Boredom
A series of short pieces by Ms Alisha
The dull, spoon fed boredom weighed heavily upon him, like a Soviet suit - ill fitting, coarse, and badly out of date. What he needed was action, excitement - maybe even a touch of adventure. Well, he was certain that it was a part of the way of living. Wage slavery hadn't been destroyed by the Technological Revolution of the 80s and 90s - much to everyone involved's disgust.
Writers of the time had forecast virtual offices, people operating from home -
telecommuting, they'd called it - but it was not to be an actuality. Data thieves had
rendered the phone lines insecure, and had plucked the digital information from mobile
phones from the air. All of which had served to send several very large companies
bankrupt, when their documents had started turning up on BBS across the world.
So, it was back to offices, stand-alone machines, and couriers. Paper consumption had
skyrocketed, as security of information began to involve physical presence, not electronic
transmission. He had regretted that. There was something comforting about knowing that
everyone you worked with could have instant access to what ever you were doing. Now, the
most secretive information was being hand written, before being typed on ancient Adler
portables. And they seemed to have a will of their own.
It was at one of these that he sat, fingers mechanically picking out the letters, as he
transcribed the research of a senior partner. The area of speciality was, oddly, virtual
communication, a subject not often examined, in the light of data theft, but he
transcribed it anyway.
The typewriters always felt warm, as if they had some kind of life of their own, and the
travel on the keys often varied from stroke to stroke. This left the document looking like
it had recently been hit by a hammer in places, and hardly touched by ink in others. And
they seemed to struggle, too, at certain sequences of words - as if they sought to
re-arrange them in different ways to that which their author had intended.
It was all rather odd, really, to think that technology had progressed so far, that it had
returned to its beginnings. Data thieves now used guns and knives, to capture the physical
documents. And it had escalated beyond that - couriers now wore enough body armour, and
packed enough firepower, to crash their way into buildings ambushed by the pirates. Nearly
back to the bad old days of '95, when the French pushed the world to the brink of war.
He couldn't remember what it was, exactly, that the French had been doing to make the
other nations so enraged. But he did remember the television being alive with images of
shops and homes being burned by Pacific Islanders, on some colonial island. And of the
eco-terrorist attack on the Versailles palace - when a crude fuel/air explosive had been
dropped from a light aircraft by one of the more extremist green groups. It had been a
poor choice of target - the French President and Prime Minister had left the building
hours before - leaving only their wives and children behind. When he closed his eyes, he
could still see the gutted shell of the Sun King's palace, and the troops sifting through
the ashes, trying to find enough bone fragments to put in the coffins.
The French had responded quickly to the attack, rounding up all the Greenpeace
representatives, all the greens, and scuttling some sort of flagship, near some small
atoll. They eventually let some of the prisoners go - the ones that were still relatively
intact. The rest had been given the chance to do something useful for the environment. The
market garden harvests in Paris that year were remarkable - something to do with increased
nitrogen in the soil....
After that, things settled into a period of stagnation. The Chinese had put an end to
nuclear testing - they were invited to test their weapons in the Former Republic Of
Yugoslavia, and had done so - and ended years of civil war in the Balkans. Or, at worst,
stopped them from actually getting near enough to each other, across the test zones, to
fight.
Then some clever researcher in America had come up with a way to end her cash flow crisis.
She flew to Africa, met with the representatives of the Zulu Inkata party, and sold them a
gentically tailored retro-virus, based on the herpes/HIV viruses. The effect was
devastating. The virus swept, unchecked, across the continent, stripping the flesh from
the bone of the unfortunate victims - all of whom were white. The virus had been
engineered only to attack skin cells with a low melanin pigment count. Well, he
remembered, she had been a particularly clever young lass. Too bad that she'd forgotten
her basic lab work rules, and put some lip balm on. They say she almost synthesised an
antidote in the 48 hours it took her to die- we'll never know, 'cause the lab had a an
autodestruct mode that took out the surrounding three buildings. That was part of the
Inkata deal - a low yield FAE, designed to burn very, very efficiently. Too bad, 'cause
the virus still flared up, from time to time.
Funny thing was that the Zulus still didn't manage to seize power - their funding dried up
when their wealthy white backers had stopped travelling to Africa. He had heard that some
of the less extreme groups in South America had found themselves getting funding from
these backers now. Besides, bio-warfare was a little bit too risky for them - and the
climate in the area was much better.