Future Fishing

I always knew, deep down, that Jayne wasn’t telling the truth. All of her answers were just a little too easy. Like, if I fell into a time portal and emerged fifty years into the past, and they asked me about all this stuff like how electricity has developed, what cars look like and how the internet works, I couldn’t tell them. I only know about my little sphere of life, and certainly not how many people in Gambia have smartphones. But for Jayne, everything came SO easily, like she was reading out of an encyclopedia. Too easily; the words of a practiced liar, no doubt.

“So Jayne, after the great ‘Robot War’ when the oceans are drained, is the marine fabrication industry pretty much over? Are people still fishing?

She had a lot to say on that, just like she had a lot to say on everything. No, of course people are still fishing. What they do now is they attach fishing rod holders to their anti-grav cars and fly up to giant, floating repositories where fish are bred, and you can fish all you like, from your car. No need to buy a boat, or worry about any of that stuff; anyone with a car can now fish.  

I should’ve realised that this was all nonsense, but she said it with such practiced ease that I assumed that she was describing it from her own experience. And she did! She told of how she saved up enough for an anti-grav conversion and went fishing every week, even though getting to the grav-launchpad meant driving through the suburbs. Bait costs double credits because the aliens settled on Earth at the time were eating it as a delicacy and that drove up the price. And only the richest families could afford stainless steel snapper racks, because of all the stainless steel being used for the battle suits, obviously.

Gah, now I feel so dumb!

-Regan