Shortys 2024 Anthology

Smitten (Shorty's 2024 Long List)

Before the extraterrestrials disappeared, they built hundreds of towers that reached for the skies and fed the world with unlimited wireless electricity. The experts were still studying the science behind the energy production, but one thing they more quickly deciphered was the uncanny stable structure of these towers – how they caressed the clouds without the danger of falling.

Urban Hamlets.

That was the name decided upon for the new architecture borne from this technology. A giant townlet held in a single building that span a city block. Within a few years, every major city in the world became host to one, two or three of these columnar structures, depending on the city. These four hundred storeyed behemoths not only dwarfed every other building around them but erased their relevance too.

A single Urban Hamlet had everything needed for any one person to live and thrive. The four-hundred-meter square base cylinders had hundreds of residential floors. In addition to spacious and highly teched out apartments, the centre space on each of these floors boasted playgrounds and parks, productive hydroponic gardens, medical clinics, water collection, treatment and recycling facilities and a myriad of other amenities, including special mirror arrangements that reflected the sun's rays from the rooftop, a kilometre above the ground, to the ground floor.

With their affordable housing, guaranteed employment opportunities, high security and state of the art technological living, Urban Hamlets caused the greatest urban migration in human history. Seemingly overnight, suburbs, town houses and farming communities were emptied as tens of thousands moved into towns to claim a stake in their Urban Hamlet of choice. Before long, ninety percent of the world's population lived in these structures.

How many of these people noticed the construction of city walls that now surrounded every major city in the world? How many noticed that they had willingly walked into what was nothing more than a decadent reality prison? Did they notice the sprawling suburbs and farmlands beyond the cities being stripped from those who'd owned them for generations and consolidated into massive parcels owned by a privileged few?

Did it even matter? They had everything they could ever wish for in the Urban Hamlets!

It went against everything logical to leave.

Despite this, she gathered the items she'd been collecting for months to do just that. Purchasing these items usually raised alarm, so she'd had to find ways to obtain them without using her card or biometrics, which turned out to be as dangerous as she'd imagined. The unsavoury people she'd had to interact with in this endeavour could barely be called human, but she'd finally accumulated what she needed to leave the city for the Wildlands without being picked up by her Urban Hamlet's Public Artificial Intelligence.

Now, she just had to make sure that her exit was not captured on any camera's feed. In a society where all the city inhabitants' every single waking hour was collected as visual and audial data, both inside and outside the Urban Hamlets, that was going to be complicated. But she had a plan. A plan and route that she'd perfected, studied and memorised for the better part of a year. She would have given it more time, but today had to be the day.

She was a mechatronic engineer and, eleven months ago, she had rewired one of her Urban Hamlet's cleaning robots during an unexpected breakage. Most machinery was built to stringent AI specifications, making her job almost redundant, except for times like this, when the quintessential "gremlins" got into the wiring. These freak occurrences were difficult for the AI to predict.

Gifted this rare occurrence, she'd programmed the robot to suffer in productivity a little faster than usual, but in a predictable pattern that wouldn't invite much scrutiny from the Public AI. After the unexpected break and the subsequent human, thus fallible, intervention, the public AI would no doubt factor this as a possibility.