You wake up
…and roll out of bed. It’s 20 years from now!
Breakfast is first on the agenda, but poking through the fridge and pantry, you notice you’re running low on a few things. Plus, you forgot to do laundry last night, and you’re out of clean shirts.
Your tap an order into your phone, and it starts a countdown clock – a delivery vehicle is twenty-seven minutes, forty-three seconds away with your goods. It apologizes for the delay.
By the time you’re out of the shower, the truck is signalling your phone, and you head out onto the porch of your duplex. You’re lucky to have it – even with a forty-year mortgage (just thirty-eight years to go!), the monthly payments are a bit steep.
There’s no delivery driver – they’ve finally worked out the kinks in autonomous vehicles, and the truck sits patiently at the curb until you wave your phone by the delivery slot and grab the package that thunks into the chute. Your phone pings and a happy mascot icon capers about to indicate that, yet again, you haven’t been charged for the delivery. You pay Amazon $300 a month for premium service, which includes access to a proprietary collection of streaming TV and movies and videogames and social networks and clothing and appliance brands, along with rapid delivery. The marginal cost of items like the ones you ordered doesn’t trigger an additional charge.
Inside, you check out your goods. Rice Krispies, a canister of milk, and three new Egyptian cotton shirts. Well, the cotton is Egyptian in that the genes for the crop were harvested from the banks of the Nile. The plant itself has been CRISPR hacked for efficiency; it now grows as a kind of vine on multi-storey lattices sandwiched between powerful LED light banks, the plants aeroponically fed an ideal mixture of water and nutrients until mechanical manipulators pluck, bale, card, weave, spin, and sew the cotton into a new shirt. Yours are the first human hands to touch the fabric in this shirt, the sunlight spilling into your kitchen is the first any of the fibres has seen.
Breakfast time! You fill a bowl with Rice Krispies and milk. The milk, of course, came from a bioreactor and doesn’t have any of that pesky lactose that your ancestors evolved so hard to overcome back in the Neolithic period. And the Krispies are indeed rice in the sense that they are rounded cylinders composed primarily of carbohydrates; they were precipitated in another bioreactor. Most of your food, along with the cotton in your shirts and the cellulose that made up the delivery case it came in, the packing material, and the milk canister, were made within thirty miles of your home in boxy buildings spilling yeast-scented steam in the outer suburbs.
That shortened supply chain is why once you get past the outer burbs, there’s a lot of For Sale signs and homes abandoned to the mercy of the banks. The news feed is full of talk about how unemployment is flirting with fifteen percent this quarter, more than thirty percent in some rural areas.
But that’s how it always is, isn’t it? New enterprises and new technologies cause disruption, but in the long run it all comes out right. People get richer and better off. You never could have afforded shirts this nice so often back in the day!
(You chuckle as you remember a college friend, more than half-drunk, poking a finger into your chest and self-seriously intoning that “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”)
But enough woolgathering! You’ve got work to do. You don’t have a “job” in the traditional nine-to-five sense, like more than half of the knowledge workers (which is most workers, now) you’re a free agent. You’re a freelance writer, and today you have a contract – a little bit of narrative futurism. Your employer has sent over a bunch of projections and they want you to do one of those typical “day in the life” things about someone in 20 years in the future. It’s the laziest sort of futurism – a pseudo-story in crude second person, an assumed middle-class professional background, heavily centered around consumer trends.
Your employer doesn’t necessarily need you to project a future that’s perfectly rosy – a little risk actually goes over quite well among the consultants-and-C-suite-set – but they do have certain expectations, and if you don’t meet them, you’re not likely to get more contracts in the future. You sit down at your keyboard and start writing.
You wake up…
And Roll Out Of Bed
It’s twenty years from now!
Breakfast is first on the agenda, so you head down to the Pantri™. You just loaded it with new nutrient blocks the night before, so its feedstocks are full, and it’s had plenty of time to deliver up the makings of a simple breakfast. Sure enough, its internal bioreactors have churned out Rice Krispies (your phone notes you’ve been debited $0.0003 in a licensing fee to Kellogs-Yum!Brands-InBev) and milk. The milk is a new variant of bison milk based on the genome of a wisent that thawed out of what’s left of the Siberian permafrost. It’s not bad, you ask your Pantri™ to turn down the fat content another five percent next time.
After getting out of the shower, you pop in your smart contacts. There’s an alert blinking in the lower right corner of your field of vision from your Amazon account. You throw on your clothes and head out your front door.
