Voices of Today

By Tristan Poje

In a future where all decisions are automated and science is just another religion, a nondescript data processor is faced with the lost history of how their world came to be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tristan Poje
• Release date: Sep 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005882464

Book preview

Voices of Today

Copyright 2017 Tristan Poje

Published by Tristan Poje at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Afterword

Other books by this author

Acknowledgements

I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the inspiration of this story. Thank you to StoryCorps, airing weekly on National Public Radio, for bringing so many people’s stories to the world.

Prologue

The right to search for truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.

- Albert Einstein

Chapter One

What is it? I asked, unimpressed. The vial looked very much like the dozens of others Brother Alby had held before me over the years, and its contents were an equally nondescript semitransparent goo. Yet from the shit-eating grin on his face you would have thought he’d found liquid euphoria.

It’s data, booky. Information.

About what?

I don’t know yet. He turned his attention to one of his many antique pieces of equipment, an oven-shaped box that hummed rhythmically. But whatever it is, there’s a lot of it.

I held up the vial, no bigger than my pinky finger. Really?

Typical twelve-hour day, how much data you figure you push through?

I don’t know. I just stop when the timer goes off.

Bullshit. How much?

I thought back to the concave screen that was the center of my attention all day, every day. Each data packet of the hundred I processed a day could have anywhere between five and ten million records of raw data—say, 10 gigabytes each—and took ten minutes to process (assuming I wanted my full pay) so...

Call it 600 gigs.

That little bottle in your hand? It’s got at least 100 million gigs.

The vial may as well have been a thousand degrees. It clinked as I dropped it onto the table and retreated, bumping into some old projection device. "What the bug?