Die Young: The Future Ain't No Fun (fiction)
Chapter 1: Loose Bologna
It was hard to keep count of all the holocausts that were happening at once. There were two in the Middle East, three in Africa, and a few that straddle the line between genocide, holocaust and ethnic cleansing, but I wasn’t a scholar on these issues. I wasn’t a scholar on anything, and I was paying for it dearly. I was an American man staring down the tail end of my early thirties with the same intensity of someone staring down the barrel of a gun during an armed robbery attempt knowing there was nothing in their wallet. Boom.
I was standing in line waiting for an AI street aid to distribute my weekly stipends for food and groceries. Despite the Neo-Democrats being in office, and a supposed budget increase for social services, you never really had enough to survive, so you always had to steal, not an excessive amount, but just enough to feel pathetic. Which is why my pants pockets were packed with pieces of bologna. Loose Bologna, you can’t steal things in the package anymore. Advances in technology have made that impossible, so you had to open the package and stuff your pockets. I loved bologna, most people didn’t, but I did. It was like some sort of hot dog loaf. Completely artificial, but in a salty delicious kind of way.
It was nearly my turn in line when a large-framed man with his gut hanging out of a shirt that was far too small pushed me aside to get his stipend before me, and the son of a bitch knocked the bologna right out of my pocket, right in front of everyone. I was so embarrassed. My bologna was fucking filthy, I had to make him for what he did to me.
“Hey you fat fuck, you knocked the bologna right out of my pocket.”
The man turned his head, his purple hair with gray roots at the bottom gave the hue of what I assume a moldy eggplant would look like if it had been through a paper shredder and glued together and said, “why do you have bologna in your pocket?”
A person in line behind me began to laugh.
“Because I like Bologna, you bitch!” I screamed as I punched him in the side of his moldy eggplant head, but he didn’t seem phased by it at all. I got scared, so i ran, but as I attempted to run away, I slipped on the bologna that fell from my pocket, cracked my head on the concrete and lost consciousness.
I woke up two days later in a hospital bed. I initially couldn’t recall the bologna or the man with the eggplant hair, I just had fog in my mind and hatred in my heart. I looked at the tubes sticking out of me and wanted to rip them out. I also wanted to be taken care of by real people. Not AI. Everything was artificial. You had to use AI for everything. Only in certain rare circumstances would you ever get to talk to a doctor in person, and it was usually AI that determined when you did. The only way to get someone every time was to shit yourself. Which I did. Not because I wanted to, but it was the only guaranteed way for me to socialize. But the person who came to clean it up was never the type of person I wanted. I wanted someone nice to take care of me, but it was also an old Asian man with sad eyes.
“You shit yourself again?” He asked in a monotone voice.
“Yes, but not for you to clean it. To make friends.”
“No one wants to be friends with someone who shits themselves.”
“Oh, yes they do. Ever met a baby before, they’re very popular.”
“Yes, but you’re no baby,” he snidely replied as he used wet wipes to clean the feces from buttocks.
“You know what’s weird.”
“No, tell me.”
“You never see babies anymore.”
“I know. It makes me sad, but no one can afford to have them.”
“What will humanity come to?” He didn’t initially answer my question, he just turned around and dumped the used wipes in a large orange trash can that said “BIOHAZARD” on every side with large capital letters. And then he just stood there for a second and looked at me quizzically.
“Humanity will come to this. It will all go to shit.”
I wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be a jab at me or not, but he was right. We were increasingly alone, few or no friends, no family. Just a big world filled with people living alone in it. Suddenly I remembered why I was in the hospital, but not why I was on the planet. I knew why I slipped on loose bologna, but I didn’t know why I was born.
Strange place to be in.