2242: The World is Different

By Rising Sun

2242 is set in a dystopian future where the world is ruled by The Fed, an advanced and highly intelligent organization with an army of powerful robots. The Fed has maintained its control through the use of sophisticated technology, including the ability to scan people's minds and control their thoughts.

John, a human rebel, is leading a group of fellow rebels and extraterrestrial beings in their quest to overthrow The Fed and restore freedom to the people. The rebels are armed with knowledge, advanced weapons, and a determination to win, but they face a formidable enemy in The Fed and its army of robots.

As the war between the rebels and The Fed rages on, John finds himself infiltrating the central headquarters of The Fed, known as The Sun. Once inside, John is captured by the Sentinel Robots, the most advanced and dangerous robots in the Fed's arsenal. He is subjected to brutal interrogation and torture, but he remains resolute in his mission.

However, as the Sentinel Robots begin to scan John's mind, a system error occurs and they are forced to leave the room to attend to the problem. This presents John with a rare opportunity to escape and use a powerful weapon he has been hiding to strike back at The Fed.

At that very moment, everything freezes as John activates the weapon, unleashing a surge of electricity that shuts down every robot and kills every human in The Sun. However, John and the other rebels, protected by the extraterrestrial beings and their advanced technology, survive the attack unscathed.

The book ends with John and the rebels emerging victorious in this first battle, but the war is far from over. More Fed robots will come online and the Fed will try to rebuild in another location, setting the stage for even more battles in the future. The ending leaves the reader wondering what will happen next, and whether John and the rebels will be able to defeat The Fed once and for all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667891828

Book preview

Chapter 1: The Border

The tree was something of a spectacle. It was like a rose atop a rose. Instead of giant leaves, there was the infusion of brownish- and cream-colored leaves, like the curly hair of some Roman senator. A giant trunk supported this tree whose top branches were inverted making the overall top look as if some lamplight. The midsection almost looked the same, but the leaves there were part of different trees surrounded by this giant tree. The trunks looked like columns there, but that was the thing with the East Wood Forest. Everything appeared normal, but it wasn’t. There wasn’t just one forest but many. They were left as if the civilization was abandoned, but the mutation in these forests was powerful. Hence, they were declared radioactive zones by The Fed.

The land of freedom once known as the United States had no states anymore. The segregation of the vast land was done by The Fed, previously known as the federal government, now the ruler of the world. Yet the segregation of different places was very much disoriented. Ever since the nuclear war, which didn’t hamper the earth, was because of another invention that was called the nuclear container. Before The Fed became The Fed, its agents had deployed these nuclear containers secretly to the countries that they had considered enemies. Yet the commonality was that normal citizens thrived all around the world. The governments didn’t matter. The real power was inevitably lied with the people. They were the modus operandi behind the revolution, behind any kind of noise. Controlling them was The Fed’s aim. It began by depriving the world of nuclear power and accumulating the power within The Sun, which was once the state of Washington D.C.

The Sun was the place where everything was nuclear, the main hub of The Fed and the main district. From devices to droids and human dwellings, the power of the actual sun was on the earth and it was efficiently regulated by artificial intelligence in the ring-like structures where one could deem the district as some satellite city. The days of the electronic earth were over. It was dated back to the year 2142 and ever since that period, populations around the world were wiped out using nuclear weapons after nuclear containers were successfully deployed. The population in the states, now known as The Fed, were the only one left in the world, but the pyramid scheme had a major paradigm shift too. The working class and the poor were sent to recycling plants as slave labors throughout the different territories controlled by The Fed. Their traditional roles were left to robots, called droids, while the upper echelons were still controlled by the rich people. They were free because they had understood one thing and it was the art of delegation to its precision using AI.

The giant tree appearing like the lamplight was quite far away from The Sun. Yet it was quite in the vicinity of the Alta-Tera Territory. A place that barely had any forests. The whole area was connected to various plants having one purpose – to recycle humans. Sometimes the humans that were put in different pods for recycling had not always died of a natural cause. Most of them belonged to the middle and the bottom of the pyramid scheme. It was hard for them to thrive under The Fed’s nose. But one man was thinking about this possibility. Timothy Proof was in his self-drive car. The flyover of Pandora district always felt never-ending. A steel highway devoid of any asphalt but with a plethora of red markings. On each marking, different cars hovered and were on their destination. It appeared that the cars were in a flowing rhythm and it wasn’t like each car had to move on a particular marking. The cars did move in different lanes in that way, but from a bird’s eye view, these vehicles appeared smooth, like dots moving equally in elongated lines.

