/lit/ - Literature

>>18027112
>Treehouses become a popular housing option

Mankind has always sought shelter from the elements: warmth, comfort, security. During the eons as hunter-gatherers this may have taken the form of a cave or natural structure, altered minimally and gradually to better suit our needs. Nomadic tribes would fashion temporary shelters from branches and hides according to the seasons. It was only after the Agricultural Revolution that man began to build with permanence: first mud-brick, then wood and stone, and eventually the first dwellings of steel and glass. As our aspirations grew higher, so did our architecture; forts and castles, temples and cathedrals, market squares and shopping malls, pyramids and skyscrapers. We built for the skies, for immortality, and it was this impulse that led to the planting of Foundation Tree-T-288 in 2073.

A dwelling is matched to it’s inhabitants in both space and time. It need not only have room for it’s occupants, but it should be built to match the longevity and the pace of change of its inhabitants. The same cave could suit twenty generations of a tribe of hunter-gatherers, but a state-of-the-art twentieth century home was considered obsolete after only a few decades of use. Wood and brick gave way to wallpaper, wallpaper became plaster, plaster became painted drywall, and painted drywall became ‘exposed brick’ once again. Nothing was designed to last longer than a trend, ten years at most.

The waste was extrordinary! Uncounted trillions were consumed as generations of homeowners remodeled and renovated the same sad housebones, constantly trying to anticipate the bleeding edge of interior design and destroy any last vestiges of the past (provided they weren’t considered ‘vintage’ enough to keep). Since it was commonly accepted that any change would only need to last a matter of years, the quality of building materials deteriorated as their aesthetics grew ever richer.

This destructive cycle, endemic across all modern societies, came to an end in 2047 with the creation of BioLife’s Duralife cell therapy treatment. The wealthy could now purchase eternal life, and all that comes with it. Before Duralife, very few planned beyond the scope of a single human life. As the pace of technology increased, it became a futile exercise to imagine life even a decade out...but now there existed a class of humanity, already post- material scarcity, who suddenly had all the time in the world.

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