bald exposition (i really don't know what i'm doing here)

singularity

I hate that shithead. he always loses his train of thought. like what the hell is his point? we live in the net. oooh. how fucking profound.

vox deorum ex machina

in the late 24th century, the earth has become too crowded. by now, we've found about a dozen different ELWs (that's earth-like worlds) within about 14 light years. unfortunately, even at this late date, the fastest we can accomplish is about 0.45c, or 45% of the speed of light. so it still takes over 8 years to get to Alpha Centauri A.

like william gibson and neal stephenson and chuck palahniuk prophesied, the world is owned by corporations. the nation-state is kaput, extinguished. well, for the most part. there are a few places that hang on. like the republica unida nueva de alta y baja california—the new united republic of upper and lower california run by laser-toting neo-marxists. or vatican city, now run by a pope who believes in world domination and has the mind-rays to enforce his will. but everything else has been divvied up between microsoft, starbucks, gap inc., mcdonalds, walmart. you'd think the weapons companies would've dominated the scene. lockheed martin. bechtel. but who needs missiles when you own minds?

money is no longer backed by anything physical. cash? what the hell is that? money exists only on the net, in various shapes or forms. call them memes. pieces of code that become experiences that people are paying mucho dinero for. in this kind of society, e-bay has become sort of the de facto united nations.

and when you've got the net, who needs mind altering drugs? the coca fields of columbia and the opium-strewn steppe of afghanistan now house a huge bank of titanium, lead, and steel coffins.

not for dead people, though. dead people are cremated, or buried at sea, or shot into space. there's no room for them. the world is for the living.

the billions upon billions of people, the teeming masses, all reside buried about 600 feet underground in nukeproof coffins, built to last the eventual vaporization of the earth's atmosphere by a swelling red giant sun. hooked into lifesupport and various sensory equipment and a terabps connection to the net.

yeah, there are holdouts. yeah, there are people too poor to afford all this shit. there are the space colonists, too. (i'll talk about that later.) but maybe 60% of all humanity lives underground.

oh, you can come out. but why the hell would you want to? the remaining 40% of humanity running around on the earth's crust still comes to maybe 18 billion people. a frotterist's utopia. everywhere you go, you are touching someone's ass, or someone is touching yours. the ruts in some places are beginning to approach the size of the grand canyon, that's how many people walk on some paths. driving a car became a capital offense about a century ago.

but the space colonists: thanks to the beauty of immersive environments, jet propulsion laboratories, inc. figured that people wouldn't mind being stuck on a starship for anywhere between a decade to maybe even sixty years. well, at 0.45c, sixty earth years would be a lot less than that, but my relativity is a little rusty, so i'm not going to bother calculating the time-dilation. so we've got colonists on alpha centauri A-4, tau ceti 2, epsilon eridani 3. turning outer space into the wonderful asphalt and astro-turf paradise we've got here on earth. (oh and mars.)

the other wonderful thing is the einstein-podolsky-rosen QLAN. ursula le guin's ansible realized and patented by cisco. so you can send bits to all those far-flung places almost instantaneously.

so here we are, in our wondrous glory.