future

Exploring the future of science today, while looking back on the achievements from yesterday. Science fiction is science future.

Collective Failure
Few people noticed when the shortages started. It was a slow process and we were all tired out from the pandemic. Food portions decreased while prices went up. Labor shortages caused domino effects in supplies of fuel and raw materials. Before we knew it our lives were different. Designated days at the grocery store lottery soon gave way to mass panic and looting. Gas pumps began to dry up and communications networks went down one by one.
By Michael Paddock5 years ago in Futurism
The Soul Generator
I wake up in a cold sweat, the touch of your icy skin hurts my hands. ‘Why are you so cold?’ I ask, your blue eyes look up at me as your body disintegrates like embers on a burning fire. I’m not awake, and neither are you.
By Lucille Hamilton5 years ago in Futurism
Killer Clouds
At first, it reminded me of looking at the clouds through an airplane window. Their clouds—the “killer clouds”—sat like oversized trees on the world’s most famous lawn, towering over even the skyscrapers that still stood in New York City.
By Hunter Bates5 years ago in Futurism
The Collapse
I never dreamt of opening it. I’ve worn this heart for seventeen years, without troubling the secret shut inside it. “Open it alone,” mama said “and only when there’s absolutely no way out. You’ll know when it’s time.” The locket had belonged to my grandmother — your great-grandmother — and once would have held portraits of treasured loved ones ensconced in its tiny golden folds. Perhaps it still does. It was our last meeting, our last embrace before they took her. Mama clasped the chain around my neck and held me tight, whispering “Keep it on and keep fighting til the end. I’m always with you”. I wish that were true. I’ve yearned for mama’s calm wisdom every day of these seventeen years. Then I was separated from you, my darling, and I thought I would die of the heart ache. It’s amazing what the human heart can bear. The past eight years without you have been gruelling, torturous at times. The hope that you have survived, that we will find each other again, has kept me alive, more than anything, more than water … until now. Now I think — I know — it’s time. I’m finally going to find out what gives this little locket such surprising weight.
By Zelda5 years ago in Futurism
A Locket Full of Surprises
There is always a reason to kill someone and always a reason someone wants you dead. Today someone will be dead, and it won’t be me. It will be a bunch of people and the world will be better off. So now I play my role, to lure the bees to the flower. I have to play the role of the sitting duck, so I must sit in a cold auditorium and watch my dad get an award. It’s cold today. It is always cold during awards ceremonies, colder when it is not you getting the award. But I have to be here, it’s a dying man’s request. I can’t believe that anyone would hold anything anywhere close to Chicago in the dead of winter. The weather is the least of my concerns, I got shot the last time I was outside of Virginia and any random idiot could get a twofer today. I am going to stop doing things for the sake of nostalgia or out of some misplaced debt that I think that I may owe to someone. I am on a stage with my father as he gets some sort of Lifetime Achievement Award for being the president who collapsed the world. Maybe that is not entirely true. He didn’t collapse the world by himself, but he did drop the bombs that started the process.
By Thomas Scurlock 5 years ago in Futurism
The Cœur Locket®
Powerful. Timeless. Breathtaking. TerraCorp’s latest line of jewelry also became its last. Forged from metals found deep in the heart of the Earth; plated with the organization’s newest blend of trade-secret Zemra™ alloys; with a ‘heart-within-a-heart’ core made of revolutionary blue Sydänite. The Cœur Locket®.
By Zach Campbell5 years ago in Futurism
Cryptofomo
She pressed her heart into my hand. It was all that was left of value. The bellhops were buying but no-one seemed to be selling. Everyone recognised the bubble forming but Cryptofomo had not only taken hold but was spreading at what should have been an alarming rate. Of course there were naysayers, but every time the market made their predicted correction it would just as quickly bounce back with interest. People may not have understood exactly what it was they were buying, but they certainly understood that they couldn’t get enough of it. Demand for cryptocurrency continued to outstrip supply. Cash would soon be confetti.
By Stephen Wyatt5 years ago in Futurism
The News
It was one of those waiting rooms where the air conditioner blasted as cold as the shrinking Antarctic, a TV played a sports game, and magazines eagerly announced which of the latest celebrities had gotten married or divorced or remarried. In other words, it was perfect for how I looked on the outside: a young, blonde, white woman, wearing high heels and dangly earrings, the image of a stereotypical businesswoman. It also meant that on the inside, I hated it.
By Clara Beth Lee5 years ago in Futurism
Rosie
Pain shot through me as consciousness returned. I tried to get up, a crackle of pain shooting up my spine. A twinge of relief, overshadowed quickly by panic, coursed through me. I needed to be quick. Rosie would know I survived. My luck may have been keen enough to land me on a grimy roof rather than the hood of a car or the spire of a church, but the residents of the Antioch Slum were more than used to the tendency of their upper neighbors to toss their toys when the rich bastards were done playing with them, and knew better than to investigate.
By Ryan Worman5 years ago in Futurism
Letter To Tess
I always listened closely to my mother. I had to sometimes interpret between the lines. I had to know what she wanted to say, but didn’t. I had to read the darkness in her eyes, notice the slight gleam when she talked about my father. I had to see the slight remnant of terror when she talked about ‘the flare’. I had to hear the tinge of regret for not seeing nor appreciating everything she once had, and not acknowledging what she actually had to lose. Life, as she explained to me, was like a utopia, but she didn’t notice then.
By Lisa LaBarr5 years ago in Futurism
The Farm
The smell, Ansel blindly supposed to himself, was always the thing he dreaded most. The thought slipped listlessly in and out, as the twinge of guilt he always felt at such times nagged at him gently. Ansel was earnestly, if not a little gravely, aware of his good fortune. Most of his brother’s and sister’s chores on the farm were a great deal more grim; and that was putting it lightly, he thought glumly. Nonetheless, his job was quite simple, and not entirely unpleasant if he was being completely honest. He was in charge of swatting down the cobwebs from the simple wooden slatted rafters that covered the porch that surrounded a little less than half of the cattle pen. Then he was to wash the windows that did completely surround the slaughterhouse.
By Sara Garrett5 years ago in Futurism
The Unnamed Wanderer
He whistled as he walked, every left step accompanied by the soft thud of a walking stick held in his opposite hand, or was a bow, yes, a bow. He held an unstrung bow, standing at least a head taller than he was. The pleasant tune he whistled echoed off the toppled brick building to his right, and the standing concrete building's columns to his left. What once was grey concrete was now covered with dirt and grime so intensely it produced a faded yellow with green at the base where the building touched the brick walkway. Moss stretched its way along a deep crack toward the roof of the structure. The path was lined with concrete boxes covered in stone veneer, which at one point, held flowers and not grayish soil and dead trees. What used to be a beautiful pedestrian walking mall was now littered with loose bricks from the collapsed building, piles of trash, and small animals like the rabbit running past his path now.
By Walker Powell5 years ago in Futurism