2043 - The Silver Rule
Keep your eyes on the road.
The following post is one of a series of 6 articles written simultaneously by separate authors who cast a vision of the year 2043. The authors have written their pieces in isolation with no collaboration between them. We would like you to read all 6 articles and subscribe to the ones you like if you haven’t already.
The other authors and their posts will be coming over the next day or so - I’ll update the links below as those stories come online:
Sunday 5:20 AM (EST)
2/1/2043
You wake up in darkness and warmth.
Layers of wool blankets and worn cotton comforters encase you, as do two dogs that snuggle your ankle and armpit. Gigi and Pocho is what you call these creatures, most of the time.
When you cast aside the covers, the warmth drains quickly. You recall Feburaries from a fading past, how those crazy city girls would run around barelegged, hailing cabs in the snow.
It's still dark out. You load two small logs in the furnace, set it off, poke it with a metal rod that used to be an umbrella stem. You could've used another tool but this one's lucky. The dogs are wide awake and skittering around now, panting hard, doing their doggy things. Pocho gives Gigi's asshole a good hard sniff, and decides, yeah, that's still her.
Out the window you see a light flurry that's almost rain, and can't decide which you'd prefer. So you shrug and head off to the kitchen, grabbing three eggs and a fat slab of bacon. You haven't sharpened your chef's knife in a while, and chuckle at the clumsy, irregular slices your groggy hands produce.
You fry it all up in a pair of pans. Gigi whines at you while you eat, and a speedblur of Pocho dashes about in a frantic search for a mama he’ll never find. You check the coffee drum for beans, but only find the shattered remnants of last week's War on Sleep.
You wash the greasy knife and head into the office, fire up the projector. Fully jailbroke and P2P (and even if it weren't, there was fuck all They could steal from you anymore). The image that splashes across the wall doesn't look much like it did a decade ago. It's not flooded with whimsical pictures and icons, for example. In fact, the entire look and feel is spare and gray now, weirdly reminiscent of monitors in those grungier sci-fi flicks of your youth. You've got the latest fork of UnDESIRd installed, so all you get is a slim, blinking prompt.
You punch into BARTr. Like the OS, the name's annoyingly retro, but the micros are cool. You scan the local trades, give the Possibles grid a quick glance: shirts and undies, ammo and knives, an antique French blender. Some account named <!>MSlater<!> wants to trade thirty yards of copper for a female dog.
You glance at Gigi. No sale.
Lots of deals on the grocery grid. Hay for chickpeas, eggs for garlic, mustard greens for whole lotta kale, beans, beans…
…the musical fruit. The more you eat, the more you…
Someone claims he found “a buttload of Skittles” off 1-79. There’s one bid so far, but he's probably meme’ing. Hell, maybe they both are. The best you find is from ActuallyNateHorshack. He somehow got ahold of around a hundred pounds of ‘fridged, vacuum-sealed ribeye.
“In the pocket,” his micro claims. “Fresh as virgin poon and twice as bloody.”
You’ve dealt with Nate before, who you know to be a solid mover and an A-rate scout (pretty decent bowhunter, too). Natre’s even a fellow vet, which shouldn’t make a difference but does. You lay a strong position on 64 ounces. An animated graph flashes your odds in hypnotic waves.
Around this time, a visitor arrives. It's a compact 3-prop unit, no bigger than a housecat. The machine hovers daintily outside your breakfast nook's window, a bloated sack of black, polyurethane webbing dangling from its plastic chassis. You recognize it as Tessa’s bird, bringing some fresh sage and rosemary (and knowing her, a surprise treat or two). When you say the magic words, it drops its payload and quietly flutters off.
Begrudgingly, you turn back to the console and punch up your REQs. As you scroll through them, you think about how they used to be called by other names. These were once emails and texts, DMs, tweets, posts and shitpoasts and so forth. That all changed pretty much overnight after the big One-One-One. Ever since, you’d catch some of the Hedz yammering on about metatrends and meat-kiting and EDD (which means “epigenetic digital dysplasia,” apparently). But you have a different theory. You think people just didn't want to hear about that any of that shit no more.
There's a REQ from your sister. It's about her kid.
You stare at it for a very long moment.
Luckily, you hear a rifle shot.