Rama 2 by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

The net result of these data delays was that in most cases individual electronic bank accounts were not properly debited, for hours or even days, to account for the mounting stock market losses, Once the individual inves­tors realized what was occurring, they rushed to spend whatever was still showing in their balances before the computers completed all the transac­tions. By the time governments and financial institutions understood fully what was going on and acted to stop all this frenetic activity, it was too late. The confused system had crashed completely. To reconstruct what had hap­pened required carefully dumping and interleaving the backup checkpoint files stored at a hundred or so remote centers around the world.

For over three weeks the electronic financial management system that governed all money transactions was inaccessible to everybody. Nobody knew how much money he had—or how much anyone else had. Since cash had long ago become obsolete, only eccentrics and collectors had enough bank notes to buy even a week’s groceries. People began to barter for necessi­ties. Pledges based on friendship and personal acquaintance enabled many people to survive temporarily. But the pain had only begun. Every time the international management organization that oversaw the global financial sys­tem would announce that they were going to try to come back on-line and would plead with people to stay off their terminals except for emergencies, their pleas would be ignored, processing requests would flood the system, and the computers would crash again.

It was only two more weeks before the scientists of the world agreed on an explanation for the additional brightness in the apparition of Halley’s Comet. But it was over four months before people could count again on reliable data base information from the GNS. The cost to human society of the enduring chaos was incalculable. By the time normal electronic eco­nomic activity had been restored, the world was in a violent financial down-spin that would not bottom out until twelve years later. It would be well over fifty years before the Gross World Product would return to the heights reached before the Crash of 2134.

5 AFTER THE CRASH

There is unanimous agreement that The Great Chaos profoundly al­tered human civilization in every way. No segment of society was immune. The catalyst for the relatively rapid collapse of the existing institutional infrastructure was the market crash and subsequent breakdown of the global financial system; however, these events would not have been sufficient, by themselves, to project the world into a period of unprecedented depression. What followed the initial crash would have been only a comedy of errors if so many lives had not been lost as a result of the poor planning. Inept world political leaders first denied or ignored the existing economic problems, then overreacted with a suite of individual measures that were baffling and/or inconsistent, and finally threw up their arms in despair as the global crisis deepened and spread. Attempts to coordinate international solutions were doomed to failure by the increasing need of each of the sovereign nations to respond to its own constituency.

In hindsight, it was obvious that the intemationalization of the world that had taken place during the twenty-first century had been flawed in at least one significant way. Although many activities—communications, trade, transportation (including space), currency regulation, peacekeeping, infor­mation exchange, and environmental protection, to name the most impor­tant—had indeed become international (even interplanetary, considering the space colonies), most of the agreements that established these international institutions contained codicils that allowed the individual nations to with­draw, upon relatively short notice, if the policies promulgated under the accords no longer served the interests of the country in question. In short, each of the nations participating in the creation of an international body had the right to abrogate its national involvement, unilaterally, when it was no longer satisfied with the actions of the group.

The years preceding the rendezvous with the first Raman spaceship in early 2130 had been an extraordinarily stable and prosperous time. After the world recovered from the devastating cometary impact near Padua, Italy, in 2077, there was an entire half century of moderate growth. Except for a few relatively short, and not too severe, economic recessions, living conditions improved in a wide range of countries throughout the time period. Isolated wars and civil disturbances did erupt from time to time, primarily in the undeveloped nations, but the concerted efforts of the global peacekeeping forces always contained these problems before they became too serious. There were no major crises that tested the stability of the new international mechanisms.

Immediately following the encounter with Rama I, however, there were rapid changes in the basic governing apparatus. First, emergency appropria­tions to handle Excalibur and other large Rama-related projects drained revenues from established programs. Then, starting in 2132, a loud clamor for tax cuts (to put more money into the hands of the individuals) reduced even further the allocations for needed services. By late 2133, most of the newer international institutions had become understaffed and inefficient. Thus the global market crash took place in an environment where there was already growing doubt in the minds of the populace about the efficacy of the entire network of international organizations. As the financial chaos contin­ued, it was an easy step for the individual nations to stop contributing funds to the very global organizations that might have been able, if they had been used properly, to turn the tide of disaster.

The horrors of The Great Chaos have been chronicled in thousands of history texts. In the first two years the major problems were skyrocketing unemployment and bankruptcies, both personal and corporate, but these financial difficulties seemed unimportant as the ranks of the homeless and starving continued to swell. Tent and box communities appeared in the public parks of all the big cities by the winter of 2136-37 and the municipal governments responded by striving valiantly to find ways to provide services to them. These services were intended to limit the difficulties created by the supposedly temporary presence of these hordes of idle and underfed individ­uals. But when the economy did not recover, the squalid tent cities did not disappear. Instead they became permanent fixtures of urban life, growing cancers that were worlds unto themselves with an entire set of activities and interests fundamentally different from the host cities that were supporting them. As more time passed and the tent communities turned into hopeless, restless caldrons of despair, these new enclaves in the middle of the metro­politan areas threatened to boil over and destroy the very entities that were allowing them to exist. Despite the anxiety caused by this constant Damo­cles’ sword of urban anarchy, the world squeaked through the brutally cold winter of 2137-38 with the basic fabric of modem civilization still more or less intact.

In early 2138 a remarkable series of events occurred in Italy. These events, focused around a single individual named Michael Balatresi, a young Francis­can novitiate who would later become known everywhere as St. Michael of Siena, occupied much of the attention of the world and temporarily fore­stalled the disintegration of the society. Michael was a brilliant combination of genius and spirituality and political skills, a charismatic polyglot speaker with an unerring sense of purpose and timing. He suddenly appeared on the world stage in Tuscany, coming seemingly out of nowhere, with a passionate religious message that appealed to the hearts and minds of many of the world’s frightened and/or disenfranchised citizens. His following grew rap­idly and spontaneously and paid no heed to international boundaries. He became a potential threat to almost all the identified leadership coteries of the world with his unwavering call for a collective response to the problems besetting the species. When he was martyred under appalling circumstances in June of 2138, mankind’s last spark of optimism seemed to perish. The civilized world that had been held together for many months by a flicker of hope and a slim thread of tradition abruptly crumbled into pieces.

The four years from 2138 to 2142 were not good years to be alive. The litany of human woes was almost endless. Famine, disease, and lawlessness were everywhere. Small wars and revolutions were too numerous to count. There was an almost total breakdown in the standard institutions of modern civilization, creating a phantasmagoric life for everyone in the world except the privileged few in their protected retreats. It was a world gone wrong, the ultimate in entropy. Attempts to solve the problems by well-meaning groups of citizens could not work because the solutions they conceived could only be local in scope and the problems were global.

The Great Chaos also extended to the human colonies in space and brought a sudden end to a glorious chapter in the history of exploration. As the economic disaster spread on the home planet, the scattered colonies around the solar system, which could not exist without regular infusions of money, supplies, and personnel, quickly became the forgotten stepchildren of the people on Earth. As a result almost half of the residents of the colonies had left to return home by 2140, the living conditions in their adopted homes having deteriorated to the point where even the twin difficul­ties of readjustment to Earth’s gravity and the terrible poverty throughout the world were preferred over continuing to stay (most likely to die) in the colonies. The emigration process accelerated in 2141 and 2142, years charac­terized by mechanical breakdowns in the artificial ecosystems at the colonies and the beginning of a disastrous shortage of spare parts for the entire fleet of robot vehicles used to sustain the new settlements.