What does the life of a statistical citizen of the Gamedecverse look like? It depends on the cultural circle, the specific job, and continent, but let's focus here mainly on Warsaw City.
Social Media
In the GamedecVerse, social media exists, and it's so obvious that it's overall ubiquitous. To NOT BE on social media, you have to block out a lot of things, because if you don't, and you agree to all the questions while registering your walktel / omnic / glasses / lenses, here's what will happen to the life of an average citizen [let’s call him Victor]:
- His walktel / omnic will create a continuous network logging. That is, it will record everything he sees and hears. The device records until it runs out of storage media. When it runs out, it places everything in a theoretically private secure cloud and then, using the device's internal memory, overwrites the previous logging. As a rule, one string lasts about a week.
- The artificial intelligence of the walktel / omnic will post to the Citizen Hub (more commonly known as CitHub, or Hub) those moments of his life that contain a lot of emotion, which the device will detect by analyzing the owner's tone of voice and the people around him.
Intimate life scenes are not posted in Citizen Hub. You need to enable this option (unlike all the others) and enjoy watching your own and others' exploits in the Erotic Hub, where only those who have enabled the appropriate option in their devices have access.
CitHub looks like a massive space in which you swim like a diver in the depths. Closest to you are the logins of your close friends, further away your distant friends, the bottom represents the past, and the ocean's surface is the present. Each new entry pushes the one that has been "floating" on the surface so far down. Each Hub user can organize the space in their own way and divide it into sectors, but this is the most popular Hub arrangement. Slightly less popular is the sphere in the middle of which the user is located. His friends determine the area of the sphere. This arrangement only works for people who have a small number of friends (determined by the Hub). Of course, your hub space can look as you wish: choose the animations that fill it and enjoy your Hub! Be in the ocean, in space, among the clouds. The sky is the limit.
If someone wants to capture a particular part of their life in CitHub, they activate the "Hub Me" command. Then he or she uploads a holm or a pholo to the Hub, usually accompanied by a comment.
If you want to capture a scene in true 3D, you use the "Scene" command, and then everyone can see the object you filmed from every angle you used.
Privacy issues
Social media like CitHub or others like it (CitHub is the most popular, though) destroy privacy, so there is a large percentage of people who don't use the Hub's benefits. It's over 50% of the population, with over 80% of users among young people using the Hub and dropping below 20% among adults. In many professions, network logging is inconvenient/compromising, and in others, it compromises discretion.
High-level managers, gamekeepers, detectives, police officers, military, Out-Rangers, priests, lawyers, IT workers, and corporate employees have most network logging features turned off, not to say that they have logging turned off at all. But many of them, for fear of leaks, turn off private logging as well.
A statistical day
Have you ever wondered what a typical day of Warsaw City dweller might look like? Surprise - many rituals from the 21st century have survived. After all, morning coffee drinking will never become a thing of the past. However, technology is changing people's habits, so let's take a look at Victor, following his footsteps during the day.
Morning
Victor is woken up either by:
- by the news being turned on the screen of which unfolds in front of his bed
- by a traditional beep
- by music
- by an intensified massage generated by his bed.
If he has a robot, albeit a Duster (a spider-shaped multitasking droid), this one can bring him breakfast in bed, though most likely Victor will get up and make his own breakfast... Sort of. First, he'll walk over to the refrigerator, which will display to him information about its contents and possibly suggest shopping at one of the well-known grocery chains. The kitchenmat (everyone has a kitchenmat) connected to the fridge can suggest a nutritious breakfast, such as a tortilla or another omelet. All Victor has to do is take the products (which the kitchenmat displays above his body) out of the fridge and drop them into the appropriate slots. The kitchenmat will tell you when the dish is done.
In the meantime, Victor can make himself a cup of coffee or tea using the almost traditional coffee machine. Importantly, his kitchen can show him various views while he waits for his dish, and the cup he's drinking his coffee in will show the same views. However, if Victor wants to save money on dishes, he can agree to have a company advertise for him on his mugs, kitchen walls, and plates. Then, the company will send him dishes, and he will be able, if he is a player, to admire on the mug the breasts of a dashing Enpec dressed in medieval armor or the sleek vehicle of a space pirate. A Varsovian can also have universal dishes that can accept all other kinds of advertising from the web. Then it will receive discounts on all sorts of products, including food, for doing so.
Kitchensmat spits out a tortilla; Victor puts it on a plate and walks to the living room, through which rounded windows (windows in Warsaw City are usually round). He watches his beloved city from a level indicating his status. The higher the apartment, the higher is their social status. Having eaten his fill, Victor gazes longingly at the servobot, which offers a drink, but it's not appropriate before work.
Work-life
Ok, but how does a typical workday look like? Is it different from what we do now? Do they commute or work remotely? Let's dive right into it.
Travel
From the moment he leaves home, Victor is at work. The unions of Free Europe achieved that much. Before that, companies were saying that as long as he is not at work per se, he is unproductive. Nowadays, Victor is traveling to the office, and he's already working because it's no longer his private life. And that's why commuting and return time is deducted from the eight-hour workday. Justice was done. You work Monday through Friday, of course, with Wednesday's hours reduced to six.
