The Introduction familiarizes us with Future Chronicles, Mr. and Mrs. Strickland, their time and their Journey.
The Future Chronicles is a kind of a technotale in which the reality meets fiction, the present meets the future, high technology intertwines with the comfort of a hearthstone, and where human empathy, lives and destinies merge into a single vision.
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Together, we will follow an ordinary American couple — Thomas and Mary Ann Strickland, on their world trip in 2046. They embarked on their journey in September — almost immediately after Mrs. Strickland turned fifty years old (“the equator”, as people used to call it).
By that time, the couple had already changed a lot of jobs, careers and specialties. Thomas Strickland joined the first volunteer organization during his adolescence — as a boy he was helping construction organizations and municipal robots to digitize and to disassemble the remains of the megalopolises of the old. After graduating the special online course, young Mr. Strickland worked to reengineer medium-sized businesses, adapting their processes to the capabilities of available machines and robots. Then he took up the scaling — or the so-called “uberization of everything”.
By that time, a colossal breakthrough in productivity and the flourishing of culture affected every branch of human activity — therefore the country needed intelligent young people with a creative spark.
Some local communities posted new kind of public orders into a special app — the same way their parents and grandparents once used to call a taxi. These new orders sometimes included opening up a new barber shop or a cozy family cafe in a particular town. Some volunteers used to create project proposals that considered the local cultural peculiarities, everyday life and existing facilities, while the others took on construction and repair works, accepted ready-made establishments and provided them with special comfort, unique features, and most importantly — a friendly atmosphere.
Mary Ann Strickland was also a volunteer. Her first job was the as a designer and later on she joined several bands as a vocalist. She also tried the roles of an actress and a hairdresser — Mrs. Strickland especially enjoyed making haircuts with a straight razor.
Real work became the privilege of masters, and the usual haircut quickly turned into a whole spectacle, a show, if not to say “experience”. The work of a master was often recorded, and hairdressers traveled across the country, arranging meetings with subscribers and exchanging “impressions” with other creators.
Mary Ann was thirty-one years old when Strickland’s first boy Jim was born. The young man grew up a patriot and a conservative. Parents managed to instill in him love and respect for work, and also contributed to the forming of a strong willpower. Since his fifteenth birthday Jim enrolled in a volunteer organization and started setting up robots for the elderly and adapting social systems to the cultural code of their owners.
Jim's younger brother, Allen, turned out to be much less sociable — the boy spent his entire childhood playing VR games and communicating with others in various online worlds. At the age of sixteen he volunteered for soil remediation — some geological work still required the participation of humans and did not fully succumb to the wave of robotization.
Angelina was Strickland’s third child — by the time her parents decided to go on a trip, the girl was fifteen years old. She loved electronic music and the so-called New Rock (most bands that appeared in the wake of the cultural dawn of the twenties and thirties).
Girl also joined “The Hands of the Earth” movement. A youth organization protesting against the use of robots and the “materialistic path of development”. The “Hands” program was not fully defined, therefore they were mainly generating dozens of petitions on public platforms on the topic of disabling robots, distributing land plots to people, abolishing basic income and “returning to the origins of American and human culture”.
After she attained the age of fourteen, Angelina, much earlier than her brothers, asked parents for a permission to move to a musical coliving — a small commune for ten girls of her age, equipped with a rehearsal base, a mass of various musical instruments, and her personal little room stuffed with all sorts of studio equipment. Such housing gained popularity at the beginning of century, yet by the year 2046, the popularity of colivings reached its apogee — clustering erased borders and united small groups of like-minded people from all over the world under a single roof.
Children had left the house, and their parents suddenly felt a desperate need for new impressions. After few evenings of intense conversations, Mr. and Mrs. Strickland decided to invite most of their neighbors to Mary’s fiftieth anniversary, arrange a great and a noisy party, and then rent out the house and go on a trip.
The couple decided to start with a flight to San Francisco and visiting a small campsite in Yosemite Park, then venture to the Grand Canyon (Mary, who always preferred social activities over nature, made a terrible face when Thomas offered her such an option, but the couple still included it in their program). The next destination point was Lake Powell, then came Idaho, and, finally, they were going to take a jet flight to Mexico.
Closing the “small circle” in Texas, Mr. and Mrs. Strickland were going to assess their strengths and capabilities before embarking on a real adventure — a drive through Canada and Alaska, followed by a trip to China, a drive through Siberia and the Ural Mountains, then venturing to Europe, the United Kingdom, and then south to Italy, to a small vineyard, recently acquired by Mary’s parents.
Stricklands have not visited grandparents for a long time now — meanwhile, the replacement of an eye and the implantation of a memory chip affected grandfather’s universal basic income severely (his monthly payments were reduced by forty percent — the inevitable price for using high-tech medical technologies).