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"Chicks Dig Power"

Have Monobike, Will Party In The Suburbs The Grown-Ups Have Abandoned
xaosseed

I stopped into an old friend in Hiedelburg a few weeks back - someone I have to make a point of hunting down because they are rubbish at keeping in touch. Her nephew was out in the street in front with his monobike working on it. It was like something my mother told me about from her childhood in the west of Ireland - the streets were so unused they became a playground for children, a football pitch and a push-cart racing rink.

I was surprised to see that this teenager had a monobike in this new green age - rather, where he was getting the power rations to run it.He told me if you were anyone you had to have a bike because as the population had drawn in towards the mass transit lines, the old suburbs had been abandoned and now they were the vast, unsupervised playground for the tiny generation of kids of the Echo-Boomers. With so few native born kids in Europe they tended to get a lot of slack cut for them, especially if you were well spoken and dressed as the authorities approved. So they had crazy parties out in robotic warehouse strips or in disused old McMansions that shuffled around and you found out by word of mouth.

But anyone who was anyone had to be able to get to these parties, it was a rite of passage; once you could get there physically you had made it literally and figuratively. You had to do it yourself, it was a big no-no to get taxis or anything because of the tracks this left on the grid. So of course cost efficiency was everything and your end result was all those tiny monobikes made out of laminate - one tyre to use less rubber, no steering assembly to save weight; put on a canards to keep it stuck to the ground and pack it full of avionics the Eurofighter guys released trying to recoup their losses and you've got something that can go pretty fast, pretty efficiently.But efficient still consumes power so if you've got one of these it shows one of three things; you're doing something worthwhile to earn your power credits, you're using all your rations for this which means you care a lot or you know how to tap the system and steal power beyond your share.From the point of view of girls (which was the point, according to my friends nephew) any of the above is good if they're what you care about instead of the bike.

I left him tinkering with a laptop and a toolkit - I think he was trying to figure out the best pattern to perforate his wheel rim to shave off a few more grams off. I figured it best not to ask how he spoofed the traffic control chips - what I don't know I don't have to explain during my monthly precautionary police interview and I do hope they don't ask about those power grid taps.

These kids deserve all the slack they can get - they're staring down the barrel of a grim future that we've fouled up for them and they're still likely to get stuck trying to keep all the elderly from starving or freezing while pushing the system to its next form. I do not envy them, I am not going to begrudge them a little fun now.

Oct 18
technology,power,youth,demographics,society,europe


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  • PonyXpress
    Oct 19
    Love it you nut! And I mean that in the kindest way possible.... :)
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