It was Bourbon street ... but it wasn't.
The sounds were the same -- the loudness, the happiness, the drunkenness ... all building in swells to supplement the spilling-over of the music from the clubs.
The smells were the same -- alcohol punctuated by the occasional pungentness of piss, unless you were lucky to catch a food smell wafting on the wind.
The looks were the same -- they had clearly carefully reconstructed the streetscape with the lights and the signs and the balconies all reflecting off of the cobblestones.
The location, though, couldn't have been more different. This was OLD Orleans. Sure, it had been rebuilt on the shores of the Mississippi. But it wasn't the Mississippi RIVER any longer. This was the BAY of Mississippi, and it was the expanse of water that separated East America from West America -- a redrawing of the geography from after the New Madrid Quake of 2023, brought on as it was by uncontrolled fracking.
In my day -- back in the late 20-teens -- this would have been very far inland just a few miles south of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. But between the earthquake and the general rise in sea levels, this recreated community was now a coastal city again, and its port of entry was heavily trafficked with goods and people like me.
And so it was that I found myself in 2084 walking down the Old Orleans version of Bourbon Street, barely stifling the urge to scream "laissez les bons temps rouler" at passersby.
Before leaving the yacht that had brought me here from the Florida Isles, Captain Sandy had given me instructions as to how to find my next handler. Being Bourbon Street, I wasn't shocked to learn that I was to find him in a gentleman's club. And even though I had been debriefed about how all sexual activity had been converted to virtual reality, I wasn't ready for the look of the strip club when I found it on a side street about a block away from Bourbon.
The man in charge of assigning out the booths looked me over very carefully.
"Show me your hands," he said, with a commanding voice that caught me off guard -- so much so, that I didn't respond nearly as quickly as he wanted.
"Your hands ... let me see ... how many fingers do you have?"
There was an urgency to his voice ... as to how I finally responded, you'll have to wait until the last day of the month next, as this month's Vitalnet update is nearly done. Until then, and as always, I remain Troy in 2084 -- known to a select few here as Ilion -- as brought to the future by t1a7n72.lif (my SQ, IQ and EQ files uploaded to the Vitalnet), communicating with you through the use of Troy in 2018's social media accounts during the monthly updates.
Stay safe!
