So Here's Your Future

A crushed Sex Pistols bootleg covers the floor with an erratic carpeting of magnetic tape, faintly translucent as the morning sun shines through curtains made from ruined sheets, and then it's gone, obscured by a fat gray dirigible, a dozen rotary engines asynchronously twisting within their housings, the heavy dull drone waking him up fully at last, his hand flailing for thumbprint-smeared glasses and knocking a bottle of something off the nightstand, really just four approximately similar pegs tenuously supporting a thin smooth segment of industrial strength circular ceramic tiling. The bottle bounces once, spills something that might be anything but good for you on the floor, doesn't break. Plastic, like everything else made these days.

Through the wall he can hear the sound of political agitporn on a full-size telescreen, telling the neighboors what ideologies are sexy today, connecting the naked interactions of bodies with the naked interactions of power. He falls out of bed, the sheets heavy with sweat in the thick summer air. The building is older than the ideas of its occupants, a thick brick block dwarfed by gently corkscrewing silver spires that rise up from the city's heart. In the street below, teenagers riot silently, a thin line of police vanishing in their midst, the soft stutter of some sort of weapon barely audible over the drone of engines and the sounds of adjacent apartments.

He tries to look in the mirror, but his reflection is distorted in the spiderweb-shaped cracks and he can't make out anything.