Short: "Today is the Day"

              Today is the day.

              I can hardly keep the skip out of my step as I leave my flat, the lock beeping behind me when I hit my clicker with almost musical nuance. At least, that how it is sounds today. I am not sure why I even bother to lock it. The flat is empty and, after today, not even mine anymore. Today is the day.

              The street, as usual, is shadowed from the traffic flying above and the air is thick and muggy from the rikshaws spewing their hydro-exhaust. Normally, I hate the humidity, even though I have never known a life without it except when I was a kid, before the oil ran out. Not that back then was much better. Humidity may feel gross, but smog tastes worse for sure.

              Ground level is a picture of chaos; the sputtering rickshaws squeal around corners and compete with hundreds of voices speaking dozens of languages. The funny thing is, almost no one is talking to anyone else. Except for the street vendors, that is. They’re always yelling at everyone, selling whatever it is they got their hands on, bursting out with the occasionally recognizable English phrases mixed into languages I can’t follow but have learned to differentiate. Mandarin here, Thai there, varieties of Spanish, and even some Hindi. Then there are the creoles, every mix imaginable. I had looked into studying linguistics at university, but, by the time I went to secondary school, language studies had become an indecipherable mess, an opaque discipline at best. I always wonder what future academics will make of this period of language evolution. Maybe they’ll call it the Post-Terror Language Shift.

              I am brought out of my daydreaming by a street seller yelling in English, “Skinners, skinners, cheap! Safe!” That’s what everyone else is talking on, their skinners. Even down here, skinner tech has become easy enough to duplicate that even we lowly grounders can afford them. I took mine out this morning; today is the day and, where I’m going, I don’t need that anymore. It hadn’t been too bad, taking it out. I hadn’t skimped on mine, so the module came with an easy removal option. I had gone up five levels specifically for that. The ones who got theirs down here, from guys like this vendor, theirs were permanent jobs. And since they use your skin to transfer their electrical signals, the module was the only thing I needed to remove. As I walk, all around me people are talking into their skinners, talking to friends, family, bosses, from all over the world. The ones that aren’t talking are probably listening to someone or streaming some show or something. Thinking about this makes me suddenly feel the quiet in my head. I haven’t been without my skinner in a long time.

              A sound from above draws my attention. A few levels up, at the lower traffic zone, two cars have collided. As I watch, they slowly pull over into an emergency bay where they will be able to get out and assess the damage. No doubt they are already discussing, maybe arguing about, what happened on Facebook with nearchat. Above them, there are a few more layers of traffic, and then the buildings continue up until they disappear in the mirror clouds. I can hear my high school environment teacher: “The mirror clouds were proposed at the 2088 Climate Summit in then-world-power Brazil to try and reverse climate change but were not implemented until 2103.” I wonder what is above them?

              Finally, I reach the sub-lift. I wait with a large group until the lift comes up to ground level. I am surrounded by all types and classes. Some are like me, grounders going to work or to run an errand at one of the insurance or utility levels. Others are overheads or subbers that are either crossing down or were just up to slum it a bit before heading home. I’ve never seen them, but I have heard that the underground housing levels look like Earth used to: green and blue and full of open space. We all pile into the large lift and begin our descent. The lift stops at every level except the highways; there are 10 down, and I am heading to 6. Since I don’t have my skinner, I pass the time looking at the people around me and trying to figure out who does what for work. That one there, wearing the suit and tie and with the cyber running up his neck behind his ear, he’s probably some sort of upper level management. Or maybe he teaches at one of the business colleges, specializing in Informational Economics or something like that. The ones that look tired and worn out are probably varieties of computer jockeys: programmers and content writers and web developers and chat bot managers and the like. Pretty much everybody fits into those basic categories, except for a few that I can’t figure out.

              I, however, am not going to work. Today is the day, and that part of my life is over. Where I am going, I won’t need to work ever again. I’ve worked a long fucking time, staying at Ground Level, when I could have moved up, to save money, and now the day is finally here. Not that it has been bad.

