        But what if it did exist?  One of his guilty pleasures had been a good science fiction novel, and it was hard to argue that the worlds that Asimov, Niven and Wells had imagined hadn’t, in a large part, come to pass.  While it was true that he didn’t have a jetpack or a flying car, he did have a smartphone and internet access at home.  Mankind may not have colonized Mars, yet men had walked the surface of the moon and sent probes into the deepest reaches of the solar system, and even now were soaring over the earth in a space station.