Things are going great. Health. The life expectancy of everyone born after 2024. War, which barely happens anymore, and when it does it takes place online or with tidy drones. And Russia makes use of the newly opened seaways, the ocean level has risen, though that’s only uncomfortable for distant atolls. Managed democracy has taken hold. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the best one we have. Right. Just look.

The world hasn’t ended. No zombie hordes staggering around radioactive wastelands. Humans are getting accustomed to the new circumstances, the new conditions, the new humility, the new people, the new limitations, the new devices. The devices. The devices. They promised everyone an amazing life. What a commotion there’d been. The devices.

Now it’s been accomplished.

Hurray. A new level of development.

Everything just as before, but with less nature. Everything as usual, just under control. The unrest is over.

As if the world population had collectively understood with its deficient hive mind that there’s nothing to understand. For them. Never mind, then. Somewhere in some cellar or other stand machines where neural networks can replicate themselves. They improve themselves by the second through natural selection.

Selection. The best won’t survive. Death is part of life. You know the story. Death is important to being able to enjoy life intensively.

People enjoy.

“It’s not so bad.

Hasn’t gotten.

Right?”

Asks

KAREN

The wasteland has changed. Little housing units and fully automatic shops stand where before the catchment ponds had been and tents had stood. A few pubs without guests, a VR space, a new bus stop, a couple footpaths with no dogs. No trees.

The hall where the children, who are definitively not children anymore, had lived is surrounded by stakes that allude to it being razed and built atop. Inside the hall it smells unpleasant. Homeless people probably lived here recently. Now they’re—

Gone.

The room comes across tatty. Different than Karen remembers it. Smaller. Darker. Not mysterious. Not a place of hope. No comparison to the flat she’s been given by her new employer. She now lives above a laboratory. Glass, top floor, there was even a piano in the place when she moved in. A piano that was probably left behind during the developer’s promotional photo shoot; prior to Karen moving in, the developer had positioned the place as a comfy urban oasis for cultural enthusiasts. Cultural enthusiasts. That means somebody who once went to a museum. And goes once a year to the Royal Albert Hall. To hear piano medleys. Anyway. That’s where Karen lives, or at least sleeps, as her life takes place in the lab. At the moment she’s developing drugs to suppress the body’s graft-rejection reaction. Important for brain implants and artificial limbs. Karen doesn’t care what she researches or for whom. She is

Happy.