Unreversible. Emil Akhundov
the fact that we could be given any amount of coins, but we received very little of them. The corporations were ruled by finance, and the heads of these companies knew this distribution of wealth and weren’t going to give it up, there was simply no other alternative that everyone could accept.
No one doubted that the list of gold companies had completely sprung up in the new generation of cities, once they had been built. The price of real estate in these cities was exorbitant – the average person had to not eat, not drink, and completely set aside all his income for about four hundred years to buy the cheapest apartment, unless it went up in price during that time. I fortunately had the means to move to a new city, and I saw what happened next with my own eyes. Some people, through talent and experience, can anticipate future events and use them to their advantage. I was not such a person, but I was saved by both chance and a lack of wastefulness.
It turned out that the head of Green City Rocha was talented enough to exploit the current state of affairs for his own self-serving ideals. As soon as the robot began to smoke the earth and the air, Vlad Taleco understood where this would lead, and impatiently awaited the change of power and the fall of the current world order. He knew very well that merchants, unlike politicians, had no such fear of power, and as soon as they were all in the cities under his control, they became his hostages. Some resisted him and were brutally murdered, and some simply agreed to give him power, but somehow, Vlad Taleko in one day subjugated the whole world and called himself Emperor Clement the First. It was from that moment and stopped all attempts to somehow make a life for all those who could not afford to live in the cities, which were named “Eden”. Their lives were reduced to one simple choice: to die here in the dirt and soot or to live under the pure sun, but to give up all the best human qualities.
3
Vlad Toleko was able to intelligently plan everything and become the sole ruler of the entire planet. No one could get to him, no one could challenge him. If the corporations somehow helped the poor, he did not care about those people who could not afford to pay for life in Eden. He even stopped supporting projects that had been successfully implemented by the previous government. Moreover, he imposed such a financial burden on private corporations that there was no way they could help the people who needed it. Now, they had only one chance to exist normally – to work in the Eden, doing the dirtiest work for which it was a pity to use robots.
Most were less fortunate – they could buy shares in companies for koins, and thereby provide a comfortable life for their grandchildren, if they had children at all. They could provide private services or streaming services in order to get financial support from other users. Some of them were good at it, while the rest had only to indulge in dejection or banditry – the world had become a perverse version of the capitalist’s dream: goods produced and sold themselves, while it was possible to provide any additional services without taxes. The market was living on its own, and in the absence of a regulator, this could not end well. Now several thousand criminal syndicates were organized in this world, which could steal income from the already poor people with impunity, and if the bandits were caught by the security service, which everyone called “guards”, they were simply killed right there, so as not to waste time.
This is how robots reduced absolutely everyone in a few years, from ordinary workers to internationally respected managers. The ironic thing is that ordinary workers were being laid off by efficient managers who had no idea that they too would soon be replaced by robots, and the workers, in turn, tried to warn everyone else that this would happen because they had already had a lot of grief from mass automation. But no one would listen to them, either out of pride or unwillingness to change anything, but it didn’t matter. This led to the most amazing phenomenon: total class equality for the vast majority of people, who were equally dissatisfied with it.
So every few weeks a new revolution broke out somewhere and was mercilessly strangled by the authorities. This was handled by Ido Brims, security advisor to the new government. A former intelligence general who knew neither mercy nor compassion. If he suspected that anyone was even thinking of overthrowing the new emperor, that person disappeared without a trace. Perhaps it was only because of him and his “guards” that none of the uprisings ended well for their participants.
That is how we ended up in a world where black ash fell from the sky every day instead of snow, where there were no birds, caterpillars, or wild animals, not even stray dogs. The rich could only work for the sake of work, and many tried to just survive somehow, and some were just resigned to it. If some realized that they could not survive, there was only one thing left for them: utilitarian oblivion. They just watched black snow fall from the sky, people fighting over oxygen tanks, and waited for who knows what. They often collected postcards that were free and were nostalgic for the days when they could see a living tree or hear birds sing. They would just look out the dirty windows at the smoky city and disappear into the world of their memories.
Most likely, had it not been for a series of fortunate events, I too would have met the fate of the latter, but as fate would have it, I had a chance to try to fix at least something. Too bad I started too late, though, after many years of happy life in Eden.
4
June 18, 2038
My morning, like any morning in the last ten years, was beautiful. I didn’t have to rush anywhere, the sun was gently warming the ground, and the aroma of my wife’s cinnamon tea spread throughout the house.
For almost 50 years now, she’s been getting up before me, and every morning she makes a new and delicious tea – she just has this hobby of making the magical drink in different flavors. I was always amazed at how many recipes there are for making tea. I do not remember my wife repeating herself, though she had a cherished notebook somewhere, where she recorded the recipes she made and how good the resulting tea was. Marina, was a wonderful wife and a wonderful woman in every way.
To our daughters, Diana and Milana, she instilled a love of home, comfort, beauty – everything that would make them even more beautiful wives than Marina, and I myself envied their future suitors. I must say that they were clever, and like all the young people of Eden, they never worked, and they didn’t need to. When they were young, I couldn’t provide for them, so they had to make do with what they had. But when they were adults, I was able to buy them everything and more. That’s the way it worked for us. And that was the worst horror of my life. If anything happened to me, they would literally be thrown against the world, and the laws were getting stricter by the day, so I had to devote my life to providing for them today and making their future as serene as it is now. I have been lucky enough to have succeeded in many things.
We had everything: a four-bedroom house in St. Petersburg Eden, fully paid social security dues for a hundred years ahead, and a bank account for more than eleven million, which received forty-seven thousand koins in interest each month. At five thousand per person, we were living on our own, and I spent the rest of the money buying new stocks, gradually increasing our passive income. I would like to say that our life was boring, and I enjoyed boring myself for more money.
I lazily got out of bed and went to take a shower. I liked living here, but I realized with dread that I was getting more and more bored with it. That fact alone didn’t scare me, it was the consequences of my actions that scared me. I knew I could move to another Eden-type city, but my family and I had been to all of them, and we didn’t like any of them, and there was nowhere else to live with the same level of comfort-there were no other settlements of this type, and there were not even plans to build them. And living outside of Eden was suicidal-the average life expectancy there had already fallen to less than forty years because of the terrible environment and the level of criminal activity.
I spent all the time in the shower in nostalgic memories of the life that was in the Soviet Union, where everyone