We shared a portion although only officially meeting that night, I guess to save money. I can’t remember what we spoke about apart from preferences for retro filming over instant information, the beauty of editing that would take days instead of inputting code for exactly what you wanted in seconds, how much we loved meat. I remember smiling at him as he looked down at me, mouthing that he wished we could have garlic sauce so that he could creep me out with it dripping over his lips. I replied that the image was enough and raised a strip up high, lowering it into my mouth.

It was funny because the politicians were the ones who decided to radically invest more money into Non Farming Food Research. Over the course of 30 years methods were speedily developed without any hindrance or hesitation into how to sustain a nation on the nutrients that were required to enable a healthy (of sorts) lifestyle. Theories went round, most of them no longer so wild, that this was a way of controlling us. Although they offered three main meals that should leave you not wanting more, some argued that limited sugar and a lack of taste could transform humanity into unsatisfied, uncreative workers, no longer looking forward to a warm meal but instead waiting for their two days holiday a week where, if they had saved enough, maybe they could find a place that served hot grease with bread, water tinted with soup flavours of the old day. If you were rich enough, watered down, powdered tea was available, which if your imagination had remained after the NFFR had their way, could remind you of drinking the real thing. If you couldn’t afford these pleasures there was no room for complaint. The poor were all fed, no one would die of hunger. Grants were given to enable housing estates the ability to feed 1000 people at a time. 3 meals a day, all the nutrients and minerals deemed ample, delivered through a mist. We were discouraged to look for non-regulated methods of feeding. If it all went to plan, the human condition was to adapt, shrinking appetites with immune systems that would no longer depend on the intestines to absorb nutrients.
We asked the car to drop us off early to walk together, vaporising tobacco substitute and mineral enriched water. His friend was taking a girl back to the house so we strolled slowly to not interrupt them, eventually reaching the white house and perching in the cold outside on a painted fence.

The future was different than we expected. Growing up, I remember my dad telling me about watching a cartoon show called The Jetsons. They lived a life of the future that was imagined, living on a space station with flying cars and pills for food. Everyone thought we’d be developing our food in pill form so when the news hit that food could be delivered vapourised, the uproar was confused, stifled, quietened. It was the same madness as sending pictures through wireless. They didn’t know how it worked back then, neither would we question nor understand the mists we were now inclined to ingest.
The difference with us and the Jetsons was that they lived in a futuristic utopia and we were too emotionally starved to even feel dystopian.

We finally got inside. After an hour of sometimes knocking to then settling back on our perch we continued to talk. I guess it was the real beer that did it, my body was no longer used to hops and barley but I could not tell you now why I felt so safe and calm around him. Maybe it was because he was familiar, possibly it was because he was the only one in his group who decided not to try his luck by forcing his hands down the back of my pants. My body was fighting with itself, a strange shaking, numbing pain in my groin and I asked where the toilet was. As I sat down an uncontrollable release happened, and I must have pissed for a straight minute. Panting afterwards, with a cold sweat all over my body I laid down on the bathroom floor, head pounding and genitals tingling. It was true, my body was no longer used to ingesting liquids and solids and everything burned with overuse. If I was to have kids in the future, they were estimated to have 0.2% less need than I to have the emotional need of their stomachs filled and to hydrate with liquid O2. At the moment I didn’t feel like having kids, I wanted relief.

The fact that we were no longer spending money on food meant that the costs of living mirrored this, drastically changing our pay. The government told us that this extra money would help the country further, so now we were living in a land where everyone had food but our healthcare system was failing and tax money was being invested in corporations like Monsanto (who supplied our Vapo-Nurich.) We all thought that with less time and effort being spent into farming and famine studies, more would be done in terms of cancer or dementia. Luckily for governments worldwide, the rate of cancer diagnosis did fall by 3%, especially for bowel cancer which they linked to our lack of iron rich meats and pre-processed junk food. There were more heart attacks reported though, and the statistics of young adults experiencing strokes was growing. The cynics knew that nothing would be done about dementia. For years clinical trials had been testing and researching: nothing was ever found. We all knew the money for this research went back into the pockets of the CEO’s but what could we do. Human population was not a problem anymore, especially not after the Dirge.

I wiped the cold sweat off my face and righted myself. I looked a bit pale, quite yellow but it was dark and he’d probably not notice apart from the amount of time I’d spent away. I planned on an excuse, got a call from a friend in a different time zone or something. He didn’t ask. As I came down the stairs he was pressing buttons for a bed to come out of the wall, a single flat mattress with cushions from a sofa for pillows. Didn’t look like he had much in the way of blankets. I watched him for a bit, in silence, then told him I’d be leaving.
“OK,” he replied and we slowly and silently walked to the door. I could feel his eyes looking down on me, the same way he had before when we were eating and so I also looked down, shy, suddenly nervous. I gave him a hug at the door and after a few moments of looking into his eyes, hugged him again.

We started mining the center of the Earth in 2045, the same time that we planned to send people to Mars. Mars never happened because no one wanted to fund it, it would take years to get there and back and people were impatient. We needed stuff for the Earth now. There were attempts to mine the Moon but the Moon had started changing. Similar to the stories we’d hear of when the Amazon rainforest was around and Earth’s way of dealing with this massive deforestation. The workers on the Moon reported changes in atmosphere, a shaking underneath their feet or rocks and machinery suddenly rolling back or lifting slightly from the ground. Crazy people held placards exclaiming that the Moon was losing mass so therefore its gravity and this could cause it to hurl into us one day. A long time after work had started, we stopped going to the Moon and instead became very interested with the matter in the middle of the Earth. So Kidd-55 was put into action and a mammoth task of 30 years mining to the center took place. The plasma was used to power machinery and also as a weapon of war to those who could afford it. Then the Earth started reacting, again. Storms and power surges, cracks appeared in mountains and clouds of what we thought was dust sweeping in. The tests done on the dust couldn’t determine where it was from but they did find that rather than just dust, this had more of a chemical relation to clay. The clay hurt everyone. Asthma suffers worldwide died in only a few short months, others were left in critical conditions, folded into hospital beds and linked up to VR so that their brains could still work inside the grid. The rest of us who were lucky, made do. The face barrier I wore outside was red and paisley, my dad said it reminded him of a better time, that he didn’t realise was better.