My Notes
This was the routine in my head that I had practiced before, and I didn't want to go away right now, even though the realms were calling me. I tightened the string around my thumb until it was purple, and then I moved the string to my other thumb and began the process all over, switching it back and forth every ten minutes.
I did this in a state of wild excitement, pulling the chair to the table and poring over my writings on the sheets of paper. The first had just my name on it, written over and over again in a column, perhaps twenty times. On the other side was a list of numbers, my birthday, my address, my age, or rather a list of ages, and beside each a list of names of the people I had known in that point in my life. There were the family names, and those of relatives, then schoolmates and university companions and then the last two, John Chambers and Mary Evens.
When I read her name, I turned and looked back at the bed. She was beautiful, lying there in her underwear, on her side in a sort of fetal position, hardly showing any sign of breathing at all, but deep in her chosen zone.
The thought came to me of trying to wake her up again, by tying the string around her thumb. But I didn't. I didn't want to hurt her or risk my own rare moment of real time. I turned back to my papers. I had to examine every one of them and find the clue. The clue as to why I was sitting here in this sordid room, torturing my thumbs for over half an hour, and breaking rules that I felt had been implanted in my head.
The next sheets on the table drew out a strange history. The words were more legible, and clearly my own handwriting. I don’t remember composing them. Maybe I’d transcribed them from a book. The whole thing seemed strange because writing and print were such obsolete things. I don’t know where I could have found a document, but as I read it, I felt as if I was hearing the voice of someone who knew, who understood the changes that had befallen our world. At the top of the page were the words: '2034, perhaps'. And below that, 'Chambers mentioned electricity'. It seemed like some type of clue. But I didn't know the question. My mind was always in a haze and I was starting to drift off again. But I repeated the words several times to myself so I might ponder it some more in my next lucid moments.
It's generally agreed that by our vocal communication and working together as teams we’ve become the most successful species on this planet, and amplifying on this, interconnecting every one of us every moment to the net, streaming all our thoughts, our beings, into one huge pool, and allowing a taste of this consciousness to flow back to us, any parts we chose, flooding our minds with other’s perceptions, working in groups, we could build whole new worlds, the perfection of our human community and condition.
It started out of course as a convenient toy for the rich, stockbrokers and the like, wanting a stream of figures day and night, news blurbs and other relevant facts, and for the idle, implanted cell phones, so they could talk at all hours with their select set of friends, without apparatus.
But the chip and the operation quickly became so cheap and easy that more and more people went wet, as they called it. They linked in and logged on, discovered new and versatile ways to use it. Of course there was the attraction of instant, constant cybersex, with hundreds always willing to participate. With the refinement of cryptocurrencies, transactions fulfilled at the bat of an eyelash, a huge, conglomerate, market of everything sprouted up from its tiny precursors of Amazon and Facebook. We gladly became brokers and dealers and gamers in a nonstop rush of mental connectivity. You could always turn down this stream to a more pleasant nighttime trickle, for the deepest sleep and the sweetest dreams imaginable.
Our minds quickly adapted to the flow. The information on demand, the ten or twenty simultaneous conversations, the seamless sharing of our most intimate thoughts and feelings, made us feel godlike.
It wasn’t for everybody at first. The old declined and the young were prohibited until predator firewalls were refined along with sets of roving administrators, who, when in place allowed even three and four year olds to join in. And then there were the levels and the admission rules, not a price actually, but a matter of content, a contribution fee one might call it, to protect the more educated in the stream from a vast sea of only takers, the world's countless disenfranchised masses, the poor, with minds as ragged as the clothes on their backs, who would only pollute and poison our river.
