25 Hour Watch

I wonder what history will call this part of our age, this crumbling disaster movie played over and over before us? Will there be a history as we know it? Or will I live on as nothing more than a background character in the epics that wandering bards will tell of the fall of mankind? They’ll gather beneath the towering structures we built, for food and warmth, and talk about how we destroyed ourselves.

My iPod finally died last night. The clicky-wheel doesn’t recognize my fingers anymore. The screen stopped working months ago, but I could navigate well enough without it by memory, until now. Now it’s just a worthless piece of metal and plastic. I’ll crack it open tomorrow to salvage what I can to use for decoration. These prefab houses are so drab otherwise.

This is the revenge of the 20th century, these stinking houses. I suppose they were dreamed up by some high-flying architect in some remote office building in what used to be New York a decade ago, as temporary housing for disaster victims in the third world. Some humanitarian venture. I’m sure he felt good about it, doing his part for the poor brown masses around the globe. Maybe he even won an award or something for them. We all applauded that effort. Go help those huddled idiots, yes, mm-hmm.

I lived in the wealthiest nation in the world. I ruled it, no less. I was the man, the cock of the fucking walk, mister big-shot banker with my four cars in the garage and a driver for every one of them. And now I’m pulling apart my iPod for shiny bits to hang on the wall, just like my ten thousand neighbors in this refugee camp on the outskirts of the burned-out shell of Topeka, Kansas. Those damn pricks in Zimbabwe are laughing their asses off at us white folk.

At least we’re not going to starve. Everything is provided. The computers and the food-printers can render any delicacy you want, any time. The power is always on, our homes shaded by those vast power cells facing the stars, listening to beams of power coursing down off the satellites. Everything is provided, and we have nothing. I went to school for a decade to learn how to shovel money from nation to nation, becoming the best damn capitalist you’ve ever seen. And now nobody needs money, nobody needs me.

They say that post-scarcity was supposed to free up our leisure time. Well, it did that alright. I’ve got so much free time these days I’m about to kill myself. I tried to burn my house down the other day, but as soon as it caught a little robot came flying down the street and put it out. Then it pulled me out of the place, gathered everything up, and ate the house. I stood there for a minute until another, slightly larger robot came rolling over and spit out an identical copy of the damn place I’d just been living.

We’re the New Poor, they call us. No talents that anyone wants. We refuse to play by their rules. The travelers, those New People. They dick around building towers to nowhere and playing music for each other. They stopped recording it, too. “It’s not worth anything. Why bother?” They stopped having kids. All they do is fuck each other, over and over, giant orgies of mechanical pleasure. “We want to enjoy ourselves. Why strain? We have everything. This is, truly, paradise.” They’re immortal. Goddamn them. They won’t even let us die anymore.

I tried to plant something yesterday. Asked a food machine for some raw fruit, and it spit out entire watermelons. I planted them behind the house, but woke up to find a little cleaning machine carefully picking them out of the soil. “Litter is to be disposed of in the internal waste bins, sir,” it politely reprimanded me. “Further food supplies can be gathered from the dispensary at the Central Hub.”

We scrimped and we saved and we tried to make the world a better place to be, and somehow I have ended up in hell.