Timothy’s car was almost oval, like an old school desktop mouse, but sleek and finest when it came to aerodynamics. The control panel was holographic. Meanwhile, the shell covering the car, which was glass, was like a tiny room and noise-proof. There was a reason that the car was known as Eudaimonia, a term once used by Greeks for achieving full human potential. One sitting there couldn’t recognize if one was moving. Timothy was in that trance state of thinking. He wondered whether people in his position could dive into such endeavors. He was on a chair. His elbows were lying on a desk. As he was writing in his journal using a pen and a diary, he wanted to let out everything that he was feeling. Using a tab was not his style. It would just pander to The Fed’s surveillance and control. There were only a few people that used papers made of wood. Timothy was one of them. He was reading his yesterday’s journal entry:

24/March/2242

I don’t know what to feel in this perfection. Should I feel blessed that I’m wealthy? That my company is taking care of droids? That everything I see around me is an artificial advancement that brings me to this New Order? There are so many territories I have visited, but nothing comes closer to the Alta-Tera Territory. The majority of my kind lives there, close to the borders created by The Fed. The few that are left, though they too are in great numbers but less overall, are so seized by materialism that there is no end to that perfection. Every day is a holiday. Every day there is no pain for them. Their work is not work. It’s just a title that they hold while living forever. The royal purple serum is what keeps some of my ‘friends’ forever alive, but are they? Some of them have crossed above a hundred without it having instant access to their ailments. Anything can be fixed, but can I say the same about their heart?

Anyway, visiting human recycling plants has helped me to maintain that human arc. I see souls that are deprived beyond their conditions. The droids treat them like malfunctioning machines. They do not care about the laws about droids-on-human killings. Their recklessness makes me think about why slave labor still exits. If we have come this far, what’s the point of harm? Why throughout different generations two extremities are so common? The wealthy are without pain; the bottom full of pain. Hence, more control, more surveillance, and more power. To us? I was thinking about this when that droid killed one of the disabled men in the L86 plant in Alta-Terra. I was pissed when I got to know the news. I had decided that I would drag this disabled man's dead body to the pod for recycling. But when I did, he wasn’t dead. It was too late for me to realize it… until I got dragged.

Timothy took a huge breath and closed his diary. He had inexplicable expressions on his face the minute he began thinking about what exactly happened. The L86 plant had different V-shaped pods. Their blue emitting lights were the only lights that engulfed the pod facility. The only exception was the white lights where the different pods circulated. Therefore, the ceiling appeared like white lines, carrying different dead bodies so that they could be ready for recycling. When Timothy was carrying the dead body on a stretcher, this was another sign of how humans in these factories were treated after their death. It was the same. There weren’t any instant post-mortem rituals. Even though it was rare for wealthy people, cremation was a privilege. Timothy thought about this when he was scrolling that dead disabled man’s stretcher. His body was covered with a white shawl-like paper. It was bloodied from the neck.

From the corridors of the L86 plant to the entrance, the pods were lined in synchronization. Their oval-shaped glasses covering them were condensed. The fresh bodies were slowly decomposed to make the royal purple serum. This particular plant had a sharp pungent smell, like the aftermath of some war that was suddenly desensitized through pods. The blue-emitting lights coming out of the pods didn’t help. The pods touching the ground were all filled. New ones came from the ceiling: the pods hanging below the white lights through a jelly-like wire. One suddenly came when Timothy stood just after the entrance. Its glass had opened, involuntarily. The sight of it was like an abyss. Timothy’s hand had begun to shake when he started to uncover the shawl. There was no droid around. At least, that was what he had ordered. Besides, the unhygienic human recycling plants were known for their lack of surveillance. It was to bypast any crime. Finally, when he uncovered the shawl, he saw how Delta 09 had cut the disabled man’s throat – like of a human being committing a crime on another.

Why am I doing this? Timothy whispered.

