The Ark Society: Just Imagine a Better Educational System, a Better Government

By David J. Nowel

Spacestation ARK is a business/ government. It becomes a master at harnessing the full potential and productivity of its over one million inhabitants thus becoming the most profitable corporation in the world and also the worlds newest superpower. The Arkians, with the help of thinking computers, have taken on the responsibility of funding new businesses and creating jobs for millions of jobless people throughout the world. Their computers control weaponry with their unique capability of annihilating whomever they wish.

The employees enjoy open sex, recreational drugs, and a chance to function in every role that anyone can imagine (president, senator, physician, lawyer, actor, musician, artist, engineer, judge, model, athlete or even a mountain climber). Their medical technology has become so advanced that they are about to become immortal.

The ARK Society precedes the story of Spacestation ARK by thirty years, it is about how three people helped make the ARK a reality. This book is the blueprint for the coming of age of our new technology like the development of new types of businesses, including solar power and electric cars; the invention of sophisticated training machines that make our present educational methods absolute; the creation of an affordable medical structure and the involvement of the full citizenry in a true democratic political system. The thinking computer becomes their Plato Philosopher King.

Its not the typical romantic love story; yet a love story nevertheless, of a young, beautiful, brilliant, schizophrenic woman, Keiko. A woman who sees what can be and leads herself, Alex, Wendy and the rest of the world into the future of Spacestation ARK.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 6, 2007
• ISBN: 9781477180778

David J. Nowel

David Nowel was born in 1935 in New Britain, Connecticut. He received his liberal arts education, premed, and BA in chemistry and psychology from Hobart College in Geneva, New York. He worked for two years in the neurophysiological research laboratory at the former Hartford Retreat, now the Institute of Living, in Hartford, Connecticut. The laboratory’s research was directed by Karl Pribram, MD, now department head of Neuropsychology at Stanford University. Dr. Pribram is recognized as the father of neurophysiology. During the author’s short time at the Hartford Retreat, he was exposed to the best minds in neurophysiology. Since that time, he has spent thirty years in sales for several national biomedical companies. Recently, he has become involved in the environmental field and was business development manager for Technical Waste, Inc. in Placentia, California. He currently works as an insurance agent and lives in La Quinta, California.

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Copyright © 2007 by David J. Nowel.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 07/20/2015

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CONTENTS

BOOK 1

BEFORE WENDY

Preface

Chapter 1 Space Station, Ark

Chapter 2 The Kiss

Chapter 3 Annette’s White Gown

Chapter 4 The Next Day And Time Goes On

Chapter 5 Terry And Annette

Chapter 6 On A Different Path

Chapter 7 Halloween

Chapter 8 Terry’s Party

Chapter 9 Guess Who?

Chapter 10 The Day After The Party

Chapter 11 Disturbing Keiko

Chapter 12 Keiko’s Insanity Rubbing Off On Alex

Chapter 13 Out Of The Hospital

Chapter 14 Off To La With Keiko

Chapter 15 Ins & Outs With Keiko The Year 1985

Chapter 16 Happy New Year, Keiko

Chapter 17 After New Year’s Eve

Chapter 18 Round And Round The Merry-Go-Round

In memory of

Neil Ginnetti, Philip Flegal and Marilyn Hickman

This book is dedicated to my son Bruce and his wife Cathy.

To my daughter Lynn Marie

To my three grandchildren Cameron, Miles and Avalon.

Acknowledgements: Many thanks to all of the people who encouraged me and to all of the editors. The principal editor was Harford Windsor. The other editors were Julius Kiskis, Helene Becker, Sophie Boswell, Barbara Tobar, and Juan Maria Crystal.

PREFACE

When I started writing Spacestation ARK way back in 1984, I was rather gloomy about our survival as a species. However, after writing and then publishing Spacestation ARK in 1994, I became convinced that Homo sapiens would not become extinct like the other 90% of the species that lived on planet earth.

I remember my first thoughts about human migration into space back in 1953. I was making my first trip home during my first semester break. It was a long journey by train from Geneva, New York to New Britain, Connecticut. It was around ten o’clock at night when I finally arrived; my grandmother woke up to greet me although she was too tired to get out of bed.

In her darken bedroom, I remember telling her about my trip and discussed some of the things that I’d learned. I was only eighteen then, and was all excited about all of my experiences over the last four months at Hobart. We didn’t use phones the way we do today so there was a lot to catch up on.

