Thoughts You’ve Thought About

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.

In about 1990, the mobile telephone was developed and the lucky people with well-paying jobs started to buy the idea of a wireless connection between themselves and any other phone in the county. A device known as the pager, which preceded the mobile phone by several years, was worn on the owner’s belt and allowed them to receive a numeric message, prompting them to call the number displayed on their pager sceen. The pager didn’t last for long, as eventually mobile phone technology had flooded into the general public by about 2002.

What started as a novelty item for the father or mother of a family quickly became a necessity for any prepubescent member of the housefold. By roughly 2005, children as yound as three years old were toting this hand held “cell” phone, able to call their mothers when it was time to pick them up from a friend’s house. It didn’t take much effort from the three year old, as “Mom”, “Dad”, and “Emergency” buttons were all integral developments in cell phones for children.

The computer was developed as a device for top-tier companies to store large masses of information in a digital format, cutting down on basements upon basements of filing cabinets chock full of voluminous reels of paper. This computer technology also inevitably made its way to the general public and by the dawn of the twenty-first century, every middle-class American family was connected to one another through a digital reality existing solely in the metals and plastics fused together to form each computer.

Just like the cellular phone, a family computer proved to fall short of the demands for individualized technology. A family computer could only be split into so many different password-protected user interfaces before each person felt entitled to a computer of their own. Within the first several years of the twenty-first century, no teen was going away to secondary school without a “laptop.”  As the name might insinuate, computers were crunched down from bulky monitors and burdensome modems into personal flip-top hubs for digital correspondence and portals into an alternate existance never realized without a computer.

Of course, the digital wave did not subside at sea. This wave grew and grew until it reached shore and swallowed all those on the fringe of the beach. It eventually consumed even those who had not , on their own accord, jumped into the vast ocean of digital technology where everthing is connected by the liquid mass in between each object, where an electric or digital current can be dispatched from any point and received instantaneously by anyone submerged in the sea of connectivity.  The waves inflated and expaned until the shoreline dissolved and the water encroached upon the land and spread to comsume all its occupants.

Those humans dry to the digital drip were eventually scooped up by the sea for the most part. By 2020, less than two percent of the human population was without a personal computing device. This meager percentage consisted of vagrants and incarcerated criminals.

However, most of these outliers were eliminated and forgotten about. Actually, the order was reversed. Once forgotten about; once no longer connected to those around you and accounted for in at least one person’s database of acquaintances and correspondents, a human fall off the map, thus eliminated from reality.

Everyone else was connected. Everyone else was connected by a less-than-physical connection that proved the difference between reality and the mere mortal. If someone wasn’t connected to the humans they knew they soon became forgotten about and slipped through the digital web that wove society together. If not connected to this all-important, fabricated existence, one soon did not exist.  If you couldn’t dial into those around you on a digital plane, you were soon labeled both inept and incompatible with the general public. Those still hanging on to an existence that revolves simply in real-time, a one-tier existence where all human connections exist solely in face-to-face interactions with real voices and real emotions soon were cast as outsiders, as humans completely out of touch with the new reality of the day.

What began as an alternate reality was now the only reality.

It was a dark night. At first glance it appeared no darker than usual, but after careful oberservation one would notice that a shroud of peculiar blackness had settled in that night. A translucent hue of yellows and pinks usually hung in the air until far after sunset, but tonight the air was opaque. 

An ordinarily breathtaking view of the vast expanses of land rippling from the barn over several hills gently reaching the horizon couldn’t be defined without squinting your eyes tonight.  It had faded by midday into a wall of night impenetrable by the eye.

Joseah and Miriam, both clad in garments more comparable to rags than clothing, doggedly stumbled into the barn after a harrowing journey that lasted nearly two weeks.  The persistant, impermeable darkness made the last twenty six hours of the excursion extremely strenuous on the young couple. The two were left crawling at times, as the path underneath them was more often than not impossible to see while walking.

If the pilgrimage wasn’t trying enough for the two lovers, the addition of a third body exascerbated the difficulty of the twelve-day crusade exponentially.  However, the third body was the sole reason for the expedition that uprooted Joseah and Miriam from their warm and comfortable surroundings that seemed no less than a lifetime away now.

The couple was both blessed and cursed with an unregistered, undocumented, and uncontrolled birth. Today, children are preprogrammed. Fetuses are grown exclusively in test tubes within labs today, and distributed to couples deemed fit to parent a child. Each child is perfect, stripped of the most minute of flaws, defects, or most importantly potential malicious intentions.  This is done to ensure a healthy, productive human race. No time or money is wasted on humans that will serve no purpose in furthering the greatness of the species and the same applies to those who could prove destructive or detrimental to the engrained, ever-present sense of naive optimism true to the human race today.