Rough Draft of the Prologue to a story coming out in a few months. Not written by me, but it's supposed to be written by my grandson. Sorta hard to explain. Anyway, here it is...
Sci-fi, roughly 50 years from today...
---------------- A Prologue
by The Digital Alchemist
Is it the future yet?
In my grandfather’s day, the future was going to be a place where the robots were in charge. Or, if not, everyone would at least be walking around with chips in their brains, linked to the net or to some hive-mind of all humanity. Perhaps we would become the robots, forerunners of some Singularity event. At the very least, we were supposed to all be driving flying cars and colonizing Mars.
Sure, we’ve got decent flightcraft, actual 3-D holovids, and pyra-plays more immersive than any virtual reality thought possible in the 20th century. We’ve made advances. Medical, especially—malaria, AIDS, autism: all quite curable. Paralysis, loss of limb, organ failure: they can build you a new anything . . . if you can pay, of course. But cancer? Schizophrenia? The goddamn flu? Still out of luck, no matter who you know or how deep your pockets.
But hell, we do have androids: simulacra, human in just about every way except where it matters. But our robots just don’t have the impetus to become Skynet.
No, this isn’t the future. The future is always another day; you never reach it. That’s its nature. And it’s probably better that way, because the future is always brighter. Today . . . things aren’t so bright. Not for most. The world is—spoiler alert!—pretty effed up. I’ll start with some of what you already know and go from there.
Of course, it’s all about the corporations and what we let them get away with.
When corps started overshadowing governments in sheer size and capital, when their net worths began to exceed national treasuries, when politicians finally got on corporate payrolls—openly—it was a slippery slope. Forget the Sherman Act, or any other international antitrust effort for that matter. You couldn’t stop them by force—the corps were already growing their own security divisions, their own armies. Oh, some nations tried. Those were some messy times, no doubt about it.
First they bought up the PMCs—private military companies like Xe, Erinys, Aegis—then culled from national armed forces and did their own recruiting. It was a sad day when West Point became just another Steelweather outpost, a privatized academy for “security officers.” Meanwhile, Annapolis met the B-One Corporation’s needs.
Go Army Beat Navy! took on a more sinister slant. They certainly weren’t playing football anymore.
When this all started up, it was freaky **** . I actually laughed aloud the first time I saw a soldier in riot gear sporting a Pepsi logo. Not that it lasted. They were eventually absorbed by B-One.
B-One—a ridiculous name. I hated their ads, popping up just about everywhere you looked, online, offline, wherever. You remember those early ones? Their slogans sang “B-One With the World” or “B-One For the World,” calling to the masses, enlisting a legion of consumers. Then it was “B-One of Us!” They were all Unity and Progressiveness, invoking roundabout objectivism and the brotherhood of man.
Stupid.
But now they're one of the top dogs, so the joke's on us. Hell, I've even done a few jobs for those assholes, off the grid. And we’re all B-One consumers, like it or not, as long as you eat food, purchase a simulacrum of your own, and enjoy the conveniences of modern life. Unless you’re with Steelweather, Visigoth, Lernaean, Zinmar, or one of the other big boys. No matter who it is, you’re feeding the machine directly.
Each of them wants to be the biggest, the baddest, the richest. They’re Capitalism’s bastard children, grown so fat they can’t get through the door, so they just want to buy the whole damned house and never have a need to leave.
They’re also the reason for the wars that screwed us all over. It’s a good thing you weren’t around for the last of all that. Back when we were kids, wars were things that happened in far away countries—usually in Africa or the Middle East—and were fought over oil, revenge, religion, political posturing. The soldiers were enlisted men and women who went overseas to kick ass or get their asses kicked. Either way, that was the status quo.
Not so with the Multinationals Wars. Its generals were CEOs, its battlefields were anywhere business was conducted, its soldiers were everyday people caught in the crossfire. And why? Because of the good old Internet.
As I see it, here’s how it went down—and good luck finding any suits backing me up on this; to own up is to pay up, and the rich never do. It was the early 21st century, and the idea of “net neutrality” was slipping away, becoming quaint and old-fashioned, like paperback novels. More and more government and corporate control was exerted on the global flow of information. With increasing reliance on the Internet in the daily lives—and livelihoods—of the vast majority, the allure of power for the one who could control it just became too much to resist. We’re talking suits trying to pull off 1984 **** , if decades after Orwell’s estimation. Multinational corporations wanted to “own” as much of the Internet as possible, and thereby the global economy itself. Gradually, legal battles between corps, and between corps and the governments that tried to keep them in check, escalated. Courtrooms gave way to battlefields.
That was the First One—the First Multinationals War™. Yes, one of them actually trademarked a goddamn war. I forget who. And it started when corporate executives started dropping like flies. The reason being, if you couldn’t undermine a rival’s business ventures to make your bottom line, just take out its chief players. Enter the assassinations. But see, this wasn’t a lasting solution. The big corps, like the mythological Hydras they are, would just grow two new heads for each one that’s lopped off. There’s always another man or woman in a suit standing in line, ready to seize power. Always has been. Skirmishes, smart bombs, dirty bombs, and bouts of terrorism sparked up all over the planet and on just about everyone’s doorstep—and in some cases, their own living room.
