2050

2065
Anon is sitting at a desk in his home, quietly listening to some music, browsing PROnet, his choice of anonymous GPL-licensed distributed network. He’s noticed recently that anonymous networks have been getting hard to find, often popular servers and sites have been shut down due to copyright violations or “criminal activity”. It has conjured a deep primal fear in the back of his mind, but this thought began to fade as he realized that his throat was quite raspy. He hadn’t drunk anything in a while, and the jug of caffeinated water near his desk had long run dry. He began to halt the extremely complex apparatus that composed his standing-desk arrangement – He wondered how he would ever stay in shape without it, as he used the computer for most of his day. The first thing he noticed is that the room he was in was incredibly dark, or so he thought, as he took off the protective sunglasses that he used to retain his eyesight while staring at a glowing screen for 8 hours. Immediately he covered his eyes and made a slight groan from the comparatively increased stimuli. For a second he examined the concrete interior of his basement. It was strewn with various bobbles and distractions, all of which he looked on fondly. He exhaled, taking note of the condensation coming from his warm breath cooling in the air – It was cold. He grabbed a thick cloth blanket from the floor and adjusted the intensity of his space heater. Anon picked up the empty jug near his desk and began to open the steel door to the east of the square room. Although he was not obese, he had become a very big guy since he had first come to Alaska as a kid – this lead to him fitting quite snugly through the frame of the door. He stood in a thin, vertical concrete tube, and began his ascent up the 100 or so rungs of the rebar ladder. The climbing stopped, he sighed as he began to undo the lock and lift the 50-pound lead hatch. The snow-covered uniformity of the forest floor was disrupted by the throwing of the hatch and the man peeking out from under it.
Many kilometers in the distance, he saw the dark blue of the photovoltaic panels peek out above the brown, green, and white of the forest. “I should’ve used the emergency water” he thought to himself. An hour later, he arrived at the wooden door of his cabin, gasping for breath. He paused for a second, and put his ear to the door, knocking once, once again, and then two, again, in rapid succession. Behind the door, the delicate whirring of a machine could be heard – 3 knocks rang out. Anon returned 5 knocks. Click! The door opened – revealing a four-limbed automaton, labeled DM2 in large red letters1. Behind the machine, several screens that dotted the interior of the cabin flickered to life, displaying an animated image of a Japanese schoolgirl. “Sensei, you have finally returned after 23 days! I have completed 5 maintenance procedures on the cabin as well as 3 repairs! In total, I have downloaded 40423 packages, which have taught me 42021 unique procedures, from which I automatically filtered 10605 relevant procedures, and via physical completion, extrapolated 547 useful behaviors.” Anon sighed at the lengthy greeting. “Mugi, why didn’t you send Droid-A1 when I requested supplies two hours ago?” The avatar went silent for a minute. “I am greatly sorry, Oneee-chan! Droid Aerial One has been in maintenance due to erratic weather conditions since yesterday. ETA is still 3 hours. Could I offer you some tea or hot chocolate?  I have prepared 25 of your most-req- ” Anon cut her off, “Why didn’t I receive a response?” The avatar’s expression changed. “Very sorry, Sensei! It seems you turned notifications off approximately 20 days ago!” He sighed.
1.	The appearance of the machine was quite puzzling for those unfamiliar with it – it’s “thorax” as some would say, was unusually small in proportion to the rest of the ”robot.” The thorax was a somewhat flat, rectangular construct the size of a child’s torso, which, at the 4 opposite edges, extended into 4 triple-jointed “limbs”, each of which, at the end, held a wireframe sphere, divided by the frame into 8 equal slices. These spheres each had 4 delicate, telescopic, quadruple-jointed “phalanges” that could move independently on the frame of the sphere, to allow for a wide variety of grips and configurations, as well as a variety of weak sensors built into the intersections of the sphere. The thorax, on the top, had two flaps to extend out into a solar cell, as well as a smaller limb that held two spinning, symmetrical ovoids. Each was dotted with many cameras (each which detect wavelengths far past a human’s capabilities) and sonar equipment to create an extremely accurate reading of the surrounding environment. On the bottom of the thorax, two small caterpillar treads were placed in case of critical damage or low battery.