I remember how I explained the mercantile system to my illiterate grandmother. She understood what I was trying to say since she possessed a lot of common sense for she was a woman who came to this country from Poland, all by herself, when she was only sixteen years old. Her father ended up marring her best girlfriend and he knew that was not going to work for her; so he gave her a ticket and sent her on her way to start a new life in America. She worked at Stanly Works plus two other jobs. She saved all her money and eventually transported all of her eight brothers and sister to Connecticut. She understood what migration was all about. I told her that man needed new frontiers. It wouldn’t be too long before we would be living on the Moon and then Mars.

Today, people ask me what I write about. Since my books are about change, people seem to think that I’m writing about the future or science fiction. All of my life as a salesman, we had to make people imagine their life in the future and how they would feel when they use our product. I sold products that no one thought they wanted and the companies I worked for had to convince the consumer that they needed those new products. The big problem was that the customer had to make some kind of change. When they finally bought our products they would learn that they couldn’t live without that thing.

It was a very slow process that sometimes took years to accomplish. It also took years to tweak the product to do all the things we said it could do. It was a collaborative effort between the manufacturer and consumer. The finished product was very different from the initial models that we started with.

I guess life has always been about change. Our ancient relatives were scavengers but they finally learned how to use tools. They migrated from Africa and covered the whole globe in a relatively short period of time. We have run out of space on our planet earth. I believe that our biggest migration is going to happen tomorrow. We all know how we are crowding this planet and we can see evidence of that every day.

My last date’s angry parting words were And another thing I don’t believe there is any such thing as Global Warming.

Okay, let’s pretend there is no such thing as global warming. Let’s talk about the smog and pollution. We have so much smog out here that I can’t breathe. Even my cat is getting asthma. I can’t see the mountains or read the highway signs.

We need to stop being the victim and do something. I have faith that we Californians will come to our senses. I know we will set the example for our nation and the world. We need to; after all we are one of the largest consumers of petroleum and we have the sun, cars, smog, freeways. We are now on this slippery slope and we are going nowhere. Let’s set an example for the rest of the nation and show the world what we are made of.

We are making the oil countries and companies rich, and they all hate us. I never heard them thanking us for giving them all of our money. The Arab countries say we are thieves and stealing their nature resources. I’ve never been a thief and yet we all have been thieves by robbing the Arab countries of their only resource. We need to let them keep their oil. Maybe someday they will make us want their sand. In the mean time let’s stop this wholesale robbery of those poor unfortunate people. Maybe then they will stop bombing us.

I believe that we are all geniuses. If not that then at least we all have very unique and special individual gifts. If we are given enough love and nurturing and most importantly, time, we can develop our special talents. I believe that we need to come to grips with our educational systems as well as our medical systems, and realize that in order to fix these faulty systems, we need to take on the same kind of complexity that we use in our defense. We need more jobs or more businesses and we need to train people better.

I have tried to put forth in my writings some of the things we could do tomorrow in order to employ especially the older people. We need to encourage the aging population, who have wisdom and experience at their fingertips, back into the work force. This will not only increase our tax base but give them income to feed our economy.

Businesses play a major role in this endeavor. I don’t believe that we need cheap immigrant labor. We need better working conditions. It will take investment of time. I’ve worked at Domino’s Pizza and although it’s not Aqua Space, as described in this book, this company has spent a lot of thought in the way they have combined the use of touch screen technology and the computer. If they can do it, so can other companies.

I’ve worked at other places where the company wants you to be an engineer on minimum wage and one has to learn the job through osmosis. Those companies give little thought to automation or standardization. This is the kind of stupidity that is dragging our country down. Every employee I know wants to do a good job. It’s hard to do that when you have idiots running things.

In fact one place that I worked at changed all their prices on major items almost every day and by some kind of miracle the employees were suppose to figure it all out. It was also obvious to the employees that the management didn’t want to invest their money on bar code readers.

In 1986, I was selling a training system that was able to teach people in one third of the usual time with sixty percent retention. I took this as being some kind of miracle.

This is the story that comes to my mind. Here it is. I called on a very large refinery in LA. They were having a problem because they were moving from an analog system to a digital system. The old system took up a large room. It was a long corridor of switches. You could walk the corridor and you could see all of the switches. If there was a malfunction, a red light would go on and you could see the switches you needed to close or open. Now they were going to take all of that room and reduce the readouts to something that was no larger than the top of a very large table. I think you can all see the problem.

The management had a big retraining project in front of them in order to make this transition. It was real easy to see how difficult that was going to be. The old system was primitive but it was so simple. You have to remember that the mind works differently when operating under stress. God forbid someone should pull the wrong switch.

