Emilja was looking good for someone 160 years old—certainly a lot better than Jaru, Kandara thought. Her hair was thick and dark, arranged in an elaborate nest around her head. Sharp cheekbones were prominent under the kind of healthy wrinkle-free skin that a twenty-five-year-old would take for granted. Light-gray eyes gave the room a swift scan, which left Kandara feeling judged, and not in a good way. The woman had an almost regal presence, allowing her to carry off her formal black-and-carmine high-collar dress of Indian silk with an easy grace.
Kandara took a malicious guess that the telomere treatments she received were probably from an exclusive Earth clinic rather than a standard Utopial medical facility. Then again, she was a grade one, entitled to the best Akitha could provide. In her case, that was fair enough.
Emilja Jurich’s parents had emigrated from Croatia to London back in 2027. Their daughter dutifully studied 3-D printer programming at the London Metropolitan University and was working in the distribution division of a food printing company in 2063 when Connexion opened its first portal link between New York and Los Angeles. What she did next became a classic case study for business schools across the Sol system and beyond.
Connexion had of course produced a map app for its burgeoning hub network, but Emilja could see how basic that was—a situation that was only going to get worse for users as more portals were added. So she founded her Hubnav Company that December, and spent every spare hour developing a mInet app to guide people through Connexion’s rapidly expanding network. She started coding it when there were a grand total of 322 public quantum entanglement portal doors in the Sol system, with Connexion already announcing its ambitious plans for fifty thousand more across the continental United States. She coded it because, growing up in London, she’d always appreciated the elegant modesty of Harry Beck’s classic London Underground map, drawn with the simple truth that it didn’t matter where the stations were, nor the way the tunnels twisted between them, because Beck instinctively recognized that all you really needed to know was where the stations were in relation to each other. She coded it because she knew people were basically stupid and lazy, and their world was about to become more complicated by an order of magnitude.
As Emilja studied the burgeoning tangle of hubs, she saw a series of interconnecting spider webs spreading across the globe. If you wanted to travel from, say, Oakham, in the heart of England, to Atlanta, Georgia, it was a theoretically simple route. Go through the Oakham hub loop into the county hub network, which links to the national hub network, and takes you to London, where there’s a link to the international hub network, which takes you to the America Arrivals Port in North Dakota (that state’s senators were impressively fast at digging into the government Fair Deal quantum entanglement infrastructure pork barrel, helped by a Washington backroom pact with Texas senators who snagged the National Commercial Goods Import Station for Houston). From there you walk into the interstates hub to get to the Georgia hub network, and finally on to the Atlanta metro network where you step out into the welcome of that sunny city’s warm, muggy air. A maximum of eight portals. Easy. Except with so many portals linking to other destinations, each central hub was a roundabout of hell, especially at local rush hours.
And Emilja was right. People were stupid. After decades of satnavs and autodrive cars, they just wanted to be held by the hand and guided, hassle-free. They wanted an app to tell them one central hub is jammed up with frustrated people, or a portal door is down for maintenance, so they could take a longer (but quicker) route through three alternative hubs. Where to go, which way to turn as soon as they emerge from a portal door, how many steps to the next, a green halo mInet graphic flashing around it just to be certain you’ve got the right one.
By 2078 there were twelve billion people living in the Sol system. Apart from toddlers, all of them had a copy of Emilja Jurich’s Hubnav app, much to the fury of anti-monopoly legislators. By then, of course, the app provided its user with a rundown on their destination’s weather, political status, canny bargains, top restaurants, cleanest beaches, hottest clubs, trendiest art, grooviest music events…The whole long, long list of profiled advertising, each one bringing in revenue. Emilja wasn’t quite as rich as Ainsley Zangari, but her wealth was enough to found her own habitats, Dvor and Zabok, fueled by the age-old dream of a fresh start fully independent of Earth. She was also rich and philanthropic enough to attend the First Progressive Conclave.
Along with Jaru Niyom, she underwrote the Utopial movement.