Madame Delany, the last remaining clairvoyant, was sad when she finally packed up her tent. As she stowed away her crystal ball and unhooked the veils for the very last time she reflected on years of visions and readings. She met all sorts of people in that tent. There were many non-believers who came in for a laugh, some were skeptics - unsure of what to believe - and the remaining others stared into her eyes intently. They trembled when they held out their palms, they clutched and shuddered hopefully. She could feel their energies, she could read their expressions and body language. It was a serious matter speaking words into people's lives. It was a matter she never took lightly and if she saw nothing amidst the faux smoke and glimmer in the crystal, she never charged.
But no one came to see her anymore. Machines had taken over.
Madame Delany sighed as she contemplated the demise of personal contact, the human touch of intimacy, romance, drama and mystique.
People were now informed of their futures via computers for handsome sums not just loose change. It was an age where machines knew more about people than people did about themselves.
Almost every human action was monitored, recorded and meta-analyzed. With the advent of social media, CCTV cameras, satellite tracking systems, and electronic financial blue-printing, machines could trace the whereabouts of everyone, the things they viewed and searched for, the friends they kept, their affiliations and habits - social, financial, and private.
It was an age where technology was fast but time was even faster. People were busy, too busy, lives always being lived in the future tense with no ability to rest in the present moment. People no longer knew each other, just ideas and marketed images, sales-pitch personalities on screens. You saw people's selected images rather than their physical being. This was how they communicated and this was how they networked. There remained very few chance encounters. Face-to-face evolved into screen-to-screen. Existence had become calculated and boring. Advertising slowly replaced inspiration, and wonder had been brushed aside by statistic.
But Madame Delany never wanted any of these things. She despised the city and its commercialism. She hated machine orientated invasions of privacy all for the sake of capital. She lived the life of a true bohemian, in the countryside on the outskirts of the city. There she lived in peace, growing her own vegetables, trading produce with neighbours, never owning a cell phone, computer or television. She had all that she needed, living a simple contented life.
But this way of life was slipping away. Slowly, even the bohemian communities were evolving. House rents increased and became harder to cover. The owners in the city began to evict those that couldn't pay. Everyone started to move further afield where the cost of living was more affordable or stay, working harder and longer. She began to lose many of her friends and the community disintegrated.
Some months later, a drunk and heavily depressed Madame Delany stumbled off a public bus in the middle of the city. Fuelled by a heavy sense of irony she swiped her bank card in a machine that told people's futures. The bank card was the only information they had on her and she hardly ever used it.
The machine quoted her the cost of it's clairvoyance service and it was nearly the entire sum of her account, but she decided to accept.
In a slot at the bottom of the machine a piece of paper emerged which read her new balance which amounted to a few quarters - the cost she usually charged her clients to have their futures read.
Below that was only one additional piece of information, her future;
Directions to the nearest bureau where they issue food stamps.
Immediately the screen dismissed her, changing to welcome the next user in bright colours, an image of a nuclear family jumping for joy in celebration on an intricately cultivated suburban lawn.
"The future is yours" it read.
