"Future Shock"

PART I - “JOLTIN’ JOE HAS LEFT AND GONE AWAY…”

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When Zipper awoke the next morning, in the comfort of her own bed, the reality of the previous night still confronted her.

She was getting older.

Zipper slipped out of bed, yawned, stretched. When she pulled back the curtains over the bedroom window, there it was: the district of Bronx-12. Early morning sunlight streamed brilliantly across the sea of buildings, all constructed in the wonderful material of tomorrow known as Aether-Polymer. Extremely resilient, flexible, smooth, strong, all-around sooper-dooper fantastical-dastical, the modern world/solar system/galaxy was built upon the foundations of A-Polymer. It came in every color imaginable and then some, so Bronx-12, as did every other district in the metropolis of Eden, resembled a bright kaleidoscope, rainbows shaped into cities. Eden ran wide, from Atlantic to Appalachians, one big urban conglomeration, expertly crafted, like an artisan moving a colorful brush across the Eastern Seaboard.

But Zipper didn’t see that. What she saw at the moment was her own dim reflection, all that badassery in the Thunderhead bathroom mirror gone by the wayside, for now she could see the dark bags like sad raccoon eyes, the crow’s feet, the lone gray strand of hair mixed in with the auburn…’course, she could fix all that with modern cosmetics, but the fact that these were problems now, that was the crux of the issue.

For crying out loud, she even had back pain from time to time!

Zipper stewed at it from her kitchen table, a cook-bot feeding her. She stewed at it from her bed, sprawled across the covers, a cleaner-bot tidying up. She stewed at it from a stylized version of Neon-Neo Tokyo, at Pickett’s Charge up Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, at the earliest lunar settlements, at the first voyage through the Warp Gate to Alpha Centauri, at any event or moment in time offered by the Five-Sense-Experience (FSE), the top-selling device of the 4953rd generation of consoles. All you had to do was place the four white bakelite sensors on your temples, forehead, back-of-head so they could connect with your Brain Implant v6.1 (Akashic Operating System v10.2.3 required), and off you go, on your virtual voyage, no need for the real world, especially not when you’re feeling mopey…

A month passed like that, Zipper in a bad mood, trying to get away from reality. Ya get universal income and a free apartment in the wonderful world of tomorrow, and Zipper, like anyone else, spent it on FSEs, alcohol chemically-engineered to not induce addiction or other diseases, food modified with self-burning calories. Robots did the jobs, A-Polymer was in infinite supply, drones could come right to your balcony with your bots picking up the deliveries, life was good. Zipper could’ve spent her entire life like that in her private womb, as most people did, but Magenta Sue kept brain-flashing her, saying you just gotta come by and meet this dude named Charles.

After an anti-atrophy bot massaged her legs and muscles, Zipper took the elevator down from the 303rd floor to the 200th, where she caught the maglev vactrain over from Bronx-12 to Manhattan-4 where Sue lived. The vactrain zoomed without a sound through the districts, A-Polymer buildings rising to the heavens, pedestrians on glass walkways, vines growing up the sides, a mix of Neo-Classical with Art Deco and a dash of Baroque, drones in flying V’s across a sky filled with clouds like cotton candy, the distant starscrapers in Manhattan-1 rising into the lower stratosphere.

But hold on - w-wait, Zipper, thousand-story buildings? Gee, this A-Polymer sounds fantastical, wouldn’t this be a good time for you to explain how it works?

Zipper couldn’t. Most people couldn’t. Could a Liverpool prole have explained how the steam engine worked? Could a Wall Street banker have explained how the internet worked? Could an Alpha Centauri settler have explained how the warp gates worked? Maybe some, sure, but the average person, little chance. They lived their lives, the technology steadily marching on, gradually changing, like frogs boiling in a pot of water, until you go “huh” ‘cuz it’s effing hot outta nowhere and the pot boils over and the foundation of society itself changes.

The best Zipper could tell you was that Aether-Polymer was some combination of Plutonian Carbon-6, micro-synthetic polyethylene, superheated bauxite, and harvested dark matter. ‘Course, she could’ve taken a free college class on it if she was curious, but she wasn’t, or didn’t live in circumstances to produce curiosity. She had no need for it.

Everybody got free housing, and everybody’s housing was good, but some were better than others. Sue lived on the 536th floor, higher than Zipper’s 303rd, a fact that gave Sue an endless amount of pleasure. When Zipper brain-flashed her arrival, Sue herself opened the door.

“Hey! Hope those extra two hundred floors didn’t give you any trouble, heyooo!”

Zipper sighed, but she smiled all the same. “Hey, Sue.”

Magenta Sue adjusted her glasses and let Zipper inside. Sue was one of them otaku-thingies, with her periwinkle walls covered in posters depicting Japanese cartoon swordsmen and schoolgirls. Her faux wooden kitchen table was littered with leftovers from Old Slappy’s Burger Joint, bottles of Bolshevodka, smokeless/disease-free Chinese cigarettes. Zipper took a bottle and stuck a cigarette in the corner of her mouth.

