2069...immersed in the metaverse...

Harriet's story continues... the next two chapters of 2069...

3

The band were three songs into their set. The front man was strutting the stage, tight theatrical trousers and white vest, lean muscular arms holding the microphone stand aloft. His head tilted back, short hair slicked and long moustache stretched as he opened his mouth wide.

‘I've paid my dues…’ The drum beat doubled. He walked around the stage, like a peacock. Harriet was in the front, crushed against the barrier, arms outstretched.

‘We are the champions, my friends…’

She felt sure his eyes caught hers. He did another circuit of the stage. He’s coming over. He’s reaching down to her. The security guards unwedge her and push her up over the barrier. She’s on the stage, under the bright lights. She blinks out over the crowd of a hundred thousand. She’s the special one. The one that’s been chosen. Camera flashes dot all over the dark expanse.

He takes her hand and starts singing for her alone, in front of all these people. His eyes are like dark pools, drawing her in. They sway together. His thigh finds a place between her legs as they move to and fro to the music, the sinewy muscles grinding, pushing her clitoris to left and right. His mouth is by her ear.

He whispers. ‘Let me rescue that little alpinist, suspended on a rope, trapped halfway up your mons pubis.’ His tongue flicks into her ear.

‘Oh, that’s gross!’ She rips off her spex and ripplepad. ‘Jesus!’ I’ve either got to change Biome fuel, or ask Gina for a faecal transplant, she thought.

The first few notes of the Marsellaise sound from the speaker. She did a double flick of her left eyelid to let him in. Francois appeared on the wall screen as she was pulling on some clothes.

‘Been h’vanking again?’ Francois still had difficulty with the English “w”. But she loved the fact he upheld the French resistance, that last resistance to the onslaught of English around the world.

‘Not very successfully,’ answered Harriet.

‘Well, I’m not sure I want to spend the evening with a stuck cum.’ Francois smirked. ‘What are you having for dinner?’

‘I’ll just take a look.’ Francois' image slid off screen right, and appeared screen left when she entered the kitchen. There were some cultured steak packs in the cooler. She popped one in the microwave.

Francois was already eating from his plate when she sat down with hers. This was their regular Sunday evening dinner date.

‘I’ve found a great new comedy on my feed. It’s set in the 20’s.’

‘You love the 20’s don’t you, Francois.’

‘Well it’s not called the “Age of Clowns” for nothing. They really knew how to do comedy then.’

The screen opened with a crowded scene. Two rival groups of men and women, quite smartly dressed, shouting at one another, from oppositely placed tiered green benches. One man stood in front of his gang, tousle haired, his jowls were wobbling as he sprayed sputum with every phrase he said. The leader of the other gang was saying:

‘Look, the foreign secretary on one side can’t open her mouth, and the home secretary on the other can’t keep her mouth shut!’

The first gang leader wobbled some more. ‘Er… wa… wa…’ He sprayed out. The gang opposite were all pointing their arms at him and laughing.

The camera panned to the first leader, his pants had dropped down to his ankles, a roll of flesh conveniently covering his nether regions.

‘Look his trousers have fallen down!’ The opposite gang were laughing. Then their look turned to horror, and they turned away, covering their eyes.

The Home secretary’s head was bobbing in front of his groin.

‘We will get inflation under control!’

An irregular white blob grew from a dot and then went splat on the lens. In the centre, in pink wobbly letters, the title evolved. “BJs”.

‘Francois! We’re eating! I should have guessed you would have come up with something like that.’

‘Not to your taste?’ He smirked again. ‘It really was the best decade. It all got so serious after that.’ The 20’s was the final decade for democracy. With each successive election, people voted for entertainment rather than competence, and the economic rollercoaster got truly scary. By the end, the appeal of democracy had faded and governmental structures started to break down. It was an easy transition for the management of nations to fall to the corporations, a Cryptocracy. They, after all, had held on to their money and had profited enormously, so why shouldn’t they be trusted with the running of whole country’s? They were led by Cryptuncs. Tuncs for short. Low profile figures of extreme wealth and power, whose collective motto was “’Twas ever thus.”

