(Sure, I was busy being born in 1975. But who are you going to believe…me, or the title of this story?)
In this troubled, smoggy, worrisome world of 1975, it is sometimes difficult to remember that Humankind is made out of progress. We’re always going forward. Things are always getting better. From where we are now, you won’t BELIEVE how great 2025 will be.
It’s true that we don’t have world peace. That’s an impossible dream. The One World Government will always have a few crazy rebels who, for no good reason, resist the imposition of eleven peoples’ will over the 16 billion people who now live. But those people are foolish; they’re usually found quickly and re-educated.
Fortunately, there’s no such thing as ‘thoughtcrime’, and re-education is nothing like the dystopian nightmare so many authors imagined. I mean, it’s obvious that certain thoughts and ideas are wrong. We don’t need the government to tell us that. Your neighbors will tell you, the people around you will tell you, your friends, if you have them, will tell you. And if you keep thinking wrong, they’ll just take care of the problem. They’ll isolate you, stop selling you food, not trust anything you say, not let you farm your own food, not let you sleep.
People in this condition ought to return peacefully to proper behavior. Many of them are SO crazy that instead, they continue acting out. But we don’t have to worry about them. In 1995, Soylent Green is proven by logic and literally hundreds of academic papers on the benefits of cannibalism. So those who insist on being nuts simply become food; and believe me, they taste way better than plain old “neighbor who’s behind on taxes”.
We’ll have access to way more information, too. The giant skyscrapers, like the Twin Towers, which used to house people and office spaces and such, now house the massive computers necessary to do complex things like algebra and Pac-Man. The Government keeps tens of thousands of people employed answering phones at the Computer Information Centers, so whenever you need knowledge, just find your nearest pay phone, deposit $37.63, and you’ve got five minutes to ask the Operator about anything you want. They’ll consult the computer, and, obviously, by 2025, computers will all be infallible.
Sports, if you look at them, are just plain silly. A bunch of arbitrary people in arbitrary uniforms playing out arbitrary silly actions in order to ‘win’ something that has no value? Good Lord, I’m glad we got rid of that in the 1980s. We now concentrate on sports which mean something. I, myself, am regional runner-up for “Most pain taken for the longest time” in my area. I don’t mean to brag, but I can stand up to toothpicks under my thumbnails way better than most, though I’m nowhere near professional level, much less Olympic level (and boy, has it ever made the Olympics simpler!)
Employment is much simpler. Everyone works from home, using computers. You simply rent the use of an Operator for eight hours, which is fairly affordable if you live on government-issued Soylent. The Operator will do all kinds of things for you – for example, if you normally would have had to try to write something, you’d have to rely on a messy typewriter. But now, all you need do is type up whatever you’ve written, and read it to the Operator, and it immediately goes into the Font of Knowledge, and you get another coupon for Soylent. It’s an incredibly simple system; but of course, in 1975, we had neither the technology nor the academic understanding for either the advanced computers, or the ingestion of your fellow humans.
(There were really, truly times when it was believed that having big burly persons hauling your friend out of the coffee shop and into the Soylent Van, and your friend might scream like a mad person, when we thought this might be a bad thing. But it’s been explained by literally hundreds of papers in respected academic journals that these are actually screams of pleasure. Maybe I’ll go voluntarily someday; they do make it sound like fun.
And academia! Oh, the pitiful knowledge we have now, and the great knowledge we’ll have in the future. Do you know we once didn’t know the difference between Right and Wrong? Now, again, the answer is as close as your phone and the nearest Operator. And don’t worry—all Operators are carefully screened by at least one Operator before being permitted to take the job, and as the Operators have pointed out, they’re infallible. Also, several publications which, crazily, thought otherwise, had their entire staffs eaten, and I have to tell you….chef’s kiss. There are some people who know how to marinate a parietal lobe, and some people who just don’t. Nobody in 1975 knew how to do that, or if they did, they were forced to keep it a secret by the repressive society in which they lived.
WAIT A SECOND! Just this second, as I’m typing this up, a massive blue glow appeared right here in my living/only room. IT’S THE FUTURE! THEY’RE FROM THE FUTURE! There’s a whole bunch of people in shiny white armor, and right on the other side, RIGHT on the other side, I can see a Soylent van! And the back door is open! For ME!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse of what’s to come. And I hope you enjoy 1975. As for me, I’m going to finish this here and then run straight through the glow and into the…
…oh! They’re coming through and picking me up and starting to shackle me up! I don’t even have to do the extra work! The future is amazing! As a final word, I’d like to say jkflajfikm/resgi09reau09jgr0ajvrg
________
If you somehow enjoyed this, you might like Eleven Things To Brag About With Your Future City
Comments are closed.