F3: ‘There Is No Lion’
Another short drip-drip-drip of story, following on from The Landsberger Vats. And, yes, there’s still a fair bit more to come.
THERE IS NO LION
In the depths of the structure, darkness reigns. The air hangs heavy with perfumed solvents and anti-bacterial agents; a wall against the tide of microbial invaders. Stumbling through the door, I drop to my knees, gulping down a lungful of fumes. Extending a hand for support, my palm clings to a floor of moist linoleum. A corridor of halogen pulls my gaze right, towards the lobby proper; the harsh orange standing stark against the gloom. To the left, a bank of terminals and, yes, more biometrics.
Struggling against the polished plastic to stand, I carefully jog over to the terminals. Running an index finger down the main panel, the screens flicker into life – projecting an arc of colourful graphs and schematics onto the dull black wall. Struggling to push aside the noisy and useless with my outstretched hand, I search for the suite. But I’m sweaty and trembling, and the terminal ignores my gestures as sign language through a fish tank.
Realising the futility of my flailing, I give up. My irises are on the system, and – shit – my alibi is watertight, but my body is in revolt. My mouth is a featureless desert, and I’m swallowing dust. Then, echoing down the corridor’s plastic veneers, the thud of approaching footsteps. I’m not getting any feedback from my lower extremities; casualties of hypertension. Now is hardly the time for pre-fight nerves, but something in the mammalian recesses of my consciousness remains convinced that – providing I avoid any sudden movement – the lion won’t see me.
There is no lion. The footsteps are those of a broad-shouldered man in epaulettes and doc martens; a man whose eyes harden as they alight on my frozen form. Now he’s yelling; his red face the conduit for a torrent of angry German. I don’t have time for this. Searching for a solution, my mind flits back to the broken heart of a thwarted victory; back to the ugly plastic mats and vapid smiles of London. Uncorked, a flood of years-old anger pulses through my muscles, springing me from my paralysis. Through a dark fog, I watch distantly, as my right leg traces a gentle arc through the air. Meeting upper chest, my toes buckle within a battered converse sneaker. As the warm sting of pain spreads up through my foot, I wince, tumbling past the guard and down the corridor.
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
Superstructing
Last month, the California-based Institute for the Future annouced Superstruct, the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. Here’s the (in game) press release;
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SEPTEMBER 22, 2019
Humans have 23 years to go
Global Extinction Awareness System starts the countdown for Homo sapiens.PALO ALTO, CA — Based on the results of a year-long supercomputer simulation, the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has reset the “survival horizon” for Homo sapiens – the human race – from “indefinite” to 23 years.
“The survival horizon identifies the point in time after which a threatened population is expected to experience a catastrophic collapse,” GEAS president Audrey Chen said. “It is the point from which a species is unlikely to recover. By identifying a survival horizon of 2042, GEAS has given human civilization a definite deadline for making substantive changes to planet and practices.”
According to Chen, the latest GEAS simulation harnessed over 70 petabytes of environmental, economic, and demographic data, and was cross-validated by ten different probabilistic models. The GEAS models revealed a potentially terminal combination of five so-called “super-threats”, which represent a collision of environmental, economic, and social risks. “Each super-threat on its own poses a serious challenge to the world’s adaptive capacity,” said GEAS research director Hernandez Garcia. “Acting together, the five super-threats may irreversibly overwhelm our species’ ability to survive.”Garcia said, “Previous GEAS simulations with significantly less data and cross-validation correctly forecasted the most surprising species collapses of the past decade: Sciurus carolinenis and Sciurus vulgaris, for example, and Anatidae chen. So we have very good reason to believe that these simulation results, while shocking, do accurately represent the rapidly growing threats to the viability of the human species.”
GEAS notified the United Nations prior to making a public announcement. The spokesperson for United Nations Secretary General Vaira Vike-Freiberga released the following statement: “We are grateful for GEAS’ work, and we treat their latest forecast with seriousness and profound gravity.”
GEAS urges concerned citizens, families, corporations, institutions, and governments to talk to each other and begin making plans to deal with the super-threats.
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Superstruct! Play the game, invent the future.
