Rent 2094

Synopsis

In an Illumined City of the Enhanced World, J Melmoth and wife Raquel are leisured, privileged, self-indulgent, and satisfied with the world that is. SmartBots do all the work, CelRenew keeps them young, organ cloning keeps them healthy, and microchips integrated with their brains keep them connected. Disturbing their contentment from afar, newsstories manifest from windowalls to report widespread sabotage of nuclear waste storage sites in Mexico's Badlands, even as Discipline & Punish continues to detain prospective terrorists in Gulag Cuba. Melmoth and Raquel take as givens the continuance of their techno-mediated lives and their exemption from surveillance and control. They fail to appreciate the commitment and resolve of Mexican rebels, who cross the Badlands and Sierra Madre in search of their stolen families and the wisdom of the Tarahumara. They are blind to the faith and steadfastness of Gulag detainees, who refuse microchip implantation despite wonders on offer; confined in-cage, obliged to fieldwork, detainees are denigrated as miscreants and tortured with comforts. Inside the geodesic domes of Mars Colony, Initiates of ancient knowledge monitor and control the dispensation on Earth while New Age alchemists work to recover the Philosopher's Stone. The secret to immortality lies in gold – it is a matter of creating enough or of finding it. The paradise promised by a century of high-technology seems at hand. Or is it? Why does Melmoth's SmartBot malfunction, and Raquel's follow suit? Why has the historical record been changed and a famous novel tinkered with? Gulag internees court death by resisting microchip enhancement. The Mexicans' quest leads them to the ancient city of Teotihuacan – conveniently for the eggheads on Mars, who fail repeatedly to transform base metals into gold. And Melmoth? His head hurts. That microchip, he thinks, must be on the fritz. Can he remediate? In the world that is, it is late in the day. For Melmoth. For everyone. Realistic and fantastic, comic and profound, 2094 is a story of quest and protest that imagines a future being born today.

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