I wouldn't sail this ship if I were you
1. You wake in the night and the printer is printing gun parts. Your house has an AI and the AI has a prediction routine and it anticipates when you might need things and gets them for you. It’s normally very accurate. Out in the street, everything is still; but if you listen carefully, you can hear the printers in the other houses clattering away to themselves.
2. When the war finally gets to your town, it does so with drones. Little, plastic ones; the type that children play with. But these have explosive charges and are programmed to look for human heads. At first they just go for adults but later on the algorithm is not so picky. People take it in turns to take watch with their guns. Sometimes they bang into roofs, blowing off a solar tile or two. But mostly it is heads.
3. After a while, in the cities, they stretch nets and cloth and wires over the streets. There is no outdoors any more. Going from house to house is like travelling in a huge tent. By and by, refugees fill up some of the gaps. Car traffic slows to a trickle. Car space becomes people space. Eventually the drones find a way to pilot themselves beneath the roofs of the cloth city, but more nets and wires are added to keep them out.
4. There is a cyberwar going on as well, of course. Some days you can only get the news that tells the stories your people want to hear. Some days, you can only get the news the other people want to hear. Some days there is no news at all. Social media is so noisy, these days, that it is almost unusable. So the future is oddly like the past, if the postvans of the past had been fortified and self-driving. Most days the news merely says that there are many things that are classified. Everyone is in agreement that nearly everyone is lying anyway, so what is the point? But you still listen.
5. Phone towers are important. These days they are hastily-reinforced, grey metal behemoths. The drones swarm round them in the early hours, getting in formation, bouncing off and flying back up. When enough are gathered and in the right places, they detonate together. It doesn’t often work, but sometimes it brings the tower down.
6. You are not sure, really, who the other side is. Is there another side? The drones are powered by an algorithm; this is how the news sites are generated, too, and how they are reworded and retweaked just for you, so that no two people ever get the same news. Even the truck bombs are self-driving. The vigilantes going house to house claim they are on your side. The centres of technology are shuttered, gone below ground somewhere. Perhaps you could try and find out. But it is so hard to travel, these days.
