The story of Lawrence, part 1.

Lawrence did not know where the city began nor did he know where it ended. He’d never left in all his very long life. Three hundred and seventeen years of endless urban jungle. The waterfall of lights on the buildings, the greyness that crept over the city when the sun rose above the smog.
He walked under a bridge and looked up. Pale blue light illuminated the underside of the bridge, the spars that kept it together. He chuckled. He was almost three times as old as this bridge and had been at its opening. Under the bridge there was only bright light, more pale blue. A small corner provided a conveniently dark spot to attract the attention of those who would hide themselves from the prying eyes of others. He noticed the nightvision camera all too easily and kept on walking.
Cheap tricks and easy lures. As human knowledge kept growing, so did the methods of surveilance, the tricks of the designers. Billions upon billions of people never left their rooms, shackled as they were to their vidgames, their brains tweaked endlessly by a constant stream of little rewards and pleasures. They ate the greasy, disgusting food that the foodpumps delivered three times a day right into their homes. They grew fat and lazy but they didn’t care. Lawrence felt disgusted by the world he lived in but he had to admit that it became a lot quieter everywhere.
When he was younger, around the age of seventy, it had seemed like everything would collapse like a house of cards. Polution was rampant, ecological deterioration was getting worse, there wasn’t enough room, food supplies were getting dangerously low. Repression and terrorism were everyday phenomena, plague a very real threat. Seventeen billion people on a world that was ultimately very small.
Some things were going alright, long term plans finally coming to fruition and all of the world coming together at last in an effort to give everyone an equal chance. That’s what the news kept saying, but the bright minds of the day wouldn’t be that easily lied to. They set about the create the world that the politicians and marketeers and lobbyists wanted them to believe they lived in. Demonstrations popped up everywhere and melted away when the riot squads appeared. Then another would pop up, somewhere else, and the riot squads would come running again. And the demonstrators, warned in time would melt away again.
They kept it up for weeks at a time, until the police eventually gave up chasing them. Their cause was so public and the support their non-violent activism got was overwhelming. The regimes and governments of old collapsed. Equality, freedom and progress. That was the rallying cry of the Progressives.
Farm towers popped up all over the rural country. Where before there had been farms that could feed hundreds, the towers that rose up could feed thousands, if not more. And they just kept on growing. Factories were repurposed to be fully automatic. A few years later, the farm towers were completely machinated as well.
Massive joblessness left the general populace discontent and restless. They were fed, certainly. They had everything they wanted, surely. But they had to adapt, had to change. And that wasn’t what they wanted. They wanted more money to buy a bigger car, not a different system that would give them a car. Not if it meant their car was the basically the same as the car their neighbour owned.
Lawrence shook himself out of the past. One of the side effects of the longevity drugs he took every day and the genetherapy he went to every month was the tendency to get lost in the past, to reminisce most days away. He had been on his evening walk, choosing to walk by the river tonight. Passing the bridge meant that he was almost home. The stairs started moving upwards when he stepped on them and he sighed in relief. Sometimes the stairs didn’t work, like the escalotors of his very youth sometimes didn’t work.
He walked with the aid of a cane, a long metal piece ornately engraved, by hand. Factory-made, of course. Lawrence was old, and the treatments kept the worst effects of aging away but they couldn’t cure it completely, although the doctors at the facility kept assuring him they were nearing a breakthrough. Secretly Lawrence hoped they didn’t. The oldest person alive today was nearly four hundred years old, which was about as long as he really wanted to live. Eternal life was just a bit too long. Already he found it hard to get going every day, instead of losing himself in the memories of his enormously long life.
His brains were unusual like all brains were unusual these days. Nootropics weren’t mandatory per se but anyone following the longevity treatments took the mind-drugs almost religiously. He could remember everything after his puberty and he was glad.

The elevator didn’t seem to be moving. He knew it was moving upwards at high speeds but the dampeners in the construction kept him from feeling it. On the seventythird floor there was a soft ping and the doors opened. Lawrence stepped out into the hallway and turned left, approaching door number 732. When his hand hand touched the doorknob an electronic signal passed between the mechanisms inside the door and the chips implanted into his wrists.
Lawrence stepped into his apartment and closed the door behind him, put his cane in the rack next to the door and sighed. Then he took off his coat, hung it on a peg. His scarf was next, which went onto the next peg. Then the hoodie he wore went on yet another peg. He took off his shoes, put them under the other garments. Satisfied, he hobbled over into his livingroom.
It was colder these days. Outside. The solar shade had counteracted the effects of global warming a little too well. But it was definitely progress and that was still one of the three goals set out at the beginning of what had become known as the silent revolution. There had always been discontent. But equality and a fed addiction could placate anyone.
Those they could snare with games and other electronic traps had been caught quickly. Those who wouldn’t be caught by such inactive pleasures were caught with other methods, drugs to suit all wants and needs. Of course the drugs weren’t everywhere. That would only lead to even faster self-destruction. Rationed and kept just-out-of-reach made them a quite efficient control mechanism for those of that particular inclination.
There was only one chair in the small living room. He lived here on his own and no one ever came to visit in person. Not that he missed contact, his memories sufficed. The chair had been designed for him and him alone, one of the luxuries he had chosen. Some chose a better computer interface or a better system. Others chose a bigger apartment, better food or some other customisation. But he had chosen this chair, his designed heaven. He sank into it, the softness supportive enough in all the right places to make him completely comfortable, even after sitting in this same chair for twenty years.
He swung the chair around and looked out the windows. Apartment 732 was on a corner and so Lawrence had a view that encompassed a large part of the city. The buildings looked black from up here, the windows that were lit glowing in the same pale blue as the bridge. He recognised some of the larger towers. There he saw the squared form of the Humon arcology with the airport resting at its top. Lights came and went continuously, going in all directions. North, south, west, east and everywhere in between. Some of the lights even went up towards the black heavens. To the left of the arcology he saw the huge building that was the Copernicus University, a prestigious university training the next generations of young astrologers, astronauts and also holding training programs for future colonists.
There were many other things to be seen, more arcologies, more apartment towers like the one he was in. A few stadiums where the last few real sport events were held. Far off in the distance he could see the pinpricks of light crawling up and down the space elevator.