After my awakening, I stayed at the institute for a total of 7 months. One of the nurses, Nurse Gerda, was interested in me as a person and for sure not a spy of the boss. I was able to have good conversations with her after sex and get back to life. I was a temporary guest for her, with whom she could forget her only unattractive marriage while making passionate love. Gerda, who had given her virginity to this man and had been used and discarded by him, had little sexual experience. It did not take long for her to accept my flirting as we were together most of the day. I was convinced after the exam by Sister Brigitte that my sexuality had totally changed. I was able to act like a young man again, but remembered that I had been very lame before the car accident. Anyway, Gerda was very pleased with the sex, she was reasonably tech‐savvy and showed me how to use the com and how to use it to do research on Comnet. It didn't take long for me to learn. So I could read up on what had happened while I was away.
King Franz had decided to re‐green Vienna after the deadly heatwave summer of 2039, when not just hundreds but thousands died from the heat. He was not the first to come up with this idea, because there were enough studies that proved that when a city became green again, it withstood the heat better. He had hundreds and thousands of trees planted, but it was King Charles who really pushed for greening. He had all the large squares of the city torn up and planted with grass, several hundred thousand trees and bushes were planted on them.
He issued a decree that lawns, bushes or even trees had to be planted on all flat roofs in the city. King Charles obliged all prison inmates who were not guilty of any capital crime to work in the garden, as well as all immigrants who had not come with an existing employment contract. Over time, 120,000 people were thus employed daily to tend the city's green spaces and plants. The king had arranged for the initial planting of private roofs to be financed by the state, but the ongoing maintenance had to be paid for by the owners of the houses themselves. Those who did not have a flat roof had to pay an obulus because of the equality laws.
Vienna was hardly recognizable within a year. All the squares had become parks, and traffic was diverted. This resulted in some traffic problems, which the king combated with another important decree: driving a car within the city limits became very expensive. Without exception, everyone who drove into the city had to pay a hefty fee. Without exception also meant that the delivery of goods had to be reorganized; instead of delivery trucks, cargo bicycles now had to be used. This measure initially met with fierce resistance, but the king stood firm and relentlessly implemented this law. The delivery truck drivers now grumbled and became cargo bike drivers, but this also had its good side in the long term, as many new jobs were created. The grumbling quickly stopped.
But soon the residents felt a marked improvement, the annual heat wave was no longer so severe. Many jobs had been created, many landlords had to hire gardeners specifically for this purpose, and the city government also had to employ an additional 50,000 gardeners, most of whom were immigrants. In the meantime, these regulations had been in force for almost 20 years, and everyone could see for themselves that Vienna had become a green city with tolerable temperatures even in summer. As far as the cost side was concerned, this project had become a negligible expense for the city over the years. No wonder, then, that other cities, such as Graz, Linz and Salzburg, soon followed this example voluntarily.
After a short time, it was realized that greening cost a lot of expensive drinking water. Thus, one can come up with the idea of redesigning part of the water recycling system and in this new process to produce water of non‐drinking quality more easily and cheaply, and to make the water thus obtained available to the municipal gardeners. This measure was followed by another that provided financial incentives for all new construction to separately discharge wastewater from homes to these new water treatment plants. It took several years, but this measure also paid for itself.
But the greening of the city had also meant that private car use had shrunk by half, because the fees charged for driving in the city were very high, which also meant that even more could be invested in public transport. Soon there was no place within the city that could not be reached by public transport. This measure was also considered exemplary worldwide and greatly improved the city's eco‐balance. The greening had a side effect that no one had anticipated in advance: cafeterias, bars and snack buffets sprang up around the squares that had become parks. The population made extensive use of these, so much so that the king ordered commercial licenses to be relaxed, but also decreed that these places of leisure only opened from 5 p.m. in the evening and had to close punctually at midnight. More generally, this development was readily accepted by the population, and the squares soon became a lively recreation area for all.
Despite all opposition, King Charles had carried out these projects professionally and to everyone's satisfaction, which was to his credit in many quarters. He had become a popular king among large sections of the population, who cared more about the welfare of his citizens than about the welfare of a few. There were, of course, many who were directly affected – more precisely, whose wallets were affected. But the king did not let himself be influenced by this, then one could reproach him with some things, but corruption by no means. He demanded sacrifices from many, but he could justify well in many speeches that this was for the good of all. However, the disfavored grumblers could not entirely unjustifiably point to the king's opulent lifestyle, which he never denied. He was the king, wasn't he!
