Five Hours Later, Five Miles East
Amateur author. Mainly focussed on science fiction and urban fantasy.
Ryan Gonçalves stared into his drink at an airport bar. The bar was disgustingly new and trendy, with its former Starbucks-esque earth tones phased out in favour of post-Starbucks decor, all garishly bright contrast. The drink was something lime-green and pleasantly chemical-tasting, and he had been trying unsuccessfully to identify the ingredients. Nothing organic, he was sure.
Surrendering, he looked out over the bar. The clientele was near-uniformly young, and unsettlingly fashionable. In fact, he felt less at home here, in the city of his birth, than he had back in São Paulo.
He had been living there, working for the local office of the social network Freetalk. But the coffee harvest had failed, from blight and climate change, then the real had collapsed in value, and then the riots started. When the government had demanded they turn over their users' private communications, the company pulled out of Brazil, leaving him without a job.
As he silently sipped the green fluid, his phone began to ring.
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Comments (5 so far!)
Average reader rating 4.00/5
ethelthefrog
Good development of the story (and good use of Unicode).
You'll need to edit the story to move the underscore after the comma to fix the italics, as the italics code looks for an underscore followed by space to mark the end of italics.
- #761 Posted 10 years ago
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wolframdioxide
Thanks! The setting I'm going for is four to six years in the future.
- #762 Posted 10 years ago
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ElshaHawk LoA
Coffee shortage?! Meh. Doesn't affect me, but so many others would be outraged. :)
- #786 Posted 10 years ago
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Inspired by (sequel to):
The sky over the city was still pitch-black, even at five in the morning, with forty-five minutes to…
Setting the Stage- Published 10 years ago and featured 10 years ago.
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HSAR
Nice name. I had first thought the setting to be more futuristic, with a name like the Megaspire, but it seems it's a lot closer to today than I thought.