The drone hovers in front of you, box held in its mechanical claspers. It scans your face and sets the package down on the front walk before zipping off again. It’s not just for you. Your duplex is near the center of the block, so Amazon sometimes drops off packages for you to deliver to your neighbours – it’s more efficient to have “last 100 yards” distribution done by hand. You got a slight discount on your monthly account for agreeing to do this, so you don’t really mind. And you get to see your neighbours, or at least their front porches. Most of them don’t come to the door until you’re gone.
The delivery is a few small boxed items, and vaccine patches. You slap yours on your arm, feel the microneedles pierce your skin. Your contacts note that within forty-eight hours you’ll be registered immunized against the nine most common currently circulating viruses, from the common cold to the new flavivirus variant – damn Aedes mosquitoes keep getting farther north every year, and Amazon doesn’t want you getting sick. It’s better for the company and its investors if you and everyone else stays healthy and productive.
At least the walk is nice. The road in front of your place is narrower now. A few years back, the city reduced it to a single vehicle lane – cars and delivery vehicles move in algorithmically-determined flocks, first right, then left – flanked by two bike lanes. The extra roadway that used to be dedicated to cars and parking was filled in with soil, and fast-growing trees were planted there. They’re intended to be carbon sinks, to slow the warming. They’re also tolerant of high temperatures and drought resistant, and they shade your place, which is good because average daily highs in the summer are now over 100 Fahrenheit.
After you drop off your three small packages, you head back home, sweating. It’s not just the heat. There’s a group of people headed down the road, most of them on old janky bicycles – some of them don’t even have power assist! – loaded down with panniers and trailers and improbably-high pyramids of mysterious tarp-wrapped oddments. They’re dressed in second-hand or scavenged clothes that fit like a scarecrow’s duds, being not made-to-order for them, and their tans come from the sun, not from melanin enhancers.
You break into a run for the last dozen yards and slam the door behind you, blinking up your home security system’s video feed from the front of your house.
The caravan, maybe forty or fifty people strong, passes through. None of them so much as glances at your place. Your breathing slowly returns to normal as you slump down against the door.
They must be from one of the shantytowns on the outskirts of town. At the edge of the suburbs, they make camps near the new forests, where the farms used to start. They’re refugees from all over – the flood zones, the cities, and the Mid West’s so-called Mulch Belt, what used to be corn country. There are stories circulating constantly on social media about how they brew up exotic drugs in hacked bioreactors, go on sprees of robbery, rape, even cannibalism. You know it’s probably not true. They’re just poor people. But you went down a rabbit hole a couple of months ago, your brain gorging on adrenaline reaction your pretended was research. Now you can’t stop thinking about a gang of hobos breaking into your house armed with machetes.
Your therapy account says you have a low-grade case of epistemic collapse. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, most people have suffered at least mild epistemic damage over the past twenty years. It’s like smoking in the 1950s, nobody knew better until it was too late. The therapy system has prescribed some cognitive exercises, a reduction in social media, and more face-to-face time with friends, but you live alone and you work six days a week just to keep up the payments on your mortgage (just eighteen years to go!) after the refinancing.
Aside from your nasty jags of paranoia, things are good. You’re more than halfway through paying off your mortgage, after all, and you have food and clothes and shelter. That’s more than a lot of people have. Shouldn’t you be grateful? (You remember your college friend – what was his name? – saying something about the end of the world… it’s right on the tip of your tongue.) Anyway, you even managed to sock away a few hundred bucks in your savings this month, so things aren’t that bad.
Speaking of money, it’s time to get down to business. You’re managed to snag a few quick-hit writing contracts for the day, and a couple of blinks brings up the deadline graph in your contacts. Five lines, all shrinking by the minute, shading from green to yellow to warning red.
You pick the red one, just two hours and eleven minutes to hammer something out. Your research agent has already grabbed all the data you need for it, of course, so it’s just a matter of massaging the data.
You sigh. It’s the laziest sort of futurism – a narrative in crude second person, an assumed middle-class professional background, heavily centered around consumer trends. You sigh and consider giving up the contract. With your panic still fading, you’re not sure you’re in the right frame of mind to deliver up what the contract requires – a little risk in the near future is okay, but if your work is rejected as unsuitable, you only get a ten per cent kill fee.
You sit down and summon your virtual keyboard on the kitchen table and start typing.
You wake up and roll out of bed…
It’s twenty years from now!
Your roommates are already making breakfast in the kitchen when you come downstairs. It’s nice having people in your house, and it certainly helps with the expenses after you had to take out that second mortgage a couple years back to deal with those unexpected medical bills.
You mutter good mornings, and everyone else mutters back, but none of you make eye contact. Everyone’s already engrossed in their augments, chuckling at something on their social feeds, or subvocalizing commands for their jobs.
