I hit the floor pretty hard. This kinda shit happens every day now, more than it used to happen anyways. The guy who ran and shoved past me is probably just like every other schmuck who lost their job to a bot. I’d like to feel bad for him, especially with constant inflation rates. But my ass hurt like hell, so I yelled dickhead as he ran off. I wasn’t sure if he was running from cops, but I sure hope the bot cops weren’t on his case. Thousands of new models brought out over the years with hundreds of protests against their defectiveness, yet they still target the wrong culprit, and we all know how that ends. If they caught you, you would be lucky to arrive at the station with a popped shoulder or crushed rib. Of course there are still human cops, but they are mainly trained to do repairs on the bot cops.
I got up and kept walking to my apartment. I needed to get it cleaned up for my boyfriend. It was our anniversary. I started speed walking and looked straight ahead. There was nowhere to look except right in front of you. The sky and ground were both equally filled with gray and black shit. Clouds overhead were gray even when it wasn’t raining, and when it did it was sometimes acidic. The smell of sulfur filled the air everyday, and some unidentifiable pungent odor that came from somewhere right below you never stopped either. You could almost taste the sourness of and feel the heaviness of the air. No one had seen stars in the cities in a few decades, and even people who travel to the outdoors report getting lucky every few nights. The streets of every city all around the country look like old New York city now. Well, the trash part at least. No one wanted a job as a trash collector now anymore than they did 200 years ago. The dump trucks were fully automated anyways but didn’t always calculate their distances correctly, not to mention kids would throw rocks at them and dismantle them for parts.
It seemed like there was a fight breaking out a few yards away, with the people stumbling over and ripping apart trash bags with needles, plastic containers, and vials. There were so many diseases popping up all over the world in recent years that first world countries started giving out treatments for them by prescription and letting patients inject themselves, with proper written instruction of course. There were the typical junkies, but there were also the munkies, a term created with wordplay after the boom in infectious diseases carried by primates a few decades ago. Now munkies were the people who went extreme on the DNA editors. Some of these editors were banned because of their side effects, while others were sold for specific enhancing or shifting purposes. They buy these banned editors on the streets from street scientists. The only people you can feel bad for in these situations were the children of these munkies. Most of them don’t have the attention or financial support to get help.
I pull out my vistact and scroll through the daily news, which is something people hardly do nowadays. They’re right not to. Recession, cold wars, active wars, nuclear plant waste being buried underground, space expeditions, walls built and torn down between cities, and anything else that people will ignore as soon as they get an ad about these happenings taking place in a film or the metaverse. But I guess I’ll be no different when I reach my apartment and watch a movie with my partner and ignore the happenings just outside my insulation 2×4 filled walls.
