- Chapter 1 -
Ascension Eve
Almost everyone in the world received the letter. The only one you’d ever see, and it always arrived on Ascension Eve, the occasion of your eighteenth birthday. Over the last three decades those in the West who’d already passed the milestone knew its contents only too well. If you were younger, then you’d spent years anticipating its delivery and were in no doubt of its significance on the next chapter of your life.
The rest of your life.
The letter wouldn’t be dropped on your doorstep. It wasn’t left carefully under your porch, sheltered from the somewhat erratic weather patterns only too common in the middle of the twenty-first century. Neither was it posted through your letter box, a device long since removed from the collective memories of door designers. Without fail, and always promptly at nine o’clock in the morning, it would arrive in the hanging basket of an automated delivery drone, which would hover impatiently outside your door until you accepted it. Rumours persisted that if you left it waiting too long the drones were fully equipped and instructed to blow your home’s front door off.
No one risked it, not in the age of the Circuit.
In the West, where he lived, every letter looked the same. It was identical irrespective of which country, city or street you lived in. Was it the same for the people of the East? Few on this side of the divide really knew for sure. No regular citizen had travelled that way in decades. The ‘Proclamation of Distrust’ made sure no one wanted to. Here in his half of the world there was no such doubt over the momentous occasion of your own Ascension Eve.
Even those who hadn’t received their letter yet certainly knew what it looked like. It had a distinctive envelope, crisp white paper with black and gold parallelograms along the edge. There was no address listed on the front, just the recipient’s name, on this occasion one Jake Montana. In the top right corner, where the older generation would recall a thing called a stamp once lived, a familiar embossed emblem shouted for attention.
The Circuit.
Although its branding was predominantly gold it possessed a reflective quality that tricked the eye into believing there was more to it. The logo had an elaborate modern font which was both iconic and unavoidable. It was emblazoned everywhere these days. Plastered on the sides of public transport vehicles, liberally splashed within the frequent broadcasts from political parties of all ideologies, laser-etched on the side of fruit and vegetables in a way that meant they were still safe to eat, projected on the side of every tall building in the city and, most importantly, inside your own mind.
No one needed the branding to know who the letter came from. Apart from their own, the Circuit abolished this type of correspondence years ago. It wasn’t the only method of communication that had disappeared. Email, the internet, mobile phone networks and video conferencing had all been consigned, like the humble homing pigeon before them, to the historical dustbin, only to be worshipped in museums. Not that there were any of those left anymore either. Initially no one bemoaned the loss of emails or text messages. When you had access to the Memory Cloud they were as redundant as writing letters. The Memory Cloud facilitated the collection, delivery and receipt of every thought, message, emotion or memory to anyone, anywhere in the West of Earth and you didn’t need to lift a finger. That’s how the vast majority of people communicated with each other in the year twenty fifty-four and it was only possible because of the Circuit.
Over the last thirty years every aspect of modern life had been affected by their presence. Simple acts, like how people entered into a contract, had changed immeasurably. You could pay for goods and services, enter agreements and sign your life away with a single simple thought, and once you’d done so there was no going back. Thinking was legally binding, and nobody got away with arguing they’d been a little bit drunk at the time, so it didn’t really count. Not these days. Arguing was pointless and incredibly dangerous. In the early years of the Memory Cloud swathes of people mistakenly purchased expensive sports cars they couldn’t afford, offered proposals of marriage to perfect strangers, and falsely volunteered for excruciating plasma grafts all because they were unable to control their own enhanced minds. Their ineptitude prompted the original system developers to reconfigure the rules.
Rules that were designed to protect and govern the actions of the collective and the individual.
Rules that were presented to you on Ascension Eve.
The Circuit’s letter contained your future life rules. The process wasn’t random. It was based on a complete assessment of the candidate’s past memories and emotions, collected and stored permanently in their Memory Cloud throughout their developmental years. The rules strictly enforced your future path, selected for you from your own innermost desires. Every letter contained the same basic information each time, yet the details were unique to the person it was addressed to.
Today Jake would learn his fate.
Ascension Eve was quite simply the biggest moment of your life and no amount of reassurance prepared you for it. It was a rite of passage that more than ninety-nine percent of humans had to navigate and, in the eyes of the authorities, it marked your transition from childhood to adulthood. If you were a Circuit subscriber there was no alternative and no appeal, if you didn’t like the outcome you only had yourself to blame. After all, the decisions were generated from your own cloud.
People trusted the Circuit to interpret their desires correctly, but that didn’t quell the anxiety of the moment. There were so many unknowns that you couldn’t predict until you saw it in black and gold. The rules assigned you a life partner, a job within the system, the country where you’d spend the rest of your life and the role you’d play within society. It even determined how you’d spend your free time, the small amount that you were allowed at least. After all of these choices there was still one revelation that raised your pulse rate the most. The letter stated, rather than predicted, how important you were in the eyes of the Circuit.
Your importance factor.
In the middle of the twenty-first century this rating mattered far more than your position in any class system or demographic. After your eighteenth birthday it didn’t matter where you were born, who your parents were, what colour your skin was or how affluent you were. In future your standing in the system was tied to one of five ascending levels of importance. From the minority who occupied the top level of vital, through essential, and then necessary. The final two levels were the ones nobody wanted to see written on the page. Trivial and the fifth level, superfluous. Once you were appointed to a level you were stuck there indefinitely, and people associated themselves with their importance factor as much as they did their own name. They’d include it, often spontaneously, when introducing themselves for the first time. This was particularly true if you occupied the top levels.
“Hi, Peter Harris, essential, and you are?”
“Brian.”
“Yes, but what’s your importance factor?”
“Um…”
Allocation to one of the bottom levels was an instant passport to social isolation from those above. No one wanted to be seen fraternising with a superfluous. Where was the value in it for someone of a higher rank? What would be gained and, more importantly, how would it make you look to others if you did? The Circuit had already judged you, so why wouldn’t everyone else?