From the beginning of his reign, King Charles also struggled with the Right, because the vexed problem of so‐called "migration" also had to be solved in some form, as this was hyped up by the Right to be the mother of all problems. He took this problem vigorously and had it legislated that anyone who could show a valid employment contract in the kingdom could enter with his family without restrictions. Secondly, all migrants – they were now called immigrants – again, were admitted to state‐run camps, but they had to do community service from day one, mostly as gardeners, but also in elderly care and nursing, where they could be very well used as unskilled laborers. Immigrants who resisted this were immediately deported without much fuss.
In the long run, these laws improved the kingdom's reputation, because anyone who wanted to immigrate had to know that they had to work for it. The asylum ordinance, which had already been in force 150 years ago, became valid law again, even if it was a step backward from the point of view of the right, but the kingdom had to be a safe haven for all those who were persecuted, that was important to the King. Especially in the old‐age– and nursing homes, the relief became clearly noticeable, so that King Charles' governmental work was perceived more positively from year to year. If in the early years one could still openly blaspheme about the king, later it became downright embarrassing when someone disparaged him as "the Pospischil" – that was the king's name before he ascended the throne –.
Another major coup occurred when the Comnet was introduced. A wide variety of providers had colonized telecommunications, customers were often entangled in a jungle of contracts to their detriment, and the rampant mischief became the most pressing annoyance of all citizens. To end this mischief, many founded new start–ups, but in doing so caused even more proliferation in this jungle. And the populist right–wing party relied fully on this anger, kept scoring points with their criticism, but could not offer any solutions. The king, who was not himself affected by all these annoyances, consulted with his advisors. The masters finally drew up a joint paper predicting that the public would implode over this issue in the foreseeable future, and they no longer ruled out riots. This was not acceptable to the king, he condemned the masters to work out a scenario for the solution together with technicians and experts.
They discussed for weeks. In the end, there was a proposal: to unite the different networks, the immense bevy of providers, into one. And that had to be done abruptly; no scenarios were simply good enough for a phased streamlining. The paper was also worked out in great technical detail: there would be only one network, a state–royal one, and the use of this network had to be free and mandatory for all citizens. A good example was already at hand; a Latvian company had already introduced this in Latvia with great success. The king listened to the scenario, then thought about it for a night and issued a decree in the morning. Thus was born the Comnet, which of course was quite soon opposed by some, since the privacy of all citizens – was uniformly but nevertheless – severely curtailed, enabling the king to establish a surveillance state. The latter, however, did not depart one iota from the path once taken and arranged for its immediate implementation.
A huge new computer center henceforth housed all the empire's communications. A single agency operated the physical network structure, replacing the many different private ones overnight. Its use was available to all citizens free of charge, so that the annoyance of the private operators by this measure no longer carried any weight with the public. And lastly, the smartphones previously sold by likewise countless operators were replaced by an ingenious new device, the Com.
The king had a small but very proactive hardware company bought up, complete with licenses. This device, then called Neuwirth's Com, was superior to smartphones in all respects. Unlike these, they were worn on the body – mostly on the forearm – instead of earplugs, the call signal was transmitted directly through the human body to the ear or from the mouth directly. The device never needed to be charged as it used the existing electrical wires directly for wireless power transmission to automatically charge the battery, this principle known as Moyhavn's effect for transmitting electricity over short distances had already been used for other electrical devices. The foundation for this technology was laid by the famous inventor Nikola Tesla around the year 1910.
The operation was simple and very effective, there were hardly any buttons, as mostly gesture control was sufficient. For the need to sometimes use a display, the device could extend a small foil on the side, which became a full screen. And most importantly, it was directly connected to the com–net to the state servers and could fully utilize their capacity. The com itself had little storage capacity, as it was no longer needed. The developers could concentrate fully on operating the device, voice– and gesture control. The only thing that took some getting used to was the tiny display, but it was enough for rudimentary communication; after all, everyone had large screens in their homes for playing movies, etc. One could call up movies or games as well as initiate thorough statistics on the server and much more. For example, the user didn't have to store phone numbers in his own contacts, as he was connected directly from the servers with simple commands for a phone call. One simply commanded: "Call Gerda Müller, Färbergasse" and that was usually sufficient to be connected to the correct subscriber, of course the servers remembered the frequently recurring contacts of each com, so that commands like: "Call office" or "Call home" were immediately implemented correctly.
