1991It’s been eight years since an interstellar virus wiped out every living cat and dog. A bronze monument honors their memory in a plaza in the center of the city. In need of animal companionship, people turned to monkeys and apes to be their pets. But the simians, with their relative intelligence, soon come to be treated more like servants, and worse, slave labor. To make human beings feel safe in this brutally stratified system, a militarized state reinforced by torture and mass incarceration takes root, as do the seeds of an armed revolution.

















1997The United States of America is on the brink of war with an alliance between China and the Soviet Union. New York City has become the country’s supermax prison: murderers, thieves, political dissidents, and perverts are walled in; unscrupulous crime lords reign. There are no children, there is no daylight. But you can still call a cab. Food gets dropped from helicopters and open fires burn in the streets. Top-security military information with the power to start or end wars is stored on cassette tapes.

















2012A genetically botched strain of the measles turns deadly, wiping out most of humanity and turning others into screaming, homicidal mutants. A man who is immune to the virus spends his days wandering through a ravaged city of overgrown weeds and abandoned cars, chatting with store mannequins, and encountering the occasional escaped zoo animal. At night when the mutants come out, he barricades his windows and lies curled in his bathtub clutching his rifle.

















2019By now Los Angeles has become a derelict, neon-soaked metropolis. Vehicles are airborne. People still read magazines. Those who can afford to have abandoned Earth for far-flung colonies. A private corporation has manufactured a fleet of androids to service their human overlords. They have a battery life of four years to limit their ambitions and keep them meek. But a faction of these robots has gone rogue. Father, fucker, we want more life.

















2021The most secure way to transfer large amounts of sensitive data is by downloading the information directly into the brains of so-called mnemonic couriers, who make room for these gigabytes by removing large chunks of their personal memories. Much of the world’s population now suffers from a neurological condition known as NAS, or Nerve Attenuation Syndrome. Also known as the “Black Shakes,” the disease is caused by overexposure to technology; the people who have it seize uncontrollably. Newspapers still exist. Mega-corporations rule society, protected by hired Yakuza. But there is a resistance movement, too, which joins forces with a data courier to thwart Big Pharma executives’ plan to withhold a cure for the plague so they might profit from a costly treatment program.

















2024Warming currents in the Atlantic Ocean have produced a new Ice Age that spreads rapidly across the Northern Hemisphere. Superstorms overwhelm Canada and Europe. Tornados break over Los Angeles and hailstorms pummel Tokyo. Manhattan is knee-deep in floodwaters. Would-be climate refugees from the United States must cross frozen tundras to reach Mexico, a journey punctuated by perilous run-ins with animals escaped from local zoos.
















2027 An inexplicable fertility crisis has befallen the world. Humanity is dying out: Baby Diego, the planet’s youngest person at age 18, is stabbed outside a bar for refusing to sign an autograph. Economies have collapsed. The UK has become a totalitarian police state; vast territories are under military occupation and migrants are targeted for mass deportation. Bomb attacks in urban centers have become so common that it’s all you can do to hold onto your morning coffee as you make your way to the office.
















2029 A singularity created by a private corporation that was once the world’s biggest supplier of military computer systems has developed a mind of its own and concluded that human beings are a threat to its survival. This neural-networked entity manufactures a nuclear war between the US and Russia to exterminate most of humanity; those who survived are hunted by a squadron of killer robots. But time travel is possible, and the hope is that an intervention into the past can reverse the horrors of the present.
















2035Now a global airborne virus has wiped out nearly everyone on Earth except for the one percent of our species that has been driven underground. The survivors once again seize upon the promise of time travel as a strategy to unravel fate, but the results are decidedly mixed—it becomes evident that what has happened in the past can’t be undone, only understood, like a procedural.
















2054Public safety is maintained by heavy surveillance and state-of-the-art biometric security systems. What’s more, three wild-eyed, soggy clairvoyants and their predictive algorithms, so to speak, have made it possible to prevent crimes before they even happen. Self-driving cars shoot upwards in vertical highways; screens are activated not by touch but by arm and hand gestures. Three-D advertisements call us by our first names and offer bespoke consumer goods and experiences to fulfill our desires and overcome our feelings of emptiness and inadequacy.
















2084There is no need to travel anymore to take a vacation because you can pay a company to implant memories in your brain of trips to thrilling destinations such as Mars, which is now a privatized colony. You’ll save money, not to mention reduce your carbon footprint. This technology, capable of implanting memories so real you won’t be able to distinguish them from your actual experiences, can be abused in the wrong hands, it must be said. But what a great leap forward from sixty years ago when the mediasphere was the only tool we had to plant false information into people’s minds.
















2101Humanoids powered by artificial intelligence now service humanity’s need for menial labor, companionship, grief management, and sexual gratification. Obsolete and otherwise damaged robots are relegated to a lawless circus called Flesh Fair where the robots are violently destroyed or tortured for entertainment. Meanwhile, global warming is causing sea levels to rise and rise and it won’t be long before New York City is completely underwater.















2122A crew aboard a cargo ship on a flightpath back to Earth responds to a distress signal emanating from another ship on a distant moon. There are no signs of life aboard the derelict vessel, at least that’s what everyone thinks until a squid-like creature manages to clamp itself on a crew member’s face, incubate inside him, and later burst forth from the man’s chest over dinner. The alien, whose blood burns like acid on contact, proceeds to wreak havoc on the commercial space craft. It is possible to smoke cigarettes in outer space and keep a pet cat.















2154The Earth, ravaged by plague, overpopulation, and resource depletion, is divided into the haves and have-nots: the one percent live on a space colony with swimming pools and high-end fixtures; the rest of humanity struggles to survive in parched, squalid environs. A marvelous invention, Med-Bay, exists, but only the rich have access. It resembles a CT scan machine and is capable of curing disease and healing broken bones if not ennui and depression.















2274Humanity now lives in underground cities topped by geodesic domes. A supercomputer maintains this utopia in part by solving the problem of overpopulation and overcrowding with a simple policy: Once you reach the age of thirty, you are euthanized.















2293Was it a war or an ecological disaster? It’s never made clear, but the result is a society divided between two classes: the Eternals, immortals who live in a gauzy paradise, bored and louche and horrible as late-empire Roman elites; and the the Brutals, barbarians in the hinterlands who worship a mysterious stone god and raise crops for the Eternals without ever having set eyes on them. But it is the Brutals who are in possession of the greatest gift: Death.















2500The polar ice caps have melted; the world is nearly entirely submerged except for a handful of floating man-made islands built from salvaged materials. To adapt to this new world, some have evolved by growing webbed feet and gills; dirt is a valuable trade commodity. Still, cigarettes are plentiful and a particularly notorious gang of pirates smokes them with nihilistic disregard for their health.















4001Humanity has entered what some call the era of full employment of memory. Every one of us, not only a select few, has photographic memory. Nothing is forgotten. This makes us better workers and more efficient at performing certain domestic tasks, but over time, we come to realize that these cognitive powers come at a cost: We’ve lost the delirious melancholy of half-remembering, the only state in which poetry and forgiveness are possible.