Wednesday 30 March 2016

A Thousand Years Hence...



Not remembering how I got on the journey, I made my way across what seemed to be an endless salt flat before I happened upon a massive pyramidal structure gleaming like a mirror. Getting closer I realized how titanic it was in scale, the size of a mountain! All of a sudden, what seemed like an animated cloud of sparkles, spreading and folding like an aerial flock of lilliputian pigeons, appeared from nowhere and flew over me, producing a directionless sound, hissing in my ear in an oddly calming diction, it directed me towards a hatchway I had not noticed before in the ground.... what further wonders I met on my way... I cannot recount here, but suffice to say, I found myself eventually inside the the enormous structure, in a room of sorts, sitting across from a black turtle neck wearing individual, that looked human enough, but who's age or gender I could not begin to guess.

“We know how you came here, but WHY have you come here?” Xe asked me.
 “I came for a school assignment, I have important things to run by you about the future of  the book, as was deduced and theorized about in my own time” I replied, earnestly.
 “Books? Hm... I suppose you've got one on you now, don't you?”
“Uh.. Yeah. Here!” I handed Xem my sketchbook and a beaten paper-back Penguin edition of Gogol's Dead Souls.
Xe gave me a curious look.
“Your year of origin is 2016, yes? Aren't these obsolete, even in your time?”
“Well... Not really... Not everybody likes reading on screens or recording everything digitally... there's room for diversity in media formats. Generally we believe the death of the book had been greatly over exaggerated... "
I was going to go on, but Xyrs face seemed to grow serious all of the sudden, as xe thumbed the beaten Penguin's pages, as well as my own sketchbook's doodles, xe remarked:
“All I see when I look at these, are loneliness, cold isolation in time and space. Crippling ignorance. Indulgent self-glorification. Pointless subjectivity.”
“You mean you don't read things? You never take a moment to just be by yourself and read a single text? Or write one, for that matter?”
“In a certain way, archaic stranger, your question is incoherent. But we forgive your ignorance. If I may try and answer what you think you are referring to: In our time, at all moments we are in communication. This 'by yourself'ness you talk about so fondly, is a serious crime in our society.”
“A crime!? That's crazy, what do you do instead?”
“We don't 'do' anything. We are interconnected.”
“You don't seem so different from me.”
“This is an emulator running right now, so that you can interface with us. You're looking at a small and carefully bandwidth lowered fraction of me, or US, really. There's no practical difference.”
“What?”
“I don't expect you to understand. Not in your present state. Beings of your caliber lived their lives through a pinhole of experience. Even your 'inter-net' was a paltry trickle of inference and nonsense, all of you flaying, blind to the future, deaf to the past, jack-knifing from one terrible half-comprehended moment to the next, without ever being able to take stock of anything outside yourselves.”
“That's some pretty fancy words for a future-man!”
“Really? We've pulled them from your own head as part of the emulation and translation program. We hope they are not too unusual for you.”
I fell silent for a moment. I should have known better then take the Professor's advice about the assignment.
“I think I have to go now...” I said politely.
“OK.” Xe replied, indifferently.

A scampered back across the salt flat the way I came....

If ever saw that mirrored pyramid thing again, it would be way too soon.



-Ben


1 comment:

  1. This is so frightening - but also a scene that my mind was able to recreate pretty vividly - I don't know which is more frightening! That this is not a surprising futuristic foreshadowing, or that my mind is somewhat familiar with this concept through encountering science fiction and other hypermediated works. Great work! This was a super creative approach to the post and I thoroughly enjoyed it!

    Madiha

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