Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1) Read Online Free Page A

because of his size, but that didn’t mean that the prospect was good. He looked at his deformed left wrist and wiggled his fingers. Since he began his walk, no magic had occurred and his left thumb and pointer finger still would not move more than slight wobbles back and forth.
                  Baggs weaved in and out of the weeds that were taking over the road, and looked up at the high-rises that dominated the London scenery.
                  Baggs was thirty-three years old. The year was 2082.
                  Baggs inhaled smoke as he walked up the road. He was the only person on the street. He could hear helicopter blades clipping through the sky far away, and the hum of air conditioning units installed in the old windows of the surrounding apartments. Something about that moment made him feel surreal. He reflected on his society and life, trying to make sense of what could have brought him to this situation.
                  He connected it all with something he had once read in the library.
                  Baggs and Tessa spent a lot of time in the library with their daughters. The libraries in London were old, dusty, and unattractive, but contained a lot of readable material. Since Olive and Maggie couldn’t go to school (school was far too expensive for a family like the Baggers) Tessa and Baggs took on the responsibility of educating their daughters. The library was the ideal place to foster Olive’s and Maggie’s intellectual growth. It wasn’t hard for Baggs and Tessa to find time to take their daughters to the library; Tessa didn’t have a job, and Baggs’s piano concerts only took up three nights a week, if he was lucky. They taught Olive and Maggie to read, write, do basic arithmetic, and gave them history lessons. They usually spent the first few hours of a day roaming around the library, all of them reading what they each liked. Then, they’d come together at one of the tables in the middle and the parents would hold lessons for their daughters. While researching a history lesson for Olive and Maggie, Baggs had come across an article written in the late twentieth century in which the scholar predicted that computers would be smarter than humans in 2020. Baggs found this humorous in the same way that he found all the recent false predictions of the apocalypse (2000, 2012, 2020, 2041, 2050, 2066) humorous. Technological development had come to a standstill around 2030, and at that time computers were nowhere near as sophisticated as the human brain.
                  Baggs liked to consider himself a bit of a scholar who didn’t have any degrees. He had only been in school until he was ten, but he continued his education outside of traditional academia, always finding himself most content and stimulated when learning something new. People were often taken off guard by his vast stores of knowledge, probably because his large stature and overtly masculine appearance came with certain prejudices. Baggs didn’t mind. He loved learning because he loved learning, not because he wanted people to think that he loved learning.
                  Baggs had a theory about the way the world was, which came out of years of study and his experiences as an impoverished citizen; he believed that technological development had reached a certain threshold, and then had caused a chain reaction that stopped technological development. “Hear me out on this!” Baggs was accustomed to telling people, after they heard his introduction to the theory. “Just listen to me through on this one, and if you don’t like what I have to say, I’ll let you have one of my smokes. How’s that for a deal?” The argument went as follows: Technological capacity led to fewer people working. The reason that Tessa couldn’t go and get a job at McDonalds was because a robot flipped all the hamburgers. Why would a restaurant owner want to pay Tessa minimum wage to