‘There’s a new doc on the ’32 mission. Fancy that?’

‘Okay, go on.’

The mission to Mars of 2032 was a game changer. Harriet watched as, on the screen, the excited smiling faces of five astronauts, three Chinese, one Russian and one American, waved from the gantry before entering the capsule. Their every movement for the whole journey was to be streamed live to virtually every phone on planet earth. Some had said it’s too soon. The technology isn’t proven yet. But the political expediency of man setting foot on another planet overrode any concerns. The first few million miles were fine. The astronauts settled in, played games, and did acrobatics in zero gravity to entertain their followers on earth. The lengthening response time on their town hall sessions, where members of the public could ask questions, was a measure of the distance they had travelled from home. The favourite trick was to turn the camera back to earth, a diminishing crescent, then flip it forward to Mars, a growing disc. Interest faded for a while on the home planet. Economic stress on a global scale, combined with the evolving climate crisis, were more pressing concerns. Then, as the space vehicle was approaching its destination, people started tuning in again.

Something wasn’t right. Those healthy, happy astronauts who just a few months before had taken their places in the capsule now looked gaunt and worried. Their hair was thinning, their eyes hollowed out. The food they had enjoyed as a zero gravity backyard ball game, was now repellant. They couldn’t face it at all. One by one, just like chicks under a camera in an abandoned nest box, they died in front of a helpless audience of billions. So far from home, so far from any possible rescue, they touched the hearts of everyone.

‘It's hard to believe they could have been so naive,’ Harriet said between mouthfuls.

‘Well of course all the preparation was done on the space station in low earth orbit. The only time that people had been outside earth’s protective magnetic field was a few quick dashes to the moon in the last century,’ Francois said.

‘Well, there had been plenty of unmanned probes going all over the solar system which must have monitored the levels of solar and cosmic radiation. To think that they thought they could counter that extreme radiation level just by having their water tanks in the shell of the capsule. It beggars belief that they could have thought that armouring the craft with just their filtered piss would have saved them.’

The journey had never been attempted again by living creatures. A base of sorts had been set up on Mars using robots and AI. But it didn’t feel satisfactory. The several minutes of time delay made the staff at mission control on earth feel separated. They had to let the machines get on with it themselves.

‘Francois, thank you for the evening's entertainment. It’s been so light hearted,’ Harriet said.

‘Always happy to oblige. Have a good week!’ Francois’ image faded.

4

The goobie’s door opened and Harriet slipped inside. The journey allowed her time to review her messages. First visit would be to Jemima Burns at the Lych Gate. Then a session at the local Hundreds. Oh, and there’s a message from Claudia. It’s an invite to her Merse tonight. Sounds intriguing.

The Hundreds take up several sessions a week for Harriet. Definitely the most challenging part of her job, as she tried to meet the health needs of the Hunnies, those whose families have spent one hundred years trying to break the financial and social constraints that had left them trapped at the bottom of society. With them were the new arrivals, the Dreds. The biomechanics craze of the early 40’s had a lot to answer for. Crippled firstly by the loans taken to meet the cost of their implants, and then crippled a second time by the failure of said implants, they were doomed to a descent from which few found a way back. All the promise of enhanced income to follow enhanced functions was but a pipe dream. Nobody wanted to employ them after infection had taken hold and the inevitable removal of their prosthetics left them scarred and deformed. Hunnies and Dreds lived together in a strained co-existence, neither group quite understanding the other, not sharing a common history, but united by the sheerness of the slope down which they had slipped. Harriet was motivated to help. Her mother Geraldine was a Dred.

Harriet’s goobie rounded the bend and turned into the drive past the sign that read “Lych Gate Residential: Time to take a pause”. Roni came to the door to let her in.

‘I wonder if you could have a talk with Jemima. She seems to be in two minds over the URP.’

The URP, the ultimate retirement package, came with some incentives for the doctors’ practice, and the care home. Or rather, put it another way. Their income might be preserved if they were to achieve the 2% target by the end of the financial year. Jemima was in pretty good health, but she had been at the Lych Gate for nearly three years now.

