'Mallorca 2045' - a short story by Adam Carlton

Mallorca 2045

She’s twenty-six.

The year before she was born her grandmother was photographed on this very walkway, the one with the charming cafe-restaurant as its backcloth. It’s Camp de Mar, Mallorca in the sunshine.

Now she emulates that very scene: a moment for reflection - how she’s come to be here.

Unlike most of her peers she elected to go to university. Her subject, the economics of consciousness, is like all advanced study now: the AIs do the frontier thinking; a few academics figure out what it might mean for people.

Her family had lived through the Great Transition, the so-called Singularity that had turned out to be nothing of the kind: not a moment but a long crisis. Economies convulsed, elites fractured, power changed hands, whole professions fought back and in defeat, dissolved. Total factor productivity had gone vertical; survival became psychological.

Now abundance is where it’s at. Freed from necessity, the world has reverted to primal drives. Denied-biology has come to the fore but to new and exquisite heights and depths. Love and hate, create and destroy: manifest in forms which would have shocked antiquity.

If some look in the gutters, others look to the stars. Her earliest memories are of those billionaire entrepreneurs who wanted to settle Mars the hard way - with chemical rockets and the most primitive infrastructure. Something that would not have looked out of place in Victorian times. Antarctic expeditions had been their model.

In retrospect, how short-sighted that appears. Fifteen years passed and it became easy to colonise Mars;  the machine systems simply did everything, armed as they were with abundant power and smarts.

It was they which built enormous domes, hyperpower reactors and vast heat sources. Quixotically, they decided to recreate the southern coastline of Majorca at Mars One. So here she is, striding down the replica of the gangway that her grandmother walked down all those decades ago.

She wonders how her grandmother would have felt, bouncing on the slats in mild gravity over a created sea; this buffer of Med-like ocean so useful in the Martian ecology.

She consults her memory and it reminds her that she's going to a modelling show this afternoon. She will exhibit clothes to no purpose at all except the enjoyment of so doing and the enjoyment of the audience in seeing what Martian design has to offer. 

And after that, perhaps she'll roll by the Interstellar office and donate some of her DNA for the starship. The one departing for a second Earth, at some star 40 light years away.

Truly, there's never been a better time to be alive.