The Committee to Nuke Elysium

“I’m sure that whoever’s still alive in the Taiwanese Friendship Zone agrees completely. Imagine them nodding furiously while chained to workbenches, assembling sheet computers for the Western market. (Sheets, by the way, are bloody awful for writing on, and I don’t care what anyone else says. I like the sheetphones – I mean, I don’t like that I have to buy a new one every year because the pixels in the crumple zone go dull, but I like the way the memory-plastic spines on sheetphones snap them out into the phone shape, because the shape always reminds me of 1970s Trimphones. But the sheet keyboards are worse than Microsoft Surfaces, and I had to switch to my old tablet and Bluetooth keydeck after the first two paragraphs of this because the wind kept pulling the sheet off the garden table.)

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I’m looking at the allergen count on my phone, from the local coverage. The local coverage, as everyone calls it, is the use we found for drones, the kind that can be loaded with sensors and autopiloted for months at a time. Everyone with access to a screen of some kind can access data from the drones. Weather, traffic, air analysis, alerts, police activity, remote viewing of public places and pretty much anything else you can think of. So long as you have a connected device. And a Facebook.gov account.”