The holographic clock flashed twenty-one o’clock. Michael Livingstone stepped out of the carriage of the Hypertube. He inhaled a deep breath of the fresh air outside the train and exhaled out the old arid gas in the depths of his lungs.

“Despicable!” he cursed. He always hated taking Hypertubes to work. The breathable oxygen inside was stored in a gigantic container located in the walls of the train. When the tube outside turned vacuum, the who-knew-how-ancient oxygen would diffuse into the carriage, suffocating every passenger inside.

Outside the station, the sky was already completely dark, but the land ahead of him was lit up like day. The street lamps emitted such powerful beams at such complete angles that Michael could barely see his own shadow on the bright ground.

Michael turned on his Bracelet. Dozens of new social media notifications popped onto the holographic screen projected above his left wrist. He swiped with his right hand and the notifications disappeared. Then the news page appeared. The title read “Five Shot Dead In Neighborhood Fight.”

“Ordinary,” Michael muttered. He swiped again, and the next heading read “Man Suspected Neighbor of Burglary and Resorted to Extreme Acts”. Once again, nothing new for Michael. He could still remember the neighbors living two floors above him getting into a huge fight because one had installed a CCTV camera on his door. Michael had forgotten what exactly happened afterwards, but he could faintly recall the sirens of the ambulance, the SWAT team rushing up with ballistic shields, and the burn marks of plasma scarring the walls.

Michael himself wasn’t so concerned about getting into fights. He had a friendly face and a deep, trusting voice. He also knew how to run away from fights. He could memorize floor plan layouts at a glance, and he wouldn’t forget any small details — even those really minor ones like the number of stair steps and the time it would take for the fireproof curtain to close. He didn’t try to remember these trivial numbers; they just automatically engraved themselves into his brain. 

Moreover, Michael could construct a 3D model of the rooms inside his head just by scanning through these 2D blueprints that were hung next to the elevator doors in every building. This skill was quite helpful when it came to life-saving. He could still vividly remember that time when his office building was attacked by a few suicide bombers and how he managed to locate the emergency escape stairs amidst the dense smoke.

Didn’t matter now, Michael thought. His main concern now was to pay for this month’s rent on his small flat. He didn’t want to sleep on the streets at night — not that he cared about the discomfort or anything, but he didn’t want to be seen as a thief and, most likely, be killed out of “self defense”.

He sighed deeply. Life was so much better for him back then before the artificial intelligence revolution. If it was thirty years ago, or fifty, he could have worked as a mathematician in some university. He frequently dreamed about attending intellectual competitions and winning awards and going homes with buckets of prize money. He would be a celebrity. But now. Now he was just working as a data analyst in a small nonentity firm — so small and poor that the company could only afford a human data analyst below the minimum wage.

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What a waste of his talent, thought Michael. However, others saw it otherwise. What Michael possessed was a useless skill at the contemporary society. This was like having fast shorthand writing speed. Pointless and dispensable. The important jobs were the ones that machines couldn’t replace and the ones that entertain people. Artists. Poets. Musicians. Actors. There was only one exception in this structure. If one began in the path of mathematics and continued to study computer science throughout elementary school, secondary education, and university and then studied for five more years in special Artificial Intelligence Construction colleges, they could go apply for jobs in the major AI corporations like ArtTech. This path was really a gamble though. The employment rate of ArtTech was as low as ten percent. The other ninety percent, like Michael, would suffer through poverty.

Michael’s trip down his memory lane was cut off as a new front page message popped out on his screen. “Abandoned missile silo located. Government refused to make an explanation”.

“Interesting,” Michael mumbled. His pupils dilated as he clicked to read the full article.

“An abandoned missile silo base was found at the countryside (detailed coordinates pasted on the map below). The flags and badges in the silo vaguely indicated that this silo once belonged to the United States Marine Corps, a division of combat when military and individual nations still existed. 

“‘I found it when I was hiking and got lost near the cliffs. I didn’t venture too far in, but I saw a lot of antique guns and ancient technology’ reported Mr. Bridges, the owner of the house and a current full time digital painter. What he didn’t mention but we saw were crates of foreign currency in forms of cash that were possibly seized from illegal parties, old redacted files with information regarding governmental cooperation with major corporations, and ancient-looking thumb drives and hard disks. Investigation of this location is absolutely necessary, and citizen journalism is highly encouraged.”

That was certainly weird, Michael mumbled to himself. It was weird to a degree of stupidity. In this decade of 2040s even clickbaits and phishing messages would be disguised with a sophisticated intellectual aura. But here, “crates of foreign currency”, “old redacted files”, “ancient-looking thumb drives” were all childish terminologies. This message seemed too brainless to be a fraud and too stupid to be a prank.

What seemed odder, however, was that the title of this report seemed completely normal, even interesting to a degree. The tone seemed nothing like the body of the article. If it really was for some clickbait or phishing, why wouldn’t the publisher just put the “hook” into the title?

And lastly, why would the geographical coordinates? If the content of this article was true, it would serve the publisher no benefit for a huge crowd to venture into such a base to loot the wealths. If the content was fake, the author couldn’t possibly receive any benefits.

Just as Michael was pondering over the article, he got knocked back for a few steps, and the Bracelet screen flickered a few times and died. He raised his head. A big man was standing in front of him, and there was a look of brief shock, anger, and suspicion in his eyes.

“Hey you! What do you want!” The big man hollered. His left hand immediately went through all his pockets to check whether he got anything stolen. His right hand, however, was pointing right at Michael’s face. Michael took a closer observant look at the big man’s hand. Nail dotted with small traces of different colors. Old sleeves smeared with paints. Yes. An acrylic painter. The colors on his finger nails were very different from the stains on his sleeve. It could be deduced that he mixed a lot of paint but didn’t put much on the canvas. And why would that happen? Inspiration ran dry? Public’s taste of art changed? Didn’t matter. This big man was in a terrible mood.

“Oh great,” Michael thought to himself, “An angry rich man who met obstacles in life. Perfect person to piss off.”

Then Michael raised his eyes a little, and his pupils dilated again, but this time it was out of fear. He was surprised that a person as observant as him didn’t notice it. The man’s left hand was now in his inner jacket pocket. There was something glowing that he was holding.

The man was holding onto a lethal plasma pistol, ready anytime to fully exercise his rights of defense upon Michael.