“Where’s Nat?” Zipper asked. “And where’s this Charles?”

Sue led her into the living room, where both could be found. Nat was playing patty-cake with Charles, who happened to be a 20% discounted monkey-butler from Obliviator Industries.

“Uh-huh,” said Zipper.

“He’s house-trained,” explained Sue. A glob of brown goop then struck one of her posters.

“Hey!” she yelled, glaring. “Who threw that?”

Nat and Charles pointed at each other.

Sue sighed and returned with Zipper to the kitchen. Nat put Charles in Sue’s Dunce Corner and joined her friends.

“What’s eating ya, chief?” Sue asked, seeing the look on Zipper’s face. Sunlight beamed through the windows, but Zipper looked as dour and sour as a tower without power.

Zipper put our her cigarette and tugged at her flannel. “I’m thinking of dissolving the band, dig?”

Sue’s eyes widened. “Wha? Waddya mean, dissolve?”

“Call it quits. It ain’t working.”

“We haven’t even put out a single yet, let alone our cult classic EP!”

“And we ain’t ever. Only alternative intelligences make music and stuff like that nowadays. We don’t even like playing instruments, remember?” Zipper started pacing. “I mean, you remember why we founded this band, right?”

“To explore our inner psyches and create and what-not,” Sue said.

“No! It was to hit on dudes and pick up chicks.”

Nat nodded.

“And just, like, I don’t know,” admitted Zipper. “I want something more than that now, see? I feel like I’m only gonna be on God’s A-Polymer Earth for so long. I don’t wanna just sit around in my room flicking the bean monkey-style all my life, yanno? No offense.”

Charles waved her concerns away.

“I wanna do something,” Zipper concluded.

“Like what?” Sue questioned.

Zipper threw her arms up. “I don’t know. I only had a month to think about it. I could do, uh…anything, really, I ‘spose. Read a book, cover to cover. Write a book.”

“Only alternative intelligences write books now.”

“Paint.”

“Ditto.”

“Travel.”

“Why, you can just get a Five-Sense-Experience for that.”

Zipper was getting frustrated and drunk, never a good combination. “Live, for God’s sake. I can go live. Your older sister is engaged! Maybe I’ll go get engaged.”

“But we were never good at hitting on dudes or picking up chicks.”

“Right, right…” Zipper pinched the bridge of her nose.

Sue, sensing an opportunity, put her foot down. “In any case, we’re not dissolving the band.”

“Yes we are.”

“We can’t we can’t we can’t!” Sue pleaded, falling to her knees, holding onto Zipper’s flannel jacket. “When people ask me what I do for fun, I say I’m in a band. People like something like that. They don’t wanna hear that I spend my life watching Japanese cartoons featuring questionably-aged schoolgirls groping each other or discussing which end to eat a chocolate cornet from!”

“Well, uh…you don’t gotta put it like that, maybe…”

“I have nothing without this band!”

Zipper pulled Sue to her feet. “Then go find something. Come with me! We can be photographers or journalists or something.”

Sue pouted. “But…I’m lazy.”

“Ugh…Nat, what do you think?”

Nat, grooming Charles, thought about it and offered a shrug. 

Zipper frowned. “I’m going for a walk.”

Sue blocked the door. “We only hang out in-person like once a month, and you’re already leaving?”

“Just need some fresh air.”

“I have a robot for that-”

Zipper slid Sue out of the way.

Sue raised a fist as Zipper departed. “Fine, be like that! Just leave! You’ll come crawling back to me, I just know it! It’s not like I’m afraid that if the band gets dissolved, we’ll lose all formal ties and you’ll have no reason to hang out with me anymore, no-sir-ee. I don’t need you, not at all!”

When Zipper closed the door, she got a brain-flash from Magenta Sue asking when she would be back.

Zipper sighed - something rapidly becoming her most common action as of late - as she took the elevator down all the way to the 1st floor. Down on street level, down to basics, a good atmosphere for thinking.

‘Course, she scrolled through the Hypernet connecting the Brain Implants of humanity on the way down. The posts she saw from her former high school classmates didn’t help her case.

Jim-Bob Rook graduated from Valles Marineris State University.

It’s not like a college education is important or anything. I didn’t go ‘cuz there’s nothing I need to learn and there's no need to get a job anymore.

Mary-Ann Sodenholzer married Ben Yates.

Married, wha? We’re the same age!

Lou Wind joined Pioneer Defense Contractor, Inc.

Sell-out. Everybody knows we’re just fighting a big war on nothing.

Grace Pillow - no recent activity.

That one got her. No snarky comments this time. Instead, when she exited the elevator and stepped out of the lobby onto the street, memories bubbled up inside. Though the skyscrapers rose up like redwoods, careful architecture and Fourth Space Age mirrors allowed sunlight to filter down, even to the bottom of the urban jungle, like Japanese komorebi. Memories worked the same way, you see, shadow occasionally broken up by splotches of light…