Podcast-style narration by myself. Excuse the odd sound as I’m currently away from my office, where recording sounds a lot better.
This is the prologue to “The Technate”, a novel about the collapse of America due to artificial intelligence and rising costs of living. People suffer a ‘soft genocide’, where slowly those who can’t keep up will die. Massive job losses with rising costs, such as gas, increasing property taxes, and rampant government corruption, all lead to instability. Even health care is too expensive for some to afford treatment. Things like insulin become more expensive to weed out those deemed ‘undesirable’. Based on Malthusian principles of population control, the elite have deemed that only those who can contribute and survive the ‘soft genocide’ stood to inherit the future. When society collapses, a New America will be formed by technocrats under an autocratic dictatorship, using mass surveillance to seize the entire Western hemisphere, and ushering a new era with the goal to propel humanity into the future.
This is fiction.
For now.
