37 Short Stories by Fed Starving - HTML preview

PLEASE NOTE: This is an HTML preview only and some elements such as links or page numbers may be incorrect.
Download the book in PDF, ePub, Kindle for a complete version.

 

Titansphere, the Cybernaut Ark

 

 

2401, the young city of “Titansphere” was built within a half-subterranean globe that was visible only on the surface as a dome.  Everyone that lived inside the city of Titansphere was a citizen of the United Federation of Freedom. Entrance into the city was permitted only to individuals that fit the standard.  Titansphere was the world's first bubble city and over three quarters of the people that lived in Titansphere were employed in some sort of cybernautics position.

Cybernautics is the use of virtual reality in a task to reach a physical goal such as operating machinery.

Cybernautics was long used in many industries at that time, specifically industries that used remote controlled machinery.  The days of manually controlling hazardous industrial machinery were long gone.

In the new era of bubble cities upon Earth's surface following the world war of the “Terminator” era, (which was essentially a series of dozens of simultaneous civil wars across the entire planet), humanity was reorganizing itself and dividing all of the populations around the whole of the Earth.  Much of the dividing was determined with the help of genetics, identifying specific genes that were deemed hazardous to the human race.  (self-destructiveness, insanities, villainy, diseases, treason)  Many personality traits could be connected to genetics and these identifiable traits were more often discarded than physical diseases that were also discarded but much more often tolerated within individual cases.

This bubble city phase was carefully planned and fully controlled.  As advanced and impressive that humanity was at that time, there were some that were equally bad and in some cases even worse on the opposing end.  Villainous humans of that era were simply killed and their damages immediately undone with the utmost swift action.  During the world civil war era the main protagonist wasn't a specific person but the technology itself, being the invention of many protagonists that fit squarely into many of the unwanted genetics categories in the bubble city era following.

Those technologies that encouraged increasing synchronization and deeper connectivity across all electronics caused a lot of corruption and nearly destroyed the concept of self and individual.  Society became an ocean of bows and arrows as the developers of the technologies continued their trend of hyperinvasive connectivity in the pursuit of reducing the powers of the consumers that depended on their products to function within the work world of that time.  This system has since shown proven doomed to implode and cannot be sustained, even when all consumers are locked into place, they simply start dying earlier and earlier.

With self-replicating artificial intelligence introduced into the already unsustainable overconnected internet, this trend of degrading, reducing and dehumanizing the world was pressed into overdrive.  When the war ended and few could stand tall when all was said and done, great measures were set in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening a second time.

Part of the bubble city plan, beyond genetically dividing the human population, was to divide the human population on a technological level.  Two new internets were built ground up from scratch intentionally in such a manner that they cannot connect to each other because it was physically impossible.  The old internet systems were no longer in use and mostly destroyed in the world civil war.  Lesson learned.  With two systems that are physically impossible to connect together the danger of spying outside of one network and into the other was reduced to nothing.

Getting into a bubble city for even the simplest of employment positions was more difficult than becoming an astronaut or a CEO.  The bubble cities would take more than a quarter century apiece to reach their capacity of 100,000 individuals.  More than 70% of this capacity was reached through birthing children and raising them within strict guidelines, developing them mentally and intellectually in the same prerequisites that their parents fit into.  The cities stayed very empty for a long time.

This division plan worked well with banishing the rogue hackers and maverick saboteurs that caused so much destruction and loss during the century before in the world civil war.  To reiterate this point, scientific research has proven that individuals with the propensity to hack and sabotage and spy have a set of specific genes that they can pass to their children and this was completely natural, research has also proven that once these genetic markers are removed completely in one generation of a closed population, the next generation is completely devoid of these particular types.  Thus, in the bubble city era, the hackers were on the outside and could never appear on the inside.

Slowly, the bubble cities restored peace and freedom to the humans good enough to get in.  Within their own separated society there wasn't much need for paranoid cut-throat overdefensiveness and overly maniacal monitoring.  Humans weren't perfect on the inside of the bubble cities but they were so much better than the humans on the outside.

Thus was the need for defending Titansphere as a whole to a much higher and severe level than seen before.  As these bubble cities were built and populated the quality of humanity on the outside of them would equally slip in the opposite direction.  Left to their own devices and technologies, banished and cut off, continually losing genetic value as the best of them were yanked and placed into bubble cities, they became nastier and scarier and more depraved and cruel.  In the post-bubble-city era hackers, spies and saboteurs of the outside human population reached a record high of maleficence never reached before.  There were no secret government systems to hack, no intelligence agencies to bleed knowledge from, there was nothing for them to devour inside their own system.  It was like having millions of dollars and the only store there is sells soda pops and potato chips and that’s it.  Security that protected the bubble cities were well aware of this and were swiftly proactive with relieving the outside population of these supervile villains.

Titansphere was highly secured.  Workers were contractually forced to live inside the bubble city network and were never allowed to mix with the outside human population.  This was for their own safety and for the safety and secrecy of the division.  The worth and value of what they have built is so priceless that all violators of the division law are immediately killed.  That is the prime directive.  Top to bottom, inside out.

This strict directive didn't limit the privacy and freedom of the bubble city populations.  Remember, this all came about primarily the result of the removal of freedom, privacy and the individual.  There is never a limit on how many people can be yanked from the outside human population and trained for living on the inside of the bubble cities.  Great care is taken to make sure there is always plenty of space.  That is why a new bubble city is built every ten years.  There is never a “no vacancy” reason to deny entry.  The most constant complaint is that there aren't enough people to populate the cities.  The standard is set and cannot be reduced.  Any reduction within the standard is proven to be unsustainable and results ultimately in the destruction of the bubble cities and the corruption of their systems and use of technologies.  This simply cannot be allowed to happen at any price, including the lives of the population, no matter how valuable each individual is perceived to be.  This standard provides greater freedom and privacy and personal security than any system that came before.

Life continues within the bubble cities to a quality and temperament similar to and greater than the old United States within the second half of the twentieth century, which has become the model for living all across the world in the twenty fifth century.  The old United States is the direct predecessor to the United Federation of Freedom and the model that many post-24th-century countries have built their own prime directives upon.

The United Federation of Freedom has set the standard in cooperation with the surviving ruling parties of the world civil war.  Much of the post-war world is devoid of a distinct ruling presence and what few post-war powers that remained were very similar and were able to easily cooperate with one another.  This could be that because the traits required to survive a total worldwide meltdown of that particular nature are so specific and specialized that it was inevitable that all surviving powers would be similar in function and procedure and therefore be compatible enough to create something like the Titansphere Prime Directive Treaty.