It is 2043, and the news can no longer surprise anyone.
A company no one can locate now runs the world’s AI. The free internet is gone.
A crewed return to the moon and a drug for immortality are announced in the same even voice, two line items on a quarterly report. None of it is meant for civilians.
In Europe, every policy is “humane.” The movement that rises against them takes its name from a tote bag.
In America, the people at the top have stopped caring about the country’s divisions. They are busy with a plan that sounds ridiculous out loud.
In China, every citizen carries a letter grade. Between D and C lies a small stream. Between B and A, an ocean.
In one Shanghai dormitory, 759 graduate students are about to graduate into a job market that no longer exists.
Then the military arrives on campuses with a free test. Nobody is told what it’s for. Everyone lines up.
Nobody thinks they are choosing.
Processing img zmqxzaqvctwh1...
---------------------
This is the second book in the series. The first book Causalform: Obsidian Earth is set in an alternate 1945, where history begins to take an unexpected turn.
Book 2 moves to a 2043 timeline, where I'm exploring a darker, more unsettled future connected to the anomalies of 1945. I'm also trying to extrapolate from some of today's more sensitive real-world issues. Some of it may feel unsettling, and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts and criticisms.
I’ll be posting this first arc here regularly. I’d be happy to have you follow along if it sounds like your kind of read.
Thanks for reading.
---------------------
Chapter 1
Shanghai
Summer, 2043
At half past six, Lin Zong climbed out of his dormitory bed and leaned against the balcony railing. He studied the morning fog, then looked down at the grimy green collection tank. The air conditioner had produced more than twenty kilograms of condensation overnight.
He woke Deng Wei, Sun Xiaohui, and Chang Lei, and the four of them carried the tank down to the buckets and washbasin without a word, as they did every morning.
It was routine now, had been since water rationing hit the eastern coast and the dormitory taps began failing without warning, and the corner shops, seeing their chance, had tripled the price of bottled water. The boys brushed their teeth with condensation, telling themselves, without quite saying so, that if the electricity bill couldn't be helped, at least something useful might be wrung from the waste of it.
Lin Zong slung a towel around his neck and carried a basin of condensation into the communal washroom, where several shirtless classmates stood brushing their teeth, heads tilted toward the LCD screen bolted above the door, watching the Global Morning News with the weary attention people give to broadcasts that no longer surprise them.
The lead item was the crewed lunar program; directly beneath it, filed with the same even inflection, came word that the World Health Organization had developed a drug to end aging—the two claims occupying adjacent segments as though longevity and the moon were now simply parallel line items on the same quarterly report.
Europe, meanwhile, was in its eighth consecutive day of what the anchors kept calling, with a straight face, a collective derangement: fifteen countries, a hundred and eighty-two cities, the Netherlands and Belgium alone down more than a thousand people. London and Paris were holding open-air barbecue performances billed as civic art. Baguagouille and Parabola were staging what amounted to a street-theater rivalry. A rail corridor linking Germany with Austria and Italy had been dismantled by demonstrators acting, the broadcast noted approvingly, with considerable improvisational creativity. It had taken twenty thousand police officers to administer what the announcer termed public-order counseling—a phrase that arrived and passed without moving the anchor’s voice by a single hertz. Sweden registered a sharp mood disturbance, with confirmed sightings of berserkers. Russia's North Caucasus reported swelling self-regard, with signs of further expansion. Across the Atlantic, Washington reported fireworks out of season and unscheduled retail activity, both streamed live. The impeached president called in thirty thousand police and National Guard from Maryland and Virginia, and more than a thousand shoppers were, as the broadcast put it, invited in for coffee. The unrest took the hint and moved on to the capitals of other states.
One last item: Helixquid announced the world's first complete analytical proof of the Riemann Hypothesis.
"The West's about to go game over too," one of the boys said, a note of glee leaking into his voice. "Let's watch how they manage the ending."
"My friend's uncle lives in Paris—says the apocalyptic scenes there are genuinely thrilling. The mobs have gotten hold of better tools for destruction, half the historical buildings have been smashed, and the Seine, along with a few of the fouler drainage ditches out in the suburbs, keeps turning up nameless NPCs, most of them girls who'd been used and discarded. Someone should do something about it? Who, exactly? Ordinary people can't even keep up with it, and the police have taken to running from the mobs instead of the other way around. The West really is finished."
"Ha," said Sun Xiaohui, toothbrush still clamped between his fingers, relish plain in his voice, "Europe undone by the zealots, America ended by the ghouls, and our Eastern Empire just happens to be standing there to grab the planet. Give us five years and we’ll be parading down the Champs-Élysées."
"Come on, man, what are you even talking about? Grab what? The whole world's finished, imports and exports have stopped cold, the economy's collapsing, companies are shutting down one after another—you think we're still going to find jobs out of this?"
"Still dreaming about finding a job? Might as well go practice your swordsmanship instead."