Well, I offered them a training program that would help in that transition. It would cost three million dollars and most of that was programming cost. I believe the hardware cost was about a million. A nice commission for me! The good part of all of this was that the State of California would pay for all of it. It was considered training and California had millions of dollars in surplus collected from unemployment insurance. It was one of those good years and there was little unemployment

This particular Vice President would have no part of this Californian program. He did not want anybody from the State evaluating what and how they were using these funds. He simply didn’t want anyone from California meddling in his business.

Eventually this refinery did go on line with their new readout. And three months later someone pulled the wrong switch and they had a major mishap in the form of a fire and explosion. I really don’t know if anyone was hurt but this mishap caused considerable damage and bad press.

All the companies selling interactive video went out of business. A part of the technology was cannibalized just as General Motors cannibalized the electric car. We did get touch screen technology out of this experiment. There were several reasons why we weren’t ready for this new technology. The computers were still very primitive and the disc players were unwieldy. The DVD disc as we know it weren’t developed. The programming was very expensive because there were few engineers that had experience with this type of technology.

Finally I ended up working in the environmental industry and left frustrated in trying to get companies to routinely do biological monitoring when using toxic material. The medical directors of those large companies were more than willing but they were advised by their legal departments not to test employees for toxic material in their bodies. They were afraid to find problems because if they did then they could be sued.

So my writing comes from the frustration I feel. I believe in the United States and believe it’s still a land of opportunity. We need to stand united. We have to learn not to listen to slick politicians, clever spins and their very expensive campaigns. But, most importantly, we need to realize that the buck stops at our door and we can vote everyday with our actions.

First things first, let’s solve our oil situation.

CHAPTER 1

Space Station, ARK

December 7, 2020. From his isolation cell on board the ARK, Alex Abramawitz looked down on the tiny blue and white sphere of his home planet, Earth. He saw the ponderous continent of Africa, its enormity dwarfed by his perspective from space, as if it were a miniature elephant’s ear.

In Alex’s mind, something about its shape had a magnetic pull. He pictured space travelers gazing at earth from a similar orbit, a hundred thousand years ago, and he could see why they would have chosen Africa for a landing pad.

The African continent was the hothouse from which man had flowered. And he imagined how, after the first extraterrestrial visitors landed, their seed might have commingled with indigenous species. Mankind’s sudden origin in Africa, and its slow migration over the planet was easily conceivable from a spacecraft hovering a hundred miles above the earth’s surface.

Alex could see the end of the Atlantic Ocean and the beginning of the bulge of Africa where South America once pulled away. From there, Africa’s northern boundary rolled up and over the Strait of Gibraltar and headed east, jutting out into the Mediterranean sea, only to barrel back down into the irregular trapezoid of Saudi Arabia and the narrow waisted Red Sea. He saw the Indian Ocean, the landmasses of Southeast Asia and the white, swirling clouds that quilted themselves together over northeastern Australia, the Great Barrier Reef, and New Zealand.

To the south, Antarctica spread itself over the bottom of the sphere, beautifully outlined against the blue ocean like a gelatinous silver cap. It was the image of this frozen land that most captivated Alex.

Water was becoming a precious commodity and would someday be more valuable than gold or oil. The new inhabitants of the Ark and the expanding cities on the moon would need more water than earth’s leaders realized. He smiled, knowing water supplies would become critical much sooner than anyone expected.

He looked forward to the day when the ARK machinery would be developed enough to recover the cubic miles of fresh water reserved in the South Pole’s Antarctic ice sheet.

Even with such reserves, he knew robbing water from its natural sources would continue to cause the earth’s arid climates to spread across most of the globe unless man stops the misuse of water for his own consumption.

Patterns of different blues formed by the oceans was over laid by vast swirls of white bellowing clouds. The yellow land contrasted conspicuously against the dark blue water that surrounded it. In some areas the light ocher colored land appeared almost as white as the clouds that lay over it. Where the light was right, he could even see the mountain ranges and long slivery threat of the major rivers.

If only they had taught him geography with a globe like this in third grade he would have gotten A’s instead of his barely passing grades, Alex thought.

He wished the conquerors and dictators of the world, including Hitler, could have seen earth this way. Maybe their ambition would have been curbed. This sight always humbled him. Even a Roman Emperor would have seen his magnificent empire around the Mediterranean Sea as a small part of the whole earth. Alex knew that someday his great, great grandchildren would look out across the galaxy back to earth and marvel at how little their ancestors had understood.

