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The city in 2048

Nothing collapsed. That is the trouble. The city of 2048 is the city of the 2020s with twenty more years of patches on it: the same brownstones and towers, the same corner stores, the same buses, plus a layer of machines that were cheap when they were new and are cheaper now that they are old. The future arrived the way a sublet does: furnished by someone else, with the previous tenant's mail still coming.

How it got here, as people on the street tell it:

• The storms
• The apps
• The cameras
• The chips
• The machines going secondhand