CP setting brainstorms

2155, 15 billion population. In the City-State of Atlanta, 75 thousand per the square mile. The result of medical advancements in cancer and autoimmune disease treatments and cures. Likewise gene-washing. Seventy years of relative peace. Made-to-order offspring. Age reversal. Human cloning. That old bugaboo, the replicant. Most of the “organic android” sent, as Dick foretold, into the Vastness for exploration and colonization. Some are unfit for transport, and remain on Earth. They are not welcome. Defective replicants constitute a gross 2% of human population, and are considered an unwanted strain on our resources. They live mostly in squalor, third-class citizens. Untouchable.

Gene-washing and genetic tampering in general have brought other legacies. We have unwittingly unlocked the full capacity of mind-over-matter. Telepathy, telekinesis, psychometry, clairvoyance, and even pre- and post-cognition. These abilities come at a price– overwhelming power and physical illness. Untreatable strains of the old cancers and autoimmune diseases unfailingly accompany these “blessings”. Psychics, like replicants, are considered in many ways anathema. They often exhibit very little control over their abilities, and express symptoms of diseases that remind people far too well of the vicissitudes of the past.

With conflict between governments at a minimum, most violence is at street-level. When one considers that 75% of the population lives well below the poverty line ($150,000/annum after inflation), life at ground-level is harsh, dirty, and mean. Not because the poor are naturally corse and violent, but because resources are in no way plentiful. While healthcare is at an all time peak of availability comparatively, the population spike brings us back to the standards of the late Twentieth Century. Even so, few people die of natural causes any more. The technical average life span is 150 years, but few people at ground level see that.

The super-wealthy .5% live, at the very least, in mile-high tower-cities. 1% of the rich live in sky hooks– incredible sky cities in low orbit, tethered to Earth by space elevators. There’s is the life promised by the most optimistic of the speculative fiction of the last 200 years.

Max Silver pt 1

What we in the middle 21st consider private life, our precursors would consider crowded living.  A given individual has a bed, the head, and his brain, but that’s about it.  Anything beyond this is considered obscenely extravagant.  Not that this perception is unwarranted, with a planetary population approaching 9 billion, we can’t afford to spare the room.  The metro Atlanta zone is a good example– 50k per square mile.  We’re rivaling Mumbai at the turn.

Instant coffee.  Pretty much always instant coffee.  Not that he’d ever had anything but instant coffee, but the thought of getting caffeinated from something other than shit brown grains dissolved in lukewarm water gave him a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

Max pulled down $200 a week for searching, checking, and collating old news media for a handful of low-rent archive sites.  Getting verifiable history out of the Internet was a lot harder than it had at first seemed when he’d taken the gig.  He’d taken to writing in the down time while his agent searched the bowels of the Web for also-ran news stories from the early 00s and turn of the century. Every word he wrote went toward a dissertation on private life in the mid-21st century.  After three months of writing about 3 hours a day, he was around 2,000 words in, and he wasn’t moving any faster right now.  He saved his opus and stared at the raw data blurring through his goggles, and sipped his coffee substitute.  He couldn’t read the binary, but it was far more distracting than the completely unhelpful progress reports from his homegrown search agent.  That’s when the power went out.  His computer ran on an independent power source, but nothing else in his apartment did.  Thirty years ago, the incumbent administration had taken to reworking the energy infrastructure of the country with solar, wind, and bio-fuel sources, but funding wasn’t what was needed, and rolling blackouts and rationing were a fact of life.  He set his edit suite to standby, grabbed his Nokia, slid into his boots and a wrinkled, faded Mucous Membrane tour shirt, and headed out the door.

He walked through the sodden Druid Hills night and across his apartment complex.  The Oaks was near on a century old, and any updating the property owners had done was mostly lashed onto the 1960s architecture rather than integrated. With the population problem bad as it was, most of the older, multi-bedroom apartments had been split up into smaller, single-room units with half-baths, tiny kitchens, common living rooms, and communal showers. Max spent most of his EBT credits at New Odessa– a 24 hour Russian deli two blocks from his front door.  Sure, the beef was third-generation clone-meat, but they made incredible pirozhki out of hydro potatoes without kelp or algae.  Also, he needed a beer and it was one of the few places left in town to get draft.  It was one of the great ironies of the globalized world– real meat was a rarity, but one could snag a Ukrainian beer no problem.

What did it say about the state of the modern human, that, while things like distance and time were dilated and exploded respectively, the basics of life were utterly processed surrogates with very few exceptions.  The deli was the kind of place that defied all but one of these factors.  It was undoubtedly a child of globalization, but the food was mostly real and the pace was pleasant.  It took a few visits a week to keep Max Silver from burning out something fierce.  The worn tread of third-hand hiking boots crunched across glass, gravel, and broken McAdam.  He edged through a hole in the complex’s perimeter fencing, took a soft right turn behind the post office, and strolled up three long flights of outdoor stairs to the high street.  He came out into a broad parking lot, and dodged cars parked mostly for the chart-toppers dance club through to the front door of New Odessa.

The owner’s son, Victor, nodded a greeting, and had a cold Obolon waiting by the time Max got to the counter.  He ordered a couple potato pirozhkis and took a seat toward the back of the dining room.  He tucked into the hot stuffed buns with a reserved appetite, and washed the starch down with a few gulps of honey-smooth lager.  Max was hitting a wall, and he’d seen it coming for several weeks now.  Since March, he’d been using his data mining as an excuse not to write instead of just income.  He felt trapped between his basic physical needs and his desire to exorcise the very real fear he felt at the shrinking world.  He chewed mushy potato and savory bread that tasted like alienation.  He’d heard the phrase “alone in a crowd”, but hadn’t understood what it meant, until now.  Though the deli was maybe a quarter full, he heard no fewer than six languages through the intermittent conversations around him.  Max knew three languages– English, Classical Greek, and Latin.  Those were not in the six he heard tonight.  Leaving wouldn’t have helped, either.  As soon as he stepped outside, he’d be assaulted with Amharic, Spanish, modern Greek, German…

He moved the rest of the food into his mouth and, after chewing, down his throat.  This process was eased by chasing the heavy stuff with beer.  He finished up, settled up, and stepped out into the humidity.  No matter how small the planet got, no matter how diluted culture, one could always rely on the heat and wet of an Atlanta night.  His shirt was already sweat-streaked and sticking to his chest.  He’d clipped his hair incredibly short for just this reason, but the sweat still clung to his scalp since the air was already super saturated and the sweat had nowhere to go.  He knew he saw faces in the small clumps of bodies in the parking lot, but they were washed out.  The club was letting out, and the groups grew more numerous, but all he saw was a mass of skin-tones and body types.  Alone in a crowd.  He wanted to rip the hazy masks from off these wandering silhouettes, wanted to pummel them into recognition, but that would be wrong and foolish besides.  The world may be homogenized, but ethics still existed and he’d likely be jailed for assault regardless.  He put the urge down to a touch of schadenfreude, and headed off across the parking lot, past the stairs, and stayed on the high street, moving toward Clairemont.

He wondered about the time, and a display in the periphery of his right field-of-vision flashed 02:07 for a few seconds.  That was from an implant that controlled the pigment along the edge of his retina.  Simple ASCII display, but it was handy.  It could manage simple shapes  by displaying colored characters in tight formation.  He stepped out of the plaza, up to a MARTA stop, and continued along the avenue, traffic humming along side the sidewalk at 60mph.