‘Hello Jemima! Lovely to see you!’

Jemima looked up and took a moment to focus.

‘Hello, is that doctor…?’ She couldn’t instantly recall.

‘It’s Dr Harriet. You know, the one you like,’ Roni chipped in.

‘Oh yes. Come and sit next to me and tell me what’s been going on.’ Jemima tapped her gnarled fingers on the smooth plastic of the chair next to hers.

‘Roni tells me you watched the film again together. You know the one that comes out every month?’

‘Oh yes, that.’

‘He said you might be interested in it this time.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t necessarily go as far as that. But it did look like a good party.’

Harriet flicked her Facto10 across her lap and it lit up when fully unfurled. Nobody quite knew why it was called a Facto10, when the most anyone had deduced were seven functions that it could perform. The remaining three remained a mystery. She brought up Jemima’s record, and tapped on the URP icon. A form appeared, auto filled with Jemima’s details.

‘We just need to go through a few questions, Jemima. Nothing to worry about. If we do it now it will be ready when you need it. No hurry.’

Harriet looked at the first check box. Autonomy. When the URP had come in a few years before there had been some resistance from the medical profession, so the department of Health and Age Management had decided to structure it along the four pillars of medical ethics so there could be no argument as to its moral and ethical legitimacy. The first pillar was autonomy: respecting an individual’s right to make decisions unimpeded regarding their future health management.

‘Jemima, firstly I have to ask you whether you understand what the ultimate retirement package is?’

‘Well I know my friend Miriam went next door for it, and didn’t come back, so I suppose it is a way of leaving here.’

‘Yes, that is correct.’

‘She said they give you some jelly.’

‘It’s more like a thick milkshake really.’

‘Oh, I don’t really like milky things too much. Could I have mine without milk?’

‘Yes, I am sure that could be arranged, if you tell them at the time.’ Harriet paused. ‘I need to know if anyone has tried to persuade you to agree to the ultimate retirement package? That might be the staff here or any friends or relatives?’

‘Well that man on the film was very persuasive. I like him. He does the afternoon quiz.’

Harriet thought for a moment. Jemima has shown she has some understanding of the process and so has capacity to make the decision, and hasn’t cited any real people who could have exerted pressure on her to undergo the URP. She probably gets over the hurdle required to justify that she has made the decision autonomously. Harriet tapped the autonomy box. A tick appeared. And at the same time three other ticks appeared in the boxes for the three other ethical pillars. Beneficence: how could it not be doing good to support someone in their decision to end their life? Non-maleficence: if you’re doing good, how could you be doing harm? And Justice and Equality: with a limited resource, isn’t it an ethical imperative to direct it towards the young who have more potential than the elderly? Some doctors had felt uncomfortable with the non-maleficence, the ‘to do no harm’ statement. Its argument was circular, and you may be doing harm to the individual. It wouldn’t have sat well with Hippocrates would it? When the system had first come in Harriet had tried to uncheck the non-maleficence box on one occasion. The screen went red and ceased to function for 90 minutes throwing the timings of her day into chaos.

‘Well Jemima, the form is now sitting there for whenever you might need it. It’s always best to keep things tidy, I find.’

‘Oh yes doctor. I always, throughout my life, kept things tidy.’

Roni led Harriet through the double swing doors to the annexe. The light intensified with their entry, and they made their way around a shrouded figure lying still on a trolley to a counter in the corner. It had a sign above it in squigly writing that read “Cocktail Bar”.

‘If you could just supervise me doing the mixing, doctor.’

This was an obligatory process, monitored by HAM, to make sure the proportions of the deadly cocktail were adhered to. Harriet was distracted, thinking of the session she would have at the Hundred after this. Roni was thinking of the staffing problems in the home. He had wind of a new carer. He must contact him after.

Powder A slowly dissolved into liquid B. Roni gave it another shake and, before placing it in the fridge, wrote on the label “Jemima Burns”.

Two more chapters on the way... in the next blog post.