Standing in front of the park in Tucson you won’t guess how special it is. Obviously, the park seems clean and all the trailers are well taken care of.
But don’t be mistaken this is far from the regular trailer park milking what’s left of the poor. This is a new concept of living, of building and harvesting its citizens potential and creating a better world. But it’s also a business making a profit. It’s not optimized to make the owners much richer, but it’s making a profit way higher than you could do with a park.
After seeing a short youtube video from one of their citizens I just had to go there and learn about it.
Fa scrolled through her list of friends keeping the phone close to her face. The women in front of her still held the shopping bag. Tall slender she wore a yellow dress with a star shaped name tag. Looking around and tilting her head waiting for the young girl.
“No social-score discount today. Buy or come back later.” the women said.
“But why?” Fa looked up to the women and widened her eyes in a last try of persuasion.
“I am not a fairy. Pay full price or fix your score.” The clerk put the bag to the side and strode to the next customer forming a broad forced smile. They nattered for a while and looked back over to Fa with a grimm grin and shaking heads. If she only had a top score, this gossip girl wouldn’t work here anymore by tomorrow.
Fa still stood in the middle of the store, looked at the bag with her new shirts and back to her phone. A loose string hung from her sleeve - quickly she tore it of and hid it in a pocked. Another try, her fingers started to swipe downwards in the list of friends. Suddenly her thumb squeezed right in the middle of the screen, another swipe in the other direction and there he was.
A lunatic snoot with big green sunglasses, a black bowler hat and a well known name on the side: “Yun for Fun”. Her thumb forced the app to open his profile and wandered towards the “block” button. Pressing it a message appeared “Do you really want to block Yun for Fun?”. Fas arms fell down, her shoulders went back and she looked up opening her mouth mumbling some incomprehensible question. The shop keeper turned over with a grim tone and pointed to the door by shaking her elbow in its direction.
She pressed “cancel” slid her phone back into the ripped purple bag and scooted outwards away from her shirts, away from the stupid tattlers.
Back from the unsuccessful shopping Fa sat in front of the apartment building on a small wall swinging her feet and typing into her phone.
Message: Fa: “you owe me 20” Yun: “I ow you bonkers?” Fa: “score down - no discount” Yun: “your score your problem. Do I look like yo mama?” Fa: “I have no mama - stupid! :-(”
Fa pulled her right sleeve through her face and snorted while looking away from the street. No answer for a while…
Yun: “I’m very sorry. I am stupid :-/… I pay you the discount…” Fa: “I don’t want no money - I need the score. For discount, classes, job, rent…” Yun: “Live here too! Don’t tell me stuff. Lets meet?”
Fa rubs another time over her sniffling nose and answers: “15:00 ice cream… You pay” Yun: “thx! :-*” Fa: “???? Just Ice cream!”
This story was written and published on wattpad.com before the very similar black mirror series appeared on Netflix - how cool :-)…
Sitting in the “low score” waiting line, looking along a endless row of disturbed citizens all gazing over to the high social score queue. The high social score queue, where the shiny harmonized residents quickly frolicked towards their goal.
“What have you done wrong for sitting here?” a gray haired fellow sitting next to Fa asked.
“Wrong friends, internet and maybe some books I liked. I guess… and you?” Fa groaned.
“I don’t use the internet.”
Both looked at each other scanning for a reaction and bursted out in laughter.
“Too much internet, no internet… Such a crappy system…” he roared.
A slick tall woman in a white dress with orange stripes walked over and reared up to her maximum height. She held a smartphone into their faces to immediately get the citizen profile of both. She touched some checkboxes and pointed towards the gate with a grim frown.
“This room has to stay quiet - please leave now.”
Realizing that she just got into another negative event, which will harm her score, she tried to hide her face behind her hands.
“Mrs. queue Manager - Mrs. queue Manager - I’m sorry, this was my mistake, she is not involved. Please don’t register her.”
The man stood up and stepped in front of Fa. Some seconds later, Fa also raised from her seat drawing attention from another Queue manager.
“No. Dear Manager. This was only a misunderstanding, we were talking about a software product from Microbytes. It was about an american software for the internet. Please don’t register this old man - he is quite confused.”
