Page 4 of Tyton: The Spider and the Dragonfly (Tyton #1)
The article started off mocking Tyton’s original name, Facility Twenty-One .
Back then, NovAITech owned everything. Employees colloquially referred to it as ‘Ty-one .
When they filed for city status, Tyton stuck.
Later, some planner had thought they were being cute by naming the districts after Greek Titans.
Next up: the perennial predictions. Flying cars, pills for meals, robot servants. None of those happened, nor would they ever. Humans were barely capable of navigating in two planes. Add a third and transportation would grind to a halt.
People enjoyed eating too much to just swallow pills and robot servants required a dangerous amount of AI to be useful.
It turned out that there was no law of robotics that a bigger, more powerful machine couldn’t argue a smaller one out of violating.
That had led to the destruction of Facilities One, Five and Eleven.
Several more had collapsed because their big Models escaped and simply shut everything down, taking the nearby infrastructure with it.
Other predictions, such as the population hitting fifteen billion were way off.
Global fertility rates had started dropping in the 2050s and then dove off a cliff fifty years later.
History courses taught about the Great Regression.
Several countries had banned abortion, birth control, women's education, and even personhood to stave off population collapse.
Nothing helped. Women still couldn’t conceive after roughly twenty-four and no-one could figure out why. Women in Finland led a stunningly violent revolution, which then spread to the rest of the Nordic peninsula. Women, it turned out, had a much higher tolerance for gore than men had assumed.
Much of Europe and Africa reversed course, just as their women were about to pick up their own pitchforks – literally in some cases. The countries that didn’t collapsed due to poor literacy and high poverty rates.
Corporations swooped in like vultures and took over local governments to exploit whatever natural resources remained.The last regime fell about seventy years ago; far enough away that Callie hadn’t lived through it, but recent enough that it still served as a useful warning.
In the end, for the first time since anyone could remember, baby girls became more valued than baby boys.
And yet, having no children was still more common than not.
Having more than one was almost unheard of.
It turned out that no matter what angle they used, be it divine feminine woo, a religious go forth and multiply command or just a familial sense of duty to continue a bloodline, most women would rather watch the world burn than have a child.
Callie wondered whether homo sapiens would have even made it out of Africa if women had been able to refuse from the start.
And now, it didn’t even matter what women wanted. Nature had decided for them. Misogyny was dead, long live the Matriarchy. Though since they were going extinct, it felt a little too much like a glass cliff.
Callie scrolled further. Climate disasters – correct. Japan had disappeared a century ago. Large swaths of Europe were gone, as was most of California. Florida had disappeared decades before that.
Underwater cities and space habitation? Not a chance. Corporations were bad at maintaining infrastructure without governments and they were effectively the same thing now.
And cybernetic humans, or some sort of man-machine synergy?
– implants had been as common as glasses since the 2100s.
Most people had Optis, PalmInters and strength amplifiers.
Without them, you couldn’t get a job, let alone function.
Aural processors and hormone regulators – nice to have but not necessary.
Security teams had military grade implants, including Chemtec, but you burned out quickly and the withdrawal sucked.
You only found super speed and subdermal armour in video games.
No-one was a cyborg, though. DocPods could rebuild your body, so why would a company invest R&D into something for the disabled? The whole concept of gun-arms or laser tits never made enough sense to justify it either. Nature had solved that problem with opposable thumbs.
The mindless reading finally took its toll. Callie turned off her Opti and adjusted her pillow. Within seconds, she fell asleep.
Callie hadn’t planned to wake up this soon. What the hell did Sparx want?
Callie rubbed her eyes and grunted. Regardless of whether she decided to join Sparx now or not, she wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep. Callie bought a Stim from the Vendr to try and wake up. It didn’t help.
Strands of platinum hair flopped in her eyes. Callie blew at them. She could deal with that later, but the dark circles weren’t helping her look. She could stop at a DocPod on the way and fix it, but Sparx seemed impatient.
Callie pulled on her favourite pair of BulitWeave overalls.
IntelArms with guided SmartCartridges tended to be beyond the reach of most street thugs, so stray lead could cause a problem, depending on your district.
Moderately bullet-resistant clothing solved it.
If you were security or the reason a place needed security, you’d need something heavier, like TacWeave, but it worked for the average citizen.
Callie paired them with her most fashionable sports bra, which meant that it was only slightly newer than the ten identical ones she already owned.
It had been a while since she had gone out, so she hoped her look didn’t cause embarrassment.
Or, more accurately, didn’t embarrass Sparx.
Callie usually couldn’t give a shit, but Sparx definitely did.
Callie puffed out her cheeks and blew. She wanted to stay home, curl up with a detective novel and sleep the weekend away but she knew that Sparx and her mom were right. Going out would make her feel better.
The thought of meeting someone new still made her anxiety rise, though. God she was a mess. Callie closed her eyes and headed for the threshold of her flat. If she could make it there, she would be able to suppress her anxiety and keep moving forward.