              I get off at the fifth level and hang a right. The hall is wide and tall, and it feels like I am in a building rather than 500 feet below Ground Level. This section is full of offices for private businesses, privately run doctor’s offices and consulting firms and tech stuff. I walk for maybe 5 minutes before I get to the office front I am looking for, a door and a small, unassuming sign that reads “Eidolon Storage.” I walk in.

              “Hello, welcome to Eidolon Storage, where life is made better,” the receptionist greets me mechanically, “I am not reading a skinner on you. Do you have an appointment?”

              “Yes. My name is Jose O’Donne. I made my appointment a few weeks ago.” The receptionist types as I speak, looking off into the middle distance with the drawn in gaze of someone wearing screentacts.

              “Ah, there you are.” She says and looks at me, sees me, again. “Please come on through, Mr. O’Donne.”

              The woman guides me through a door and down a hall way, where she gently knocks on a door that says “Consultation” on it in neatly printed and applied lettering.

              “Come in,” says a voice through a small speaker to the right of the door.

              The woman motions for me to enter. I open the door and walk into a hall, where she leads me to another door that she opens and motions for me to enter. Inside is a room in which a man is sitting at a desk. Holos of varying sizes litter the space above his desk; from behind, I recognize them as promotional and informational material for Eidolon Storage. He is going to try and upsell me. The window in this room shows a pristine beach, waves crashing against a distant breakwater with a deep rumble and shooting spray into the sunlight. It takes me a moment, as I am seated, to remember that we are underground. The man, with a swipe of his hand in the space in front of him, moves the holos aside so that he can face me.

              “Mr. O’Donne, welcome,” the man smiles brightly, “my name is Mr. Smith, and I will be helping you in your transition today. Nothing major, just a few choices to be made before you start your new, and better, life here at Eidolon Storage.”

              What follows are a series of attempts at upselling me thinly veiled as questions confirming the preferences I had already picked in my previous meeting. The main thrust of his attempts center around the data package I have chosen. At this many terabytes, Mr. Smith is kind enough to remind me, I can accumulate 50 or 60 years worth of memories while in storage, assuming I don’t later pay for clean ups to make more room. This is subjective time of course. Out here, in the real world, only a few years will pass before I reach my limit and am terminated. For an extra fee, the data package could be upgraded to Gold or Platinum… also, have I been told about our cryogenic, real-world storage? I could live 50 years in digital and then come back out to the real world to live the rest of my life. Some people, Mr. Smith says, do this in cycles, alternating between decades in storage and a few years in world, living long, wonderful lives this way.

              I don’t tell Mr. Smith that I am from Ground Level, and it is against the law for him to ask about my finances beyond proving that I can pay for what I have already picked. I don’t tell him that I have been saving for years, selling everything I own, just for the chance to live the next 50 subjective years in peace and comfort, away from the world outside. I don’t tell him I don’t have anything more to give him and his company. I just nod and thank him for the information but make it clear that all my decisions still stand. He understands the reasons, I think, and does not make a show of it. I am grateful.

              As he leads me to the prep room, I think of the people he spoke of, the ones who can afford to live hybrid digital and analog lives. I have read about them, the rich and famous, world leaders in government and business. Some have achieved lives hundreds of years long. They say the first person to reach a millennium, combining both timelines of course, is nearly there. They say that, as cryo-technologies improve, people may one day effectively be able to live forever. Some people, that is.

              Soon, I am lying on a cold table with sensors attached to my freshly shaved scalp and all over my naked body. A light above shines brightly in my eyes, backlighting the technicians that fuss over me and the connections. They are speaking, but already their voices are becoming murky as the chemicals are pumped into my blood stream. My mind feels as though it is stretching, becoming clearer with each moment. I set aside thought of others and of what they can afford and I can’t. None of that matters anymore. What matters is that, instead of 60 more years of life in the real world, working myself to death to live as I watch my body slowly decay with age, instead of watching the world around me change in ways I can’t comprehend, instead of living long enough to find myself decrepit and obsolete, a simple cog in a wheel that does not care, in a few minutes I will enter a world of my choosing, a world where I will never have to choose between rent and food, between work and my own free time, a world where I will never age, where I will stay 31 years old until my data package runs out, and I am deleted. It doesn’t matter that it won’t be the real world. It will feel real enough to me. Today is the first day of the rest of my life.

              Today is the day.