Ralph Ehrenpreis

Grade Zero: a Memoir from the Late Twenty-first Century Ralph Ehrenpreis

The latter half of the twenty-first century, and the triumph of capitalism, lead to the rise of the corporate state. It is a golden age with crime, poverty, and unemployment virtually non-existent. Universally accepted as a part of everyday life are technological advances like electric cars that drive themselves recharging on the go, computer terminals that give a 360 degree theatre-in-the- round view, and imbedded electronic i-Plants the size of a grain of sand, which activate with the wave of a hand, and keep people constantly connected. So how come Aaron Wyckoff is so uneasy? He has a good job as a Grade 25 Archiver-Indexer in the Lexus-Nexus division of Googl-Y. He is married to Drucilla De Caser, the perfect wife for him, as determined by e-Matchmaker. He has two kids in the local privately run high school, a house in the suburbs of Westchester, and a car-share. What could be troubling him? Is it the constant nagging via messaging that he needs an extended warrantee on a mattress? Is it the sermon at the state sponsored New Church? Is the problem watching the bills mount up automatically while driving mile after mile on company sponsored roads? The world has changed from when he was young decades ago. The Second Constitutional Convention changed a lot of the rules: DHS, Homeland Security has taken over local governments, police and fire departments, and everything, even religious services, are run as a PPP, public private partnership looking to make a profit. In his reluctant odyssey ?Y?, as his wife calls him, goes from a middle class lifestyle to homelessness, to imprisonment, to being trapped in a virtual reality world, to joining a rebel movement, and back again. Through it all he has only his keen knowledge of obscure laws, and the people he meets along the way to help him out. He finds himself in many roles becoming both the victim and the instigator of forces beyond his control. In the end he discovers many things about himself, how society treats those who are deemed unproductive, and what it means to have friends, and family, all while trying to make a difference in the complex world of 2084.