This is the End 2(8)

Neil shrugged. “My aunt, she’s from an older generation. She grew up with paper. I told her to give these up, but she can’t.”

There was a fortune around us. A fortune in books. Thousands of books. All of them illegal.

Not that their contents were illegal. Their content was public domain. It was the paper that was illegal.

Sometime back around when I was born, thirty years ago, the biofuel shortage began, quickly followed by the food shortage. To stem off the inevitable, plants were no longer used to make anything but fuel or food. So natural cloth, wood furniture, and paper, among many other plant-derived products, were banned. Those that already existed were gathered up and recycled for fuel.

Not that anything was actually lost. Even back then synthetics could imitate, or improve upon, most natural products. And digital memory had become so cheap and plentiful, every word ever written had been digitized and could be stored on something called a hard drive, which was about the size of many of these smaller books.

Those were dark ages, compared to today. Now you could fit 300 petabytes on a memory card the size of my fingernail. Enough to store every piece of media ever created by human beings. This base of information was given away freely when you bought a digital tablet. It also came with an intranet operating system, so you could access and search the vast volumes of knowledge and entertainment, accurately updated IRT by a team of experts and technicians. If you wanted a recent bit of media, like a new book or movie or magazine, you could download it at a news kiosk for credits with a flash of your wrist, and it would transfer directly to your digital tablet.

Years ago, when DTs needed separate monitors and processors and were called computers, people used the Internet to communicate and exchange information with other people. These days, the Internet was an underground thing for bored hobbyists and fanboyz, saturated with untruths Wikied by the uninformed, conspiracy flakes, and pr0n. Basically just a big mess of nut jobs jerking off and shouting lies at one another. And don’t even get me started on the malware.

That was why, when Web 4.0 became a wasteland, the tech geniuses took everything off the Internet that was worthwhile—basically every bit of knowledge, media, and art in human history—and created the intranet. Now everyone owned everything, and no one missed the flame wars and inaccurate half-truths of the Internet. It was much easier to communicate using headphone implants and digital tablets. And why waste time looking for unverified information when you could spend fifteen lifetimes sorting through the accurate information on your personal intranet and not even come close to viewing it all?

Since these books were old, I could guarantee Aunt Zelda, and everyone else on the planet, already had copies of them on their intranet cards, so there was no real reason for her to keep them, other than sentiment. Especially since digital books were interactive and versatile and just plain better. I pulled a volume off the shelf, and peered at a random page. It was medieval. You couldn’t adjust the font size, couldn’t change the contrast, and it didn’t even have a button that made it read to you.

Still, if Zelda had met with foul play, here was a monetary motive.

“She, um, gave up everything else,” Neil continued. “Cotton clothing. A real particleboard desk. Some cherry-wood frames. But she couldn’t part with her books.”

“How about these bookcases?” I asked, pointing to the wood grain on them as I replaced the book. Truth was, I didn’t care at all about an old lady’s book collection. But I did enjoy freaking Neil out.

“Synthetic,” he quickly said. “All fake.”

I frowned, pretending to think things over. “Is there any other contraband I need to be aware of?”

Neil got even paler. “She, uh, also has a still.”

I raised an eyebrow. As the twenty-first century marched onward, liquor also joined the ranks of illegal products. Again, not for its effects—the Libertarian Act of 2028 made all recreational substances legal. But alcohol was made from plants, and plants could be used only for food and fuel. While the synthetic forms of drugs were cheap, plentiful, and popular, synthetic alcohol supposedly didn’t taste right. It was eventually made into pills like all other drugs, and I sometimes liked to kick back with a few whiskey tablets when I was off duty. I’d never tasted the real thing, and I was curious.

“You’ll show that to me later,” I told him, my voice stern. “But first, show me the blood you found.”

Neil nodded quickly, then led me into the kitchen. I lugged the TEV after him, setting it down next to the sink.

“There,” Neil said, pointing.