Thought of a fun sci-fi future, where instead of being bright and flashy with unexplainable future tech, its just the world thats pushed the limits of basically the modern day.
Essencially humanity minmaxed themselves into a wall, and cant go amywhere else but higher into the clouds.
A future where research comes to a deafening halt.
Have you heard of the Tower of Babel? It's said that the Ancients once built a tower, with technology so advanced, to reach the height of God. they tried to claim themselves equal, and for their hubris they were scattered across a changed world.
Today, we have long surpassed that punishment, although, it seems out technology has reached a silencing stalemate... Nobody even funds research projects anymore, its a job on par with trashmen... in terms of pay and respect.
This world, it consists of so much change, towers reaching past the limits of the breathable atmosphere. Shelter is a free thing, everyone is employed in some degree, and every company has a podbay floor.
Most building always have some renovation happening, the eliets simply buy companies out from under eachother... a deal was made. It abolished gigacorporations that threatened the Federation of Continents, but all of that power and wealth stays in the families, even today.
None of then have the foresight to give a shit about long term gains, but honestly why should they? Nothing truely changes anymore, its all just a back and forth. Some corporation has record breaking profits, a Family comes along and offers the owners ten or twenty million credits, the business gets a new puppet owner, they give the Family 80, hell somtimes even 90% of the company, they run that shit into the ground, another Family sees a company they can fix and boost right back up to their original status, and it all just repeats...
Renovations are just a bunch of different options. Barely ever specialized, if even barely. It takes companies a week to be restructured, and you know what? That week is all the break you get until your company gets sold in two months. You know what happens after that? It gets bought again after two more months. Its a god damn cycle.
I refuse to believe this is all there is to our world, there has to be somthing more, something greater than these glorified sorting algorithms that take up entire skyscrapers to opperate, somthing other than these building blocks that run the world we live in. We made a plethora of Babels, and you know what we found? It wasnt a god in the clouds, it was a wall, a limitation, humanity finally found their predator, and its a ceiling higher than we could climb..
I'd rather draw than write, but i dont really know where i could start with this. I figured the tech we had now made for an intresting story for this, we do have "AI" but it really is just a glorified sorting algorithm, efficient at what it was made for, but very demanding with modern limitations.
Basically every major crisis is solved, but the world is boring, the world is always rotating. the economy is in constant motion, dragging the working class with it.
Feel free to take this idea and run with it. If it already exists I'd also love to see it, but yeah, enjoy this! Make it what you want, i wanna see stories with this idea.