Of course, the apparent causes of the war were legion: patent infringements, antitrust disputes, trade violations, you name it. But the real reason for this global madness was corps trying to control and rebrand the Internet in their own image. And until outright war broke out, they’d nearly succeeded.
But you’ll remember that. Everything changed. The world got significantly darker, in some places quite literally. Both offline and on. It was so long ago, but some of our generation can still remember a time when the Internet was just the Internet. It was everybody’s and nobody’s, more or less anonymous. But in the decades that shadowed the First One, the Internet itself became the battlefield. And even that name went up for grabs. It was the In-2, and the Bscape, and the Verizonet, and a dozen others over the years, sometimes all at once.
Over the decades, we grew used to the idea that our information was not private, that anything put online was technically owned by some company or other. We all paid for our access to the net one way or another, and we generally knew who was in control of what. Corporate logos were everywhere. It was an illusion of freedom and a semblance of privacy. And we suspended our disbelief to the contrary, stuck our fingers in our ears and pretended it wasn’t so. I guess we just got used to it. But it wasn’t about our complacency. It was about power. It’s always about power. And the pie was just too divided for any of the corps’ liking. From the day the First One ended (if it ever did really “end”), everyone knew it was coming: the Second One. And when it did, everything changed. Again.
There’s no point in detailing the war itself. Although the era of national wars now lived in the shadow of corporate wars, they’re still all the same: kings and queens stir knights and bishops into a jingoistic frenzy and ultimately clear the board of pawns. There’s unforgivable collateral damage and sometimes even the royalty end up zeroed out. And this was true of the Second Multinationals War, too.
But when the smoke had cleared, when the endlessly rebranded old Internet was thrown down in bits and pieces . . . there was a clear victor: the Worldnet. Familiar, but new. Ordinary, but alien.
The old spirit of net neutrality from a bygone era was resurrected. The Worldnet was mysterious, but it was vast, intact, and wholly undivided. Most surprisingly, it appeared to have no competitors for control. There was no corporate branding to be found. The Worldnet is what we call it now, and it seems as open and free as the Internet once was, very much the same if not much better. But whose was it? Who owned it? Somebody had to. So then came the conspiracy theories. Most people don’t bother asking how or why. But someone—perhaps one of the corps, or some superconglomerate of corporations, or some other phantom entity—now must secretly own and control the great majority of the infrastructure which hosts our new global information network. Yet no one’s come forward. There is just the Worldnet, unchecked, unknown, holding untold potential power never turned kinetic. In a world that is otherwise decidedly dystopic, the Worldnet appears completely utopic.
What, me worry?
But hey, it’s not all that krakt. A lot has changed since you left. It sounds bad, but the fallout of the Multinationals Wars finally burst what was left of the American bubble, with mixed and manifold results. Suddenly we all realized that the universe didn’t revolve around us. We were no longer the world’s leading super power. For the sake of surviving, we had to learn what “international” meant, we finally went metric, and we were among the first to adopt the new global currency: the World Bank Currency; the WBC. The W. The dub. Sure, locally you’ll still see dollars, yuán, and pesos, but anyone who’s anyone carries around a dub-key to at least one account.
And those who resist this sort of progress? The holdouts? They get laughed at. Or devoured by the wolves of change.
In my grandfather’s day, there was going to be a nuclear-blasted World War III someday, or a technological apocalypse. But Armageddon never came. Or this is it, and we’re living it now, having crept up on us so slowly and so surely that we didn’t even notice until we looked at our own past and saw how good we used to have it.
And the end of the First One, a popular sentiment was that the world had been knocked down to zero, that we were starting over again. But that was years ago now. Yes, maybe things could be worse than they are, but they can still suck royally. And no, I guess our world hasn’t died yet.
But sometimes it feels like we’re all ghosts anyway.
IP: Logged
12:57 AM
PFF
System Bot
Synthesis Member
Posts: 12207 From: Jordan, MN Registered: Feb 2002
I'll only really like if it doesn't end in a downer. Sounds like personal freedom takes hit after hit. I can't tell if its a warning or a version of someones utopia. Well written though and will probably be a big hit.
A few buddies of mine are working on a project, It's called "Foreshadows: Ghosts of Zero" which will be out soon - it's a collection of interconnected short stories with a CD of music meant to be played while you read them. The stories are set in the future (around 2090) and from what I've been exposed to so far, it seems to be some very cool stuff.
The setting may be grim, but I believe at least a few of the stories have 'happy' endings.
What I shared with you above is just a prologue to the stories...
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02:03 PM
Mytime Member
Posts: 741 From: Long Green,Md Registered: May 2003
My sister and I were talking the other day about science fiction in general. We are both in our fifties and miss the "classic" science fiction we grew up with. It seems the bulk has switched over to fantasy. I don't read as much as I used to, just too busy with life. But she does. This sounds like it may be a good gift for her. Keep us updated on when it may come out.
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05:03 PM
Patrick Member
Posts: 39261 From: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Registered: Apr 99
Glad to hear you like the intro... The other stories are all different mini stories, and some have interwoven subplots.(From what I've read, the stories cover all different topics...)
I think the intro sounds like it was written in the present, but perhaps that's TDA's writting style- sorta 'retro'
