Future Histories – a short story

While sorting through my oh-too-many pdfs with the brilliant Yep, I came across the following story I wrote about a year ago, imagining a realistic dystopian future. Comments are welcome!

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“To your right. No, your other right.”

Folks, we’ve all been there. We give a simple direction to a friend or futurefriend, only to see them turn in the opposite direction! In the Dark Days, you will remember from the History Before the Bright Smile module, such an encounter would have led to frustration boiling over into physical violence. People didn’t smile enough in the Dark Days; they would hurt each other instead! But we know that cannot happen now, so we don’t need to talk about it, do we? Let’s get rid of those nasty thoughts: smile!

But some things never change, unless we help them along, so just how often do such encounters actually occur? How often do otherwise intelligent and law-smiling citizens of Great Brightain make such an elementary error? No-one is yet suggesting that these mistakes are evidence of the mental delinquency which takes so many forms and which we
have worked hard together to Smile Away, but quantifying this phenomenon may help us be on the guard against the future.

Gathering such data in the Dark Days would have been nearly impossible, despite the then increasing use of rudimentary SmileCams. In those frowny days, SmileCams were cryptically referred to as CCTV and were only thinly spread amongst the population. Imagine, even right before the Bright Smile, Dark Days Dwellers still just outnumbered SmileCams, and there were several hours every day when people were painfully separated from the safety of being Smiled Upon. Folks, this is scary stuff and I apologise for talking to you about it during your SmileSachet time, but come on: eat up, and together let’s smile those fears away!

Let’s smile on some data points together. Here’s a great example from the smiling community of Little Grinning. Of course, we can never give away personal details of SmileSiblings on the SmileNet, so let’s just say that our subject is a 32 year old blonde male, married, no children, and living on the west side of Brightness Road, close to the corner. Smiling Sibling A, or SSA, as we shall call him, was SmiledUpon last week as he enjoyed some intimate SmileTime with his wife. Let’s play the recorded data now. We start with SSA’s wife murmuring her encouragement.

“A little to the right.”

At this point, we overlay the data from the seven SmileCams in the room, some of which employed their infrared, X-ray, and ultrasonic functions to really penetrate to the nub of the issue. Slowing the data stream down, we can zoom in and continue:

“Ow! No, your other right.”

Nasty! Motion-tracking softAware, our artificially intelligent but genuinely smiling software, easily saw that coming, but SeniorSmileSiblings would never intervene directly. We just SmileUpon, as you know! Smile! Sadly, SSA’s worrying mistake led to a loss of smiles all round, as these blood-flow diagrams show. This is one tragic tale of smileless mental delinquency, but how common is this dangerous error in the population at large?

We have collected the names and addresses of all citizens who have displayed this hideous delinquent behaviour over the past six months. Folks, we were so surprised we almost let our smiles slip! Haha, no, of course we’re not confessing to such delinquency as not smiling on data happily gathered by our SeniorSmileSibling colleagues, but the results were shocking, folks, no doubt about it.

Fully one fifth of you have committed this appalling show of insubordination to our SmileSir and his glorious Smile in the past six months alone! Folks, please remain calm and smile. Come on, put some effort into it! We’re SmileUponing you right now, so make sure those blood-flow and muscle-monitoring data streams convince your SmileFlat’s softAware that you mean it! That’s the stuff!

This disgusting and base affront to SmileSiblings everywhere will be removed without trace from our SmileSociety. We reserve the right to impose the greatest punishment on those who infringe our national dignity so: we will strike hard, fast, and wipe the smile off their faces!

If you are still receiving this transmission, you have been identified as a Smileless Mental Delinquent, charged, tried, and convicted of the crime outlined above. It is now 1830 hours and so you have just finished ingesting your daily SmileSachet. Although it arrived in the usual way at the usual time, and although you sat in your usual SmileSeat before this SmileScreen, the SmileSachet was laced with sedative. There is no way to run or fight: your SmileSeat has already numbed your thighs, buttocks and back, and woven your skin to itself with carbon nanothread. You will wake in the morning far from your friends, far from your SmileFlat, far from every smile you have ever seen, and in this Smileless place of pain, you will never smile again.