Among other reasons, many people in the GamedecVerse work without moving from home. This makes both the employer (the employee does not spend half a minute traveling) and the employee happy. However, this type of work does not work everywhere. You can be a virtual receptionist (if the office provides such a position and has an automated reception desk). You can work from home as a freelancer (engineer, graphic designer, writer), but homeworking is more difficult with a team. It is worth mentioning that homeworking sometimes takes place in a virtual environment (the employee lies on a bed). Such people work in a network. However, despite appearances, this is not light work because, over time, it puts a strain on the body, so better companies pay such employees compensation for harmful working conditions.
Let's go back to Victor. He can go to the parking lot of his tower and fly to work by cab (more expensive option), he can get there by his own pneumobile, he can go down, take an elevator to the PTT (public transport tube), he can finally get there by aurocar (let's recall that PTT and aurocars run on the lower levels of the city, and on the lowest level PTT doesn't go any further, only aurocars run there).
During the trip, Victor can activate a section of the vehicle's window and view a section of news services and advertisements there, or he can tint his glasses and view the news in them. Not everyone has to admire their city, especially if it's the hundredth time they've traveled the same stretch of air route.
At work
Of course, before Victor gets to work, he has to go through an airlock. Practically always at the tower entrance and exit, people pass through the locks, which inform about the temperature outside and inside, pressure, and humidity. They also make sure that we have not miraculously brought representatives of fauna or flora undesirable in a given environment (the company has its own environment, right?). Work in the office has changed little and a lot if we compare it to the early XXI century standards.
People still work in teams, which many employees joke about, because any employee could be a team leader leading a team of Artificial Intelligences, and they generally are. Still, organics create "superteams," Their primary purpose is to integrate people into the company and its community. Company headquarters are full of rooms making work more pleasant, which does not mean that there is little work. The kind of views we see today at Google's headquarters in Zurich are common in GamedecVerse. Why? Companies are trying to replace the lives of their employees. Employees eat (for free) at companies, pursue virtual or real dreams at companies, and fall in love at work. There are so-called "Chat Rooms" and "F-Rooms" (Flirt Rooms), where you can officially go on a date or even experience sweet erotic moments. Romance in companies is not only allowed, but employees are even encouraged to do it. Why? So that they will gladly return to the company and enjoy staying there.
Suppose someone is reluctant to flirt with a colleague. In that case, company servers offer W-Pals, or Work Pals, bots residing on the company's network (and only on that network) that are created according to an employee's sexual needs. Many people with an orthodox view of life view these practices with distaste, but there are quite a few more modern-looking people for whom both polyamory and AI relationships are a kind of the norm.
Manual labor has been largely eliminated. People tend to work at a design, supervisory level, working more conceptually than repetitively. This results in increased stress on the nervous system, frequent burnout syndromes, neurosis, depression, and nervous breakdowns. Employees often take nano-drugs to stimulate and regenerate the nervous system, and in this respect, they differ little from professional players.
The situation is aggravated by the fact that competition in the late 22nd century in every field is pushed to the limits of absurdity, hence the need for each company to have larger or smaller armed forces, agent cells, investigators, and investigations.
While in the company, Victor may work in front of a computer screen (rare), in a vipress (the most common form of work), or a VR if team/parallel work is needed. Then (in VR), Victor may find himself in a factory tens or hundreds of kilometers away, where he supervises the work of industrial robots, remotely controls an industrial robot, or manages its work. This type of work is very popular, although less paid. They give the feeling of doing something meaningful.
After work
After work, Victor needs to chill out. After taking a Ch-pill to calm his swollen neurons and stimulate glial cells to cleanse the brain of excess metabolite. He can go to a walking platform or any of Warsaw City's numerous observation terraces, where he can watch the setting sun, clouds, and other people until late hours. De facto, these are the most frequent, most popular meeting places. Suppose he has a lot of money. In that case, he can fly in a special aurocar to the very bottom of the polygon to the Old Town, where, surrounded by a high cylinder of illusion, the Old Town of Warsaw stands almost identical to the original one. The most expensive restaurants, the most snobbish galleries, and the best possible protection from the terrifying reality of the undercity surrounding the place.
Victor can also have a drink, take a plex, go dancing, visit one of the many shopping malls where he can buy his clothes, equipment, or toys, or go to a collective cinema (Colmov) where passively participating in the holovidrome. In there, Together with the other viewers, he can decide how the action is to unfold in the film's key moments. The whole game is about pulling the audience to his side during negotiations that last a maximum of one minute.
Then Victor goes home, asks the servobot for a drink, turns on the news or the holm, looks at what he recorded that day with a walktel or an omnic, takes an anti-gravity shower, goes to bed and, lulled by a massage, transports his spirit to the land of Morpheus.
How did you like the daily routine of Victor? He surely has a lot to do, so no wonder he wants to chill after work in one of the many bars or jump into the virtualias. Can you imagine yourself living in the 22nd century Warsaw City?
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