A Sissy in the 22nd Century

In a future not too far flung, humanity has progressed to a stage where almost all production and provision of society’s needs is automated. With no need to work, all citizens are instead driven to find lifestyles that fulfil their own and each other’s fundamental desires. This is achieved by the medium of an overruling system of artificial intelligences and mathematical algorithms which record vast amounts of data about each individual from the moment they are born, working out precisely where they will most comfortably fit into the lives of everyone else.

Medical science has also progressed, to the degree in which the grand algorithm can manipulate hormone provision and expression in all those under its control… shaping their bodies and minds to perfectly fit the role it determines they are destined to fill. Citizens age slowly and rarely suffer any sort of malady, with immortality being considered a very real possibility in the next decade or so. Ideas like gender division are considered childish and old fashioned, with what genitalia and pronouns an individual uses dependant more on the lifestyle they lead than whatever was attached when they were born.

There are still inequalities and divisions within society though. Having emerged from the cocoon of free market capitalism, this civilisation is very much tiered by class and overseen by corporate entities… with the commodities sold simply having changed entirely toward ‘entertainment’ in one fashion or another. The rich are deemed fit to stay so by the algorithm, able to spend their entire lives devoted to any perversion that might take their fancy. This self-centred outlook leaves little interest in raising a family, so any children they do produce are generally given over to group ‘Homes’ wherein they are looked after and raised by those who have been determined to actually enjoy parenting. These young men and women are, of course, then sorted into roles that provide for their progenitors desires… thus continuing the cycle.

This story follows one such group of young adults who, on all having just turned 18, are graduating into the lives they will lead from now until their deaths. This is administered, with little ceremony, by a simple printed card ejected from their high-school’s connection to the grand algorithm...