You shovel some cereal and fruit into your mouth. The fruit’s a new variety, some engineer has been doing something peculiar with strawberries and… is that honeydew and a hint of turmeric? You ask for a readout, and the smart phosphene-inducing bacterial network that has colonized your visual cortex starts showing your a whole damn promotional video about the new fruit. Some bullshit about the designer’s childhood with sweeping drone shots of an Italian villa overlaid by long-chain molecule diagrams. You wave it away and mutter a three-star rating for the flavour, which means you’ll probably never see it sprout from the Company’s crop-wall in the kitchen again. The Company takes low ratings seriously.
You shower and dress – despite having five people in the duplex, you’re never short of hot water thanks to the solar array on the edge of town. Power is so cheap it’s a flat charge on your monthly bills, less than your property tax or your mortgage. Just thirteen years to go – you had to refinance after you fell behind during the last recession, when work dried up. Still, you’re getting there.
A warning blinks that you need to get some cardio, or your Company health score will go down, and that’ll impact your insurance rates. You sigh and swing joints kept flexible by regular workouts and tailored nutraceuticals. You’re past what your grandparents considered retirement age, but you’re in amazing shape compared to them! They were absolute crones when they were your age, worn down by nicotine and smog and unfiltered UV radiation. You’re incredibly lucky to live in an era of proper health care.
You head outdoors and go through your stretches, then for a nice easy two-mile jog around the neighbourhood, until the little icon in the corner of your vision turns into a full smiley face.
It’s average-busy, people out exercising and walking their pets, the more cautious wearing veiled hats with privacy netting. You hate doing that, makes you sweat too much, though you abruptly regret your choice when you feel the sharp pinch on the back of your neck. You slap it dead, and wipe off hacked Aedes guts, but it’s too late. As you’re rounding the last corner for home, the jingle starts in your head, delivered by the virus the little bug inserted into your bloodstream. Damn thing has crossed the blood-brain barrier and dumped a simple sequence into your memory, and now you can’t stop humming a tune that advertises for cheap vacations to the Greenland forests. This one’s even added a feeling of nostalgic longing, as if you’ve ever been able to afford a trip to Greenland before.
Second time this week you’ve been bitten. You take a broad-spectrum short term memory inhibitor. Twenty minutes later, you can’t remember what you had for breakfast and your augments have to remind you that you already jogged, but at least the… what was it? Another fucking adversquito?
Your regret at using the inhibitor kicks in, as it usually does, and you worry about what else you’ve forgotten over the years. It isn’t just the inhibitors. At your age, healthy or not, the days sometimes blend together. You never moved, never could afford to travel much, never married. There was always just the scramble for work, get those contracts, pay those bills.
And your work paid off, didn’t it? You’ve had a good life, had the things you want at your fingertips whenever you needed them, always kept busy, kept healthy, kept producing. What else is there to a good life?
You brush away the unsettled feeling. There isn’t going to be a future if you don’t get to work, and today you’ve got a contract.
You settle down to write, words appearing across your visual field. The assignment is futurism, which you’ve really come to enjoy. People want to know what tomorrow is going to be like! What kind of foods they’ll eat, how they’ll work, how they’ll shop! It’s exciting!
Your mind is wandering, and you notice your first paragraph just reads “It is easier to imagine the end of the world…”
Some old memory, kicked up by the final fog of the inhibitor. Stupid. The world didn’t end. It’s never going to end. Things are just going to keep on going, like they always have, better and better, progressing towards… something.
You erase the sentence and shake your head, watching the convoy of military vehicles passing by your house for a minute. You used to worry about stuff like this, but your moods have long since been thoroughly stabilized. You know the front is miles away, the occasional booms and thuds of explosions safely distanced, beyond the deep woods. You call up a meditation routine and run through some breathing exercises, your heartbeat synchronizing with the rhythm of the engines of the drone tanks outside.
They pass by, and so does that strange feeling. You start to write again.
You wake up and roll out of bed. It’s twenty years from now…
So… last week I promised “vulgar futurism.” In last week’s newsletter, I started writing a bit of a futurist blob, realized I was wandering far afield from my subject matter, and deleted it. But I kind of liked it and wanted to expand it, maybe into a lightly sarcastic/satirical take on the genre of “What your life will be like in the distant year of 2020!” that we’ve all been reading since we were kids.
And then I wrote this? It kind of got away from me once it started looping itself.
I feel, as usual, as though apologies may be in order. I don’t even know what this is. Is this metafiction? I feel like if I knew what metafiction was, this might be it.
Next week, something more normal. Something about nerd culture, or John le Carré, or how Robertson Davies and Mordecai Richler were secret fantasy authors, or something.
(Did you know that the spellcheck function recognized ‘nutraceutical?’ C’mon, that’s not a real word.)