An electrical motor whirred through the stillness of the black night.The automatic lanterns only illuminated the when there was biological material detected.. Were it not for the steady whir and whine of machinery, you might hear snoring or for those more fortunate, the thrum of sleep apnoea machines. In a quest for the darkness, in a night filled with lights at the ready, the only way to find true black was to wandered through the quieter streets which had no lights installed.. There, homeowners and the very structures themselves took care of the task of being lighthouses by the side of the roadway. Where you could find the facades of the almost identical houses illuminated in clinical, artificial daylight.
For your safety. Without you, without anyone else, at night, only darkness.
If factories could churn out perfectly manufactured goods in the darkness, then electronically governed trains and vehicles roaming the streets didnt need light to navigate. People did.
No more did the rumble of internal combustion or the ticking of a diesel motor shake the poorly installed, barely sealed residential windows. Instead, the quiet whisper of magnets, the inescapable sound of rubber making rotational friction against road, and the protests of suspension against axle as the road deteriorated in the same place as tyres applied torque into surface at ideal planar intersections.
Logistics started its longest night shift cycle,, one which was now without end.. The entire industry had shut its eyes to daylight. It increased margins by flipping its operational schedule. Supplies distributed themselves during the night thanks to enormous fleets of autonomous delivery vehicles that were obscured by the enormous solar panel arrays that swallowed up the sunlight during the day at multiple open air depots, situated ideally between factory and demand. During the day, they were filled with not only goods,but efficient pathfinding routes that would expend the least energy and deliver the maximum number of parcels a given roadway could support.
The energy surplus was monumental and abundant. In the summertime, they'd even chance a few daylight deliveries, owing to the excess available energy. The factories worked ceaselessly, too, conveying goods to distribution centres efficiently.
When capacity and workforce no longer remains a constraint, one man can run an empire competently. Even in his dreams he managed his business endeavours. For a long time, for him, the line between sleep and wakedulness had been lost. The implant let him retain a train of thought constantly, with the ability to issue commands.
Thats exactly what he did in his sleep. Through his armada of machinery, he leveraged one into the next, expanding at a rapid pace, branching out into the materials industry itself to enable a further competitive edge. His implant offloaded commands to digital schedulers, creating a dizzyingly high number of tasks for others.
Others were his machines, and his scant few remaining human employees, a board full of nepotism and affirming words. His mouth twitched in his sleep, and a command was issued to a factory somewhere else, where the construction of a new, specialised robotic machine commenced.
Why sell the shovel, when you can use it to dig up more shovels, which in turn allow you to manufacture more shovels? It reminded him of early video games, where you needed to make the most optimal use of limited resource and map space to maximise production, or at the very least, exceed the level of production of your opponents.
Still, his profits had enabled additional purchases of land, and distributing these among the countries of the Earth proved prudent - it allowed exposure to all markets, all at once. And it worked.
At first it was a gentle whistle breaking through the stillness of his bedroom. It wandered in the air conditioned, purified currents, until it slowly found its way to his ear canal. It woke him. Gently. He could have the implant wake him, but he liked to maintain some tradition. This manual alarm was one of those small luxuries. He even had to get out of the bed to turn it off.
He rose from the crumpled sheets as artificial light added an intricate network of shadows to their verdant green Meadow. He would not make the bed. The alarm continued its ascent up the pitches, increasing in noise level as he strode toward it. A fumbling hand reached toward it, and electrical energy ceased in its circuits.
He took another step onward and the carpet stopped caressing his feet with its soft, woven fibres against the bottom of his bare feet. Coldness replaced the sensation of luxury as he moved onto solid stone. Red Light entered his vision, and the steam shower sputtered into scalding life.
He closed his eyes and pondered on where the various fragments of his scattered enterprise orbited. It was becoming too large for a single man to fathom.
He would need a new employee.
