Year: 2064
Machines are everywhere. Everything is automated. Almost all predictions made by Shika Ouike, in 2025 about the future have come true. (Shika Ouike was a Nobel Laureate, scientist and top researcher. Her work in physics had impacted humanity directly, and she was touted to be as intelligent as Nikola Tesla.)
Cars run on solar power. Trains, flights, ships, and buses are now obsolete. There's one universal system of Chutes, which can transport you anywhere. All you need to do is to press a button and enter the destination. A Chute uses principles of quantum dynamics to compress space around you and create a vacuum. Once you step into the vacuum-hole, you are taken to an underground network of tunnels. A set of wheels attached to a board appears under you, and you are automatically steered to your destination.
If you need to enter a closed room, a voice announces your arrival. The people inside the room can choose to block your entry. But if you need to enter an open area, such as a hotel lobby or a restaurant, the same principles of quantum dynamics work to create a vacuum, and you are thrown back out. With sufficient practice, you can learn to land on your feet every time you get thrown out of a Chute hole. They even teach kids at school how to land gracefully, because transportation is so essential.
All of education is centered around perfecting your usage of these machines that permeate every human activity. Schools are run by robotic professors, because human professors got tired of repeating the same words year after year.
Most professions don't exist any more. There's some type of robot to do it all. The only jobs humans can hold today are the creative ones. Artists, writers, painters, designers, actors, musicians...oh, and sportsmen. People still love cheering their favorite sportsmen on.
Every child, as soon as it is born, is put through a genetic examination. This genetic screening decides which profession the child is best suited for. The child then lives out its life based on the results of the genetic exam.
If the machines determine that the child is made to be a sportsman, their diet changes accordingly, even from age 1. They start attending school when they turn 4 years old, and spend the next 6 years learning how to play the major sports. By the time they are 11 years old, the children need to pick a sport to major in. This decision needs to be backed by another genetic exam—you can't have a child playing hockey when his genes clearly tell you that he would be great at swimming.
Amidst all this, there are a few rare children whose IQ is so staggeringly high that they become programmers. They are sent to an elite school that tests their mental abilities on a daily basis. At the end of a gruelling 12 years of school, these children become the scientists that improve all the machines. This breed of mankind—with the most evolved brain structures of the planet—is so rare that only 2-5 new programmers are identified each year, from all around the world. These children are called Gems, and their schooling program is called The Polish.
Hirona was one such Gem, who had been going to The Polish since she was 4 years old. Her schedule was rigorous and highly competitive. Her classmates were constantly fighting about who was the most intelligent of them all—but not her. She would sit glued to the screen, watching the best actors perform.
Hirona, at just 13 years of age, had come to the painful realization that the system was flawed. She wanted to be an actor, not a programmer. But her IQ was too high for the Gem community to lose out on her. She had tried telling her parents that she didn't want to attend The Polish. She wanted to attend The Opera House instead, and learn the nuances of acting. Alas, the genetic screening had determined that she was to be a Gem, and that was that.
Nobody was allowed to dispute the genetic screening system. It was greater than the law. It was run entirely by robots, which meant that no human could tamper with the system. The original Gems who had designed this system were killed immediately after the system started working, to prevent malpractice.
The system was so perfect that crime was completely non-existent. Everyone got a fair chance at doing what they were best at doing, and there was no one left wanting. Except Hirona, that is. She was stubborn. She wanted to act, and she was going to act—or die. But she knew that while she was still at school, her hands were tied. The strict rules and highly watchful faculty prevented her from stupid attempts at escape. So she decided to do what was expected of her: become the best Gem of the class.
She grit her teeth and sat through all the classes, learnt the best algorithms, learnt how to write better algorithms. She memorized the names of the programming greats before her and what they did. She wrote more efficient programs each day, sometimes achieving complicated results in less than 5 lines of code!
Hirona graduated top of her class and was assigned to the Tesla Robotics Laboratories (TRL) immediately. She was allowed one month of vacation before she joined Tesla labs. She was free to do whatever she wanted during this time, and her parents enouraged her to visit family abroad. But she ignored them and spent all her time cooped up inside her room. What she did there, no one knew. She only came out when she was hungry or had to pee. Her parents were used to her being away from home, so this behaiour did not puzzle them. Little did they know that they were harbouring a future fugitive in their home.
One month later.
Hirona's first day at Tesla Labs.
Clad in a white lab coat and denim shorts, Hirona strode into Tesla labs with confidence. On her face, it did not show how nervous she was feeling inside. She was about to do something no one had attempted to do before. She was going to bring the system down.
Hirona had spent the previous month designing a program that contained one of the most dangerous computer viruses of all time. Any file that had ever interacted—even briefly in the past—with an infected file, would get infected as well. This highly contagious virus would shut the system down forever. The only way to get it back up would be to write it all from scratch. This would take time, time that Hirona had made big plans about.
Wearing her new ID card, Hirona gained access to the server room. She located the mother computer and inserted a button-drive into it. All of this took less than two minutes for her to do. Taking down the system was such a serious offence that the authorities were confident no one would dare to do. So confident that they had not put in any security measure to prevent this from happening.
Hirona went back to her orientation session and pretended like she was an eager new employee. She wanted to act, after all.
Within 45 minutes of the session, the lights started flickering. Soon enough, the lights went out. The holographer and e-pens followed suit. Darkness was everywhere, and even the eye-torches wouldn't work. A wall of panic started to descend among the employees of Tesla labs as they realized that this electric shut down was not just in their lab. It was everywhere. In the town, people stepped out of their houses, only to see the same darkness everywhere.
People were terrified. Their entire lives depended on electricity. They couldn't even drink water if they electric water dispenser didn't work. Food was out of the question, because all the robo-chefs had shut down. They couldn't even use the toilets, because the flushing system ran on electricity. They would have to stew in their own waste if they ever needed to go.
The people knew that the backup electric system worked for at least 12 hours—but it ran on solar power and the sun had already set for the day. They were facing at least 15 hours of absolute darkness with no where to go, no way to move, eat, drink, or even pee.
And while everyone was having panic attacks or hyperventilating, there was one person enjoying all the misery. She sat chuckling to herself, knowing that her virus would eradicate every bit of data ever collected virtually. This meant that she could start a life anew, as someone who was an actor, and not a Gem. It would take Gems at least a year before they set the system up again, and in this time, Hirona could disappear from the vicinity. She could set up a life somewhere else. With all the satellite monitoring networks down, no one would be able to track her.
Hirona Ouike was finally happy.
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