A History Of Tommorow

Prologue: 2015, Cambodia, Phnom Penh.

He sat and stared off into the distance, through the window of his silent literature class and into the distant city. The phnom penh skyline was not impressive, a few tall buildings dotted the panorama. A hundred smaller structures comprised the rest of the view, ten storey high apartments as far as the eye could see. The occasional radio tower or pylon jutted up from between the congregated concrete constructs. A few more apartments were under construction,wrapped in their green safety nets and scaffolding. he swore he could spot a new one pop up every week. In the far distance he could see the top of the boot. he called it the boot because it looks like a big glass and steel boot. It was the tallest building in phnom penh by quite a bit. It was finished a year ago but he still had no idea what it was, an office block maybe? probably a bit of everything with that size.

He could also see the stump of Gold Tower 42. A few years ago it was set to be the biggest building in the whole country. It had a gleaming showroom displaying the amazing apartments that cost a pretty penny. He remembered going into the showroom with his mother and being thrilled with the apartment design. There was a Television in the kitchen, living room and each bedroom. He now wondered how many people had prepaid for one of those apartments. It was being built by some korean construction firm taking advantage of the cheap labour in cambodia. Of course they started running out of funds and construction slowed. People started fearing for their prepaid homes and quickly wanted refunds. The company is probably still paying people back till this day. The worst part is they left a sad husk of a building in the middle of phnom penh. It never reached halfway to its goal of 42 floors, being cut short at the 20th storey. It stood as a glum reminder of how unpredictable the future is.

Now the vertically challenged half tower was quickly drowning in the sea of other buildings that began to rise around it. Next to it a kids play center had been and he figured it would not be long until the half tower wasn’t even visible anymore. His school was out in the dried up lakebed. It was like a tiny desert because of all the sand that had once made up the lake’s floor. He often wondered how the school had any foundations in the sand. To see the city he looked out over his school’s football field, with the sprinklers eternally on as to keep the grass alive. This was softer grass than the coarse native grass which would hurt to land on and gave terrible rashes. This grass was foreign, hardly a wonder it needed constant water to survive the arid heat of the lakebed. Even now, in the monsoon season with almost daily showers of rain the school still felt the need to keep the sprinklers on for the entirety of the day. He turned his attention back to the class, the muffled voices of his classmates now came into focus. The past year life had been going by so fast, it all seemed to pass him by. He was tired beyond all belief but still had trouble sleeping. The bell rung and class ended.

He took his time to pack up his computer, it was time to go home. His classmates filed out of the room, until he was the last one left. He pulled the door open with one hand, the other clasping his laptop to his chest. The corridor greeted him with a slap in the face. A passing student had elbowed him in the face by accident. Neither of them took any notice, a small accident in a busy hallway. He shuffled past another student and into the open area of the stairwell. A gust of wind passed him by as he crossed to his locker area.

He took out his belongings and made the arduous journey to the gate of the school where he took a tuk tuk home. On the way home it began to rain. The droplets of moisture whipped his face and he had to squint to see through the mist of droplets. When he arrived home the road outside the gate was flooded and he had to wade the last block home, umbrella in one hand and bag in the other. He arrived home to find his cat perched on a plant pot in the garden, it was seeking shelter from the rising tide, which was only a few inches deep on the raised driveway. He picked it up much to it’s disdain and carried it into the garage where the water could and would not reach. He then trudged through the five centimetre deep water to his doorstep. His soaked Nike shoes squelched on the tiled floor. As he took them off water quickly seeped into the void where his foot had once occupied. He placed the sodden shoes in the bathtub upside down to dry. He had rolled up his shorts before he waded so they remained dry, apart from the little raindrops that decorated them in a haphazard pattern. He sat down at his desk and he thought.

Chapter one: 2017, Japan, Tokyo.

