Future Diary 1

While moving out, I found a picture of Tiger. It was a picture that my mom took on a digital camera, printed out on a bad color printer, ripped off the page in a tiny square and snail mailed to me. It was taped on my computer case for the years where I was in college and away from him, and it sat on the bottom shelf of a bookcase after he died. Without any help, without anyone with me, I took him to the vet and had him put down on April 21st, 2007. All four of my blood grandparents are still alive, and my three remarried grandparents are as well. I've never known a person well who's died, and I've certainly never been responsible for it. Putting down my cat was the saddest thing I've ever done. I was 23, and he was 20. We spent 18 years together.

In the past few months, I've adopted two more cats, both a year or younger. I will hopefully get over twelve years with each of them, maybe 20, like my Tiger. I will be 43 by then.

I suspect that touch/slide technology will dominate everything--lights and electronics will be panel-controlled, and everything will have an interactive component. We'll be able to vote for things on TV without having to call in, maybe even vote for large-scale things like political elections. Everything will be fingerprint ID-protected but still faster, more convenient.

I hope we have a new form of car by then. I want a more aerodynamic, more sleek design, that doesn't depend so much on specific user function. I still suspect that it will be miserable getting through Tysons, but it would be much nicer if we could guarantee that the traffic lights would function better in a thunderstorm. I think the storms will get worse--in the time that I've been here, the weather has only gotten more extreme in Virginia. We'll start having superstorms, and need to develop better materials to protect us again. Once, we used brick and stone to guard us from nature. I think we'll end up using plexiglass or titanium: something strong, light, reflective, and easily manufactured.

I wonder if America will have been invaded by then. I doubt it.

I think our financial system will be revamped. Because of the more advanced ID system, people will be able to keep track of their taxes and such more readily. Because of the sometimes ineptitude of the current generation, the next one will devalue old people, and social security will undergo serious reforms so that two young people don't shoulder the weight of one AARPer.

I hope I live in a two-story house in a bad neighborhood with a security system that actively punishes criminals on the grounds. The police will be spread thin and demoralized, and the world will be scarier, but third parties will create technology that make it simpler for the private citizen to protect himself.

I think women will be more equal and louder about inequality. However, insurance companies will start covering more childcare, abortions, and birth control medication. As a private organization, I don't think they can help but see that women will need medical attention for that kind of thing, and shouldn't be doing it off the books. Schools will pass out more condoms to fewer complaints.

But when I'm 43 and my kitty dies, I'm still going to fall onto my neo-linoleum floor and cry for a day. I'm going to take her to the vet, who's going to stroke her and pump her full of a different-but-the-same pink fluid. I'm going to watch her fight it, bite me, and then slowly her eyes will just lose their sparkle, their responsiveness. I'm going to be very, very upset, and maybe my android companion will have to drive me home. It won't be fair, but then again, it's never fair.

The future will make our lives easier, I think.

Human Resources 1

It wasn't until after General Motors, Toyota, and AstroTransport/Volkswagon discontinued their wheeled vehicle factories that experts on Wall Street declared that the age of repulsor-based travel had begun. The Department of Transportation gathered manufacturers from around the globe at a roundtable to discuss how a new traffic infrastructure should work. They spoke ambitiously of gravity-repelling highways, of skydrives and mobile hover cities. But the new, wary president of the United States opted instead for a conservative, tax-saving plan, and two years later, the old asphalt roads had been repaved with a smooth, friction-reducing surface that looked like rivers of volcanic glass.

Nike and Adidas responded warmly. In the same fiscal quarter as the wall street announcement, the two athletic giants began a new line of jogging shoes with comfortably friction-sensitive silicone soles. By the time working crews speed-heated the hover-friendly surface material, a new generation of young people, barely weaned off of their organically grown soymilk, had already chosen their globalization-sensitive footwear and were ready to pound the pavement.

Because of new safety regulations and extra sensors built in to detect and accomodate single-occupant vehicles and pedestrians on the road, sidewalks had been mostly abandoned. When his mother demanded to know why he still insisted on walking on that damned cement, Jeremy Hernandez told her that if he was held away from mother Gaia, he would lose his magical strength. She flicked him on the nose. "Screw mother earth. She's a bitch. I'm your only mom."

After a volcanic adolescence and four estranged years while Jeremy went to college on the other side of the country, he returned to D.C. and his mother with an appreciation of the kind of woman he was. At school, he had dated four hawkish, demeaning, and large-breasted women with fabulous hair before he realized that he had a Freudian attraction to women just like Laura Hernandez. They reunited at a D.C. steakhouse (she did not attend his graduation from UCLA), and, breaking a nine year habit, he listened to what she had to say. As a result, he ended up asking for their waitress's phone number; a month earlier, he never would have looked at a girl as slight and shy as Rupal Panneer.