The phone buzzed in my pocket after I exited the downtown shipping hub, a notification of payment received. On private sector repo jobs, Coursers had 24 hours to get the item into shipping lanes before it became a federal crime. I still had 23-and-a-half hours, but I needed the money fast. It wasn’t much, but it’d float me ‘til the next job. Nightfall blanketed the concrete steps in front of the only remaining logistics company, the first to adopt and profit from blockchain technology. The rest were too slow to adapt, fading into obscurity or limping along on rural routes. A couple, like the postal service, existed only as purveyors of “off-record assets”, the kind where you transfer some money to a seller’s wallet and hope the item you bought shows up on your doorstep.
Snow crunched underfoot as I walked toward the beat-up black Tesla, an original Model S complete with scrapes and dents from real driving. Missing was the 20-inch touchscreen, quick charging cable, and autopilot that came with newer models, but it was a serviceable work car.
Rush hour traffic flowed past as I eased onto the roadway, autonomous vehicles slowed or gently drifted away, giving the Tesla a wide berth. The city was a backdrop of old architecture supplemented with tech, an amalgamation of brick, mortar, steel, and glass, blurred by the static falling from the sky. Buildings had been retrofitted with 6G hubs, connecting every device in the city, allowing for near instantaneous data transfers. Solar windows adorned new constructions, while panels dotted the rooftops of older buildings, making the city self-sustaining. Every entrance, stoplight, crosswalk, and corner was equipped with Recog cams, tracking movements and authenticating access, but the city recently started experimenting with drones, as stationary cams came with blind spots. Originally embraced by the government as a niche security feature, facial recognition was now integrated into the surveillance infrastructure of our daily lives.
The intersection light turned yellow, forcing me to slam the accelerator to get through. In the rear-view, a car ran the red light causing cross-traffic to brake abruptly. Obviously not autonomous. With every turn, the car followed. As I accelerated, it accelerated. As I braked, it braked. Whoever it was, tailing wasn’t in their skill set. The traffic thinned as we drove further from the business district into the Drifts, lowlands within the city where the cracks of the old world were visible. My mom used to say the name derived from the nearby river, prone to flooding and depositing mountains of driftwood in the area as it receded. Dad was more pessimistic. Said the name came from all the drifters who passed through. Some from uptown and the suburbs looking for vice, the others homeless and on the street. Those days were gone, but the name stuck.
Only people who went looking for the past came down this far, the rest exited toward the city outskirts. There was more brick and mortar, less steel and glass, with retrofitted tech poorly integrated like a cyborg trying to drag everyone into the future. But no matter how hard the system pulled, some prefer to be left behind. Depending on the day, I’d take the old world over this one, but nostalgia was a dangerous drug. Back then, climate change, illness, war, and wealth gaps kept most longing for their past, while an enlightened few envisioned a brighter future. Division eventually sent the world into a spiral of apathy until a new war broke out, disrupting the foundation of society and ushering in a new age.
I was a teenager when cryptocurrency made the leap from dark web drug transactions to meme status. As more money poured in, technology advanced, making wealthier the top 1%, but signaling their collapse in the process. Cryptocurrency birthed the NFT or Non-Fungible Token, a digital asset so unique it was impossible to counterfeit. Imagine a baseball card or a painting, both could be copied or reprinted, but there was only one original. Assets like NFT’s operate similarly, they could be copied, but there was only one original thanks to a few lines of code.
A digital arms race ensued, creating more technocrats who lived to disrupt traditional business. Movies, television, and pop-culture sold out first, then sports teams, music, and everyone else. It was a long line of dominoes that fell too fast to stop. Before long, the NFT evolved into a key, granting access and ownership to not only the digital space, but to the real world and everything in it.
I slammed the brakes and cut the wheel, sending the Tesla into the opposite lane. When the car came to rest, it was crooked against the curb, facing the opposite direction in time to see my shadow pass in a silver Prius. I didn’t recognize him or the car, but I watched it in the side-mirror until the taillights disappeared against the cityscape.
Yikes! More, please.