Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, the Official Pirate Edition by Nas Hedron

a deadly combination.
    Now people in cafés and at work rattle off phrases like “generalized pustular rash with lesions, fever, and minor toxemia” and “enlargement of the cervical and inguinal lymph nodes” as easily as they banter about baseball batting averages. It’s as common as talking about the latest war or what new sim came out this week. There are regular health alerts, sometimes for a building, sometimes for a neighborhood, sometimes for an entire city.
    When an alert is issued, the affected area is surrounded by a nanobot membrane. The barrier is one-way permeable, allowing air and supplies to enter, but preventing infected people, or the pathogen itself, from escaping. At first it seemed absurd to me that, with all the medical applications of nanotechnology, society still suffered periodically from these new diseases. As it turns out, though, the highly mutagenic nature of emerging infections makes them difficult targets to hit, even for nanobots, so the most prudent way to deal with a new disease is to use a quarantine until either the outbreak burns itself out or a particular, identifiable pathogen can be targeted.
    So far this quarantine has been up for three weeks and there’s no sign that it’s going away any time soon. It shows up as a light green rectangular structure extending from the ground to the top of the tallest building, encasing the entire affected area. The coloring isn’t functional, but it lets people see where the barrier is.
    So a lot has changed in the world since I died. On the other hand, it’s sometimes jarring how much things have remained the same. In some ways science fiction didn’t go far enough to predict this world, which even after years still sometimes seems foreign and futuristic to me. In other ways, though, there are so many things that were predicted to appear—or disappear—that have stubbornly refused to do so: I travel home on my motorcycle.
    The hovering aircars that inhabited the “future” L.A. of my youth are technically possible, just impractical, expensive, and dangerous. Humans, who evolved on the flat plane of the earth, have a hard enough time navigating there without zipping around in the sky. At the same time, the fact that large areas of civilization disappeared into the black hole of the Grey Zones, where extreme lotek is the rule and cars aren’t used, means that fossil fuels, which should have run out long ago, are still available.
    So ground travel remains the norm within the cities. The L.A. Freeway looks much like it always has, as does the L.A. skyline—when you can see it. Because traffic remains a serious problem, I opted for the cycle when choosing a means of personal transport. It allows me to take short cuts cars can’t, and to maneuver illegally past traffic jams.
    It’s nearing the end of the afternoon now, and as I follow a circuitous route to Chinatown the sun is a huge orange ball sinking toward the horizon, bathing everything in a tangerine light that discolors people’s skin and reflects sharply off the glass of the office towers. All around me workers are heading home, while people who have no home to go to are in ample evidence.
    The fall of the Empire had an international effect, but it fractured Cali internally as well, sending a lucky few spiraling up into the stratosphere of wealth while millions plummeted into the sinkhole of inescapable poverty. Sandwiched in between is a slim layer of people like me, the remains of the middle class.
    I pass scores of homeless people, who hunch on the sidewalks and in the alleyways and parkettes—lingering, loitering, begging, drinking, getting high, raising their children, arguing, sleeping, and fucking. They are heaped up in a steaming, funky hive of humanity, with nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no one to help them. Some of them are old enough to remember having jobs and even owning houses, computers, holos, cars—all the good stuff that makes for painful memories. To others