It was a
new application. Invented by a man in New Poland called Mac Schubert. Somehow
it tapped into your brain and read your mind.
We remember
everything you see, it’s all there. Our little conversations, the thoughts, the
decisions, the scratchings of our heads… a lifetime of tiny incidents from
deciding what we’re going to eat for breakfast to what shirt we’ll wear for
work. A lifetime of memories.
Wouldn’t it
be great if you could live your life again? “Live your life over,” was the line
they used in the advertisements.
Schubert
and co had the elderly in mind. Too old and infirm to do much apart from sit in
a chair plugged in to their i-pads. It would bring happiness to victims of
unfortunate accidents: the disabled, and could even aid depression, madness,
drug addiction and the list went on.
Choose a
date, a time, hit the button and you were away. What were you doing at four o’clock
on the twenty-first of June nineteen-ninety-three? The dream machine would take
you back to that moment and you were suddenly re-living a day forgotten by your
conscious mind.
Remember
that holiday in Madrid
Apple
secured the patenting. Millions were spent on advertising and billions were
made as the world queued up to get their own personal app.
Almost
immediately the effect of this new toy began to take its toll. (Have you
guessed it yet?)
Put
yourself in the situation of your average Joe Bloggs. You have a choice: Get up,
start a whole new day that might turn out to be fairly non-eventful, even
disastrous; or stay in bed, turn on your dream app and live through a day that’s
guarunteed to bring you a perfectly satisfying, pleasurable time.
When one
could repeatedly go back to their golden age of youth, was there really any
alternative?
And then
something new became available; an illegal download: Hackers tapped in to the
dreams that people were experiencing and sold them on the black market.
Unsatisfied
with your own life? How about trying something new? Ever seen the pyramids?
Ever fought in a war? Ever had a threesome with two well-known porn stars? Ever
been Tom Cruise?
An ageing
Tom Cruise (you may have heard of him) was famously fighting a legal battle to
win back the privacy of his own memories. Mostly he was unsuccessful because
the hackers had got there before the laws were written; and the lawyers who
gave a damn were few and far between anyway - too busy re-living their (or Tom
Cruise’s) college days…
Addiction
to the device proved devastating to commerce. People were showing less
enthusiasm for their jobs, hardly willing to leave the house. Food was about
the only thing anybody bought. Before they knew it they’d become cocooned
inside their own minds. The body no longer had any use - people stopped taking
care of their personal appearance and hygiene. They ate, they shat, they
dreamed.
Apple may
have secured the patenting but soon the thing had gone viral. It had spread
across the world in a matter of months. Unemployment soared. People were
stealing the essentials, feeding their habits by abusing the public electricity
sources.
Of course
there were some who opposed the devise. There were demonstrations, petitions;
there were even plans to make it illegal by the end of it. But inevitably it
was too late. Nobody was living. Almost no one was making any effort to start a
family, to reproduce. The average age of the world population eventually
exceeded sixty and after that there was no going back. The governments no
longer cared and even the scientists were too busy being Steven Hawking to come
up with any useful solution to the problem.
There are a
few of us left now. But we can hardly call ourselves “the human race.” We’re
barely animals. Nothing but tribes scattered around here and there. Surviving.
Learning. Starting again. To conquer the planet again we’ve more than a long
way to go.
All we can
do is learn from our mistakes. But the device still exists. And even with
education the danger will always be out there somewhere.
