Every Nightmare Has A Silver Lining (FICTOID)
Without realizing it, NASA solved the homeless problem.
They spend billions developing the ultimate space survival hard suit, guaranteed to keep an astronaut stranded in orbit or on any planet alive indefinitely. A self-contained mini-nuclear reactor purified exhaled CO2 into oxygen, urine into fresh water, solid waste into solid food. Internal temperature remained a comfortable 72-degrees Fahrenheit regardless of how hot or cold the external environment. Nanobots scoured the wearer of excess hair and dead skin cells, and an internal display enabled the astronaut to access any communication system on or around the planet, including streaming entertainment media.
The first generation of suits cost tens of millions of dollars each but mass production soon knocked the price down to a mere hundred grand.
At that point, it became more economical for cities to offer the suits to homeless citizens than pay for the emergency health care, food kitchens, crime victim response, and public cleanup they otherwise incurred.
Homeless hoarders found they could create vast online treasure troves that scratched that itch, addicts found the suits’ life support systems kept them safely drug enhanced, the insane could create online empires to rule with impunity, the disenfranchised / disinherited / discarded could escape chronic loneliness through a multitude of AI-generated faux family and friends.
Being virtually indestructible, the suits protected their wearers against all accident and injury. There were problems with some wearers wandering onto highways and being struck by vehicles, but thanks to the suits’ rugged design, their inhabitants remained unscathed even if the vehicles hitting them didn’t.
The solution came in the Mark 2 survival suit which enabled the suit to recognize off limits and out of bounds areas and override their human wearers to walk away.
Soon this programming expanded to guide the wearers to congregate in areas rarely visited by the public. Since all physical and emotional needs were met by the suits, the wearers didn’t object.
When wearers died, the suits would walk their corpses out to a nuclear waste dump in Nevada and there meltdown their mini-reactors, consuming everything in the suit but leaving the intact hard shell exterior frozen in place like the terra cotta armies of Asian dead.
Though radioactive, the Forest of Fire Frozen Forms is a favorite sightseeing destination for 3D drone tourists.
© Buzz Dixon