He picked up the body in his arm and the moment he was gently putting the body in the pod, the mouth of that dead disable man began to gasp. His eyes suddenly opened and before Timothy could put him, the dead man who had woken up suddenly made sure to pull Timothy in by grabbing his collar. The pod’s door had immediately closed when that happened. It had not remained stationary. Instead, the jelly-like wire slowly pulled the pod back up, which was strange. It began moving the pod to another plant. Everything was so fast that Timothy was just flabbergasted. When he noticed the man beside him, he now wasn’t breathing. Meanwhile, the pod had passed several sections that Timothy had not known these sections even existed. He thought the coding had gone wrong. He kept on banging on the pod’s door, fearing for his life and thinking that he too might get recycled.

Furthermore, a succession of fears emerged when he thought that his pod was going to clash with another. The rhythm of travelling was fast-paced that it didn’t make sense. Plus, the intersection walls appeared so unfamiliar. They weren’t steel. It was like Timothy was passing the walls of some pyramid until suddenly a gaping hole in the wall awaited him. Like a raft falling down a waterfall, the pod had followed that fright. It was suddenly out of the borders of the Alta-Terra Territory, landing itself in the jungles of the East Wood Forest. Timothy had almost suffered a blackout. The pod had begun to beep and after a few seconds, its door had opened like some gasping of a steam locomotive. Timothy's heart was beating fast. He wasn’t exactly interfering with the radioactive zone, but he was close. The reason that he wasn’t dead made him think that way.

When he came out of the pod, his back began to hurt. The sky was clear, but the dullness of the evening made the glow of that lamplight tree more present because its leaves had started to glow. That place was the hallmark of radioactivity. Timothy was in fear. He could hear weird chirping noises in the vicinity. That was also where the actual jungle had started. He was near the proximity of a huge wall, which was the border; confused and dazzled at how a pod could be out this way. Placing his arm on his back and glancing at where he had fallen from, it felt to Timothy that the distance was calculated. He just couldn’t believe how this could happen. Timothy again checked the man inside the pod. He was certainly dead now. Meanwhile, his blood had splattered on Timothy’s suit. Before he could use his watch, a rattling sound began to hiss that made Timothy move. He was observing. Just outside the borders, there was a minute space of barren land and this was where Timothy stood. Ahead of him was the pod and that was where the jungle’s lushness had started to envelop. Yet Timothy was still unable to make out the origin of the rattling sound.

He was looking everywhere while still not using his watch, but he stepped back the second he saw moving stems inside the pods. They were wrapping themselves around the dead body. Timothy saw how these stem branches very slowly took man back into its civilization. At that moment, as the evening was becoming quite darker, the jungle too had begun to glow as if it was some dark rainbow like an intelligence aware of itself. Even the buzzing of the insects was something that Timothy had never heard before. When a loud screeching voice of an animal echoed in the distant, it was time for Timothy to look at his watch. The minute he did, a holographic image of the Alta-Terra plant’s manager appeared.

Delta 606, I need you right now, he said.

Immediately recognizing his location, Delta 606 was baffled. What are you doing outside the border? he exclaimed.

I will explain everything, but first, send rescue. I can’t move properly, replied Timothy. My back is hurt.

The rescue is on a route to you, sir. The drones will be fast.

His holographic image was gone. Suddenly, two drones came out of the border. They were quick to lend their help through a spinal stretcher. The next moment Timothy was in a gigantic office whose corners had thick exhaustion pipes. There were cylindrical cubes below it and circular lights all over the ceiling. Also, there were random machines that were lying around. They appeared like old-fashioned MRI machines. It was for the droids overseeing the humans working in different plants. If they needed their body parts replaced, these machines helped them. Where Timothy was standing in front of the huge rectangular glass that was overseeing the main facility of the Alta-Terra Territory. His eyes had the maximum exposure to humans working in dire conditions. In his hand, Timothy was holding what appeared like an asthma breather, but it contained protein peptides. Taking a puff, his back now felt that it never had any pain. But he was pissed when he turned his head toward the manager, Delta 606.

So, you don’t believe that I was pulled by a human inside of a pod? he asked.

You should have left that job to droids, sir, replied the manager, nonchalantly.

I saw one of your droids killing that disabled man, said Timothy.

He couldn’t be revived and—

That should mean, interrupted Timothy. Before he could further go on, he stopped. He saw Delta 606’s expressions that were devoid of any reaction. It was plain, simple and metallic, yet with a human touch. Timothy thought Delta 606 was pre-programmed by ACSC (Advance Controlled Systems Co.) to deal with any uncertainty related to human recycling plants. The core of his coding, perhaps 606’s soul, included the implementation of slave labor to its maximum. Timothy again was quick to turn his head outside the glass as