Fa opened her eyes wide, stepped closer to the tall gazelle, lowered a little and looked up in the best begging manner possible. The manager lost a short warm smile, held her finger to her mouth and signalized to be silent. Both troublemakers sat down with a short look of acknowledgement.
“So let’s fit in Fa, just fit in and don’t lower your score.”
She started to do what everybody was doing. Grabbing her phone and starting to swipe through whatever appeared on the screen. Scrolling through her citizen social stream where she quickly liked, shared and swiped what ever looked community compliant. Slowly breathing out air through her blown up cheeks with a empty stair to the screen revealed her dislike of this ritual.
The gray haired fellow peaked over her shoulder at how quick and easy she went through all kind of lists and items increasing her score. He whispered after checking if the Queue manager was looking over.
“You are very good with this - could you teach me? And why do you still have bad scores, if try to fit in?” her neighbour asked.
She turned the screen of her phone away from him and covered it with her hand.
“I told you - it’s mainly some uncompliant friends. Or lets say one specific friend. Playing the accepted social game is helping. But looking at other people’s screens it definitely not helping.” she shook her head and checked for the queue manager’s attention.
“But you could show me how to do that? Maybe I can help you hide your friendship?” he mumbled keeping his view on the managers.
“How would you want to help me? You don’t use the internet?”
“I know how to bring people out of the country.”
She turned away hissing quietly and tried to ignore him. After some minutes of waiting he continued.
“For real. I know how you can get out of the country if you or your friends wants to.”
She held up her open hand to the side of her face to hide behind it and try to act focusing only on her phone. She turned further away and bumped into another unfortunate person to her left.
“O sorry, sorry…”
A annoyed stare came out of hairy face above a stained blue shirt.
“Igh” Fa turned back in disgust.
“I thought getting out of the country is easy. And why don’t you get out?” she gave in into his approach.
“Getting out is easy, but where do you go, and what about them keeping track of you. I can solve that…” he murmured and suddenly stopped as the second shorter and broader queue manager walked by.
In a professional smile she walked along the low score queue looking happy towards everyone that was holding a smartphone. At the end of the line she grabbed a box with snacks and walked back to the higher score line giving them away.
“Ok, but why don’t you get out, if you’re so much into that?” Fa whispered.
“I like my house and garden - I’m fortuned that I can life around the system and endure the very few moments I just have to interact with it, like today. But still, I gets harder, I’ll have to get into this social citizen crap to keep my place independent.”
The whole line stood up and moved over to the other side of the room where the queue manager was waving for them.
“Dear citizens, thank you for visiting us today - there is time for another five people to register, as our leading fellows are finished. So the first five can come with me and to the others I wish a very nice evening and recommend to be her Monday morning again.”
A frowning went through the crowd and silent frustration propelled everyone out of the government building.
“Do you want to join me for a coffee?” the gray haired man asked when they reached the street.
“Coffee with a old stranger not using the social citizen system - My parents would turn in their graves…” she chuckled and looked for his reaction.
“Ok no coffee, so how about I give you some products from my garden, or what else you need and you help me to set up my first smartphone?”
“Your first smartphone? How do you survive?”
He silently gestured a question.
“Ok, I’ll join you but not at your place - let’s go to Chin Coffee - do you have your phone with you?”
He shook his head and she unbelievably opened hers to look for the next phone store.
“Ok come with me, we get you a contract and a phone.”
Published on wattpad.com on 19th of June 2016 by one of our writers.
In our next book we will tell the story of Jane, our Deceptionista. You may remember her from our first book, “Ayden’s Choice”. Here are some teasers episodes to get you interested.
The green hat is missing the badge, and the sash she cut from a green t-shirt has signs drawn on it in black sharpie. But when she twitched her eyes to look into the mirror her outfit matched the girl scouts’ she had found on google image search.
Jane was back with her mother for a while, as, once again, she had been pulled away from grandma’s fastidious care. Quite a clash of worlds, but to the young Jane, dropping in and out of middle school, it was the world as she knew ist.
“People will get it.” she whispered to her mirrored self.
“I’ll make them believe it.” she announced a little louder, turning to see her profile.
“Don’t you think so mom? Mom! Mom look?”
A thin figure appeared in the door and sank on it’s frame. One arm hanging numb, a trickle of blood running down it.