It was finally his, he had waited in line for hours and it was all worth it. The Macrosoft (can I use microsoft?) hololens. The first consumer friendly virtual reality product. As soon as they were announced ready people began to queue up outside wherever they were going to be sold. He had been one of the first to buy and now it was his. For only 499$ He had rushed home through the bustling Tokyo streets back to his studio apartment. It was nothing too much but he called it home. The elevator was taking too long so he decided to take the stairs. He was regretting his choice by the fourth flight of stairs. He stopped and rested on the railing, leaning against the side of it. As he drew in some deep breaths to recuperate he noticed the mist on his breath. It must be colder than it felt. He trudged up the remainder of the steps, it felt like it took him a few hours to make the ascent but it must’ve only be a few minutes. When he finally got up to the twelfth floor, his floor, he sat down once more. When he managed to pick himself up he was still exhausted, he should really go to the gym. Maybe even just jogging in the morning.

He fumbled with the keycard as he approached his apartment door. Getting it in position just in time to swipe it through the scanner. The little green light beeped red and then green to let him know he could enter. He turned the handle and stepped into the cool air conditioned room. It made the sweat that was plastered all over him feel like ice. He plonked himself down the desk chair and allowed himself to enjoy the cold for a second. It took him a second to realise why he was even here. He reached into the bag and felt for the cardboard laminate box. The box that contained his most precious possession. In little under 10 minutes he had set up the hololens with his X-Cube One. He pulled the elastic strap of the hololens over his head, coated with the thin balding hair of a man in his mid sixties, even though Joseph was only 32. His hair had started falling out in clumps when he was 24 and it went downhill from there.

The display hummed into life, a gentle electronic hum compared with the whirring of the fan inside the air conditioner. It displayed the Macrosoft logo before it booted up and connected to the X-cube One. After some setup he could choose the first surface. The wall became a massive screen only visible through the hololens he wore. He loaded up some minesweeper on his living room floor and was amazed by how real it all looked, all thoughts of hunger were forgotten and he was swept away with the device. After playing well into the night he fell fast asleep on the sofa, he forgot to even take the hololens off.

Chapter two: 2020, Great Britain, London.

She knew granny would want one, one of those fancy cardigans. The new ones what could read your pulse and notify the National health service if anything started to go wrong. Now that grandad had died, granny was living alone and this product was going to be her saviour. It even had a built in system that phoned the NHS on her voice command and it was done automatically if her heart rate began to pick up, indicating injury. It could even take temperature for fevers or chills.

They had begun to sell them in every fancy clothes store, Monsoon and the like. They weren’t too expensive either, all the technology built in only added 10 pounds to the price tag of the garment. It was advertised as not being visible to others or noticeable to wear, no bulky wire packages or anything. It was all measured at the wrist, through a little sensor. She had to take the train to gran’s out in norfolk. She figured she could pick one of them up on the way to king’s cross station. It would be a little under two hours to king’s lynn station and another hour to her gran’s house in the rural outlying area. Her granny resided in a little village called binham, with it’s own ruined priory and accompanying pub. It was as much as a tourist hotspot as anywhere in norfolk could be called a tourist hotspot.

It was granny’s birthday and she planned to get there in time for dinner so she had better set out for king’s cross now. It was already ten twenty five. Alice closed the twitter feed she had been scrolling and put her Iphone 7 back in her pocket, smartphones had been getting more and more expensive, some vital ingredient was running out she had seen on the BBC the other day. She got up off of the sofa and grabbed her small wheely suitcase. She made her way to the door and opened it, stepping out into the cold summer air with her small suitcase trundling behind her. She closed the door and it locked itself. She worked as a web page designers and had worked for google and youtube doing different things, small little jobs. She was now quite rich at the young age of 26. Her islington home was proof of this much.

She had hailed a london cab via her Iphone the day before. A new app called Sherlock had recently launched. You just entered your address and it found you a cab free at the same time. She waited on the stairs outside her home and watched the traffic pass her by. She only had to wait a few minutes before the spacious cab pulled up, the driver looked to be in his mid sixties or late fifties. He had greying hair and a face filled with worry lines. Years of driving a cab in the haphazard london traffic would do that to you.

No words were exchanged, he knew where he had to go. The journey to King’s Cross was short and uneventful apart from a near miss with a swerving cyclist. They pulled up outside the station. The sun had begun to shine and the fluffy white clouds were few and far apart. Scattered cloud debris in a static blue sky. She gazed up before heading into the fray. Bustling and busy, she managed to get past the initial throng of people, all heading one way or another. She saw that the train to Edinburgh was leaving from platform 7. She saw another to Cardiff from platform 12 begin its journey.

