The 21st-Century Man
 by
Ataide Tartari

(approx. word count: 60,000 words)



PROLOGUE: Year 2076. M.Igor Slysh, the richest man in the world, dies.
The funeral is held in his museum in Antarctica.

I - THE HELL'S PENGUINS: Antarctica, summer of 2003.
Vladimir Slysh, M.Igor's father, is a Russian-American
wildcatter prospecting for oil in that continent. Another
oilman, Bronson, warns Vladimir about the arrival of an
environmental group that wants to stop the drilling. They go
to the harbor to face this group and, pretending to be
tourists in sympathy with their "green" points of view, they
mingle with them. When the group starts the protest
demonstration (with a crucified penguin killed by an oil
spill) and raises a blockade around the hotel where the
oilmen live, Vladimir and his friends, dressed as typical
tourists, go to the environmentalists' boat where they find
the oil used to bath the dead penguin. Eventually, the
environmentalists realize that they are not tourists but
oilmen. Vladimir attacks the blockade and ends up chained to
his own oil well. His friends release a film that shows how
the dead penguin was "oil-spilled." His wife Helena watches
it on TV, sees him chained to his oil well, and decides to
go to Antarctica in order to support "Vladimir Sergeyvich."

II - THE TRANSLUCID TWENTIES: The 2020's in Los Angeles. M.Igor Slysh
has grown into an ambitious college student. He thinks that joining his
teacher's group, Citizens for Direct Democracy, is a good starting
point, but he is rejected. His colleague Cynthia Jiang drives his
ambition--and his money--toward the art world, her world. She introduces
him to the new art of the 2020s, Translucidist Art. They start a new
business, Translucidist Fashion, in which the pants bear a transparent
triangle right on the crotch. Cynthia shaves her groin in front of a
sensationalistic TV's camera in order to show how the girls should use
her new fashion. The Translucidist Movement is a fashionable success;
the Direct Democracy movement is a failure. M.Igor's former teacher asks
for his help. He agrees; the pro-democracy political movement is
Translucidized and his former teacher is discarded. Slysh becomes The
Patron of Translucidism and The Patron of Direct Democracy.

III - THE LUNAR LIGHT GOLD: Year 2057. Big Money magazine names M.Igor
Slysh the # 1 and schedules Albert Lenzner to
accompany the richest one to the moon, where one of his
supertankers is leaking and losing some precious helium
3--the new source of energy, the new "oil." In flashbacks it
is shown how Slysh got a lease on the moon to explore helium
3 and how he became the richest one: While the ultimate oil
shortage makes his inherited Antarctic oil fields vital and
valuable, the Department of Energy launches a program to
mine the moon for helium 3. Slysh plans to bribe Fall,
Secretary of Energy. Using a detective to be sure that Fall
isn't being bribed by anyone else, he offers Fall a
"retirement plan," a firm, Fall Associates, with rich
foreign clients, which Fall ends up accepting. After the
successful rescue mission, Slysh and Lenzner return to Earth
and Lenzner discovers that the man had actually made money
with his cracked supertanker, for he had avoided tranqui-
lizing news about the lunar accident and so the speculative
market pulled helium 3 prices fifteen percent up.

IV - EURO-IZING AFROS: The Sixties (2060s). The Afro-
American Leroy Brown is caught in the middle of a violent
protest demonstration and is arrested by mistake. In the
jail he meets the Euro-Izer leader, Luther Owsley. Luther,
formerly a black man, is white and produces the whitening
drug taken by his followers. Brown is bailed out by his
employer, Cynthia Jiang, owner of the museum where he works.
Cynthia meets Luther, but, as a liberal, she keeps rejecting
his whitening drug; nevertheless he becomes her lover and
she promises to use her experience (from the 2020s) and her
relationship with M.Igor Slysh to help his movement. Leroy
Brown takes the whitening drug. Slysh is called in and
offers a third-rate company he owns to spread Luther's
viewpoints. Leroy Brown becomes the "spokesman" of the
movement, but he uses his own language, not the movement's.
(He has effeminate manners and uses a mystical, "New Age" language.)
Sylvester--white Leroy's new name--is a new star and the former
Euro-Izer Movement now is the "spiritual renaissance of the Sixties,"
and Luther Owsley ends up murdered by a black-movement leader.

V - THE MARTIAN BUSINESS: 2069, the second space race. The Martian
Treaty is rejected by the U.S. Senate and Spencer Craft (the first
Martian, son of astronauts who were working on Mars) starts to lobby for
his pet project, the colonization of Mars. He is advised to ask for the
richest man's help, but Slysh refuses to put his money on this
colonization business. Three years later, Slysh is commercially defeated
by the Chinese and asks for the government's help. As he gets no help,
he decides to support Spencer Craft's project in order to spoil the
relation between USA and China. (The Martian Treaty, never approved by
the Senate, forbade colonization, which both governments were
observing.) China makes its own colonization plan; the space race is on.
Spencer Craft wins the race through a risky maneuver, and Slysh gets a
subsidized Martian business from the American taxpayers.

EPILOGUE: Year 2076. In M.Igor Slysh Museum's opening party, Sylvester
says that there's no future for their country after Slysh's death.
Cynthia replies saying that History always repeats itself.