealed that she was very ill. Tom told me later that Fangold was 'an angel', but was not able to provide a cure.
At Antonia's request, Tom drove her in a buggy to the Tharsis Shield. They sat at nightfall with remoteness all about them - in Tom's words, 'with that singing quality which absolute isolation has' - as Earth rose above the horizon, a distant star. There Antonia died, lying and gasping out her life in her husband's arms.
'Thank you for everything,' she
Japan's Minister of Exterior Finance, Kasada Kasole, committed suicide. Four hundred billion yen of bad debts were revealed, hidden outside the complex framework of EUPACUS accounts. The debts stemmed from tobashi trading; that is, moving a client's losses to other companies so that they do not have to be reported. Chiefly involved was the Korean banking system, which had invested heavily in its own right in EUPACUS.
An equities analyst said that the Korean won, closely linked to the Japanese economic system, was now standing against the US dollar at 'about a million and falling'.
Recession set in, from which the EU was particularly slow to recover, as its individual members were forced, one by one, to close shop.
All round the globe were companies and manufactories that had relied on or invested in EUPACUS business. Many were already in debt because of delayed payments. The closure of EUPACUS Securities led to a collapse of the world banking system.
Shares fell to just over one quarter of their 2047 peak. Property values followed, leaving the PABS - Pacrim Accountancy and Banking System - with substantial bad debts and asset write-offs. The IFF was unable to muster a credible rescue package.
The deflationary impact was already being felt in North America. The situation, said one US official, was deteriorating dramatically as Asian speculators were selling off their huge holdings of US financial assets in order to try and meet their obligations nearer home. 'The US home market is going into meltdown,' an official said.
Only a month after this remark, the world's economy was in meltdown.
We sat on our remote planet and watched these proceedings with a horrified fascination. Bad went to worse, and worse to worse again. There came the day when terrestrial television went dead. And we were truly alone.
A fish stinks from the head. I'm told it's an old Turkish proverb. Despite the rigorous checks that had been set up by the UN, bad conditions and poor pay had made workers in the Marvelos Health Registration Department just as open to bribery as those at the top of the vast organisation.
So it was that Antonia Jefferies and her husband Tom were able to pass the Gen & S Health Test and travel to Mars on a CRT trip just under four years before EUPACUS collapsed, and the world economy with it.
Antonia suffered from a cancer of the pancreas, on which she had refused to have nanosurgery; it was a long while before I discovered why. Nevertheless, the gallant woman was determined to set foot on the Red Planet before she became too ill to travel. Her interest was in the Smudge experiment, which she saw as an extreme example of the interlinkage between science and human life, for good or bad.
She was a historian. Her boovideo, The Kepler Effect, had been a bestseller. Tom Jefferies had moved from employment as a theoretical physicist specialising in monopole research to what he called Practical Philosophy. His new profession brought him fame and the soubriquet the 'Rich Man's Tom Paine'.
Tom was in his early fifties. His wife was forty-eight. They had no children. He had married Antonia only after the cancer, then in her pancreas, had been diagnosed. The diagnosis had been in 2052.
Roused from cryosleep, disembarking from their ship, the Jefferies went to the R&A Clinic. Her cancer had not slept on the voyage. The diagnosis by Mary Fangold revealed that she was very ill. Tom told me later that Fangold was 'an angel', but was not able to provide a cure.
At Antonia's request, Tom drove her in a buggy to the Tharsis Shield. They sat at nightfall with remoteness all about them - in Tom's words, 'with that singing quality which absolute isolation has' - as Earth rose above the horizon, a distant star. There Antonia died, lying and gasping out her life in her husband's arms.
'Thank you for everything,' she
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