Ghost Town - 1

 

Hey there, readers. Greetings from my desk. My almost home for the past one and half years. It's lockdown once again, we're in the middle of the second wave (strange, isn't it, that the word second wave is immediately attributed to the pandemic) and it's been six months since I last did this conversational blogging thing. A lot has changed between the first quarantine post and this one, and that is how you guys feel too, I guess? What started out as a welcome break and a way to get to know myself, and bring to fore previously unexplored interests like blogging, has today become a monotonous routine. Dalgona coffee stories has given way to oxygen cylinder and medicine hunt stories.

Yep, India is definitely in a bit of a downward slope. Feels wrong to be happy about anything. Anyway, sad vibes aside, it's sometime in the night, I'm listening to Agar Tum Saath Ho, and there's a friend here. Here we go! Hope everyone is safe, and if not, soldier on (words I never expected to write in here?).

So a couple days back, I went out of home for the first time in a long time. The first thing that I noticed was the sheer emptiness of roads, the dust-free air and a pleasing silence. But also, dozens of closed shops, and dogs lazing in the middle of the road. For all I know, it could be some prehistoric town we see on the telly, without any sign of human life. And that, prompted this story.

This story is set in a dystopian world where the pandemic has won the war with humanity, and humanity has been forced permanently indoors.

Here we go.

(art by Mahima Daga - budding digital artist and excellent friend)

Check this out! - Mahima Daga - art on Instagram

Rohan was walking along the road, humming. The day was warm and he was feeling stuffy, thanks to the regulation PPE. He was walking in the middle of the road, as the few vehicles that did pass now and then hugged the extremes. The occasional dividers and the white lines had been deemed useless and were seen more as a hazard these days. There were high risks of UAVs hitting dividers while landing or getting confused by road markings. These were heady days. All sorts of technologies were being tested in the market to replace human interaction.

And from a technical standpoint, the transition was not that tough. Most of what human beings did were virtualized and substituted with relatively low technical blockades. How the human beings were coping up, that was a totally different story, one that nobody was ready to get into right then.

Buildings, all closed now, threw fantastic shadows on the roads as he walked. He'd never seen inside these buildings when they'd been actually used. These days, they were just storage bases for robots, UAVs and goods. The buildings had been shut down years earlier - he had only seen the interiors on old shows on Netflix. And God did it look great! People actually walking out without PPE, greeting each other with hugs and handshakes. Two things he'd never experienced to date.

Taking a left fork led him to his destination for the day - an old shopfront with a huge warehouse behind. The warehouse was being used to package all sorts of goods, from toilet paper to refrigerators. The metallic whirring noises made him shudder as they echoed off the high ceilings of the warehouse and sounded like some alien vehicle.

Speaking of alien vehicles, Rohan was now staring at the reason for his visit, the Delivery Master 500. The UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) was still under Research and Development, and was poised to replace the men that currently drove about in large trucks wearing PPEs. The DM500 was developed with the aim of replacing human delivery drivers with vehicles that were more precise, and more importantly, wouldn't come down with disease.

Every human being venturing out was always thinking of the infection encampments in the back of his/her head. An entire city walled up and converted into a sort of concentration camp for people who had the virus, it was a last ditch attempt to contain the virus. It was rumored that the world government was the source behind the dark rumours about the dire state of life in the encampment camp, and about the speculated mass graveyard town.

The DM500 was staring back at him out of blue lifeless eyes, some weird crossover between Wall-E and Eva. The UAV was massive, could carry a ton of supplies and had scary looking claws that were designed to hold on to any falling objects and rather weirdly, to swat away birds that come close enough to risk a bird strike. They would be, for now anyway, controlled by human beings securely seated in the comfort of their home wearing virtual goggles.

"So, how are we feeling today, Alice?", Rohan was questioning the UAV, as he usually did. And just like usual, he expected no answer, the UAVs had no way to understand him or respond. However..

"Why, good! May I know who this is?" Suffice to say, Rohan screamed with terror, and promptly blacked out. Startled by the response, Alice stepped from behind the DM500 and started requesting for medical response, puzzled by the behaviour of her co-worker. 'Oh well, these techs', she thought. And thus begins, the journey into the Ghost Town.