Dear friends and fiction-addicts, week n. 6 has come and this time I want to challenge you with a story based in a dystopic future. I'm very curious of the results. If you want to align with my writing mood, you may listen to Clément Janequin, Le chant des oiseaux and see it in a futuristic-big brother-fahrenheit 451 fashion (I heard it in a loop, at the end it was too much also for the bananafish inside my brain and I had to counterbalance with some Lez Zeppelin).
Also, if you feel like, I encourage you to create a post in your blog with my part plus yours (instead than a comment).
A contest with a pot of 3 @steembasicincome shares + the SBD payout? You're in the right place!
I write a story, you finish it, you get rewarded. Everyone will get a reward and enjoy each other stories! Not bad right? :-)
A Treble Clef
The tower n. 19 was among the first built as well as one of the highest. The purple shades of the morning had something sacred when it began to embrace its glass walls. The clouds were iridescent drops of cochineal, dipped in a basin of water.
The Chant des oiseaux laps between a cerebral hemisphere and the other of Lucien's head, swaying in a crescendo of pressing voices. The morning light, accomplice of the melodic joint, presses through his indolent eyelids, pulling at the same time the sheets from the foot of the bed.
In the monthly planning, Lucien likes it when he's awakened by Mothergrid with this music. It instantly makes him feeling productive and optimized, plus something else that he can not totally grab.
A sinuous raku porcelain cup emerges from a niche on the granite wall next to the bed. The Wednesday pills slide into a watery bolus through the esophagus, while the hologram ends its daily programming routine. Three point five minutes of preselected Entertainment. This is followed by an 8-minute fitness cycle.
"Good morning Lucien, your circadian rhythm has been optimized during sleep to increase your productivity by 2.75%. Select 1 for performance statistics. Select 2 for the parameters related to the circulatory system. Select 3 to know your hormone levels. Select 4 for last week trend in cortisol secretion.."
Janequin's polyphony mingles nicely with the female voice, while the latter reels off the repetitive rosary of available options.
Lucien smiles seraphic, welcoming the harmonious dressing of the home-daemona that, dancing around him, resembles rites and vestiges of past times.
The integration between man and machine had been a slow but unstoppable process and, for how much ironic it may sound, completely natural. Take an electronic device, make it useful, then indepensable, then vital. Small and powerful amplifier of human faculties. Wonderful extension of the senses, joyous inventor of infinite divination, indomitable improver of the lives of billions of laborious ants.
In the beginning, the devices had passed from hands to clothes, then from clothes to direct contact with the skin. Then, as obvious as it was, from above the skin to under the skin. Down, sinking deeper inside us, to make our lives better in a sparkle of electronic subsidence. To give us optimized and publishable experiences with the maximum of upvotes on the most relevant social media.
A lifetime of guaranteed and constant broadband connection. Many things had taken on a different perspective and value, the world had changed skin very quickly.
The Entertainment was now recognized by the United Nations as one of the first basic human rights.
The search for optimization of work performance and life in general had grown in a directly proportional way to the need for integrated leisure, directly inoculatable in the cortex.
Soon, it seemed to everyone spontaneous to totally rely on apps for obtaining the best performance during all kinds of work, academic training, activities. Everything was done better thanks to an army of automatic pilots, well anchored to the brains of the citizens. Then came Mothergrid and, only then, everything was really perfect.
It is half past seven in the morning. Lucien should have been away from home since five minutes, injected into one of the monorail pods headed to the workplace. Instead, there he is still, in his full anthrax color in front of the door, the man in a bowler hat of a Magritte's painting. Between him and the entrance, on the cold slate of the floor lies a yellow sticky note. What the fuck is doing a post-it there. These things are no longer used since decades.
Lucien can not understand how such an irrational disturbing element may have jeopardized the harmony of his apartment on the top floor of the tower n. 19.
Approaching that yellow spot, bathed in the purple light flickering from the windows, the scribble on the note takes shape before the eyes of the man, who observes him less and less perplexed and increasingly dismayed. A treble clef stands out in the center of the paper and, further down, a strange tangle of signs.
From the mind of Lucien, a memory surfaces just in time before the darkness closes on his field of vision. That scrawl was once called a "signature". His signature.
For those that want to join the fun, here is how this contest works:
1. I write an unfinished fiction story
2. You finish it with a comment in the comment section or your own post
3. YOU WIN! For next round, I will donate at least 3 @steembasicincome shares, all to one or divided between more writers with the most engaging ending + Wednesday's post SBD PAYOUT will be rewarded between all the participants who won't get one of the 3 shares (I'm the unquestionable judge. Well, technically not me.. the bananafish voices within my head are).
It's super simple and most of all we'll enjoy our fiction ideas!
Nothing is mandatory here, but voting is highly appreciated. Just enjoy and prepare for a trip into my delirious fiction world!
What's next?
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