From his high vantage point on the ARK, Alex could see the little village he and Keiko had visited in Africa. She’d been so happy talking with those poor African children. He knew he would never forget those memories and how good they made him feel. He loved thinking about Keiko and how much of his present success he owed to her.

His thoughts transported him back to that visit. He was feeling so close to her then. He thought how marvelously young she looked. He’d first met her in 1986 and although she is forty-eight years old now, she’s held that look of a child, so vulnerable and innocent, yet so curious and warm with an impressionable quality. He still knew he’d been correct in getting her released from Camarillo State Hospital for the mentally ill twenty years ago. They had diagnosed her as a manic depressive, paranoid schizophrenic, and everyone told him not to do it. But watching her in Africa, working with kindergartners and elementary school children, he knew he had done the right think. She loved being with children, but because she had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, she was afraid to have any of her own. Working with children like this was the best substitute, and the best therapy for her.

He always marveled at what a linguist she was. She spoke so many languages and could pick up new languages with the ease of a child. Keiko was confident when she was with Alex. It was almost impossible for her to tour alone, but somehow with Alex she received special energy and became very eloquent. Although Alex was fluent in English, Keiko managed an ultimate performance in all her languages, using colloquialisms to their maximum effect. He watched and thought how incredibly bright she was.

He continually tried to master different languages, but even using the ARK’s latest teaching techniques and memory increasing medication, Alex just didn’t have the knack for it. He was envious of Keiko’s gift. He had no trouble understanding the words, but he had great difficulty moving his mouth and tongue so the words would come out right. He managed to speak German, French and Russian, but he lost track of how many different languages and dialects Keiko could speak. He had learned early in the game to rely on her ability to speak with different people.

When he first promoted his books about a new type of futuristic society and was on talk shows throughout Europe, he was able to understand the question but relied on Keiko to give a fluent answer in the host’s language. They had the presentation down well. It was all pretty canned in the sense that they had twenty to fifty different alternatives, and he would signal which phrases she should use. As they worked with different audiences, they learned that the question most people would ask was almost always some variation of, What is the ARK really like?

But how could anyone really describe The ARK? If Alex called it a space platform, people would look at him as if he were using an improper word and say, Platform? What’s a platform?

Then he would say, I mean a space station.

Then they would look at him as if they really understood the words, space station. They didn’t even ask him the questions, What does it look like? What is it? They all acted as if they knew what the ARK was by the simple description… space station.

Alex would feel frustrated and have to continue with, It’s a series of buildings of attached to other buildings with passageways and streets. Think of the biggest shopping mall you’ve ever been to that’s entirely enclosed. Think of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, the Hyatt Hotels throughout the United States and the world, that’s what part of the ARK looks like. Or think of a theater with the screen totally surrounding you, you’re standing in the middle, looking into space, and you can see its blackness, the blue earth with its swirling white clouds, the brightness of the moon, the sun glaring off in the distance and trillions of bright shining stars, glowing back at you. This was a site that can only be viewed from space.

When they were in Africa, Keiko spoke to the children in their native dialects. She loved dressing in garments of the country she was visiting. She wore a colorful, loose fitting robe of the natives and looked like she belonged to these children in spite of her light pigment.

Most people thought of her as an excessive introvert, and yet, here she was, performing like a professionally trained actress. She was startling in her simple beauty. She used every range of her soft feminine voice that made one vibrate and respond as if he were hearing beautiful cords played on a harp. She was hypnotic and captivating when she was like this and could convince everyone of her sincerity. He could see the big eyes of the youngsters looking at her, believing every word, every description she made.

Alex didn’t want to think about the fact that this was their last trip back to Mother Earth. It wasn’t just the thought that he wouldn’t be able to give back to the people of earth anymore, but also that he’d miss seeing that special exuberance in Keiko’s eyes. He could see how the young people in Africa respected her visions of the ARK and its new society and how they were influenced by these visions. Alex was her invaluable disciple, but without him she felt too fragile to travel to earth.

He saw the sparkle in the children’s eyes, and the expressions on their faces that she was telling them about space walking, how vast the universe looked from up there, and how bright the earth, moon and stars shined. He would hear laughter when she described the zoo and the different prehistoric animals preserved and recreated on the ARK. She showed them how these creatures looked and acted, and the children laughed and even squealed with joy. Alex heart exploded when he thought of the magnificent scenes she created.

He saw how being down with those people kept Keiko alive. He loved her most when she was like that, but it was getting more and more difficult, almost impossible to go down, and he was feeling less and less comfortable on earth.