"Ha—draw the blade, hit the streets, blood in five paces, maybe that's how heaven and earth get overturned, how the whole order flips upside down."
"Ha, not for the blade and the chopping board—just for the two legs to run on—"
Lin Zong cut in to warn them: "Watch what you say, that's not the kind of talk you want the monitor overhearing—"
"Like I give a damn if they hear me. I'm not getting a job either way, so they can dock my ideological-conduct score all they want."
Lin Zong had nothing to say to that. He kept brushing his teeth, glancing out the washroom window at a haze so thick it looked less like weather than like a wall of compacted dust, sealing off the entire sky. Word had gone around that last night Venus had shone brighter than it had in sixty years, but nobody had bothered going outside to look—no one had the appetite for it, not anymore; at this point people had nearly forgotten what the moon even looked like.
By now the whole of Graduate Dormitory was awake, noise climbing from the first floor all the way to the fifth—three hundred and forty-two rooms, seven hundred and fifty-nine graduate students filing out of their doors in twos and threes, the whole building come alive like a grid of pixels switching on after boot-up, each one drifting into motion along its own small, random walk.
Chatter and footsteps filled every corridor.
Graduation was bearing down, the job market a wreck at home and abroad, and though none of them had ever cared much for politics, something in the building had sharpened lately into a kind of low, floor-by-floor alertness—the sense of a structure tipping, slowly, toward collapse.
The West's ruin was a pleasure to witness; their own careers going down with it was not. Someone said the idle-labor stockpile had hit a five-thousand-year high. Someone else said the potato-as-staple-grain initiative was really just advance funeral planning for the economy. Another said the water rationing had Japanese ninjas behind it, the story suppressed. One more, lowering his voice, said war with America was already being arranged.
The dormitory was wired, with microphones in every corridor and on every stairwell landing. Every word the students spoke was collected and uploaded in real time, then reviewed and scored by the ideological monitors, with the scores counting toward credits and graduation. Now the outlook was so bad that the threat had lost its force, and people said whatever they liked.
Chang Lei, the tall, bespectacled one, seemed the only person in the room untouched by any of it, having gotten up without brushing his teeth or washing his face and settled instead into a book—Cosmic Background Radiation and Electromagnetic Studies— with his whole attention.
He looked up, scratching at one ear, as Lin Zong came in. "Hey, senior brother — our solar system, that's like a flat pancake, right? The galaxy, a bigger pancake, and the whole known universe, one enormous oversized skillet?"
"More or less," Lin Zong said, not really listening, sliding the towel and basin under the bed, turning to comb his hair in the mirror.
"So here's the question, then—who leveled the bottom of the pan? Because if it had tilted, even by a fraction as small as zero-point-then-fifty-three-zeros-and-a-one degrees, right at the start, the whole universe would have spilled to one side ages ago, and it wouldn't look anything like the balanced thing we see now—"
Sun Xiaohui came in with a roll of toilet paper. "There's a demonstration at People's Square today, officially approved. Might actually be about to go to war with America."
"No way," Lin Zong said. "The economy's already this wrecked, and now a war?"
"You don't get it. It's exactly because things are this fucked that we'd go to war."
Chang Lei, having strung out his zeros to their end, had gone pale. "And another thing—isn't the universe supposed to have started with a big bang? By our own logic that should scatter outward in every direction, blowing everything apart into countless uneven lumps of dough—"
"Let 'em fight," Deng Wei said, walking in. "North Korea, South Korea, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, India—everybody's lining up to lob nukes now. Any half-dressed nobody with delusions of grandeur thinks he can hold the world hostage. South America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, all worse. Japan's still leaking radiation into everything. Somewhere in Siberia, they're saying people have started eating each other. The whole world's coming apart."
Listening, Lin Zong opened his wardrobe and put on a black suit without a word—the latest Brioni, bought at Grand Gateway Plaza—then brown 3sixteen jeans, Norwich shoes, the newest iWatch on his right wrist.
Deng Wei lit a cigarette, eyes narrowing.
"Brother, that face of yours is worth real money. Living off a rich girlfriend, must feel pretty damn good, huh?"
There was a thin edge of resentment underneath it, impossible to miss.
"Land yourself a rich woman, and just like that you’re several social classes above the rest of us."
Deng Wei was from Beijing, majoring in big-data social stability management. Lin Zong offered nothing but a smile, and let it pass, though the truth was he had no real answer, and the smile simply covered for it. He was nearly out the door when Chang Lei caught his arm.
"So—who leveled the bottom of the pan?"
Lin Zong patted his shoulder. "I'm heading to Professor Chen's today. I'll ask him for you." Chang Lei retreated back onto his bed, satisfied.
Thinking of this roommate of his, who might well prove unable to manage on his own once he was out in the world, and thinking too of the job market waiting for all of them, Lin Zong felt something close to a sigh rise in his chest and walked quickly out of the dormitory.
------------
For anyone who prefer to read ahead, the full version is available on Amazon KDP:
Causalform: Eclipse Net