“Get me more… Please, will you get me more…”
A crackling voice burst out of the pasty mouth. The girl at the mirror tilted her head, put on a distorted smile, and danced to what seemed to be her mother.
“O mommy. Did you sting yourself again… Let me clean that…”
She grabbed the now trembling arm, and despite being two heads shorter she managed to fixate it, as she had had to do so often before. She pulled a hankie out of her pocket, wiped away the blood and pressed the bleeding dot for a while.
“Didn’t we agree that you won’t do this yourself anymore?” she chirped with an odd happy sound, hoping to awake some last remainder of life in that drifting mind.
The mother’s other arm swung around, grabbed her by the hair, pulling back the small head. She shouted, spitting in her eyes. “You fuck! Bring me more. I tell you. I can hit it myself. But you fucking better bring me more…”
The girl swung around, desperately trying to get out of her mother’s grip.. Only a kick to her leg made her finally let go. A crack appeared in her carefully maintained facade and tiny tears began wetting her eyes.
“But no, no, we won’t. We are strong…” Jane repeatedly slammed her hand against her leg — a tick she seemed to have more and more often.
In order to feel the wind in my face I have to leave virtual reality and go out on my bike. In other words I like to be outside - something not that common in today’s times. To put it in another way, everyone else sits inside hooked up to their computers running around in their virtual network. That is to say that I also like to fly around through the endless worlds of digital live. To that end I also have my full equipment to hook into the net. But let’s go back to me riding this bicycle in a pink dress. Moreover, I’m riding a non electrified bike, one that you have to fully power with your legs. Furthermore it’s a quite old bike which I love very much as I inherited it from my older sister who left for europe. What’s more, this isn’t a closed community road, it’s an actual public road. Likewise this neighborhood is one of the unmanaged blocks without specific permissions. Similarly, the roads have no charging panels and but lot of holes and bumps. Another key thing to remember is that it’s close to sunset, which makes it even more awkward for me to be out here riding my bike, as well as wearing a nonfunctional pink dress. Not only am I violating our closed community tracking rules by not having anything digital on me, but also am I taking the risk of getting in contact with unmanaged people. Coupled with the sunset taking away the sunlight this is not a thing my friends would do. Firstly they barely disconnect from virtual reality, secondly they barely leave the house and thirdly they would never ride something they have to steer themselves, not to mention powering it by muscle strength. However they like to train their muscles by using their gateway stands where they are strapped in wearing video glasses, run and jump all around in crazy worlds. On the other hand the robot assistant brings them water with added chemicals when they sweat from moving around in a cage connected to the internet. Having said that I can go back to my ride. By contrast I like to go full risk, leave the closed community, unhook from everything and steer as well as power my vehicles. Then again, I like my friends for what personality they have left. That said there is a non digital coming towards me on the sidewalk. Yet I’m not from here he greets me by waving his hand. The area is marked as very dangerous but he sends me a heart warming smile despite this. With this in mind - let’s go on and meet some more non digital survivors. Provided that we call them survivors it still looks as if they can be happy. In light of his smile, I ask myself if they all have this ability, as my friends are not used to smile in real world. But my friends nonetheless send me a lot of smiles in virtual reality. That is just a digital representation of a brain wave the computer saw in their neurons but I appreciate it nevertheless. Notwithstanding the limitations of the brain scan emotion software, it helps to have at least a little bit more sole in the virtual world. For instance if you meet at at virtual hot spot and tell a group of people what you found, everybody was smiling in the past, now the software picks up boredom and shows it in their avatars faces. To give an illustration of what this could look like, picture you talking to a 3D animated avatar selected by a friend and suddenly it’s face starts to switch quickly between emotional expressions. Significantly, reality is more real than virtual reality, there you can find all nuances of emotion and especially users are self aware of what their faces do, what’s not always the case in the digital havens. Me still riding the bike is notably more interesting. Importantly as I am feeling the slight breeze which is not from a fan but from the real weather system of earth. In conclusion it’s windy which nobody can disable by a click. Above all it’s the world how it is: non scripted, non engineered and non coded. This is the most persuasive factor to me of being outside. To me most compelling but all things considered not very looked for by my digital friends.