Keiko and Alex never failed to use the word, ARK, for propaganda purposes. ARK referred to the biblical meaning, a ship that preserved the species during the Great Flood. Many animals that had become extinct on earth, even in recent times, were still preserved on the ARK. Using the principles of ontological phylogenic recapitulation and biological engineering, the ARK was able to bring back many prehistoric animals. Alex even started to laugh when Keiko tried to stretch her neck to look like an Apatosaurus. Then she moved her head from side to side using her arms and hands hooked together to look like the huge tusks of a Woolly Mammoth.

Because of the Arkian Prehistoric Zoo all of its recreational devices, the ARK was a huge success as a tourist attraction. The ARK and space had become more popular than Disneyland or any other theme park on earth. Some tourists decided to stay and live on the ARK. Of course, this new society and international business needed all the immigrants it could get, just as the United States needed people during its formative years.

Alex’s thoughts returned to the African trip, and he remembered watching Keiko describing the ARK to the children by moving her hands, delineating some of the narrow passages in the older part of the ARK and then describing the newer parts, which were massive and roomy. He watched her describing plastic cloth-like material, made from plants that the ARK had developed from genetically manipulated organisms. The fiber was like plastic in its hardness. She told them how certain parts of the ARK were glued together, and how sturdy yet soft and warm these materials were. She moved her feet to show them how, at first, the ARK was more metallic in its makeup, how your shoes clanked when you walked and how it had the cold feel of metal.

Alex shuddered when he thought back to the beginning of the ARK when it was just a simple platform with tubes and chambers. Some places weren’t even big enough for a man to move his body through. How claustrophobic that old ARK was, and how different the new ARK is, with superstructures of floors upon floors and buildings upon buildings. One new section was so extensive people started calling it a city. It was amazing how quickly they could prefabricate sections, and repeatedly recreate these sections once the plans and technology were developed.

Elevators now interconnect some sections, others have moving sidewalks and escalators. Some sections are vast with high-ceilings, like department stores and big hotels on earth. Huge plasma windows allow everyone to look out and see the moon and planets with the countless stars and galaxies beyond in the heavens. Some sections of the ARK are totally transparent on both top and bottom. As you walk, you can look in any direction and see nothing but the vastness of space as if you were space walking.

Alex remembered how happy he was when the ARK was finally able to simulate gravity. At first it was very primitive, using centrifugal force, one open cylinder rolling around inside another. But once they improved their mining techniques on the moon, and they were able to move huge masses of material to the platform, they created artificial gravity. At first, two-thirds of the ARK had gravity and one-third was weightless in this stage of development. But most people couldn’t easily adapt to weightlessness. It was tolerable to be out in space and have limited periods of weightlessness, but living under those conditions from day to day, month-to-month was impossible for most earth people.

Thinking back to the African village, Alex saw Keiko with her mouth wide-open making fish-mouth facial expressions, and knew that she was talking about the huge aquariums on the ARK. He saw her making swimming motions and knew that she was talking about scuba gear and how people played in large bodies of water in the ARK’s reservoirs trying to explain the novel experience of swimming without gravity.

He wondered how words could describe what we have in the ARK. It’s different from earth, all man-made. The tunnels and passageways are parts of a universe in space. The ARK was such an unimaginable marvel that most men never dreamed it could be achieved in such a short time, but it was cheaper and faster to build in space without gravity, and with the latest technology, space wasn’t as harsh as people once thought. Another important advantage of construction in space was not having to work through the protective factors of unions. For years people talked of cheap modular homes built from plastic molding machines yet nothing was ever done for fear that these new homes would displace traditional union jobs. Cheap modular construction could have solved so much of earth’s needs if labor and management had trusted each other and worked together. Some of the expense of building new homes was in the vast array of conduits. Special tubing was needed to reuse wastewater, and special types of wiring were needed for the many different kinds of electrical outlets.

Alex’s thoughts jumped back to one of his favorite quotes, The present is really the past biting into the future. He believed that if someone had looked back in the eighties hard enough, plastics would have become more important because of their non-corrosiveness, lighter weight and molding ability. Auto manufactures were being pressured more and more into building lightweight economy cars. So much so that these cars became engineering marvels but their cost elevated at astronomical proportions. So automobiles became major investments similar to the purchase of homes. The financial institutions were forced to finance cars for longer periods of times. With improvement from research, the all-plastic car could be virtually permanent compared to the rusting steel cars. The newer plastic cars could have withstood the elements for more than twenty years, even in