Gadgets spawned by the technicum
were everywhere, and their control was almost absolute, even over the
earthlings that had created them in the first place, that had subjugated the
entire animal kingdom before then.
Earthling adults had regressed back into childhood, button pressing and
screen goggling, taking their ethics, and half-baked ideas about
humanity with them. The distinction
between what was ‘good’ and what was ‘bad’ in latter day morals, had been lost. Reality was dead. And, for the most part, pulling the arms off
a new born baby in the realm of cyberspace was thought of as nothing more, or
less, than tearing the wings off a daddy-long-legs in the old world.
There was no place for nostalgia, the perpetrators of hippy
ideals were talked of in cyber-schools as quasi-sixteenth-century-religious heretics, their
doctrine of free and universal love described as ‘unclean’ and ‘sordid’, or simply 'irrelevant'. Recreating paradise lost on a hill in the
forest had, in some hyper-spheres, become a running joke in that earthlings were
convinced by their own conceit that they, thanks to their technological revolution, were in the process of creating
their own paradise in the future (always in the future!). A paradise you didn’t have to share with anyone else, all your hopes and dreams could be made hyper-reality – if you could,
in fact, remember back far enough to hold onto any of these non-binary,
non-linear phenomena.
After all, the memories of most earthlings were now
inextricably linked up to Google Mind.
In its infancy Google Mind required the user to wear headgear similar
in weight and size to a latter-day bicycle helmet, and needed Google Glasses to
achieve synchronic function. Google
Glasses had developed to become ‘AI’ contact lenses, and Google Mind, a silicon
mole about half a centimetre in diameter, fused to either the right or left
temple (depending on whether your pre-cog tests came back as showing if you might be more inclined to think with the
right or left side of your brain).
Google Mind essentially monitored your routine behaviours and put
thoughts into your head based on what the technology thought you desired, thoughts you would then almost always act
upon, thereby leaving behind a form of memory in the aftermath of your actions, which would then prescribe you future (Google driven) actions.
Meanwhile, conscience was also, for many earthlings, a derivative
of Google Mind: mild to severe headaches could be introduced if you tried to go
beyond the boundaries of where technology decided you might, or rather should, want to venture. Conscience (as once conceived), it was repeated ad nauseam, had
led to the destruction of the old world, for it had meant latter day earthlings
acting together, often with purpose,
sometimes against authority – and as every-single-body now knew, authority was
there to facilitate happiness, and the move towards future paradise always (incidentally, the phrase at all times no longer had much
relevance, time being an archaic vestige of the old world, and obsolete reality).
Nevertheless, there were a few earthlings who had clung to
the old ways, but being outside of the technicum,
they were paid virtually no mind at all, free to wander the British Isles, and
love (naked sex!), live, take and give.
Google Mind referred to these earthlings simply as strays, not part of the system, too much of a minority to worry
about. Paradise
would happen in the future without them, too bad.
Strays were,
however, defined by Google Gospel (a version of the latter-day Google powered Wikipedia) as follows: ‘feral, or
ex-domesticated earthlings, sub-AI, low IQ’.
If you were to pursue your search for more information on Google Gospel,
Google Mind, of course would pre-sage you and deliver a splitting
headache. Some clever earthling had come
up with a slogan for this eventuality that read as both a warning and an
invitation: ‘Don’t stray from the path to the future’.
The genius of Google, and the three or four other
organisations that had monopolised the technicum
(the world), and thereby achieved an unprecedented grasp on the day to day
existence of earthlings, was in understanding the propensity of latter day
earthlings to live for tomorrow, for something better than they had had in the
past, or in the now, as well as the unrivalled avarice and greed alive, or at
worst dormant, in many of them. A
promise of a better future, with more
for you was an easy sell, especially
when it came with blue screens, flashy buttons and the apparent luxury of
choice.
With regard to choice, again Google and co
realised that earthlings only needed the promise of choice; in the eventuality
(with perhaps the constituent ingredients of earthling lunches, dinners aside),
Google and co knew earthlings preferred to have somebody else, or indeed
something else do their own thinking, and lead their behaviours. Arriving at the concept of Google Mind, was
ironically, a no-brainer.
Heaven’s in here proclaimed
an early advertisement for Google Mind, with an evidently (self)satisfied
customer pointing to his new headgear.
The tag line ran You can choose!
But the irony was lost even then, and has all but been eradicated from life today.
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