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Rationale This dystopic short story was created for the purpose of forewarning readers what the abuse of technology could lead to. Yes, it is an exaggerated future, however it may even itself in odds with the growing amount of time we, as a human race, spend on technology. Carmine is a child who was lucky enough to have a non-conformist father who did not believe in the pleasures of technology and rather saw worth in spending quality time with his daughter. However, given that we, as a human race are all interconnected, majority will often rule. Minorities may at most cause a fuss, but they cannot resist the tide of change. Carmine’s father was taken away during the night after the conversation, as the authorities have eyes and ears everywhere. Carmine was lucky enough to escape the same fate as the rest of mankind and hid from them for many years, hiding in small spaces within the dominating towers which eventually occupied the entire surface of the Earth. Her character within the story represents the real personality mankind should be in touch with, the side mankind had forgot about in the presence of pursuing pleasure. Carmine’s behaviour throughout the novel represents the unfairness and dehumanising effect technology has on our loved ones, that in our ignorance with less important matters, such as technology, we will forget the important things in life – resulting in our own purposeless death. 3030 Introduction Plot development climax falling action resolution Sucking our life out, like an outdated 2009 kidney dialysis machine, is the internet. 3030 is the year mankind now claims to live in, but no such creature lays its vertebrae in alignment with gravity. They all sit, cooped up, bathing in the light of their own screens in place of the sun. The year is 3030 and the outdoors don’t exist, save for an Apple here or there. Each representative of the name mankind harbours in small shells the size of a toddler’s cot, they are squished and trapped into tiny compartments. I am the only survivor on Earth, I have escaped the tragic fate many of my comrades are now trapped within, for the purpose of satiating their eternal desires and their never-ending wants and needs! As I gaze over the stacked rows of pods a thought occurs to me: try as they might to enjoy their creation, try as they might to ignore the feeling that something isn’t right, try as they might to entail eternal happiness – they will find it impossible. For anything in life to become intelligible, one must include spaces of silence to distinguish between sounds - much like death exists to prove that life exists. The word’s I recognise as not my own, but my papa’s, each syllable from his own wise mind. Before 3030 we lived a prosperous life, outside of the concrete buildings stacked with only pods and machines, we had our own house overlooking our city. In the distance we could see the scores of grey towers looming over our pathetic 70-storey skyscrapers, briefly, I observed our city against the looming towers, so I asked Papa what would happen if there where more of them. He pulled up a chair and further explained to me why we weren’t with them, and why we will never agree to their terms, for it was a sentence far worse than death. You see Carmine, they will be so absorbed in their devices and distractions they will never have a moment to themselves, you’d think nothing wrong with it wouldn’t you? The Sahara Desert would provide more company than the metallic desert I now inhabit; not a single person not engaged in the online realm is alive, except for me. Even papa disappeared, he vanished the night after our conversation overlooking the skyline, the very next day, I escaped from our house and hid amongst the pods. We never even said goodbye. There will be moments within the program that will be inevitable, small brief intermissions to allow the people to make sense of what they are watching, for they can’t continuously surround themselves with everything, it would defeat the purpose of the pods. Those moments of silence will only last a few seconds within the 24 hour cycle, which seems to any customer for the Online Realm Party a discrepancy! You can trade your day to day life for one of your dreams for eternity, how are a few seconds going to ruin all of that? So, they all leave their families, abandon their children to The Party and vanish into thin air, forever. Papa paused now and traced the discrete skyline with his fingers from end to end, encouraging me to study each and every one of the identical towers. It looked like a glorified prison camp. Those moments of emptiness will build up…you know that don’t you? Those seconds will tick away to minutes within a month, then those minutes will layer atop to guild it’s victim with an hour of silence, silences which remind them of who they where before they pledged their lives to The Online Realm Party.   Lost in my last memories with papa, I hadn’t noticed a distant rapping and tapping noise, one of distant crackling, crackling of metal and against plastic. The creatures began to stir in their stainless pods of white; swivelling their membranous eye sockets, found to be blind from abandonment to feed on senseless information. Their carefully crafted body of legs and arms formed by the love of their mothers and fathers where now stumps, to allow leeway for thick needles and metallic probes. Those streams of empty seconds had morphed to empty centuries, their screams for help could not be heard! I could see them clawing within their simulation for escape, begging with the deafening silence to stop, asking for murder upon their head – they have begun to suffocate from their own filth!  