Revolt- Episode One by Steven Luna

Author:Steven Luna [Luna, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dapper Press
Published: 2019-05-21T22:00:00+00:00

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Warren’s journey to the store was a stroll down a street that was kept clean with hourly passes made by sleek, automated street sweepers. They rolled through the paveways, then climbed onto the sidewalks, turned on a dime, and made their way back in the other direction. They were quiet and unobtrusive, buzzing softly as they moved, controlled entirely by external sensors that conducted them via GPS. There was a similar team of machines that slid up and down the outer surface of the skyscrapers, sudsing and squeegeeing their glassy skins clean. Their motors murmured a soft hum-squeak-chug song that was comforting to some, unnecessary to others, but offensive to no one. The expansive buildings that lined the cityscape were made of renewably-sourced materials that gleamed in the afternoon light as they received their baths from sleek, unthreatening robots. The passers-by on their beeping foot scooters and gurgling pedal movers arranged their paths accordingly, the sensors on their vehicles automatically adjusting for obstacles and changes in pavement. And the cars that whooshed past in the center of it all were driven not by the humans who rode in them, but by a vehicle network that conducted all traffic in the safest patterns possible. Their virtual drivers were charming and peppy, and their topics of conversation and levels of interaction could be requested ahead of time or adjusted manually during the ride if a passenger changed their mind. The greenspaces that enveloped the city were lush, the storefronts tidy and modern and warm.

The city was a post-modern marvel.

And Warren was oblivious to all of it.

He entered the market and circulated the aisles absently, his cuff emitting quick whistles whenever he was in the vicinity of the items on his list. The shelf section would glow to let him know where to make his choices, and his cart calculated his bill as he added items, then deducted the total from his bank account when he returned it to the repository. His cuff chimed happily when the transfer was made. A smiling AI projection was waiting for him at the door, hovering between the lenses that gave it substance. “Thank you for shopping Fast and Fresh...have a pleasant afternoon!” Everything was clean and ran smoothly here. In fact, there was very little in the modern world that didn’t work exactly the way it was supposed to. And all of it was due to the company he worked for.

The company that saved the world.

“How did we get here?” he thought as he passed the hologram without responding.

How indeed.

NeuTech had begun ten years prior as a consortium of scientists, funded by billionaires and every developed government on the planet, with a single mission in mind: stabilize a climate that had fallen wildly out of control. Storms had grown savage, drought ravaging already vulnerable regions, and rising sea levels had created massive flooding and eroded shorelines everywhere. The debate about what had caused the imbalance could have raged on forever, until the suggestion was made by an astrophysicist-climatologist named Colin Hague that it really didn’t matter anymore.

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