10 a.m., and it is dark outside on a hot day in California City. But this is not the absolute darkness that comes at night. It’s a deep grey hue created by the relentless stream of fumes from the automobile population that has surpassed the optimum limit. These are the same fumes that have unabashedly eaten away at the Earth’s fresh air, reducing it to a rarity over the last few decades.
As a young woman in her late thirties gets out of her house, the dense smog in the atmosphere makes her cough, aggravating her asthma, as she hurriedly puts on her face mask. It’s Remembrance Day at work today, and this year they are commemorating the year 2020. It’s a big deal for her boss because this was the year that he founded his crypto firm, which is now worth millions of dollars. However, her sole recollection of that year is the handmade facemask she’s wearing to work today. This one was given to her by her mother, who also launched a facemask business during the Coronavirus outbreak in 2020. A business that was started as a side hustle, oddly enough, is still thriving thirty years later.
As she gets into the air-conditioning comfort of her self-driven car, she hopes that the temperature at least drops down below 90 today, considering it’s Christmas in a few days. She has a date later that evening and wishes to have some respite. They’re planning to go to the beach for some drinks. But of course, they will need to maintain a safe distance from the hot greyish-red water full of acid and toxins.
Her boyfriend works for a company that recycles the plastic collected from the ocean. So the couple does spend quite a lot of time on the beach. This year he supervised a project that collected 50 trillion tons of plastic debris from the ocean, so he kept swamped at work. A few days back, he told her that a new study conducted by his company has found that there is officially more plastic in the ocean than fish, but there’s been a lot of political pressure not to let this news come out.
This makes sense as the last time she had fish was on July 4th, when she went to see her sister for the weekend. Sea fish prices have risen to the point that she can no longer afford them. You can’t help it; given the manual labor involved in removing the plastic detritus from the fish, the fisheries have to raise the rates. Too bad that she is allergic to the artificially manufactured meat that everyone’s having as a cheap alternative for authentic sea fish nowadays.
In fact, any kind of regular food is pretty expensive these days. The majority of individuals just take a nutrient-dense tablet as a meal substitute. These are tablets that are manufactured in medical laboratories. They are made up of the ideal proportions of all macro and micronutrients based on your Body Mass Index. These tablets are believed to increase a person’s life expectancy by 45 percent. The program, initially launched by Pfizer in 2035, has completely revolutionized the food industry. Companies like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithe have replaced what used to be KFC or Mcdonald’s.
4th of July was also the last time that she could spend a holiday weekend with her family. With the development of the ‘work from home’ culture, corporate working hours have increased to 80 hours a week, which is almost 12 hours of work per day. This, however, shall include a combination of in-office and online work. But such an arrangement hardly leaves any scope for a proper work-life balance.
It’s not just a corporate thing, though. The government has made it mandatory for all capable individuals to devote the maximum amount of their time to the system as a measure of “public emergency.” With the population standing currently at 10.8 billion, the number of bodies to feed, nourish and clothe is increasing every day, and therefore resources are being stretched. As a result, both government and private offices are being continually overworked to generate maximum results to sustain the economy. The rumor is that the whole world is collapsing, and people need to do their best to save it. But nobody knows how this is happening or when this is happening.
As the electric vehicle drives itself to her workplace, she sits back and relaxes. She was almost about to fall asleep last night without remembering to schedule her car charging. When the first commercial electric vehicles reached the road in 2013, the batteries weren’t working because they were too heavy and required a lot of maintenance, making the entire process extremely cumbersome. Cars are now connected through real-time wireless energy, eliminating the need for batteries. Of course, finding an automobile that you can drive manually is tough. Cars drive themselves, and approximately 95 percent of all deadly traffic accidents have occurred in the last five years due to manually driven cars.
She checks her enrollment number for her chance to board the Mars Rover on a routine basis. Even after 5 years of waiting, her turn was due after about 500 million people. We all are aware that our planet is dying. But Elon Musk’s SpaceX finally found some optimism for humankind’s relocation and survival on Mars in 2039. The program, obviously, was available to those who were ready to pay up. After paying an initial charge of 800 million, you were required to pay a quarterly price of 250 million to access resources. The application procedure is extensive, and even if you have the funds on hand, a strong recommendation is mandatory. Lucky for her, she was among her boss’s favorite employees and was quick to receive one.
