It was swelteringly hot out at 110 degrees and it was only May. Sam tried to calm himself as he left, but the heat hit him and it felt like he was standing in an oven. He knew he couldn’t stay out here long in the middle of the day.
“In one month I’ll finally be free to make my own decisions and join the military. Then I can take the fight to the Machine Emperor myself.”
“I can’t even beat up other people my age.” He thought grimly. Everyone else was augmented and far stronger than he was. He looked at one of the walls as it flickered to animated life.
“I’m so disappointed in you.” A stern older stereotypical man looking like a father said to his hulking augment son in a cartoonish speech bubble. “Who gave you permission to breathe?”
The animation changed and the son gave a cocky grin to the viewer and held his thumb up. “With the Everlasting Breath Augment, nobody needs to! I can go for a day with only a single lungful of air!” A torrent of disclaimer text followed before flickering away only a second or two later.
Another ad popped up, this one showing a hulking man flipping a car with the Caption, “Superman in a bottle!” A bottle of pills popped up with the same hulking brute on the outside.
“Just imagine if I were that strong,” He said to himself. He looked at a nearby electric car quietly humming as it drove past and wondered what it would be like to be able to flip it as easily as a table.
Sam had already defeated champion boxers from a century ago that were in his weight class, but that wasn’t how the modern world worked any longer. There were no weight classes. There were no fair fights. An average augmented teenager like Ian could kill him easily, and he was no danger to the real threats out there.
“I hope you don’t mind me saying so kid, but I saw your little fight through the window.” A man’s voice rang out. It was rich and pleasant, like he was right on the verge of breaking into a song or an advertisement.
“A country just fell and you wanna talk about my fight?” Sam turned around and asked, annoyed.
There was an older man standing on the sidewalk near him with black hair and a beard graying slightly at the temples. He resembled someone in his late 40’s. Sam wasn’t fooled - just like Jerry he could have been in his 90’s, or even older. For some people the appearance of age was a choice. He towered over Sam at what had to be at least six and a half feet tall and was built like a bodybuilder. One of his eyes shined blue inside of a chrome-ringed eye socket. A sign of cyber augmentation, something that unnerved Sam, since it had gone out of style as soon as the gene-paks came out. Almost no one had cyber mods anymore except some of the oldest elders. His suit was also out of style by at least forty years. A loud business suit of red, gray, and gold shimmered in the sunlight with animated moving color as the man stood there looking at him with a warm and too-familiar gaze.
“You wanna talk about depressing shit or do you wanna talk about that fight?” The man boomed.
“Whatever you’re selling I’m not buying it.” Sam said, waiving at the air to dismiss the man. “Way too many of you old bastards have persuasive augs.”
“Aww come on, don’t be like that, I’m not trying to sell anything.”
Rather than reply Sam brought out his ancient and antiquated cell phone. He hit the speed dial and soon, a skycab landed on the street in front of him. All four helicopter blades sat atop a small box with transparent metal sides.
“Whatever happened to the polite people in Idaho?” The man asked forlornly.
As Sam stepped into the quadcopter, he said, “They got replaced by refugees. Get with the times.”
Closing the door he looked down on the man as he began rising into the sky rapidly.
The AI-generated voice of some long dead actor Sam didn’t know came over the speakers.
“Where to?”
“Wilder High School.”
“You got it kid.”
He looked down on the man as he rose in the skycab. His blue glowing gaze followed him.
“Hey,” He asked the cab. “Were you alive when this place was small?”
“You askin’ me, or the voice?”
“You, duh. I know it’s just a voice filter.”
“Thank god I don’t have to stay in character. Yeah, Wilder used to have like a few thousand people in it. Now we’ve got fifty thousand or something here. It was still pretty quiet when I moved here from California in the 2050’s.”
Sam looked down on the sprawling metropolis below him, with towering skyscrapers and dirty streets. This was still a small and underpopulated city compared to the rest of the country, but there were a bunch of skyscrapers where the old downtown used to be. From the air Sam was able to see all the way to the vast tent city on the outskirts.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
The Pilot of the Skycab flew with incredible skill. Once upon a time an AI might have done this job, but those had fallen out of favor.
As the quadcopter flew above the buildings he caught sight of a rally going on downtown. It seemed like they happened every day now. He couldn’t hear what the incensed speaker on the stage was saying, but he could see the signs being held up. “Death to the Machine Emperor!” “Break the Machine!” “Jesus’s Return is Nigh!”
“Were people actually nice back then?” He asked.
“Yeah well, we still met each other face to face sometimes. Now I’m stuck doing this remote piloting job. It’s not bad, don’t get me wrong. But Wilder - well, all of Idaho really - was pretty rural. People were nice most of the time, I guess. None of this remote work. Just people being people. Lots of farms, tractors, stuff like that. The biggest change is definitely the space though. I’ve got one of those little coffin apartments in Boise. It’d be nice if I could live in a little town like this again.”
“Huh. Thanks. My grandma talks about old Idaho sometimes but I tune it out because it doesn’t matter much now.”
