OGENUS EARTH 🌎 🌊 {Dystopian Sci-Fi Adventure}

Heart of Gold

Olivia's eyes flew open in a surge of panic. Her alarm hadn't gone off! She wasn't going to have all the time she required to get ready. With a tug at the blankets that seemed to be holding her hostage, she tumbled into a heap onto the unforgiving floor.

Disoriented and a little wounded, she looked up, dazed at her surroundings. It wasn't a nightmare, she realized with cold horror, I'm really aboard this cramped little tin can, surrounded by morons, Arturo, and the deaf freak he'd dragged along with us on this doomed mission, hundreds of leagues below sea level.

Arturo was dozing in his bunk after finally having passed out a few hours ago. The sight of his peaceful breathing softened her barbed attitude, and she began to creep away so as not to disturb her mentor.

It was well known that Arturo had been plagued by disordered sleep since a most unfortunate event in recent history. Everyone aboard the Arcs knew the story well but rarely spoke of it.

It is not often that one person is afforded too much happiness in life, and widely accepted that if a windfall of disproportionate amounts fell into your lap, the universal forces that bring balance would eventually come to collect. This was exactly the situation Arturo had found himself in on old Earth. The story was so unfortunate and so far-reaching it was practically mythos on the Arc Cities.

As a young hotshot tech entrepreneur who's star was shooting to stratospheric heights, Arturo was lauded as the most remarkable mind mankind had ever seen. His flagship creation, Coeuss, was the most extensive artificial intelligence engine with limited adaptive learning capabilities the world had ever seen.

At first, Arturo's technology was a private application designed and marketed to link every device a human owned or touched, in order find efficiencies and reduce risk to the individual or owner by correlating hundreds of thousands of data inputs simultaneously. As a narrow AI, Coeuss was designed to learn from its mistakes and use pre-programmed environmental percepts to aid his progressive logic. Essentially, Coeuss was a glorified butler who could anticipate your every need, secure your critical data, and sort through life's burdensome quandaries with a lag of only a few seconds.

When the United States government bought Coeuss to mitigate and repair the interminable cyber attacks that they faced, Arturo hit pay dirt. With the billions he'd made from his private ambitions and the hundreds of millions more he would receive annually for exclusive leasing rights to the government, Arturo decided to travel. He took off with a one-way ticket, a backpack, and an analog camera he'd managed to coax back to life in his mid-twenties.

It was a romantic notion and one that Olivia was wildly jealous of. Now, travel between Arcs was the furthest anyone really got. She could picture the bookishly handsome young Arturo expanding his mind by broadening his experiences as he bumbled through third world countries to assuage the guilt of his privileged life.

While vagabonding through India, Arturo met an incredible young humanitarian woman by the name of Neepa. He was volunteering at a local school sweeping empty classrooms and washing dishes. Her ethereal beauty and silken raven locks were secondary to her nearly divine benevolence and gentle nature. By all accounts, Arturo meant to merely pass through on his trip of altruistic self-discovery and wound up staying much longer than he'd ever expected.

Neepa was educated and relatively well-off by Indian standards. Her father had been a handsome heartthrob who starred in several of the first virtual reality Bollywood experiences, and her mother was the first daughter of the studio executive who produced the experiential musical-movie marvels that took western society by storm in the mid-twenty-second century. Neepa had even starred in a few of the addictively immersive stories alongside her father while in her teens and that made her a minor celebrity to the millions who enjoyed copying her graceful moves.