Anon completed rolling the steel drum back to the bunker hatch. He held it above his head as he descended, which was something that especially pissed him off. He carefully balanced the jug on his head, making sure not to drop it. He returned to his desk. Crck! His only pair of headphones lay broken under his feet. “Shit.”
His hands fumbled around the earthen forest floor, desperately trying to displace the snow. Approximately 5 feet away from the hatch, he found the knob. The lead door of the safe opened surprisingly easily, considering it hadn’t been opened in almost a decade. He grabbed one of the various objects covered with tinfoil, closed the safe, and hastily ran, following a red wire away from the bunker. He eventually approached a rather large antenna. In the distance, a droid labeled DM1 rolled on its caterpillar tracks towards the communications hub, “O hai, Sensei!” could be heard far away. All data from outside Anon’s compound went through here. The foil covering the device was hastily unraveled, revealing a “smartphone” in an antistatic bag. He took out the device, powered it up, and connected it to the hub’s network. Something was wrong – his mail-order subscription had expired, and unfortunately enough, he only used cash. He was going to have to drive to the city and purchase it the analog way. He re-bagged the smartphone and wrapped it back up with tinfoil.
The three-and-a-half-hour drive was extremely silent. The drive through the wilderness all melted together into a fluid, continuous territory. However, when Anon neared the city, he knew exactly when and where he entered the city limits. The first actual road he came across was distinctly unnatural. A steady stream of cars rushed down the road at half the speed of sound, cars literally bumper-to-bumper. These were not like the car Anon had been driving in – Their wheels were spherical instead of circular, and they all had an almost-identical aerodynamic model, like 4 ballpoint pens holding up an eraser. Anon drove right into the stampede of cars, each of the surrounding vehicles automatically strafing out of the way, like a school of fish avoiding a predator. The other drivers (or passengers) did not become angry, in fact, most of them stared in awe as to seeing the first completely non-autonomous car in years. This world seemed completely alien to him, and it was, he hadn’t been anywhere else than his cabin in 10 years.
Remembering his journey 10 years ago, he navigated his way to a main plaza. The buildings in the plaza were not at all grand like he had remembered before, but instead everything had been converted into similar grey cubes with QR codes printed on each face. As he got out of his car, he noticed the people around him. Most of them wore grey, contouring clothes with the same QR codes printed on the front and back. Their skin color was just as monotonous – all just a depressing tunneled tone, and most of them had shaved their head completely, another ominous QR code tattooed to the front and back of their head. The men were mostly androgynous, however the women usually were very feminine, only in physique, as they often seemed to be exceedingly masculine. The people, from the bottom of their brow to the top of their cheek, they all had a black, opaque film covering their eyes, with a wire from which extended to a device (not unlike a hearing aid) in their ears, as well as a book-sized device under their shirt, resting against their backs. Anon approached one of the storefronts, which’s entrance was completely glass, with quadcopter drones taking off from the roof with cargo to deliver. Anon entered the store, going through some kind of turnstile. From an unseen speaker, someone (or something), greeted him in an unidentifiable accent. The voice was feminine, however spoke in an otherworldly, vulgar slang. He wandered the small store, looking over the various chest-high aisles, trying to find his item out of the hundreds of small items encased in transparent boxes. He suddenly found his target, a small case, seemingly made of glass, containing his desired pair of headphones. He looks around for a register, but doesn’t find one. The voice tells him to move towards the entrance of the store. Immediately, the case is pulled by a strong magnetic force towards the entrance turnstile, it beeping with a red light. He took out his cash, but found no place to put it. A manager came from the back of the store and reluctantly accepted the bills, and made an air gesture as if she were typing a code. The turnstile let out a beep, and the transparent case opened, the headphones falling out. As he walked back to his car, he plugged them into a PDA on his belt. Immediatetly, a window appeared on the screen that read:
Please log into your BBro account.
Epilogue
Anon immediately unplugged the headphones, threw them on the ground, and crushed them underfoot. He angrily got back into his car, and turned the key. The car sputtered and refused to start.
“Fuck, I forgot my gas!”