Twenty-four Hour Short Story - Daisy Bell, the Eternal Song

A Google business programmer, Rip van Winkle, is somewhat tired, he still has an hour left before returning to his work, so he throws himself on the sofa, he sets the alarm on his phone to wake him up in half an hour. Then Rip wakes up hearing a song:

It is the song Daisy Bell that Rip has as an alarm on his cell phone and that his old grandmother used to sing him as a child. He gets up from the sofa, then adjusts his tie and puts on his jacket to go out to work; but when he opens the door of the house he is surprised, "what the hell is all of this?," Rip says when he looks around him. What Rip has in front of his eyes is a vast desolation, his house is in the middle of a desert. The anguished young man walks a few steps and looks around, in the sky appears a ship just above him, then, two men came down from it, flying with special thrusters, they took the frightened young man and put him on the ship, after that, they locked him up.

"Who are you?" One of the men asks. "Why do you live in the forbidden zone?"

Rip is so scared he can not talk, he is then taken to a city that is inside a colossal glass dome. In a special room Rip is sitting in front of a machine that asks a series of questions, then a green light makes a scan of his brain, the machine diagnosed him as a mentally ill patient who has been left in the desert by rebel groups. Rip is taken to a cell where he is attended by several people who feed him and ask him questions every day, after a month Rip is convinced that he is not dreaming and if he wants to survive and not go crazy he must accept what is happening to him.

The young programmer is in a world where everything is technified, cars travel through the city autonomously and telecommunications are done through three-dimensional holograms that are displayed in front of people by special contact lenses. Laptops and cell phones do not they exist, everything is done by means of this holographic system that stores data in a nanochips that everyone has incorporated in their bodies, the source of all the energy comes from the sun and the wind. Rip has realized that he is in his own world but one hundred years in the future.

In this future world there are no countries, the whole world is governed by something known as the Universal State (US), here there are different hierarchies or classes of people: type 1 that are the elite that runs the US, type 2 that are the majority called the citizens of the United States, type 3 that belong to the police intelligence, type 4 that are the labor force and a last group, called simply the rebels who live in the mountains and deserts of the planet and who are against of the political and economic system of the US.

The police authorities in the city are convinced that Rip is not dangerous, they insert a nanochip and classify him as a type 4 person, so they send him to a work factory called SpaceX, there they build spacecraft to travel to the Moon and the planet Mars that have been colonized by this new generation of humans.

People classified as type 4 work together with robots in the manufacture of all equipment, appliances, machines and homes in the US, on the other hand, US type 2 citizens have a monotonous job, which consists of entering information on a base of giant data, all of that information was used to manufacture robots that were more and more efficient and intelligent, to such an extent that people did not do anything related to thought or knowledge, in the US there were no colleges or universities. The engineers, scientists, doctors and lawyers had disappeared, all the scientific and technological advance was made by artificial intelligence and quantum computers.

One day Rip worked as always in the factory and a co-worker named Paul began to sing:

Immediately he was interrupted by Rip who took him by the arm and asked: "Why do you know that song? Where did you hear it?", "nowhere," said his frightened companion, then left the place as if fleeing from Rip. Every day the young programmer tried to find an answer to how and why he had awakened in the future, and when he heard that song and the reaction of his partner, he thought that there was some relation to what he had experienced.

After so much effort Rip managed to gain the confidence of Paul, who began to talk about the rebels and told him that he was one of them and that he had infiltrated into the city. Paul told Rip that in the desert there was a group of rebels who had tried to hack into the US' central database, but something went wrong and their computers exploded killing the leader of the hackers, but they had previously received in their quantum computers a signal, a very strange song, they had received the song that Rip had heard, the same song he had on his cell phone alarm the day he woke up in 2119, a hundred years in the future.

Rip joined the rebel group and thanks to his programming skills Rip managed to alter some security programs and managed to escape from the factory and the city to go to the desert with the rebels. He knew that the song had a direct relationship with what had happened to him and he was right. The quantum computers had made a connection in space time and had transported Rip and his house a hundred years into the future.

Rip works with the quantum computers of the rebels using his impressive programming skills. After a year the rebel group manages to enter the US' database, where there was information that had been stored for a hundred years. However, that day Rip discovers something chilling, his computer receives a song' signal, Rip can not believe it, it is the Daisy Bell song. The quantum computer had made a link with space and time, then there is a big explosion that kills Rip and some rebels.

In the same instant that the explosion occurs, Rip wakes up from a nap listening to Daisy Bell's song, he gets up from the sofa, then adjusts his tie and puts on his jacket to go out to work; but when he opens the door of the house he is surprised, "what the hell is all of this?," Rip says when he looks around him.