Part 3

April 9, 2009, 10:13 pm
Filed under: My book in the making...

Eventually the cell phone and computer were combined. A hologram screen and keyboard allowed what looked like a watch or wristband to be the door to infinite connectivity with the world around you.

Eyes didn’t meet other eyes anymore, even when the streets were crammed during the morning commute to work. Eyes were constantly glued to the screen of one’s personal cellular device, enabled with sensors to warn them if they were close to nudging or bumping into another human.

Arguably the most influential invention in human existence was a product called the “RealME.” What first made its way to the general public as a replacement for makeup in stage actors soon took the world by storm in a way that could only be compared to a tidal wave touching down simultaneously on every shoreline worldwide.

The “RealME” consisted of a series of LCD hologram filiments strung together with each square micro-millimeter tightly packed with a series of light-emitting diodes. Prototype versions of the “RealME” were attached to hooded garments that people would wear, complete with a video screen much thinner than paper, spanning from edge to edge and top to bottom of the hole in the hood.

The hole covered each user, or what later was known as a creator’s face. Each creator programmed the image that occupied the vertical plane from one side of the hood to the other, digitally mastermining a pseudo-self. For those disappointed with the way their hallowed diety has assembled the features of their face, there was finally some respite.

Until the “RealME,” humans could only create optimal versions of themselves through computers. Hidden behind the disguise of anonymity the internet and digital correspondences provide any human could be the perfect human online, a version of themselves with no flaws, shortcomings, or downfalls. This trojan horse encasing each human’s physical reality didn’t translate to the real world of human-on-human interaction. Each person had no mask to hide behind in reality and could only portray who they actually were. Only the flesh and organs you truly consisted of in whatever physical tint, arrangement, and spacing you were born with were visible to others.

People became less and less confident and at ease with their naturally-derived physical selves and more and more comfortable hidden behind the man-made, computer-derived, idealized facade of reality each creator composed for his or her self.

The “RealME” enabled humans to, for the first time, take the alternate “self” they had made for the invisbile world of digital corresponcences and integrate it into the world of actuality; the world where protons and electrons make up living and breathing objects revolving around you. Humans could now take the cloak of anonymity so conveniently wrapped around their digital experiences, and sport it in public. The digital and actual worlds were now irrevocably attached at the hip. Walking down the street, one could not differentiate between a real set of eyes, with working irises and retracting pupils, and a set of eyes programmed to blink at regular intervals, inset into the face that the creator behind the mask had developed as their optimal being.