This ingenious concept convinced even the most skeptical smartphone–defenders. The resistance of the private network operators dwindled as customers left, and there were no private network operators left after a few months. Within a few months, everyone was using the Com and the Comnet, because everyone could use it for free, it was after all financed from the royal coffers, the centralized management of the network was very stable from the start. And as a little bonus, everyone's whereabouts, every conversation and every use of the Com could be tracked at any time, which served the royal surveillance apparatus just as well as the police authorities. Data protectionists went ballistic, but people came to terms with the time, there were no more organizations that dealt with personal data. Most citizens, after all, were law‐abiding and did nothing that the surveillance state was not allowed to know about. The other citizens, however, to follow scrupulously no one could doubt. The citizens had become transparent without significant resistance.
Totally without the kingdom's intervention, the situation changed with regard to climate change, which had become a matter of great urgency at the beginning of the century.
The Western oil companies decided to make a joint switch from oil to hydrogen, to fuel cells. This was a huge step, but they were convinced they were doing the world and themselves, yes, especially themselves, a good turn. They told the auto industry to start producing fuel cell cars immediately. Pronto! They justified this step by saying that the attempted switch from internal combustion engines to battery‐powered electric motors had failed, mainly because the raw materials for the batteries could not be made sufficiently available worldwide. In purely mathematical terms, not everyone could switch from internal combustion engines to electric drives, and it was not possible to build sufficient batteries and charging stations.
In contrast, the production of hydrogen for fuel cell drives could be done with much less effort without the problems of raw material procurement. People were aware that fuel cell vehicles achieved a slightly lower energy yield from the hydrogen, but this was an advantage for the producers because motorists had to buy slightly more hydrogen than for internal combustion engines. In return, they did not have to change much, because whether they filled up with gasoline or diesel or hydrogen did not mean any particular change for them. The carmakers ended the electric–experiment and drop it without a sound, the changeover from the internal combustion engine to the fuel cell car was an easy one in comparison, they did not have to deal with the problem of job cuts, and the supply chains and refueling stations also adjusted without any problems. The cost to make cell fuel cars was nearly equal to make cars in the old fashion.
The conditions were created to be able to build large hydrogen plants in North Africa. The countries of Libya and Algeria were forcibly pacified by Western countries such as France and England, and later by the United States. The divided countries of East–Libya and West–Libya were forced to make peace with an iron fist and a steel glove, the local petty rulers were vigorously removed, a democratic government enforced by the Western powers was established. Algeria, also on the verge of revolution, met the same fate. Iron fist and steel gloves were by many democrats and ethics seen as problematic, but there was no easier way to go. And it had to be done fast, without lenghty negotiation games. In return, the Western powers were able to build large hydrogen cell factories and grant all the necessary licenses to the large Western oil companies.
North Africa did not suffer from a lack of water – it is, after all, located directly on the Mediterranean Sea – and it has enough solar energy available. Science was able to work out the basics needed for production, and oil companies pumped all their money into these hydrogen factories and the necessary delivery infrastructure to Europe and the rest of the Western world. While hydrogen was initially delivered via tankers and tankers, a pipeline was also built to the north, first to Spain, and from there later to major cities in Europe. After the first ten years, a large part of the conversion was completed.
The era of the internal combustion engine thus came to an end.
The West, as well as the U.S., were the winners; climate change could be steered in a huge step in the right direction. True, global warming would not slow down or perhaps even reverse for another 100 years. But however much the Western oil giants, motorists, and the entire auto industry thought themselves winners, there were also losers.
The events in North Africa were not democratically justified, of course; the West's iron fist was not peaceful, but it was purposeful. The disorder in the Middle East seriously worsened. Oil production had to be slowed down in big steps, they sold much less than they could produce. The wealth of the East inevitably shrank, and with it the order that had been so laboriously maintained. The revolts of the impoverished population and a thousand small groups literally tore the Middle East apart. The winners were the various Islamist groups that openly threatened Israel and the entire Western world. Without oil, the boom that was still celebrated at the beginning of the century was almost completely lost, and the East fell decades behind in its development.
Even for experts, the current balance of power in the Middle East seemed barely manageable. The uncertain circumstances were also the reason why virtually all investors from the West stayed away, sealing the doom of the Middle East as we knew it 60 or 80 years ago. The hydrogen factories in North Africa were ironcladly defended by the Western powers; otherwise, from Turkey to Morocco, from Iran to Somalia, arbitrariness and terror prevailed, which one could not imagine defusing at the moment.