Editing A Future Imperfect (section)

==='''A morning in Sydney, 2040. '''===

As I have half an hour to spare and like to paint pictures with words, here is an average morning and worktrip for a middle class Sydneysider of 2040.

They wake up in a Homicile, one of the new cluster housing approaches to solve the rising population of the cities along the East Coast. While families still tend to own individual homes in Sydney, these are slowly being replaced by Homicile clusters.

Their iCom [the portable portion of their ihomenet] wakes them up, assesses weather and transport options for the morning and relays any important comms from the night. They are heading to an actual work location, something only slightly 50% of the employed do now. Many work from home or by SenseOps. Breakfast is a mishmash of gengrown foodstuffs, preprepped and only needing a few seconds in the microwave [or mag cooker if you're better off]. It is summer, the weather is good, so they decide to fly to work.

Clothing is still natural organics, except for protective gear - like a streetsuit, the Synthsilk one piece that has become as popular as jeans for weatherproff clothing. Our flier wears one over her office clothing, cotton and synthetics rendered wrinkle free by nanotube fabric enhancers.

Her iSys registers intent and location and the local trafficnet spits back a flightpath. She engages her parasail, the cheapest flight option available to the up and coming - a self inflating sail with a podseat and prop combination. solar cells in the sail help power the minaiturized Hydrogen cell batteries that power the electric motor. 

She climbs slowly into the traffic stream, a colorful array of parasails, microlites and gyros headed in a thin stream toward the landing parks of the city. Here and there, traffic cops zoom by on extremely expensive maglev powered vehicles, monitoring flow and safety. Ballons mark stationary flightpath junctions. Down below, the stream of cars, trucks and other vehicles is as heavy as ever...