Emptiness will carve a gaping hole into the complex brains of Mankind and it will not matter how many endorphins are injected into their skull! The machines will quite literally, absorb them; eat and devour mankind in a kind of constructive cannibalism! The needles will erase the conscious mind, the thinking mind, with their bitter-sweet thirst for chemical toxins, further luring them with the promise of more and more! Papa was on his feet now, becoming illustrative in the future of our human race in the year 3030. He struck a match and plucked a plastic fork from the sink, then further scavenged our house for a plastic spoon. He lit them on fire in front of our view of the towers. The web will slowly establish itself into every single neuron until mankind no longer possesses power over himself, then man will slowly disintegrate amongst the pumping heat of machines. Those machines will be left with nothing to feed on, so they will die with them. So, mankind will seep into the forgotten world to which no one will be around to remember. The spoon and fork had melted together before dripping onto our tiled floor in a smoky, heated, vile mess. Papa’s prediction was coming alive in front of my eyes! Every single pod now embodied the image of war; the wires protruding like veins to the arm of the machines, constricting and slowly choking each human into a slow, unwilling, empty death. Horrified, I watch helplessly as each and every human disappeared through thick sharp needles into the heart of the machine. The clean white pristine pods now reeked of burning lithium and spilled toxins, painting them black from poisonous fumes, furthermore, oozing out of the electrical arms where spilled humans, dripping slowly onto the machines below. I could almost hear papa’s voice the day The Party took him from our home “RUN CARMINE! RUN! DON’T LET THEM CATCH YOU, REMEMBER WHAT I TOLD YOU!! CARMINE RUN BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!” his voice awoke a newfound flower of hope within me, that I would not suffer the same fate as those around me, I would die an honourable death only to be reached by giving everything I had left. I spotted a hatch, 50 pods above where I was hiding, I knew I could get to it if I was careful enough. All the while I climbed, the noise of metal grinding on plastic and flesh grew louder, chemicals cascaded and leaked all around me – a shrivelled brain dropped next to me. Blood gushing through my veins in panic, adrenaline forced me to keep climbing despite the befalling chaos which surrounded me. I had only 20 pods to go when the loud shrieks and struggles of man vs machine grew quieter, softer yet…until silence rippled throughout the towers, reaching me. The lights switched off, clothing me in the cover of darkness. You know, I’ve never heard real silence before; it’s rather beautiful. I remember it, perhaps, when I was still in my mother’s womb, or the feeling of when I was small and papa used to wrap me in warm blankets and sing lullabies by the light of the setting sun. Even when I used to swim and dive so deep I couldn’t hear the world above, just floating silently. A crack like that of lightning suddenly echoed tenfold into the atmosphere; killing the silence was the last machine, and it found me by my pulse. Only 10 pods where left but my arms felt heavy, my palms sweaty and my knees where weak, I may not make it… Getting closer still further off into the depths of the library of pods was The Claw. The Claw was initially used to introduce costumers to The Online Realm by removing their cranium and engaging them with similar experiences they would find in the pod. The last pod was in front of me, the hatch within reach, when The Claw latched onto my leg. It began to drill its ugly blades through my ankle and file into my blood wires to replace my arteries. It slowly pulled me from the hatch, dragging me down pod by pod to it’s whirring mouth, to murder me like it did with the rest of humanity. I grab onto anything falling by me and find some leaking potassium next to a bottle of water. I kick them into the machine’s mouth and initiate an explosion enough to eliminate the darkness to regain my path and throw it off my scent. I clamber up now, faster than before and open the hatch. It slowly creaks open, heavy and rusty from never being opened since it’s placement. I struggle to leave the dark abyss beneath me, and grasp the concrete around me for support. Suddenly, I feel a hand push on my foot and lift me above the tower’s insides, up into the atmosphere. I look down and see my father blind and limbless with only a single arm growing from his side. “PAPA!! PAPA GIVE ME YOUR HAND LET ME HELP YOU!! PAPA???” my crying pleas for his help are fruitless. He has made his mind up. “PAPA PLEASE!!” I yell at him as he drops into the churning mouth of the machine. “NO!” and I’m forced to close the hatch on my father and to the rest of mankind. I hear the clunk of the claw reverberate against the concrete, driven mad by the closeness of my pulse it furiously beats against the hatch. My back against the concrete I am consumed by a feeling of numbness, the sky grey, the concrete grey the metal claw trying to kill me also grey. A colourless life, my papa’s chance at survival ruined to only increase my chances of survival, not a guarantee, but a chance for me to live a better life than he did. The destruction of mankind and life. Everything that mattered had disappeared. Tears slowly flowed over my face as I remembered why the sky was grey. It was grey from billions of satellites orbiting at ridiculous angles and speeds to support the powerful, controlling and irresistible Internet. Now, the internet had ceased to exist along with mankind, it’s steady binary-byte banquet began to falter in flight. The satellites which once spun with intense ferocity now paused at such peculiar angles to reflect the light around them; and so, the sky began to glitter silver. Like a school of perch near the surface of the ocean, like a shimmering lake against the radiant sun, or, like the universe in the middle of nowhere. That was how the sky glittered.  The sky was grey because of machines, if the internet fails to function, the machines will fall. I was about to die by the fate of machines, I had fought and killed my father for nothing! The world seemed to slow down when the satellites hit the Earth; the flames swayed with contempt, smoke turned in on itself like an idle tornado, sparks bounced like millions of gumballs poured over a trampoline. And In a flash of light, I was gone. I heard from the angels afterward, that the red rain eventually came to a stop and revealed a destroyed Earth, but a clear blue sky spilled overhead, for the first time since 2020.  The year is 3030 and the outdoors now exist and not a single creature is alive. The year is 3030 and mankind has vanished, he has left the Earth uninhabitable, ruined and spoiled - but at least the sky is blue.