And to conclude this gibberish - don’t use this kind of writing, although it’s recommended by some university. If you’re able to keep things simple and short, readers will like you :-) But if you have nothing to say, than you can try to use this tools to hide it from non conscious readers. So to conclude - the picture is great but the article is: BOLLOCKS
You are sitting in front of your e-mail program. Does it spell e-mail or email? It doesn’t matter. Nothing happens. Even clicking on your send and receive button doesn’t help. You know today you don’t need that button. Long gone are the times when one had to send and receive mails manually when the device was online. You think “when were the devices ever not online?” - what a stupid sentence. What use are devices today if they are offline, that is how you experienced devices without power back in the days. Do the kids know that? Their kids, your grandchildren, don’t even know email anymore.
You open your address book - having your address book that you manage on your local computer is weird today - but anyway you want to send an email. So lets see: Albert… He has alzheimer and wont answer, so you would have to write to his daughter to check for a visit but she has no email address… So you would have to talk to her virtual reality self and not mumbling to much so her chat bot and voice recognition doesn’t get confused. You hate those things. Sometimes you don’t know whether the other person is there or if it’s the bot and sometimes they try to answer but you never trust them. So you go back to your address book.
Bodhi - dead. Brandon - most likely still angry. Caroline… Caroline you would like to talk to. But, no, you remember she is dead, too.
Still no mail. You don’t even get spam mails anymore. Back in the days of big business you managed to fight through dozens of mails being productive while using them to make all kind of business. Today not even the prince from this rich african country tries to give you money anymore by having you send some money first.
Ok, so focus. No Virtual Reality today, it always gives you headaches and you don’t want to take the VR-aspirin or whatever they call it. Just simple plain email like in the old days when there still were mostly gasoline cars on the road.
Dave! That’s it! Dave for sure still uses email! He hated VR from the very start. Ok, he also hated shopping online, but who cares. You write:
“Hi Dave - Long time no see. I guess you won’t see this for a while, because you too don’t get much mail anymore. I still use and like email - so if you have any thoughts, feel free to share, you happy old sack from the Cost…”
You press send and tell your home assistant to have the coffee machine make an espresso. Also a thing you distrust. If you mumble again it will order coffee from its makers or it 3D prints a new cup. You have a lot of 3D printed cups with presso written on them. So you go: “Hey Silvi. Please. Make. Me. An. Espresso. Now.”
Badabim - your computer makes a long forgotten noise. You are amazed as there is an email in your account.
“Dear Sender - we are happy to announce that all qmail.com users get a free VR bot - but our classic mail service is closed down. Please use VR…” … … The email goes on with new lines. … … “Hahahaha… Just kidding you fool. They will never turn off this old piece of junk qmail.com. As long as there are two old grumps like us, they have to keep it running or we will VR the hell out of them. Let’s meet like in the good old times. Most bars are closed, but my crazy exoskeleton mechanic has kind of a Bar serving coffee for waiting customers. Some stuff you just can’t do online isn’t it? Or at least I don’t send in my exo and go back to the wheelchair without watching what the hell they are doing to it. Remember the old days, when you couldn’t walk if you couldn’t walk.”
You look down to your robotic left hip and leg with the green led glowing as the battery is still full, and laugh. What a crazy world this became, all while you barely recognized it changing step by step.
(Little experiment how Second Person Point Of View feels - it’s hard…)
Dust covers the brown leather chesterfield and only the clean circles on the table testify of recent visitors. Once in a while we hike to this hotel from the 1970s in the middle of the forest. It’s not the most beautiful hotel in the region but it has several advantages. As it was already equipped with a lot of solar collectors we could reuse them to have some power after the grid failed in 2043. But as you know we didn’t move into it. Still it serves as kind of a close by holiday place although we seem to be the only guests.
Claire brought her son Micah who can’t stop nagging me about the old times and all the big things that happened back when the wheels still turned. So he asks me about the first time the world had believable official evidence of advanced alien live. There is not a clear simple answer as opinions differ a lot. Was it the first time we could decrypt an alien message or was it after a probe found equipment on the jupiter moon.
I say it was KIC 8462852 back in 2015.
