THE SCORCHING SUN beat down mercilessly on Newer York from the perpetually coloured iron-grey sky. Usually a thick blanket of smog covered the city, but today was a Perfect sunny day. Perfect with a capital "P".
Perfect: A state of being or doing that is exactly as nature intends for humans to be or do for the optimal chances of their survival (according to and endorsed by the Human Emphasis Police).
When things on the Earth were not Perfect the Human Emphasis Police (usually referred to in its abbreviated form, HEP) would deem them unPerfect. This strange use of language meant that in the Perfect Age the imperfect could be Perfect and the perfect, unPerfect. Such was the effect of the Perfect indoctrination of the HEP.
This seemingly contradictory statement of affairs could not be better emphasised than by the way the HEP indoctrinated the citizens of the Earth to think of their perpetually coloured iron-grey sky. It was a layer of chemicals created by the robots during the Robot War that gave the sky its worldwide perpetual iron-grey hue. HEP scientists found it impossible to eradicate the chemicals from the atmosphere. Whenever they managed to suck up a sizeable amount of the chemicals, the chemicals reappeared hours later as if by magic. The mechanism fuelling and maintaining the chemicals was a mystery, but since the iron-grey layer acted as extra protection against the sun's harmful radiation, the HEP deemed it a case of Perfect unPerfectness, though some believe that they had no option but to deem it so. Furthermore, the HEP labelled this layer the "Worldwide Veil of Protection".
In Newer York, a particular huge drab grey building shaped like a giant shoebox stood up boldly against the scorching sun. Inside this building, the factory floor of Newer York's Synthetic Foods Processing Factory was a visual symphony of business and order. There were no windows, but the lighting inside was as natural looking as a rare sunny smog-free day, such as the city was currently experiencing.
For such a vast amount of activity, the factory was a surprisingly quiet environment. Noise pollution was not an option in the year 1724 PP (Post Perfect) of the Perfect Age (3997 AD, Gregorian calendar). The factory's Noise Control officers would deal with the cause of any errant noise severely. Like everywhere else in the world, the Synthetic Foods Processing Factory was a place living up to the ideal of the Perfect Age.
Neat rows of products hurtled along silica-carbon conveyor belts in a quiet swish. Noise-proof machines carried out most of the food processing operations with nothing more than a pleasant hum. Even the forklift trucks, powered by their pocket-sized nuclear reactors, made little more noise than a team of heavy breathers, and the skill of their drivers in handling heavily laden aluminium pallets was something of a master class in the art of the silent operations of heavy goods manipulation. Workers and machines cooperated with clockwork precision in a dance of faultless harmony. Such was the synchronicity that the workers seemed as if they were machines themselves. However, if there was one faulty cog in the machine that was the Perfect Age, it was one particular worker cooperating in that very dance—27-year-old James Riley.
Riley was a Quality Assurance operative, and in a quiet corner of the factory he was performing yet another "needless" Quality Assurance test on a sample of Proteinium 45. In all his four years at the factory, Riley had never known of a sample to fail a Quality Assurance test undertaken by either himself or any other Quality Assurance operatives either here or in any of the other food processing factories in the other 99 cities spread across the globe.
Proteinium 45 was a mainly protein packed fist-sized ball of food with a taste that in days long lost would be reminiscent of cherry and which is still described as cherry flavoured (though not many inhabitants would know what the extinct cherry was). Food engineers created all the food of the Perfect Age from a combination of chemicals, sea-creatures and seaweeds. Because the world population was so low, just over half a million, there was no shortage of food ingredients. And there was no competition for food because there were no longer any land animals known to live on the planet's surface, except for a breed of grey insects, which varied from a microscopic size to the size of a small housefly. The HEP deemed these insects as Perfect animals as they acted as cleaning agents both inside and outside the home. All in all, it was a Perfect situation.
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Last Robot
Science FictionThis is a novel pushing the limits of psychological attack. One might call it an extreme form of gas lighting. Meet the ever-changing future of humanity. The reader is kept guessing for the majority of the novel as to what the reality of the situati...
