Visa Riots #5
by tycho garen on Aug.26, 2008, under Trailing Edge
“Visa Riots” is a short story from the Trailing Edge project. This story happens several hundred years before the other stories in the project. This is part 5 of 6 7. Read part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4. Enjoy!
The there were, it turns out, riots under many of the domes. The previous day the colonial consortium had released the procedures and policies regarding the next–and first mass scale–emigration wave to Mars and the Moon. For years the only colonists have been the scientists, engineers, technician and their families. Other people got to go, but you had to know someone in the contracting firms.
Now everyone got to go.
At least that’s what people had hoped. The truth was slightly different.
There were only so many spots, after all, and the consortium decided, basically, that only certain people who had already filed initial paperwork (more scientists, technicians, and the like) and a subset of people selected by the consortium based on a closed algorithm would be able to emigrate off world.
Thirty years ago the consortia couldn’t pay people enough to recruit them into the Space Corps, not even the engineers could be convinced to move–likely permanently. The domes were going up all over Earth. Domes provided weather control, solved the power generation problem, protected old cities that would have been lost of toxic rain, and kept the encroaching deserts and the oceans out.
The economy boomed: there was no reason to leave. Understandably, a baby boom followed shortly.
The astute reader can see where this is going.
The domes, most of Earth’s population centers became overpopulated, underemployed, and unmanageable over the next 20 years. Domes which were designed to last for centuries, didn’t. The consortium had always argued that in addition to mostly solving the energy problems of most cities, the big domes would “get us all ready to colonize.”
No one expected people to be so ready so soon.
And then the only chance to get off of Earth, was restricted by the same consortium that built the Domes.