Adelaide 2047AD

After they released me this morning I returned directly to my apartment. It was like a nightmare. A fight had taken place. A fight to the death. I'd left the balcony door open. The vacu-dog was belly-up in the middle of the living room, batteries dead, with the neighbour's cat en rigor mortis having been sucked half-way in.   What's worse, my In-Tray had over seven thousand e-mails waiting.

I began to sift. The AusNews net channel played in the background and I learned that Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev (was he really still alive?) was underlining the importance of the Fourth Kyoto Protocol and the need for Australia and the United States to sign up to the global agreement.

Gorbachev was in Adelaide to co-chair the global forum Earth Dialogues Adelaide. The Nobel laureate said he would be raising the issue of Kyoto at the summit, regardless of whether Prime Minister was in attendance or not.

Of course, the Prime Minister still denies the existence of a greenhouse effect. Because our big buddy in America does, too. Talk about Gilligan's Island. Is he insane - half of Fiji's gone, and we can now grow bananas in Virginia, just north of Adelaide. Without greenhouses. If that's not a greenhouse effect I'll eat my Feng shoes. And all he can say is - the government is working in partnership with the corporate

Australia to find solutions. I'll bet when he finally says that maybe something was going wrong that he won't say sorry.

Meanwhile, Gorby was also warning that there were signs of a new arms race emerging around the world, with nuclear weapons again being considered as a first strike weapon. Gorbachev, whose reforms in the late 1980s helped end the Cold War, today called for the destruction of all nuclear weapons, including Australia's stockpile, held in trust for our Skipper (Just In Case!).

It was all very depressing. My e-mail that is. After sifting through them I only found eighteen personal e-mails. Those spammers just keep getting smarter.

Now to decide how to spend those thousand hours.

Forget the suspension of license - I never had one. But a thousand hours community service! I know, I know what you're thinking - lucky not to have a jail sentence or a conviction recorded. Well, I had a good record didn't I? And it all came down to some software in a network of computers sitting on a bench in the court. Cursors blinking as if they were barely awake. Did they have to put those ridiculous wigs on the screens. Ludicrous. Microsift JusticeScales v34! Every single judicial case, precendent, sentencing note, appeal, sentence, crime, victim impact statement....all in a huge artificially intelligent neural network.

"Continually learning, continually expanding" - so says the advertising campaign. Continually learning how to rip us off, continually expanding into every facet of our lives.

Ali finally showed up for a visit several hours after the limo event. When all the sugar had left his system. He felt so guilty he paid for my lawyer, who after getting advice from a team of legal software engineering experts (in fact, one of them was an ex-Microsift employee with a grudge), formatted my case details in such a way as to convince the neural network that I deserved a lenient sentence. Talk about legal arguments, they inserted a recursive loop that sent those networked judges into a spin. They went from laptops to lap dancing in a few milliseconds. In the end, the court sherrif had to reboot the lot of them, which according to the rules of double jeopardy (Computer-assisted justice Regulations 2020 Article 14), meant that I got the default sentence (a thousand hours community service) and couldn't be retried.