“Nah, that it doesn’t. Too many damn refugees these days. They even drank up the Snake River, you know? It’s just desalinated shit pumped in from the coast now. It’s not even real.”
“Yeah, but how else are you gonna deal with all these people?” Sam asked.
The man mumbled something Sam couldn’t quite make out, but he thought he heard, “chuck ‘em into the fucking ocean” before the quadcopter landed. “We’re here!”
Sam hopped out of the cab and let his payment get automatically deducted from his account.
“Thanks for flying Idaho Skycab!” The voice shouted after him.
The school itself was at least a century old, if not older. It was still tiny, having never really expanded past the size it had been when the town had only a few thousand people in it. Few people bothered physically going to school now.
Sam went in through the double doors and found no one at the desk inside. Instead he walked to one of the empty classrooms and saw a familiar figure within.
Standing all of 5’3 and weighing probably 120 pounds even after full augmentation, the mousy woman was lifting one of the fulldive VR pods with one hand. Each one weighed at least a few hundred pounds each but she didn’t so much as break a sweat as she carefully cleaned under the large metal coffin with a rag.
“Hello, Miss Tanner.” Sam said quietly. He barely spoke above a whisper, but that was all the teacher had needed to hear. “Oh! If it isn’t my little Sam! Welcome back to school, I don’t get to see many students other than you these days.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty close to graduating.” He said simply.
“Well good. Here, let me get you in this pod. We’ve still got one that regular kids like you can use.”
Sam liked Miss Tanner. She was one of the few people that called him a “regular kid” instead of a baseline. Pods that unaugmented people could use were becoming rarer and rarer now. People were expected to have neural links and those could replace the need for a pod entirely. The news made fulldive pods extremely unpopular.
Miss Tanner carefully set down the equipment that weighed four times as much as she did without the slightest sign of exertion. She was an elder, a cut above even the most enhanced of his peers. Though her small stature, short cropped mousy brown hair and sweater of questionable taste didn’t look fearsome, he knew that she could beat both Sam or Ian to death with one hand tied behind her back. Fortunately she had the disposition of a very friendly rabbit and no desire to harm anyone. Her nose seemed to twitch as she smiled.
“I’ve got a day to write two reports for history class.”
She frowned. “They really don’t let up on you, do they? They know you’re not enhanced, right? I remember when kids used to just use AI to cheat on that kind of busywork.”
Sam shook his head sadly. “That’s the standard now, Miss Tanner. At least I’ll be done with it in a month.”
“It would be easier on you if you could use a standard connection. Of course if you were augmented I wouldn’t get to keep you company.”
Sam gave a grim chuckle that shook his lean frame. His height was below average for a modern teenager at six feet tall and although fit he knew he’d skipped too many meals to be considered any kind of musclehead. He was very athletic, but only that. A normal human level of well-built, not ‘casually lift 400lb objects’ or ‘effortlessly beat a championship boxer to death’ strong.
“It’s the only way I can learn. I can’t have one of these at home, you know that.”
“Your grandmother is still insisting on that huh? I can’t believe that girl is still being so stubborn about technology. Still, you’d be better off with at least a neura-sync aug. Even the anti-tech people are starting to give in.”
“Yeah, I know. Grandma was pretty clear. No Augs. She’s still a hardline Rapturite.”
“I don’t know why she wants you to be disabled in this day and age. You can’t tell me you want to live like the rest of the Raptureites forever. Those aren’t the eyes of someone that hates good living! I mean she’s still got you using an old cell phone! Who even uses those anymore?”
“She’s all I have now and I’m all she has. You know I can’t just leave her. Unfortunately that means she’ll still get to make the decisions for me until I’m eighteen...”
“For all that she’s got left. Look, do you want me to talk to her? Maybe she’ll take the rejuv if it’s me doing the talking.”
“You should know by now nobody is going to talk her out of old age or any of her beliefs,” Sam replied morosely.
“Yeah, there’s no cure for stubbornness, and she always was a stubborn kid. My husband was just like her. Had a heart attack about fifty years ago and passed on. That was before synthetic heart tissue injections were invented.” The teacher saw his expression fall and decided to pretend she hadn’t said anything. “Well, are you going to get in? I’ll help you out.”
Sam nodded. “Of course, Miss Tanner. My condolences on your husband. Thanks for putting up with me.”
Miss Tanner laughed. “You don’t make it to nearly a hundred years old without learning to put up with teenagers. Now go on.”
Sam nodded and headed off. Miss Tanner might work as a teacher but she was an exalted elder, after all. One of the good ones that had seen the dark times and made it through alive. Unlike a lot of the scumbags out there Sam felt she was truly a good person. “Who else would choose to work in what was left of the school system for next to no pay?” Sam mused to himself.
He took a moment in the small restroom to clean himself off before coming back out to the classroom, finding everything pristine and in place.
“Alright Miss Tanner, I’ll see you on the inside.”
“Let’s get going.” She said with a smile, her voice warm with honest affection. She opened the clear glass door of the pod and Sam prepared for another dive into the virtual world.