Welcome to their city
I own nothing, have no privacy, and life will never be better. Written in response to @IdaAuken‘s Welcome to 2030.
Welcome to their city. I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes. So, except for the clothes part, nothing is new.
Everything you considered a necessity, is a luxury out here. They control communication, transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one they took over all these things, so now we don’t own much.
First they took over communication. I don’t believe what I hear anymore. I only trust what I see out there in the streets. Then, when they took over the energy grid and fuel supply, things started to move quickly. Transportation became increasingly restricted. It made no sense for us to use cars anymore, since their control systems wouldn’t let us go anywhere inside the city anyway. And the militias control the countryside, so with a bit of skin pigmentation, there’s no telling whether you’ll end up as labor or food. I wonder what those flying cars look like from the inside. The only things that fly around here are the autonomous police drones. Forget about using public transportation. Unless you want to get tased. Or shot. Their facial recognition software is not good at distinguishing dark faces, so they may well confuse you with a known threat. Now, I can hardly believe that we were once allowed to move freely about the city, not to mention not being watched by persistent, omnipresent security systems. Sometimes I use the sewers when I need to go to somewhere far. They haven’t rigged them up with cameras yet, I think. I guess the smell is deterrence enough for most people. It’s hard to wash off that journey.
There are some pitfalls you should try to avoid. The drugs may be cheap, but they were made on someone’s kitchen stove and within weeks you will be chewing on your own bones. If you sense an altercation brewing, just run as fast as you can. The predictive policing algorithms mean that there’s already a drone there to detain everyone. Stick to eating unopened emergency rations. No one knows how to cook anymore. I’ve seen people stir fry ToFaux in motor oil. One of my few joys in life is trying to keep a plant alive. It’s easier now that the cat’s gone, but I sure miss that cat. I don’t know who took him, and I shudder at the thought of what might have happened to him. But I digress.
Of course, we don’t have to pay rent since we don’t have anywhere to live. But at least there’s plenty of uninhabited space between the city and the protected areas outside that are still under city control. You want to remain close to one of the emergency dispensary points though. I wonder sometimes why they never found a place for us in their circular economy. I guess that when all the services got automated, there wasn’t any more jobs for the working poor. But why even keep us alive then? It’s not like we could fight back or stage an uprising like they did out in the country with all their guns and such. One of the stories that people talk about is that since meat production got banned, they are keeping us just for the taste of actual flesh. But I don’t believe that. Although people do keep disappearing, it’s usually only after having said something out loud about doing things to the people in the city. Once, they locked down a couple of blocks. Biological emergency, they called it. That means armed drones, inflated tents and people in big yellow plastic suits and gas masks.
Sometimes they airdrop supplies, food mostly but also clothes, but who wants to wear an orange jumpsuit with a huge QR code on the front and back all the time?
It’s hard to remember how life used to be. Everything happened so fast, and you quickly get used to new conditions. I guess the human brain evolved that way in order to be able to survive anywhere. Some out here try to make a living doing things for other people, but I just try to get by and stay out of the way. It’s the only way I know how to stay alive. I don’t have many friends, but I know people.
I hear that life out in the country is like it was “in the good old days”. That’s why I don’t go there. I’m not spending the rest of my short life farming for a white guy with a gun. As for the city people, they have it all, but there’s no way to qualify for that. You can’t just walk in and say, hey, I would like to register. The people that do that end up in the camps. I don’t know much about what happens there, but it’s not pretty from what you hear from the few that have managed to escape. Not pretty. And I sure as hell have not heard of anyone that made it from the camps to the city. Maybe on someone’s dinner plate, I don’t know. Haha. Only kidding. I don’t think they actually eat people, but they sure as hell won’t go and make you one of them.
