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It's sitting right there, against the wall of my flat. My future, if all goes well. I can only hope.
Honestly, hope sometimes seems more like a thing of the past, even though it's really inextricably tied with the future. When I was little, my grandmother used to tell me about the stars. The actual stars, in the sky long hidden by the roof of the Walled City. She was very young when the city was sealed, but she remembered the stars. She described them as tiny pinpricks scattered around the sky. They were small and sparse, not like the well-defined rings that were put on the roof to mimic them. She said her grandparents told her that there were even more, but they were so small that the lights of the city overwhelmed them, and to see them as they really were, you had to go far away from civilization, out into the wilderness.
It was hard to imagine wilderness. It still is, really. Seems like it would be almost eerily quiet and far too open, too empty. It didn't stop me, though, from poking small holes into cardboard and holding them up to the neon lights and imagining what it was like outside of the walls and away from the people. Sometimes I would make up my own shapes from the scattered dots of light. Grandmother would smile and say that that's what they used to do with the actual stars, too.
Constellations, they were called. A way to make sense from what seems like randomness.
It was a fascinating thought, and may have been the first step that drove me down the path of science.
It's not easy down here. It would have been so simple to just become a scrap collector. After all, there's plenty of scrap and more coming every day. Science was the harder path. To look around at chaos and try to make sense of it. To stick to it and learn things that seemed like they were a world away and irrelevant to what was actually around me. To get those processes ingrained in me to test and to strive and to... well, to hope. But it was the only option I was ever going to take. I knew it was going to be the best way to learn about the world beyond just what I was familiar with because it was around me, and I thought it would be the best way to improve the world that was around me.
The slums are home. It's not the ideal life our ancestors dreamed of, of course, but we're people. We find our joys even in the darkest times. We get together and have wild, reckless nights that are fun even with the world around us being what it is. The joy comes from each other, from the residents, from friends, from family, not from this world and city that we're mired in. Part of humanity is being able to imagine something better. And what I chose to do with my life is bound up in that. Science got us into this mess, in part. It will have to help get us out of it. Unfortunately, as the years go by, improvement has looked like less and less of an option.
It all started with the destruction of the world outside, but we found a way to survive. We secluded ourselves to protect us from that destruction. It didn't end up protecting us from ourselves, though. Stratification, first of all. I suppose that's another way to make order, although not nearly as hope-inducing, at least not for those of us at the bottom. But after that, the decline continued. Trash, chaos... and of course, something that has been haunting humanity since long before these walls have been. Disease.
The plague isn't going anywhere, which means the people are. Acquaintances new and old are no longer there. So many of my friends are gone now. My family... well. I'm not the only one. Even the flow of trash has slowed somewhat, and I really doubt it's because all of a sudden, Midtown's decided to be kinder. It has to be hitting them, too, whether or not they're actually willing to admit something's wrong. Down here we know it is, but those of us looking for solutions aren't making headway as fast as the plague is. The Sentinels sure can't do anything about it, because that's not what they're programmed to fight. And Companions, sure, they're more helpful, but they're also limited. Science is the pursuit of truth and I don't like lying to myself. I really think that humanity is on its last legs. At least as we are now. Without more time.
I certainly am, anyway. But there are ways our memories can live on. And as soon as I noticed my first symptoms, I knew it was going to be my best opportunity to maybe still do any good whatsoever to the world I'm going to leave behind. I watched my loved ones go. I know how this progresses. I know what waits for me at the end of this path. But with some scrabbling, some saving, some haggling, and, thankfully, some connections, I managed to get my hands on a Sarcophagus. Some essential part of myself can live on. It's an old one I had to get secondhand, but I can fine-tune it so it works like new.
So there it is, sitting right there against my wall. Like I said, if all goes well, it's my future. If all goes even better, it's more time, and maybe more ability to find solutions to help those that will still be here when my physical self is gone. Will I be losing something? Of course I will, and I have to, in a way, mourn that. But I also have to think of the advantages, or at least the potential ones. Sure, it's entirely possible that even given the extra time that a digital existence will offer me, I won't be able to do anything to change the trajectory we're on. But even a little hope is something, right? After all, even the worst-case scenarios are, at most, the same as what's going to happen to me anyway.
And in the best case scenario? In my wildest fever dreams, where I can stop this, help who's still here, and ensure some kind of future for those still standing? Who knows. Maybe some day I'll even be able to help solve everything. And the roof will open and those constellations will be viewable again. Even if it's not with my eyes, it will be with someone's.
I should get to work.
With luck, the future awaits.