Pedro Windsor wakes up in his bedroom. He looks up at the dampened ceiling above him for a few minutes, before amassing enough strength to lift himself off the bed to clean himself.

Under the fresh running water, he washed himself thoroughly, while listening to a Frank Sinatra song. To be frank, he doesn’t really listen to the song, treating it as a background noise for his day-to-day activities. To be more precise, he doesn’t focus much on anything outside of work for quite a while.

Eating a bland piece of toast with coffee, he starts checking his e-mails. Electric bill, water bill. He scoffs at the idea of the government still charging for these utilities. Boarding school result. Pedro raises his eyebrow for a brief moment, before getting back to their usual positions. Kira is doing in fine at school: mostly A and A+ for most subjects, B for literature, and a C for P.E. Pedro chuckles slightly, knowing that whatever he says to her, these grades will not improve. Kira resembles her father, even at how bad he is at those subjects. He speeds through the rest of the e-mails with much less interest.

Finishing up his routine mail check, Pedro gets into his car, and starts driving to work. This is one of the highlights of any days in his life.

Anyone would love driving a flying car to work.

Pedro often reflects on this. In the 19th century, everyone already thought about this, and believe in the 20th century, flying car would be a reality. 20th century came, and everyone believed flying car would be real in the 21st century instead. The idea of a flying automobiles has been entertained for quite a while, with the joke being that human wasted their time on ridiculous matters before expending their efforts to advance science and achieve something more worthwhile than cat dancing video, or teenagers trying to replicate some idiotic “challenges” like eating detergent. However, flying car is a reality in the 24th century, and now a common form of transportation.

Pedro gets into the car, and puts it on auto-drive, while he enjoys another cups of coffee on the driver seat. The car breezes smoothly and soundlessly onto the road, and begins flying. Just a few minutes later, he is already on the highway, enjoying the views of the trees and forests hidden underneath numerous other highways crossing on top one another, which are built to accommodate the current amount of traffic in this country. A far, the city stands tall against the sunlight, with tall skyscrapers and building, gleaming with pristine glasses panels and white painting. It is not something people in the past would think of the future in their movies yet, but it is getting there. The city grows larger and larger, as the flying car carrying Pedro picking up the pace.

Pedro himself is a scientist. Yet, even he is amazed by how fast technologies and science have progresses. He often imagines himself as someone from the 21st century, and how slowly they must have felt technologies progress. Minimal changes or innovations to their basic accessories, items, and equipment were put at the forefront, while the real changes, the stepping stones for humanity to make a huge leap in progress were hidden from the majority of the population. “Those cat videos definitely played a role in that”, Pedro often tells himself, musing as how all those technologies, once thought to be fiction, are now just a daily utilities for the people of the 24th century.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”- Pedro often thinks about this statement from Arthur C. Clarke, and how these daily technologies that current people would take for granted would be magic to those of the past. Next week, he would take a business trip on Mars, where Humanity has just only colonized recently at the beginning of this century, while 21st people still debated whether it’s possible to live on other planets. Yet, while sciences and technologies surely have taken a giant leap, the people using them is the one constant on the time-line of this universe.

People are still creatures of violence, of excessiveness, of selfishness and of vanity. We live among wonders, among magic, and yet we are still obsessed over trivial things that somehow are considered vital in our brains. Stopping at a red-light, Pedro looks to the his right window to see a homeless man sleeping in a self-made tent; a strange sight indeed against the clean, pristine white buildings behind him. It seems that he is taking another person’s spot, as another man comes to fight the sleeping man for the spot, or his bed. Shifting away from the violence, Pedro turns his eyes to the left just to see some teenage girls dancing before there hover phones to some contemporary music. Social media is still a thing, Pedro supposes, three centuries after its birth. Looking ahead, the traffic light is now showing some holographic advertisements of vacation trips, milks, shampoo, etc. Consumerism does seems to be able to squeeze itself into every single second of life, even in this faraway future.

Believe it or not, most scientific advancements still come from the fruit of space engineering, or war. Nations compete against one another to colonize different regions of Mars, in the name of expanding the new frontier of mankind. This gave birth to a de facto “Cold war”, where nations are in a race to develop better, or cutting-edge, technologies that would help them get to Mars, settle down, build cities and mine for minerals as soon as possible.

And of course, when there are new land to take, to exploit, war and conflict are just a few steps away.

Shortly after discovering abundant materials on Mars, the first thing mankind looked into was how to weaponize them. This led to the birth of Hyper-nuclear bombs, then the Inter-planet Rail-gun. Human even manages to create black-hole bomb that can be denoted to create a small gravity well that last roughly ten seconds, but still able to deliver devastating effect.

Before, mankind often questions if there is lives on any other planets. But now, satellites and drones outside the Solar system have delivered no hint of lives out there, that Earth is a lonely ball in this vast universe.

Pedro couldn’t help but thinking that they all have decided to move as far away from Earth as possible.

The light is now green, and Pedro continues driving, away from the chaotic music, and the grunt of two men fighting for a place to sleep.

Pedro now thinks about Kira. Her semester is almost finish, so she might be able to spend the holiday at home with him. However, he would be going on the business trip that week, so it might be better to let her stay at the boarding school. Before, Pedro would feel ashamed to deliberately avoid his daughter like this. But now? “It would be better for her that way” is the go-to response of Pedro on these matters. Pedro definitely loves Kira; there is no doubt there. It’s just that Pedro feels as if he doesn’t have the strength to be with his little princess. Especially after what happened a while ago.

Before Pedro could dwell further in his thought, the flying car slows down, and stop before a large cyclical building. This is where Pedro works and delivers some of human’s most ground-breaking creations of the century, or of forever.

As Pedro approaches the gate, he takes out his name card to swipe through the slit to confirm his identity, while staring intently at the camera for rectal recognition. After everything is in order, the machine speaks a happy tune:”Welcome back, Professor Windsor.” The hologram system hums slightly, shining the light on the floor in front of Pedro. The light shifts, and an image of a android, wearing a white blouse, is slowly conjured.

“It’s great to see you again, professor. Are you ready for the agenda today?”- The holographic android speaks smoothly, like a person, while still loading the rest of its hologram. “Certainly, Waltz.” Pedro Windsor responded. “Today is a big day for you too.”