Sorry For Party Rocking

A Chapter by garside

Dance baby dance, like the world is ending,

Dance baby dance, cause the world [has] end[ed].

Lyrics modernized by me.

I have discovered three things this morning. Firstly, it's very very hot, and if I stay outside much longer I'm going to very closely resemble a giant piece of burnt Macon. Secondly, the doomsday protocols have apparently been activated; which is the first good news I think I've heard since the GOD. Thirdly, it is apparently a Monday. I mention these seemingly unrelated epiphanies because I had them all within a few seconds of each other.

At precisely 10:30 AM (solar powered laptops set their clocks by the intensity of the sun and the last known GPS coordinates they receive from the what I presume are still functional satellites), I heard a song which I didn't personally pay a licensing fee for, and I had to swiped the big Monday the 21st calendar icon to shut the song up. I should probably explain what this all means, in case you have no idea what I'm talking about.

Now, I'd include a photo of the laptop, but it's cameras can't be turned on itself. Maybe I'll find a lake and take a selfie with it or something later. Anyway, it's about 15 inches square, less than 8 cm tall, and is glass on both sides. It has solar panels embedded beneath the LCD display, is completely water proof, constantly charges, transponds your position with the now-defunct governments of the world, and has a dictionary, built in tip calculator, and a collection of every board game owned by the Milton-Bradley-Hasbro-Parker, which is quite a few. Sadly, most are two player, so I get to play and lose against an adaptive AI who will learn my habits and try to thwart my every attempt at digital domination.

Right, so the doomsday protocols weren't nearly as dangerous as they sound. Well, sorta. So almost 10 years ago or so there was a near miss with an asteroid that almost hit the Earth. Some private European space agency managed to trap an asteroid in orbit around our moon, and began mining and harvesting it. It was like super cool and almost crashed the hollowed with the amount of bandwidth taken up by the streaming. 5 years ago or so, an explosion on the surface of the asteroid knocked it out of the moon's orbit and sent it basically be lining for the 45th parallel. The USSF managed to fling the thing back out into space using some kind of carbon nanotube solar sail. It was all very interesting if you were into that sort of thing. Anyway, the EFAF lobbied successfully to put in place a system which would turn off all DRM on all computers simultaneously if another catastrophic world-ending event were to happen that couldn't be averted. As with most reactionary legislation still trending, it passed almost unanimously. And I guess they turned it on before the web went down. Great news for me! Well, great except that this particular laptop seems to only have s****y classic electropop end-of-the-world remixes.

Once I was awake, the first thing I noticed after realizing I could listen to music was "Ohmigo it's too hot out." Now like 20 years ago, the atmosphere got like way out of control. China basically tore a hole in the ozone layer the size of… well China. From what I remember of maps, this meant that the ozone hole basically irradiated crops over every agricultural center in Europe and America. The best part is the Chinese not only didn't apologize, they said they had already paid for it by absolving so much debt during the Gilded Depression. The NATO organizations started Project Bubbles as sort of a last resort, but it had so much success it became the model for modern agriculture. Huge UV filtering domes were dropped over hundreds of acres of then-worthless farm land. The transformation was shocking. For one, the nice gridded landscapes I remember from plane flight as a lad were replaced by giant swaths of planet sized bubble wrap. It ended up saving the planet from global hunger.

Real shame all the farms went dead again when all the farmers stopped maintaining them. I haven't been inland since the GOD though, so I'm not entirely sure if they're still standing or if they're Freestanding dangers now. I don't know if you streamed documentaries when you grew up, but there was a particularly fun one called "At The End of the World", which was a various look at what would happen to human civilization if the asteroid had actually hit. It was pretty desperate stuff. The three most important facts they said were: (a) Avoid cities. Without regular maintenance, it's only a matter of time before they fall in on themselves. (b) Avoid survivors. If you're not with a group, don't try to enter one. You'll likely be eaten. © Do not eat yourself, no matter how good it smells!

That one I should probably qualify because even if you find the vats, you probably won't know what they were for, or why there seemed to be a revitalized stigma against cannibalism in the Ad Council posters. Well like 15 years ago, some super genius perfected CF meats. That's cruelty-free; meat grown in vats! I don't know the Sci behind it, but basically instead of grazing livestock and then butchering them, we could just mix a bath of cells and grow meat the same way we grow potatoes. Well not the same way, but you get the idea. You might think lots of people would be totally against this, but this was almost a decade into the Pork Ban. Turns out pigs not only had higher cognitive function than we gave them credit for, but with a little of salt water and an EEG cap, we could actually talk with them. Didn't seem right to eat something you could talk to.

Anyway, when vat meats came out, bacon came back. It wasn't long until someone offered to donate their cells to be the basis for a series of human meat. We are "long pigs" after all, and it turns out we're delicious when you combine our genome with that of garlic. Things were great until the aforementioned Chinese ozone hole thing. Famine hit people pretty hard, and the hit to infrastructure left a lot of people hungry. People who were use to eating people. Synthetic people, but still people. Things got pretty dark until the Safeways started opening again. It also lead to the #Ban_Macon legislation.

You know, it seems funny now, but when they came out with idea of Progress-Not-Congress hashtag based democracy, it seemed like such a stupid idea. Looking back, I realize it was the single greatest decision we had ever made as a country. It's just a real shame they dismantled the system the next year during the Conservative Amerissance, as part of their "Return to real normalcy". I'm really glad most of those senators are dead now. Fuckers.

Also the laptop just popped up a UV warning, so now I really gotta go. Maybe I'll find a bodega somewhere and pick up some sunscreen.

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