The Formula - Buckley, Peter

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Résumé :
Forget about the millennium. It's now! What about the 22nd Century? What will the DNA alchemists, info age whizzes and the super-pure activists have done to sanitize our poor old world by then. THE FORMULA is that story seen through the eyes of a lost flier who's stretched life a bit with a life-extending elixir of exotic plants found hidden away in the upper Amazon. His coming out party - a journey out to New York and beyond - allows him to revisit his old world. Along the way, a high bred lady adds to his education, teaching him once again romantics may have more fun but invariably finish last, sad to say. Not a joyous world, he discovers. Conformity was king! Worse still, supreme authority is now resident in a worldwide net of supercomputers (The SUPERCOM). Standard issue politicians and bureaucrats long since had handed over their responsibilities to it. Making decisions had become too stressful! Cut too much into playtime. Inadvertently on the way by, or was it revengefully, the powers that were let the programmers advance their own agendas, those of the environmentalist, the political corrects, and new age moralists of every persuasion. The take no prisoner types. Everybody now wore 'ident' bracelet implanted on one's wrist serving as an identifier, tracker, and money card. He discovered it was a paperless world, as well as bookless, with paper and pencil now the mark of an antediluvian. An all encompassing net of surveillance towers and concealed sensors insured the computer knew all - even to the extent that illicit coupling in the park was duly noted. The statues have ears, even! A no choice world for the lower orders aptly called STUPOIDS. Still stuck with doing the work, but strictly fenced out of messing up the environment or straining natural resources. Even thinking of climbing up to join their betters was a no-no! Running the show for the SUPEROID is a new brand of beautiful people, who'd found a way to have their DNA 'rejiggered,' that is, reinvented themselves into paragons of slimness, attractiveness and articulateness. They had the exclusive on the procedure, naturally, and wormed themselves into the handmaidens of the New World Order (NWO). It's enforcers, rat finks, whatever! Most startling of all the NWO's innovations was the SNOOPIT, a pint-sized, self-levitating robot. A formidable array of sensors, a bone-crushing manipulator and a laser zapper made this super-cop a surefire keeper of the peace. Cooled things down in a hurry!...