Not So Much A Forgotten Future, More An Overlooked One, I Like To Think

Recently, New Scientist ran a Flash Fiction Writing competition, which invited entrants to speculate about futures which never were, or could have been.

Well, I entered, but as the shortlisted folks have now been contacted and it doesn't appear that I was one of them, I thought I'd take the opportunity to share my entry with you lovely people. Waste not, want not, as they say, and hopefully it'll amuse you...

I Still Dream Of Orgonon

Deciding that Operation Paperclip had been very successful, in the mid-1940s the US government ran another operation collating scientific knowledge, once again targeting foreign nationals resident in the USA.

An admin error put Albert Einstein and Wilhelm Reich in the same group, but the two had met previously, and got on well. They talked about how Reich had fudged his figures last time, and Einstein candidly admitted that he'd pretty much done the same in introducing the cosmological constant, and they laughed, and set to work.

Within a few months, they announced that Reich had been right about Orgone after all, and whilst the UK set up a Health Service, the USA provided tax incentives for the mass manufacture of Orgone Accumulators. By the early 1960s, there was an accumulator in every home, and the average life expectancy had increased by 23 years.

Other countries followed suit; in 1983, the UK used Reich’s cloudbusting technology to improve their weather, and other countries used the same technology to counteract droughts and turn deserts into meadows.

Global population levels, but most notably those in societies with a strong religious influence, stabilised once it became clear that channelling sexual energy served the common good, and in many countries state-funded single-sex boarding schools for teenagers replaced power plants, boosting power reserves and education levels alike.

Einstein and Reich both lived to be centenarians, though tragically neither saw Project Iapyx, and the launch into space in 1999 of the first Orgone-powered spacecraft towards Barnard’s Star.

Iapyx I is expected to report back in 2012.