When I was covering Pittsburgh (and the steel industry) for BusinessWeek in the mid-90s, I dropped by Richard Florida, then an urban studies professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz School. His research, at the time, focused on the future of the Rust Belt.

It was a pressing interest in Pittsburgh. While the city itself managed to transition from industry to health care and tech, the surrounding mill towns, places like Homestead and Wheeling and Youngstown, were in dire straits. Florida at the time, as I recall, was upbeat, and believed the vast region, with its great state universities, strong institutions, and crucial resources, including fresh water, could remake itself.

A few years later, in 2002, I was working in Paris, when Florida published his breakthrough best seller, The Rise of the Creative Class. The book has stayed with me through the years, because it laid out our future with eery precision. His argument was that the knowledge economy would take root in global hubs that would have a few things in common: Leading universities, openness to diversity, including races, ethnicities, and sexual orientation, along with great restaurants and lively art and music scenes. These special places would host a global elite, a borderless bunch that felt nearly as comfortable in Copenhagen or Hong Kong as in Palo Alto, Calif.

Florida called this elite the "High Bohemians." They included the coders and designers, software architects, financiers—in short, most of the people who have been thriving for the past two decades. Most have advanced degrees. They like places with high quality of life, including food and art, and good parks. And these features, increasingly, make each city even stronger, richer. It is this process that has pushed up rents in New York and San Francisco, LA and Austin to levels that drive people, literally, into the streets.

This was the coming divide that Florida pointed to. While the cities thrive, he predicted, the country (and world) faced the risk of leaving vast post-industrial populations far behind, feeling lost and, yes, angry.

Richard Florida saw all of this coming.

So… When it came to hunting for “blurbs” for our upcoming book—Hop Skip Go—How the Mobility Revolution is Transforming our Lives— John Rossant (my coauthor) and I agreed that Richard Florida would be among the very best to get (at least among those not named Ophra).

It’s such a pain to ask for blurbs. People are busy. And you’re saying, in effect, “Hey, could you spend a few hours reading this, and then give me a slice of your valuable brand?”

Nonetheless, we asked Florida, through our agent, Jim Levine. And he promptly said yes. Some blurbers need a little help, “remembering” parts of the book they found especially trenchant, sometimes even coming up with words to describe them.

But Richard Florida raced through the book, wrote that he liked it, and delivered a very nice blurb. I'm grateful. 

“The automobile era is giving way to a new form of networked mobility, driven by digital technology but involving everything from new forms of transportation and electric, driverless vehicle to bicycles and our two feet. In this engaging and important book, Rossant and Baker tell the eye-opening story of this mobility revolution and what it means for our society, our planet, and each and everyone one of us.”

This is an excerpt from Dark Site: Boost Trilogy--Alissa's Story. In the scene, Alissa, a 16-year-old from Washington DC, has just gotten a cognitive implant in her brain. It's a powerful networked computer, though only the size of a fly's wing. But she needs help learning how to operate it...

A therapist came in. Noli. She was Japanese and extremely nice, though she treated me like a baby. First, she told me how lucky I am to have blue eyes and blond hair. Then she lifted up my hand and patted it for a while, the way I do when our poodle, Gilda, puts her paw in my lap.

Noli taught me a lot about how to operate the Boost.

“Look at a space behind your eyeballs,” she said. I tried. It took a while, but eventually I could make out a dark screen. A black dot seemed to float in the middle of it. She told me to concentrate on that dot, and to move it up and down with my thoughts, and to one side or the other. I did, and it moved.

“Now squint with your brain,” Noli said.

I didn’t want to be rude to her, because English wasn’t her native language. But I explained that we squint with our eyes, not our brain.

She insisted. I should stare at the dot and try squinting with my brain. So I tried to give it a contraction. The dot seemed to jump in place.

That was a click, Noli said. By steering that dot with my mind and brain-squinting on it, I would navigate entire worlds with my new chip, she said. For starters, she had me follow the dot down what looked like a corridor of applications. She told me to stop at one called Life Diary. I did, and with more clicks, I filled out a little menu and clicked OK.

What did that accomplish? I asked.

She told me that from that moment, every minute of my life for the next 20 years would be recorded. Everything I saw, every conversation, every meal I ate, it would all be there. (In fact, I’m looking at that conversation right now. It’s easy to find, because it’s at the very beginning of my records. Noli has my hand in hers and is explaining that it’s hard to find certain scenes. She says that search is “a work in progress.”)