She waited in line at the automated ticket booth, where a couple were trying desperately to calm their child who was having a tantrum of sorts, crying screaming and kicking, something about ice cream. After collecting her ticket from the machine she proceeded to platform 4. She had to get in the one of the four frontmost carriages, because the rest would stop at Cambridge. Norfolk wasn’t exactly a hotspot for visitors so there was no point in sending the whole train there. She sat down in a window seat and put her bag down on the seat next to her, she didn’t want any creepy strangers coming and sitting by her. It remained sunny the whole journey as she gazed out towards the golden wheat fields, interrupted by green hedgerows with oak trees dotting the landscape. The sun shone through the dirty windows of the train carriage. The rhythmic bump of the train as it passed over the slats was soothing. They made various little stops that she didn’t bother to note. This was the first time she had taken the train, normally she would have gone by taxi but the M25 was being renovated with roads to charge the new electric cars, so getting out of london by car would’ve been hell.

The train trip seemed to last only a few minutes and before she knew it she was getting out at kings lynn station. Kings lynn was a village compared to london but a city compared to the rest of norfolk. There were a group of taxis eager for customers waiting by the station for the people they knew were bound in. Some agreements were made about the price before she boarded and the hour long drive begun. This leg of the journey however felt longer than the train ride. When she finally arrived she paid and stepped out of the taxi into the still bright light of six in the evening, it was the summer so it wouldn’t get dark until about ten or eleven. She could smell the smell of cooking and she knew her grandmother was finishing dinner. Just in time.

Chapter three: 2024,United States Of America, Indiana, Hobart.

The sky was a hazy purple above the outskirts of Hobart. It was one of those purples that was so nearly a blue. Dark and full, so vivid you could reach out and grasp it. The most beautiful sky you’ve ever seen. It was dotted with stars, little pinpricks in the thick canvas of a night sky. The hot indiana sun began to melt through the horizon, the purple giving way to dark blue, giving way to light blue, giving way to a yellow line on the horizon. The sun rose and the cool night air was evaporated in favour of dry heat. There were corn crops as far as the eye could see. The soil was clumpy and dry and some corn had visibly wilted. It was no longer a bright full green but instead a dull and dehydrated green. The purple sky was now a searing bright blue, not a cloud to be seen.

The soil was cracked in places, the shallow roots of the maize crop could barely make it deep enough to reach the moist earth beneath. Already Elliot had seen his a quarter of his crops fail, they had just wilted over and died in the course of a single month. This was the longest and hottest dry spell he had come across in his time as a farmer. He wasn’t some wizened old man however, he was only thirty-four years old. He had inherited the farm from his old man who’d passed away years ago, at first he was inclined to sell it to some big conglomerate company for a lot of money. But he soon realised the money he would get for the farm and house would be all but useless to him seeing as he would just be unemployed. He had left the local school after finishing sixth grade because his mother had died of a heart attack and his father needed help on the farm.

Now he was no idiot, he knew very well how to read and write and had even planned to become a doctor. But since his mother’s death all of his ambitions seemed to have melted away. Much like everything else seemed to be melting away in the unbearable heat. The past few years it seemed to have been getting hotter, with longer dry spells every single year. Now it hadn’t rained in a good four months and his crop was starting to suffer for it. He’d been resorting to hiring a special watering tractor and driving around the field watering as much as he could on a budget. Now he was sitting on the patio of his olden looking house staring out at the corn. A single bead of sweat ran down his forehead, down the bridge of his nose and to the end, where it hung for a second before it dropped. It landed on a wooden plank below and splattered outwards, leaving a the smallest of stains. In a mere few seconds the stain had already been evaporated, leaving everything back to normal. He was no stranger to heat and dry but this was something else altogether.

As it approached noon he felt the heat ramp up even further, how was it even possible. His tongue felt dry against his inner mouth. He was tempted to lick his lips but he didn’t want to lose any of the little moisture that remained in his mouth. Today was too hot to work, it almost too hot to sit on the patio at all.

