You can respond however you like - poetry, a short blurb/story, or just go on a tangent in a post.
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
Liked that glimpse of your Banks inspired future. The only things I would like to argue about in it is the conception of isolated, alienated living and individuality. There are good reasons to believe we don't really want to live as we do now - alone - and without others on "our houses" with "our cars".
A future that is as you describe might have sprinkles of individual sleeping units but surely also collective and more communal spaces.
It was a burning day in January, like they all were these days. Emerging from my tent (a shelter sized for two, though I didn't share mine with anyone else) I groaned and adjusted my wide-brimmed work hat, thinking of the centrally-cooled public apartment I had left to travel to the Great California Desert. Thousands of us had come, living in a colony of temporary life that was slowly crossing the state so that we could be close to our work.
After visiting the nonsegregated public showers and sharing small talk with my fellow late risers, I dropped my previous days' clothes in the laundry bin, and dressed for another grueling day in the sun. Lightweight fabrics, long sleeves and pants - a wide-brimmed hat and a pair of sunglasses (which bore the logo of a company that had existed before the revolution). It was tiring work to be sure, but everyone here was free to come and go as they pleased, and to work at their own pace, so many workdays were broken up by impromptu sports and long conversations.
The collective canteen was my only refuge from the dry heat, as it was a more permanent structure built to service the workers and thus had air conditioning. There were two lines to get your food, one with a revolving schedule and one which served the same staples every day. Old comrades like me often complained about the plant-based faux-meat not tasting quite like the real thing, but the truth is that this was only bluster - we had all been vegan long enough at this point to have forgotten what animal products actually tasted like, and in many places even the faux-burgers and hot dogs were being phased out because demand was simply too low to warrant them.
After "mobbing up" with some of my closest friends, we grabbed tools from a converted old military truck, and headed out to the current edge of the job site. We would work within earshot of each other, in order to carry on conversation (mostly complaining about the heat) as we churned the hard dirt, mixed healthy soil into it, and planted a combination of plants that grew both fast and slow. There were mangers on the site - technically elected but in practice almost always just the oldest person - but it was hard to waste your effort at this stage of the project. All of the dirt that the eye could see needed to be soiled, so we simply picked a direction and got started.
It was hard for me to see from my position so close to it, but the "Carbon Recapture and Desertification Reversal" project was already showing promising results in the northern part of the Californian Socialist Republic. Animal populations were growing, wildfires were decreasing year over year, some land thought lost forever had once again become tenable for farming - but I know that it's all too easy to get complacent.
The way I see it, it took us a few hundred years to get here, so it's only natural for it to take a few hundred years to clean up. I remember my last days before I joined the revolution, working at a private space company which had designs of building a space colony. I was a true believer in colonization, that I would get to be among the thousands that fled this world for another - but in hindsight that dream was the coping mechanism of a society that saw its own doom coming.
Now, in the post-society, the dream has been broken, and reality stretches before us. Some among The Party itself still cling to the hope of seeing final stage, fully automated, post-State communism in their lifetime - but most, like me, recognize that that society won't exist until we create the material conditions for it to come into being. Almost five years I've been out here changing material conditions - less Decembers which I spend back home with my family - and we've still got a long-ass way to go.
We're in fuckin 1320 motherfucker
You are a serf. Bitch, you live in Alsace. You are a peasant. You need to give your fuckin' lord the grain. Your fucking children, you've had 15 children. You've never taken a bath. You've literally never. washed. your. penis. You've never used toilet paper. Motherfucker, you have worms. You are dying. You've had 40 children, 3 of them are alive. 2 of them are child soldiers in the Duke's army.
Bitch, the greatest thing you can hope for is to die at the old age of 36. You fucking can't read. You don't know what TV is. If you were transported into today, you would be the worst gamer of all time. You don't know shit. You literally probably don't even know what the direction 'left' is. I'm sure some Medieval guy is gonna get mad at me for this, bitch I've been to the Renaissance Fair. I've eaten a large turkey wing, which the Juggalos call 'bitch beaters', which I think is problematic but a funny thing to call them.
Motherfucker, you gotta recognize where you are, and then you gotta get passed that. You gotta be unemotional. You can't sink into this hole. You live in the oubliette. Your job is to crawl up the ladder, motherfucker. You live in the HOLE. You're in the HOLE. You are a RAT. And the rat, when he's in the hole gets fucked. People only throw trash in the hole.
You need to eat a body. And you need to carry the plague. And you need to carry a plague around this whole world, that will change this whole fuckin world. And all your enemies will vomit black bile and will choke on blood and will grow boils and die. But only if you get together with your other RATS. And you come up with some kind of super plague, to fuckin end your enemies and...
End. This. Nightmare.
P.s. nobody said it has to be set in the future.
Dear diary, I came incredibly fucking hard all day long, and in fact I am still coming as I write this.
I skin my knuckles turning a bolt
I ignore the blood, I need to finish
The pain didn't last anyway
But now the bike turns over
vroom vroom, look at those trees
>Wake up with the sunrise
>Stretch and get out of bed
>Make a note to put the spare bed in my room into storage. It's a little cramped, and I don't know why my bedroom has an extra bed to begin with
>Go downstairs, have breakfast
>It's the most delicious, ripest fruit hybrids you can imagine, it's the perfect time of the year for them. also have some eggs and dandelion greens.
>Parents absent mindedly laid out an extra plate. how silly of them
>Go to school
>We spend the day in stimulating study and exercise, refining our talents and getting our group project ready for next week.
> for some reason our work-group only has 4 people while everyone else has 5. meeting the deadline is going to be tough
> spend the time afterschool playing with my polycule and throwing mud at some rat-people across the river.
> head home late at night, tired but happy.
> Feel like something has been following me
>Get killed by giant cats
We slept. We ate. We ran. We played. We tickled. We laughed. We hugged. We did not worry.