She pulls down her window for a moment, but the heat is unbearable. Today marks 97 days of extremely high temperature and heatwaves in Southern California compared to the 67 days almost 30 years back in 2019.
The temperature rise has inevitably skyrocketed energy expenditure owing to air-conditioning, but it has also significantly increased health costs. The body is stressed by the heat, which increases the risk of heart disease and stroke, especially in the elderly. Premature births and infant death have also been related to high temperatures. There has been a spike in infant immortality rates as most pregnant immigrant women cannot afford air-conditioned transport while going to work or running errands. According to a study, temperatures above 80 degrees slow down mental processes, making it more difficult to focus and make rational judgments.
The higher the temperature, the worse will be the air quality. So more days with the temperature above 90 means higher chances of asthma, lung diseases and ultimately more deaths.
She fixes her seat as the car crosses by one of the Hyperloop stations. The Hyperloop, launched by Elon Musk, is a sealed tube or series of tubes with low air pressure through which passengers may travel on little or no resistance from air or friction. The Hyperloop was started as an energy-efficient alternative to the railway system that lets people travel from one city to another at aircraft speed, just in a matter of minutes.
She activates her Neuralink system with a tap on her shoulder and begins scrolling through her feed, which shows up almost instantly on the air screen in front of her. She stops at a photo of her colleague, which is from a One Direction concert. Her mother was practically obsessed with the band as a teenager. How delighted would she have been if she had been living to see them reunite after the bad breakup that they had in 2015!
But that isn’t the only concert that has gained popularity recently. According to reports, a New York-based entertainment firm has devised a series of concerts and events called “Bring Me Back.” The idea behind the Bring Me Back concept is to bring legendary pop stars and musicians back from the grave to play live shows or participate in events.
But how are they going to do this? They’ve apparently been using some miraculous new technology to cryogenically freeze the bodies of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Britney Spears, and even Van Gogh, only to bring them back to life for live performances. The tickets are going to cost you a hefty sum, though. Yes, in 2050, they do bring people back from the dead. Talk about technology.
This weekend, she’ll be holding their weekly “work-from-home” group session at her home, and several of her coworkers will be there. She wants to make a Peruvian specialty, but she has to learn the recipe first. She searches her Neuralink gadget for the dish and clicks on ‘install.’ The recipe is simply neuro-transmitted to the biometric chip implanted in her body.
In fact, she used this same biometric chip to wake up for work today morning, as instead of an alarm clock, this chip directly sends signals to her brain. Not only that but the chip aids in the learning and memory of her brain, just like the Peruvian recipe she learned in a few minutes. The chip is connected to the latest 12G network, so the information is redirected to her system in a matter of milliseconds – almost before she can finish having thought about it.
Her brain activity is also backed up to the cloud in real-time via this biometric chip. Even if the chance of acquiring a severe sickness nowadays is relatively low, it’s always wise to have a backup in case something goes wrong. Every four seconds, this chip does a thorough body evaluation of her health, and if it detects any problems, it immediately informs her doctor.
Ah! To create this meal most authentically, she has to utilize a specific Peruvian salt. No worries. She goes to Amazon Prime Air and orders a drone to deliver the items she needs from a little Peruvian shop. Packages weighing less than five pounds from across the world are delivered to your home in a matter of hours with Amazon Prime Air. A notification pops up on the air-screen that her order will be delivered to her home by 7:30 pm that day.
She reaches work and the car perfectly self-parks itself at her designated parking spot. She gets down, and once again, the heat is unbearable. The smog is heavy, and it kind of displaces her Google Lens. These lenses are linked to the biometric chip installed inside her, which records what she sees. This enables her to obtain the information she requires, and because the lenses update in real-time, she rarely has any queries that remain unanswered. In fact, when her brain has a question, the solution almost immediately shows up on the lens in front of her. The response is so quick and accurate that she doesn’t even notice she has a concern regarding something.
“Work is going to be crazy today!” her Google Assistant predicts to her. How, you ask? The year 2050 is full of surprises, and artificial intelligence‘s capacity to foresee the future will undoubtedly be one of them.
Last Updated on August 28, 2023 by ayeshayusuf