He pulled himself up out of the wicker chair and felt his back creak, he let out a yawn that made no noise and opened the door to his home. He stepped into the dark living room, he had the curtains drawn and the air conditioner turned on. He had bought an air conditioner two years ago when he had started to notice the heat. He only ran it on the hottest days but for the past few weeks as summer had begun to swing he’d had to keep it on to able to go to sleep.

He sat himself down on the red sofa that was in the centre of his living room and proceeded to turn on the television. It was tuned in to the local FOX news. There was a grey suit clad reporter standing in front of a corn field. Under the reporter’s arms the gray had a visibly darker stain. Sweat no doubt. He was yapping on about climate change. Elliot was disgusted by the absolute crap that had been getting onto the news recently. Climate change was a conspiracy started by government to sell genetically modified corn. The damn government was always trying to take advantage of everything. If the weather was hotter then they would say it’s climate change, if it was colder they would say it was also climate change. It didn’t make any damn sense and he had had enough of it. He turned off the television, grunting to himself under his breath. He had had well enough of the media and their idiotic climate change crap. He slumped down further into the soft armchair. He let out a long and drawn breath. He allowed himself to close his eyes and he drifted into peaceful sleep.

Chapter four:2028, Cambodia, Battambang Province.

The rice paddy was dry. Cracked earth could not conceal the shallow roots of the rice. Snapped and uprooted stalks lay hither dither around his feet. He was walking in what had once been his father’s rice crop but was now little more than some cracked earth. The monsoon was weeks too early last year, and had ended far too soon as well. This year’s monsoon hadn’t even begun. This had left the land dry and arid for months longer than it should have. This combined with the fact that it hadn’t rained throughout the monsoon season meant that there was drought throughout Cambodia. The mekong was still running as ever but the reservoirs and the rice paddies themselves had started to dry up. The shallower and less irrigated rice crops had already dried out completely leaving nothing but hot earth.

Kosal’s rubber synthetic sandals beat down on the scorched land. He cast a dark shadow over the beige dirt that mottled the ground. The drought was harsh and little to nothing had survived on most fields. It had come out of the blue as well, in the rainy season prior to the drought the monsoon had been long lasting and heavy. Which caught everyone off guard for the massive dry spell which followed. Still there was no end to it. Kosal used to work in this field and now there was nothing to work on, no ground to till or rice to turn. Just endless dusty ground caked in the remains of rice crops. His family’s crop relied almost entirely on the rains to fill up their reservoir. With so long without rain the reservoir itself was nearly gone, and the irrigation streams had proven too shallow to channel what little remained to the crops. The family was in big financial trouble now and when tax collectors came knocking there was little they could offer. The self proclaimed chief and leader of the nearby village was offering a loan to Kosal’s father, Pich. But Pich knew the loan would be a scam, with a lot of interest and little hope of ever paying it back. The offer had been denied. It seemed there was little hope and so Kosal was due to be sent to phnom penh like his two younger sisters to work in a garment factory. While the prospect of independence from his father did entice him he knew he would keep very little of the miniscule amount that he would earn. Most of it would be sent back to his father and mother in the provinces. Taking the little excursion into the dusty dirt that had only a few years prior been a rice field was a goodbye in many ways. He knew he would be back, but probably not until new year. It was a farewell to the field which he had played on the sidelines of for his childhood and raced his motorbike around in his teenage years. He was still only 23 and he had his whole life ahead of him, but everything felt distinctly set in stone.

He didn’t want to be like his father, he didn’t want to grow old on some old farm and the city was the first step to his future. A job in a garment factory was nowhere fun to be but he knew he could work his way up the chain and be something better. His sisters had told him of the terrible work conditions and the low pay. He somewhat hated his father, his father knew exactly what he was doing. He was sending his children away so to work in a horrible place so that he could live in a reasonable degree of comfort off of their backs. Kosal didn’t want a lot of money or a lot of fame. But he wanted to do something meaningful with his life. The drought was as much as blessing as it was a curse because he didn’t have the heart to run away to the city. This would be the last day that he was someone else’s person. He would be his own.

