3072

Prologue

It was the year 3072. I had everything I could have ever wanted: a loving family, a beautiful apartment, even an amazing view of the Pacific lake. My apartment was huge with two bedrooms, a kitchen, it even had a recreation room. My parents lived in the room across from mine and I shared my room with my younger brother, Nate. Our recreation room had only a hunky old holographic projector but did have a very comfy sofa and a few overstuffed armchairs surrounding a heater with a projected fire. I lived on the fifty-third story of apartment complex seven in the rich side of town. The rich snobs who lived in actual houses laughed at us even though we were some of the lucky ones. Ever since the oil and coal abundance dropped in 2875, people have lost almost everything to raised taxes. No one can afford to live in mansions as they did in the old days of the twenty-third century. My family and I were very fortunate. We had an apartment, running water, even electricity was a luxury. Because of the debt our country owed, we were barely able to build enough wind turbines, solar panels, and hydroelectric dams to supply half the country with power. Everyone was desperate to have at least some coal for those without power. My best friend, Abigail, wasn't so lucky. She had to survive on what we "rich folk" threw out. She had to live in a dirty hut on the edge of the city, Nhara, with no clean water, no AC, nothing. I had always wished I could have lived even a few hundred years ago when houses were not only for rich people when running water wasn't as much of a luxury when people didn't have to scavenge for food. Our world was a real-life utopia only about five hundred years ago. There was no homelessness, no hunger, everyone was happy. Then we mined the last of our coal and oil and everything went downhill from there. Taxes were dramatically increased, people were beginning to buy and use more and more fossil fuels before it ran out, global warming was becoming more and more of a threat, no one was happy. Global warming was the biggest threat to our world as a whole because it dried up rivers and lakes, I even heard that the Pacific Lake was even an ocean before I was born. Schools and office buildings and houses became rare as people scrambled to find coal or oil but none was found. Eventually, our society gave up hope and began to try to recover from the massive debt we had built up. The only way people like me were able to find enough money to live by was by selling land to miners or by selling the remains of our coal. My family used to own a large farm in the middle-eastern United States, but we were forced to sell it. We were paid about seven hundred thousand dollars for our seventy acres. It wasn't a very successful farm because the cows, pigs, and crops were rapidly dying. We had wanted to move but never had enough money, but we were given a chance and we took it. We had enough to move and buy our apartment but not enough to pay for school. I was homeschooled my whole life, learning from Mother while my brother learned from Father. My parents and I all worked part-time. Nobody was happy, but who could have changed it? It's just the way we had to live.