I got into the contraption for the first time today.
At one moment I was in that typical, somewhat drab beige-grey room that we've spent so much time in as of late. The next, I was hiking in the Adirondacks on a calm, cool sunny day - just the way I like it. I'll admit, the transition was a shock to the system. It didn't feel real at first, almost an out of body experience - we'll have to work on the transition.
But I was right there, walking the trails, taking the crisp air into my lungs with every stride up the mountain. The air ever so lightly drying and cooling my throat all at the same time. As I pushed higher, my chest heavily heaved...in...out as I took in the air deeply to nourish my cells with much needed oxygen. But it wasn't really oxygen, was it?
At some point, I got lost in thought, as I'm known to do. Thinking about the marvel of this invention that has come to life, how it's going to change the world. It's going to drastically change our existence as we know it. There will be naysayers and never-adopters, and that's OK. Making huge leaps like this in a single generation are bound to leave some to the wayside. It's the early adopters we're looking for, and the new generation. Bless the new generation. Out with the old preconceptions and in with the new realities. Eventually this machine will be ubiquitous. It will be life.
That was when it happened. BAM! The sight of stars and the metallic taste of copper. I'd been neglecting my attention to the trail. There was a root just tall enough to catch my big toe and I came down HARD. My ankle aches where I twisted it. My lip, bloody. This is going to make getting back to the trail head much more difficult. I may even need a stitch or two.
That damned root. The decision had been made to map out any known trail that was already identified on the Internet, down to the minutest detail - the flora, the fauna, the pattern of the fallen leaves along the sides of the trail and apparently the roots within it. We didn't want to make any changes to the natural landscape - keep it all in tact. Customization was to to be left to our users - let them decide what this world would look like. Of course, we could make enhancements based upon their general preferences, but that would be later, after many, many more people have walked over this trail. Our dedicated team of designers had done a good job, but this root had left me reeling.
In a world where everything is inside your brain, time is the finite resource. Time is the new money. Of course "time is money" was a saying back then, but the link is so much more transparent now. I'll come back to this later.
Right now, I have a swollen ankle and a busted lip, and right now I have no need for this. So I'm posed with a few options: I could just limp along the trail until I find help; I could teleport myself directly to a hospital; I could tell the computer to heal everything instantaneously; I could opt to be eaten by a bear; or I could use the rewind feature and go back in time. Today, I think I'm going to choose the latter.
I called up the computer and asked it to go back 10 minutes. I could have said a specific time, but seeing as this is the first day of the system's creation, I would only get back as far as this first hike. As time goes on, future generations will be able to go back and witness our present - to actually sit in a lecture hall and witness the great thinkers of our time. And as we continue to gather data, we may even be able to create a virtual simulation of a person from the present who is able to interact with the future. I wish we could have done this with the great people of the past, but with as little as we actually know about them, any recreation would only be vague caricatures and machinations acting a part.
But there's no need to dream about them now, there will be plenty of time to discuss these experiences when they actually happen. As for now, I'm jumping back 10 minutes on this hike with the knowledge that I'll have to avoid that damned root. In reality, I'll have aged 20 minutes but now I'll only perceive it as 10. Time dilation is finicky like that.
No comments:
Post a Comment