Earth 2074 (Part 1) - Core Cut (Patreon)

Earth 2074. I don't always take the rail-lines; like any other incentive, the incentive itself creates the problem. The gangs know that freight along the rail-lines tend to be higher priority and more expensive, and so easy targets like me are even more vulnerable. I wish I could afford a hover-car, but the regulation for AI flight control is more than I'll likely ever be able to afford.

As a result, I mostly stuck to the lower levels. There were different types of danger down here--a lot more debris from unmaintained areas and roads, for one. But a lot of the time, I liked being down where I could see shops, the streets, the people who make up this city. It also was nice because sometimes I'd see street races, or hear about ones I could join after my shift...

The world hadn't ended, exactly. But the changes to the world always felt most visible at twilight, where the smog of the city made the sunsets take on insane magenta glows. What more disconcerting to me, though, was the way that sometimes through the smog you could see the upload data links of HyperNova, connecting to the space station high above.

I was worried I was becoming recognizable. Once annoyance was that, obviously, it was much safer to drive with a helmet on. But the current generation of visors, with real time GPS and route planning also connected to the AI driver bots. So long as I was far out from the city, I'd still wear my visor, but I was worried that if I always kept it on, gangs like the Grins might flag my driver virtual-ID number as a courier.  

It's not like I had my whole support team. Some of the gangs drove around now expecting trouble, with AI-driven backup bikes as part of their 'crew.' It sometimes made me do a double take, looking at what looked like a full street gang and then seeing one completely unmanned bike that was just carrying gear.

Freedom City was everywhere. It had no real beginning, no real end. No borders. There were large sections of expanse between the different 'centers,' little stretches of wasteland, but you were never truly outside the city. Not fully.

It was odd. Half the reason I did these jobs was to get away from the big centers of the city, to get away from the noise and the chaos of all the advertisements there. But then just as quickly, when I was out here on the road with only a single other driver ahead of me, I sometimes felt this odd sense of loneliness. I tried to savor that sense of loneliness, to truly imagine that I wasn't being watched all the time, the way I felt--and knew I was--everywhere else in the city.

Of course, out here, instead of the truly nonstop surveillance, there was instead the classical panopticon. There were still cops--human cops, even, sometimes--but these were few and far between. You'd see just enough of them to know that you could be spotted. You could be seen. But they'd never be around when there was trouble.

When I passed this cop, I noticed her looking out at a distortion in the sky. Something was strange about how the HyperNova upload was interacting with the smog today; it made it look like an outline of a planet. I knew this was an optical illusion, but I hated the way that HyperNova sometimes made the real world seem fake.

Usually after spotting a cop, I'd take off my helmet for a little while. I wasn't really sure this would do anything other than get my hair all messed up, but I liked the thought of making it just a touch harder for them to associate 'me' with my specific 'driver-id'.

As I got back closer to a Center, I saw that some of the bikers were looking up at the strange distortion in the sky from above. How much energy was HyperNova pumping up into the atmosphere in the pursuit of maintaining its relay?

 I was curious fi there would be any report on it. I shifted to full visor mode, looking to see if there was a news bulletin, but there wasn't. It was like we were all supposed to just ignore the sky going crazy, be indifferent to the reality we lived in that the big corporations were transforming the sky before our very eyes. There were conspiracy theories in the unlisted gossip videos, but even these seemed couched in 'hype' -- this was all connected to HyperNova's next big release, and was probably all some kind of PR stunt. I wasn't so sure about that, and I hated how these days even the conspiracy nuts seemed like they were secretly corporate shills.

In the haze of the smog, I parked, and noticed an ancient LCD display advertisement for Zombie World, one of HyperNova's big game worlds. It almost made me double take. It didn't feel that different from the world I'd just been seeing as I drove outside the Center.

I didn't want to think about it too much. Now that I was back in the city, I needed to be more careful to avoid traffic. It felt odd that everyone seemed to just be acting normal, even with the sky feeling so strange. I could see so many of the 'upload beams' connecting to the HyperNova satellite. Usually I could only see one or two.  I knew that this Center of Freedom City had it particularly bad as far as that went. Just as Freedom City had no beginning or end, so did HyperNova corporation. I wasn't really sure there was any one central headquarters, but I did know that just outside of the Center there was a huge relay tower. That was the one usually causing the most obvious upload beam.

 I knew I was getting tired as I saw a white motorcyclist passing me... ...and I knew he was a guy, but when I looked again there was a female motorcyclist. The first guy must have passed me and I didn't notice. It had been a long day.  

Of course, just getting home would force me to drive through the most heavily commercial section of town. With my annoyance at the strange things in the sky already high, I could barely contain my latent rage at HyperNova. 

##

Earth 2074 - Part 2 will be coming Tuesday May 21!