Someone else might have gotten it wrong.

K is best

-“It’s been a good ride.”

-“…the best.”

From Mass Effect 3, Citadel DLC Ending.

Resurrect Trilobites and give them lungs and sell as pets, then we can talk.

Explanation?

Back like four years ago when I was at uni, I wrote a real cringy sci-fi short story set in a future where political dissent had been neutered almost completely by a total subversion of language via commodification.

Essentially everything and anything was a brand, “anarchy” was a brand of shoe, even “terror” was a pack of potato chips, and “terrorists” were stans of that pack of potato chips, making it impossible to even talk about any kind of rebellion or alternative thought, and bots would perpetuate these alternative definitions, making it seem like they were more common, sort of like how if you own 51% of some primitive blockchains you can manufacture transactions.

Sufficed to say I’m glad it’s not true, but it’s worrying how consensus reality has collapsed and is now shaped by the few rich and powerful interests, not too dissimilar from what I imagined as a fun hobby creative exercise in imagining the most soulcrushing world imaginable.

It was also just a prologue to a story that featured ‘carbon capture gone wrong’ turning the world into a Sahara-esque desert, through which caravans of brave desert travellers delivered scarce goods between human settlements, assisted by navigators who sit in office buildings and make sure the caravans don’t get lost in the constant sandstorms. Then there was a conspiracy by the main love interest, a Fallout-esque cartoonish A.I. and the navigators’ boss who liked to LARP as a pre-collapse middle manager, they’d drug the navigator crew to keep the protagonist from finding out the shock twist that the travellers are slaves, amongst other things like the fact the rich all left in space rockets, are in contact with earth, live in relative luxury and that there are still functioning rockets on earth.

Also at various stages of conception it had time travel, alt-history and of course - the space shuttle, because autism.