I asked her about words. How was I going to send messages with my thoughts? She told me to be patient. The Boost needed some time to link up words with what they mean to me. She said it was a “learning algorithm” and I laughed, because she had a cute way of pronouncing her Ls.

As she left, Noli told me not to obsess over the Boost, just to forget about it. It would adapt to my brain, she said.

“You can’t turn it on by thinking,” she said. “It just happens.”

Dark Site, my new novel, is for sale at Amazon's Kindle store. Price $2.99.

The year is 2043. It’s as close to today as we are to 1993. Pods roam the streets of Washington, and black drones circulate above. Sometimes they swoop down, wrap their metallic arms around their targets, and carry people away, high above the Virginia exurbs. The drones slowly shrink into dots, eventually disappearing into the southern skies.

These drones are usually taking people to Dark Sites. Alissa doesn't think about it too much until her friend is carried away. Then Alissa, a high school senior, does some research. Her conclusion:

“It used to be that we had prisons, and if you were a criminal, that’s where you went. Everyone else was free (at least once we were done with slavery). A Dark Site is sort of a middle ground. You don’t have to be a criminal to go there, but you’ve probably done something wrong. Or maybe they think you’re going to do something wrong. So they hold you there. And if they think you’re dangerous, it could be forever.”

Alissa lives with her father in small apartment on Columbia Road, in Adams Morgan. He doesn’t know it, but Alissa’s billionaire grandfather had her spirited off to Jakarta a few months earlier, and she returned with a tiny chip, barely the size of a bee’s wing, implanted over her right temple. It’s a Chinese cognitive chip, a Boost. She’s the only kid in Washington with one, and it’s a secret.

Boosts are the global rage. The Chinese have implanted their entire population, and productivity is soaring. It’s like they’ve taken an evolutionary step forward. And the US is under enormous pressure to match them. But naturally, some people resist the idea. The more vocal ones, including Alissa's friend, Javier, are ending up in Dark Sites.

Here I’m going to stop telling the story, and instead ask a question. If the new brain chips give the Chinese a cognitive boost, and if the United States is preparing its own chips for a national rollout, when exactly should the president get his or her implant? Should the president be first? It wouldn’t make sense, after all, for the rest of us to get these powerful processors in our heads, and for the president to remain “wild.” That would be silly.

I should add a word about the Shotgun app. It's one of the outstanding, almost magical features of the Boost. In Shotgun, one person rides on other person’s chip, and experiences the world through that person’s eyes and ears (or virtual versions of them). It’s through this Shotgun app that Alissa finds herself in the White House. The story rolls from there.

I got an email from a friend who just read my manuscript of the prequel to The Boost. The working title is Dark Site. For a story that takes place about 30 years from now, in 2044, he said, it had a few anachronisms.

Bandages, for example. When people get a brain chip, or "boost," implanted above their right temple, they have that patch of scalp shaved and the incision covered with a small bandage. The bandage signals that a person has passed to this new order--from wild to enhanced--and is probably still struggling to master the brain-machine interface (or even to find the computer in his or her head).

But who will wear bandages in 2044? Won’t there be membranes that cover the skin, breathe like skin, and decompose over time, either blending into the skin or flaking off like dandruff? Could be, I thought. So I switched bandages to “patches.” I’ll leave it up to readers to figure out for themselves how advanced those patches are. (an example)

I also had my characters pick up groceries at a supermarket on Columbia Road in Washington (the same Safeway I used to shop at in the ‘80s). I knew this sounded outmoded as I wrote it. My friend agrees. So I’ll have them order more food. (It’s too bad, because excursions onto the street are good chances for the characters--and readers--to get some fresh air, and run into people.)

Try as I might to fish out anachronisms from the future, part of me is in rebellion. The future, as I see it, invariably carries a lot of the past. Look around you today. How much of what you see could have been there 30 years ago, in early 1985? From where I’m sitting, lots of elements could be from '85--the moccasins, the coffee cup, the lamp, the fan. Much is the same. And some things, like the flat-screened TV, are mere upgrades. But there are a few differences, like the Nexus tablet playing Lee Morgan on a Sonos Wi-Fi speaker.