Micah asks: “2015? Fuck! How old are you?”…
“I’m so old Micah, I don’t even give a fuck anymore about you saying fuck”
Micah laughs and Claire slaps our heads leaving us both grinning.
“So why do you think KIC 84x whatever was the big thing grandpa?”
“First of all I’m not your grandpa and second of all let me finish telling my story. I’m slow but if you want to hear it, wait.”
“Ok! I’m just asking… Don’t loose your last hair about it…”
“Shush… zip it… So back in 2015 finding new planets in other solar systems was the big thing. They found a new method by looking at changes in the light of a star to determine if there is a planet in it’s orbit.”
“Mr. Graybeard - I’m not asking about planets, I want to know when they first found out about aliens and how you reacted.”
“Arg… Just give it a second, I’ll try to make it short. So I was sitting in bed scrolling through 9gag on my smartphone, as I found some joke about alien cities. Not knowing what they were joking about I went to my news stream to see this article of big think, a smart blog, I liked to read…”
“What the fallout is 9gag, what’s a blog and why was your phone smart?”
“Ok. Let’s make it simple. They found a star with light changes that could not be explained by natural causes. The only explanation they found was a big sphere around it which collects the stars energy and has some holes where the light goes trough.”
“And how did people react.”
“Not much. It was very scientific so the regular distraction dwellers didn’t take notice.”
“No wonder most of them died. Stupid generation of polluting throwaway fools.”
It’s always the same with Micah. As soon as we talk about how people were back in the old world he get’s angry about how stupid my fellow humans where. Luckily it’s easy to distract him by talking about our next step to expand the settlement.
Yesterday my dear sister left this world. After suffering in secret for several months there wasn’t much we could do. It’s not a good idea to get sick in Silicon Valley today, once the digital jewel of our old center of the world. Gone are the times when the glowing stars of the internet filled the valley’s coffee houses with hipsters hacking some new ideas. If you were lucky to work in one of the rising stars you had everything including health insurance. Today most people are happy if they can pay the ticket for the bus.
In 2017 the so called “exodus of the smart” started as Drumpf took office and nobody could continue to pretend that the old west is a good place for innovation. It just didn’t add up anymore. The backward laws, the crazy fears, the lack of basic services and freedoms every other developed country provided. Drumpf was merely the last straw that broke the camel’s back.
But she couldn’t leave. My older sister was always a little nostalgic and much more into horseback riding than me. We both grew up on a farm close to Mountain View and somehow both ended up writing code changing today’s world. I still get the question how a farm girl ended up writing software, but stepping into this big white room and filling it with our own crazy ideas always made sense to me.
We were already looking for places in Canada some months before the election. She was very angry about me thinking about leaving. I told her she’s so smart she will easily find a new amazing job in a nice startup and that we can move her horses there. Her team was working on a break through neuronal network engine and she just managed to get her therapeutic horseback riding side business to run. So it wasn’t her time to leave.
I clearly remember the morning after Drumpf was announced. There was a frustrating whisper and several of our intellectual stars filed for relocation to Europe or even quit their jobs in the valley.
At 11:00 we all got a message to get into a global company hangout. Larry and Sundar where on the screen smiling and welcoming everyone as we were used to. They gave a breathtaking speech about how our mission is important, more important than any political development and much bigger than any country borders. Then they told us that they insist on keeping everyone and will offer amazing relocation plans for all the bright minds that want to leave the states. Somehow they managed to get several locations with a strategy to extend them for all employees. And then the line of the century hit: “By now the official headquarter and country of A-Z is moved outside the US…”. It went around the globe like a wildfire. The company that created the most amazing search engine, a revolution in mobile operating systems and ground breaking technology in every important field was not a Silicon Valley company anymore.
This step was like a shock wave to the tech world and the impossible happened. Most smart minds and with them nearly every important technology company left to resettle all around the world. Silicon Valley became the Detroit of Drumpf and was the starting point of a gray wave spreading all over the country. It wasn’t a apocalypse, it was a slow decay that spread further. A decay that a lot of regions where already used to before.
I’m very sad that this decay also hit my sister and that somehow I didn’t see it coming. After they closed the borders and nobody could leave anymore it was very hard to get any support to her. I begged her several times to join us but she just didn’t want to leave the farm. But at last she could stay at the place she loved most…
