Never a Second Chance

As Sarah Argon opened the door to her living unit, and the latter with a fizz wheeled sideways into the wall, she thought that perhaps today was not the best of her days. For starters, she felt groggy and tired because her body had gotten too little REM sleep the night before. The dormitory chamber had yet another flaw last night.

She could, of course, have used a dream simulator that very morning or one of the famed soul regenerating pills but that, in today's standards, would have been equivalent to intaking about fifty cups of coffee worth of caffeine. Her physical self mentally protested.

It was a fun thing to do back in the days of her youth, to experiment with the ways that one could trick their own brain into thinking they were positively productive. And while many of them had indeed worked, even for adults, being twenty-eight years of age Sarah was way past the point when her body could safely rehabilitate from a harsh session of experimental masochism. She was way past the peak of her biological development to, for instance, engage in the famed and medically prohibited uberman sleeping schedule or searching for REM sleep replacements all for the price to stay awake during the twenty-four hour period of the day.

Tough was the life she used to live where she came from. It was even tougher here. It wasn't always easy to tell others that all was well when it wasn't. It was even harder to achieve intimacy in an acquaintance with somebody. The whole idea of friendship had been obscured and drifted far from what she had been used to. But hardest of all was to accept the idea of life behind masks itself, to live it freely and never seize wearing one, to show trust to those that had been born into this world, those that had it in their blood all their life, those that could easily deceive and sometimes even lie to those they loved.

Sarah stepped over the threshold, threw the heavy bag off her shoulder and leaned with her back on the surface of the door as soon as it stopped sliding back into place. She closed her eyes and exhaled blowing away some threads of black hair hanging down in front of her forehead.

She could bet she would have had the same thoughts 5000 years ago when the world was no different. A bad day was a bad day and, no matter how technologically advanced, sophisticated or beautiful the world had become, nothing could change the way she felt.

She woke up that morning feeling perfectly normal and refreshed. The dormitory chamber in which she slept that night had located the moment in time during which her brain passed through a stage of sleep most comfortable to wake up from, calculated it to be most optimal with respect to the hard-wakeup timeout she had set the night before and sounded the alarm, which, quite innocently, was two hours too early.

Sarah was half way through her second cup of coffee when she saw what time it really was. She could barely help herself not to spit out the mouthful all over the kitchen table. She felt a great fatigue as she watched the clock for the next several minutes along with the quite vivid and realistic images that played in her mind, images of her cracking up just after the noon.

She knew it was too late to go back to bed as she was already half way through her second cup of coffee and although she could compensate for that amount by counter-caffeine pills she knew all too well the impact the overall effect would have on her body would be more that devastating. And logically enough the next thing she did was pack her things and get out the balcony door onto the exterior platform of her apartment on which herflyer was parked.

She peered at the dawning sky that roared from civilization. Traffic was extremely heavy at this time and even after all the years she went through in this world, Sarah was still not a morning person. She wasn't used to maneuvering her vehicle through the vast rivers of flying machinery that rampaged through the city at this early hour. She could, of course, have used public transportation but the last time she had waited for an empty vertical capsule or a vacuum train had her even more so appreciate the incredible luck she had had on the day she received her flyer license.

As the years went by she did very much get used to getting around by her own means, as far as that didn't involve waiting in traffic for too long. Apart from her time at home and apart from her time at work as long as there was little traffic steering that machine through the space of the city had been a thing of leisure for Sarah. As she turned down the opaqueness on her flyer windshield and stared out into the three-dimensional maze of flying caravans she knew that the leisure she would get would actually be closer to a nightmare. How she wished these silly vehicles had autopilot built in!

Truth was that in the far past, as far as several thousand of years ago, such self-piloting vehicles had been introduced to the human society on numerous occasions. They had quickly become popular and much quicker they had become too popular. The number of vehicles on the roads, and eventually in the air, exponentially increased over the following years as society became richer and the demand for public transportation fell like a rock as both a cause and effect of the new technology.

However, it had always been in human nature to develop technology that humans themselves couldn't fully understand. To satisfy the upset automobile market the manufacturers had been installing cheap and relatively unreliable autopilot computers. Unsophisticated as they were, a vehicle possessing one would be more likely to cause accidents than as if it was driven by the most inattentive and unskilled of all drivers in bothprematural or overelderly age category. Consequently the number of accidents both on the road and in midair skyrocketed and the United Government of Earth had soon agreed that perhaps there had been a good reason why obtaining a driver's license had been such a painful task.

Following the worldwide ban on the autopilots for personal vehicles the real auto pilot systems, the ones that actually worked, would henceforth only be installed on large aircrafts, and, eventually, spacecrafts such as interstellar cruisers or heavy transport ships. The issue of their accessibility to the general public was decided to remain closed until better times. Those times never came. And even now, in the year 7000 AD, no vehicle carried a system capable of letting its driver to take on a role of a passenger.

And now sitting behind the wheel of her flyer Sarah wanted nothing more than to feel like a passenger.

"You could use public transportation," she said to herself.

But the thought of waiting in that line up just to see the unwelcoming doors open of a train stuffed with people like a box full of tiny cereal finally made her step on the gas.