NFT Name: Girl on JetBike
Creator:
NFTShowroom URL: https://nftshowroom.com/gallery/litguru_the-technologies-of-god_girl-on-jetbike
The cacophony of Athena’s crowded market sounds like a radio quickly flipping from station to station. The smell of incense and herbs wafts through the air like olfactory eddies.
Slightly ahead of me on the fast lane, I see Sarah slow down and begin to turn her jetbike around, so I quickly catch up to her and block her path.
“Where do you think you’re going, missy?” I say, holding on to one of her bike’s fins.
“I’m gonna mess that bitch up!” she says looking after the girl who just bumped into her.
“I already told you, we’re not here to mess anybody up.”
I feel like a big brother talking to my little sister, which raises the question, since when do I get to be the responsible one?
“She called me a land rat!” Sarah says, looking down the lane.
“Come on. The last thing we need is getting flung back to earth. Hana went to a lot of trouble to get us this far. ”
“So, it’s Hana now, is it? I didn’t know the two of you were on a first name basis.”
“Let’s go,” I tell her and glide off down the glowing market corridor. The market lanes stretch in a parabolic arc around one of Athena’s central cylinders. It used to be the heart of the rotational engine that had stopped working decades ago because the ecclectic group of colonizers were incapable of maintaining it operational and would only allow limited maintenance crews to service it. So, the cylinder eventually fell into disrepair, and the artificial gravity disappeared. Now the main mode of transportation through the narrow micro-g spaces is jetbikes. Not easy for two “land rats” like Sarah and me.
A blur of images whiz by as we glide along the lane- psychedelic flags, living pods, tiny shops, massage parlors, dance studios, arcades, clubs, and the whole morass of the sensory industry that has taken root in Athena. Three-dimensional renders float like ghosts in the air, navigation cues, and a whole slew of marketing 3D blocks that pop out of nowhere with promises of sweet bliss.
Young, sleek, and well oiled bodies cruise around in state-of-the-art jetbikes and sporting the latest in wearable gear, unlike us earthling tourists rigged with the old-fashioned hardware. Their eyes are bright and their smiles are healthy. There is no one over 35 years of age. Guaranteed by law.
Do you want to know what happens when you put nearly half a million of Earth’s most spoiled brats in a space habitat?
Athena happens.
Oh, they had all the money in the world to play cosmic house, and an inflated sense of self to match. What they didn’t have was common sense. Music, art, theatre, literature, and enjoyment of all the senses is essential to any colony. Ideals are its soul. At the end of the day, however, someone has to keep the lights on and the oxygen flowing. It’s not going to be wide-eyed idealists. So, it didn’t take long after Athena’s founding for the orbital utopia to degenerate into a Lord-of-the-Flies situation. Had they not been the children of the rich and famous, their experiment in society building would have ended in disaster long ago.
The original colonizers, who actually called themselves expanders, finally allowed maintenance crews to live in the bio-rings on the periphery of the main colony, forming a hive of separate classes in what was original intended to be a ‘classless society’. Later, other colonizers with different ideologies showed up, and what remained of the orbital utopia was a fragmented ringed honeycomb of disparate cultural and counter-cultural sectors with only one libertarian ideal binding them together like scotch tape: mind your business.
This philosophy of looking after your own affairs before getting yourself involved in those of other’s brought it’s own set of troubles, but also its own unique advantages. Athena became a pop-cultural design factory in which personal choice and responsibility were taken to the extremes. New trends and technology emerged from the fusion of multi-disciplinary fields, which although heavily waited towards the humanistic fields, contained pockets of engineering and neuro-scientific wizardry rivaled nowhere on Earth or her colonies.
“How are we supposed to even know what this alchemist looks like?” Sarah says catching up and hovering beside me.
I look up from the nav interface and shrug.
“What are the chances that he even knows our android friends?”
I program a new route through the inner rings. The agricultural spaces should be easier to navigate. I transfer the coordinates to Sarah.
“They say every synthetic drug that is sold here has passed through the Alchemist’s hands,” I say. “You won’t find purer chemicals anywhere else. The K-23 that Tattiana and Enso gave us could only have come from one place: Athena.”
“You seem to know a lot of about K-23,” Sarah says.
“It’s a long story,” I say.
“A long strange trip, huh?”
I give her an enigmatic smile.
We fly through glowing greenhouse rings, and for a moment, it feels like we’re back on Earth’s pastoral fields.
“Strawberries,” Sarah says hovering near a patch. “They look so big and juicy.”
She hovers beside some plants growing wild outside the ring wall and plucks a large red one. She bites into it and her eyes light up.
“Here, have a bite,” she says and floats towards me with the half-eaten strawberry between her fingers. She puts her arm around my waist to stabilize herself, then shoves the strawberry into my mouth. She laughs when the red juices run down the side.
“Mm. Tasty,” I say, wiping my mouth with the back of my glove.
“Maybe we should forget about the androids and just stay here. We can eat strawberries every day.”
The rings of Athena glow in her eyes.
“Is that what Eve told Adam after making him eat the apple?” I ask her. “Come on. We got a date with an alchemist.”
“Race you there!” she says and jets off before I react.
I see her glide erratically down the ringed lane, the breeze blowing through her mane of hair. Shaking my head, I lower my visor, and pressing the N-button on the handle, I give the bike a burst of air and propel myself through ring after ring of glowing strawberry fields.
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Part 1
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Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13
Part 14
Part 15
Part 16