Chapter One

*Shay*

The year is 4102. The planet is earth. Everything has become digital at this point. Half of the planet has been vacated because it is impossible to live there. Humans destroyed the world with pollution, war, and just general life. At this point we're working on fixing it. Everything we do, everything we have, helps the environment. We live in spheres where there is clean air and work at places dedicated for the best future possible. Of course, there are those who still cling to the past, to when flesh and bone was what most people had on rather than the holograms that really do populate our beloved green and blue planet.

I'm one of them.

I'm still a student, really, but students don't exist anymore. Once upon a time college, learning, and getting a top paying job were the things everyone wanted. That fairytale ended when China blew up the United States. Obviously I wasn't alive back then, but I keep my nose tucked in books most of the time and even in a world where learning has taken the backseat, you can still learn some things.

I was born in Chicago. That's one of the cities that wasn't completely decimated by a bomb. For whatever reason it was left out of a lot of the bloodshed. My parents were eco-biologists. They focused on the regrowth of plants in places where it seemed ungrowable. Against the doctor's orders they had traveled to a city filled with poisonous radiation- even though it had mostly faded off at this point- while my mother was in her third term. There aren't many problems with babies being born anymore, with all the advances. We cured cancer about 200 years ago and the last case of Autism was seen over 500 years ago. Things have changed drastically and while travel with a baby on the way wasn't smiled upon, it wasn't like I was at risk of dying or anything. I was born a week early, no troubles at all, and the next day my parents continued on with their studies. They were dedicated to their work, and while they loved and cherished me, I wasn't part of their work.

My Aunt Florie came in from London to take care of me. After a few weeks trying to live with my parents in Chicago she gave up and we returned to her home town. London had been destroyed during a war, but not by any atomic weapon. Instead it had been destroyed by lasers which didn't leave anything dangerous behind. London was one of the first and only cities to be built up completely, which was why it contained about a sixth of the world's current population.

Aunt Florie raised me until I was ten, when my father finally came back from America. My mother had died when she was crushed by a falling cinder block- we still didn't have a way to resurrect people- and he didn't want to continue on with his life. He took me from Aunt Florie, who I would never see again, and raised me under the roof of a hotel.

When I turned sixteen, like all humans living on earth, I had a choice to make: how I would help the world. I wasn't one for all this "green-love" but I tried a few things. I worked in solar energy for a while, then I tried cooking, like my Aunt had done, and neither of those worked. Eventually I petitioned to be a historian. There were few historians around because you had to argue your case in front of a court and if you didn't have a good reason for that position, you certainly wouldn't be getting it. I argued on the grounds that we could learn from our mistakes in history and that by learning from these mistakes create a better, more peaceful and healthy, planet. I got my placement.

Which is why I call myself a student. I work out of an old dormitory building that used to stand part of a great college. It was the only piece standing and a few other historians holed up here as well. Most had a specific part of history they studied because of how they had argued, but I had all of history at my fingertips because I had been smart enough to make my plea so generic. I could have been talking about any time, and that was what I got to study.

My favorite was the 21st through 23rd centuries. The most interesting things happen then. People were colorful then. They would think for themselves. Now most carried on like drones.

My small apartment was lined with bookcases, which themselves were lined with books. Books weren't strictly prohibited, but printing was, so they were all at least a thousand years old. I was proud of my collection. For the most part they were all in good condition because I had a friend who specialized in black market printing and he could bind and mend books for a price. He had also taught me some basics.

So no, I didn't travel strictly in the legal areas of life, but I had so far managed not to cross the line that would lead to something much larger. There wasn't anything, really, that was large enough to make a difference at the moment. Sure, there was a rebellion movement shifting underground, and it had a strong leader, it just lacked the resources and means to set up a government after it took over this one.

Which leads to pointing out all the flaws in our government. People were healthy, the economy was at an all time high, the world was headed in a bright direction. None of that needed to change. What needed to change was that people needed to start thinking for themselves again. A greener earth hides many flaws in a system that is called perfect. Behind the digital age of documents hides the fact that everything is censored. You'd never know it if you hadn't read the original, and few people had, because reading, and printing, did not lead to a better planet. And everything becoming digital, even human beings, led to new ways of control. No longer did people go in to get nose jobs, but brain jobs. They traded in their skin and blood for a completely holographic existence where their mind could be hacked into and censored by the government that strove to protect us. This had to stop, this had to change, but there was no way for that to happen. Not yet.