Chapter five: 2029, Punjab, India

The ground-water aquifers had started to run dry completely on tuesday. This was the last of the deep ground-water pumps in Punjab to run dry entirely. Supply had fallen 53% below demand over the past few years in India, Ajit was an engineer working on deep ground-water aquifer number 4 in Punjab. At 4:38 AM that morning the aquifer had started churning dirt. The water table had been sinking for years and the natural rate of replenishment was not high enough to refill it. Now the unthinkable had happened, they had run out of drinkable and arable water. It was almost unbelievable in a world where 70 percent of the surface was coated in water. The sea-water was all accessible and simple to get, but of course it was not profitable so the government had been stalling for far too long about taking long term action. And now it had happened. Punjab had been importing water from southern regions for years already, but it had still had some produce, until now. Ajit was scared, not in a fearful way, but in a long term sense it gave him chills. If something as vital and plentiful as water was running out it did make him concerned about the state of the wider world. Not so much the fact that it was running out, that was inevitable. It was the fact that his government and others had taken minimal action until it was too late, he supposed this was the nature of the human spirit.

He had been woken up with a call from one of his night shift operators telling him of the sudden lack of water. They all knew it was happening sometime in the next month but it wasn’t expected for another week at least. He had woken up with wiping the sleep out of his red rimmed eyes. A lack of sleep was blatantly scrawled upon his face. He fumbled for the phone on the bedside table beside him, not bothering to turn on the small lamp that also resided on the same table. He didn’t need to, his hand was familiar with the situation, it already knew roughly where to reach. When he lifted the phone to the side of his head he was shocked. It was a strange shock, a shock he knew would be coming but was still just as unbelievable. The entire grandeur of the water-aquifer plant was now useless. So many empty pipes that would probably never see use again unless the government did something to relieve the crushing demand for water. Last year there had been massive outcry as the first of the aquifers in punjab had begun to shut down. The outcry was far too late and the desalination plants on the coast were taking far too long to be finished.

He had been unable to respond for the longest of times after the words were emptied into his ear. His early morning grogginess furthered this confusion and disbelief. He got out of bed, put down the phone and kissed his wife on the forehead before he left the room. He longed for a hot shower but he knew he as needed at the plant, so he hurried along without one. He poured some cereal into a small bowl, there was no milk, he had been meaning to buy some yesterday but he had postponed it. Milk wasn’t a necessity to him. His parents had been very traditional and seemed to be rooted in the older ways. As soon as he left home he tried to further himself from his old culture and his traditions, deep down it was because he wanted to end up different from them.

He had put on his fluorescent orange safety vestments over his white shirt and blue tie. A pair of factory grey trousers were hastily adorned to his legs. He put on his glasses and adjusted them so that they didn’t tilt. He hated the non symmetrical things deeply. He clambered into his two seater, and not some fancy sports car, while he could probably afford one with the salary he had, it was his strong opinion that sports cars and the like were all things for idiots who needed an ego boost. Maybe if he were ten years younger. It was a small car, large enough for him, his wife and a few suitcases, nothing flashy, but very functional. He had keyed the ignition and it started up, chugging slowly down the road towards the aquifer plant. That lead him to where he was now. He had since equipped himself with a bright yellow safety helmet and some basic goggles. He didn’t know why procedure was such but he had complied with the rules for years, not worth risking losing the job or any face in front of the staff. He needed to set an example.

He was waiting, grim faced with some of his night shift employees. They had called in to the day shifters to let them know that they need not come to work today. There were probably a lot of tears shed on the other side of the line, employment meant everything in such a time. Nobody had necessarily lost their job yet, it all relied on the desalination plants being finished and bearing some of the load of the demand. That way the water table could be given a chance to rise faster than they could drain it. But that seemed like a hopeless endeavour thanks to the government's dysfunctional behaviour. He too knew that his employment was in grave danger, but he tried to remain as calm as he could in the face of his staff. He had been a good cooperative manager of the site and he hoped his superiors would look down kindly upon him and perhaps re-employ him elsewhere. In the meantime he knew the big men would be coming on site soon, as soon as they could wake up. Everyone was prepped for their entrance, looking as formal as they could, shoulder to shoulder. The proceedings would not be pleasant but they faced them with dignity nonetheless. He was proud of his staff. That was the last day for nearly a year that the plant was operational.