Pods

Αθήνα: Θησείο

Σάββατο πρωί, έτος 201x

Lenny Kravitz, "I want to get away"

The story goes like this, brother. At first, we downloaded songs. I mean, what else was there to download? You clicked the name of your favourite whatever band, chose an album, were charged a buck per song and whoosh! into your pod and into your ear. The catch was obvious now, wasn't it? You had to know beforehand which band you wanted! What if you didn't know? What if there was a new band, that'd just come out from its hatching garage, played the best music in the Universe--well, your Universe--and you didn't know about it? Huh? How about that? Could we afford to spend a couple months in the darkness of ignorance, waiting for the band to crawl out into glory? There had to be a way for the uploader to know beforehand if we would like something and send it to us! Of course the answer was pretty simple. Neural networks had been up and running for years, guessing, learning, getting smarter. Based on your previous choices, your next music was chosen for you. You just let your pod on the default setting of "Auto download" and it did the job for you. There were even special offers. So people started not bothering any more to search for what they liked. It was done for them. Then some smart guy thought, "why only music?". I mean, most of the population was already spending most of its time plugged on its pods, and soon the pods were not credit card sized any more and carried around in pockets, they were aspirin-sized and implanted behind your ear, hooked directly on your acoustic nerves. You could stay connected all day long, chat with anyone, listen to music, and then watch films, news or whatever, projected onto your glasses. The next step was obvious and it's what your pod can do now, brother. These last year models hook on your optical nerve, let you watch anything at any time, and on your vocal cords, letting you talk, right? But that ain' t good enough no more. These babies that I have, hook on the central nervous system. You clip it on your ear, next to your implant, and you can download your entire, personal Universe and live inside it completely isolated from anything, for as long as you like--a few minutes or your entire life. Your Universe is chosen for you, based on your genes and your hormones--it gets the info from the implant. You can modify it at will, of course, but few people ever do. They are just happy travelling into the unknown, tailored to perfection for them. And I don't mean just clothes and streets and climate. I mean everything. You can download a lover, made especially for you, and if he or she, by the tiniest of chances is not up to expectations in bed, hell, you can download your orgasm, and it would be just how you would want it to be. "But it's not really there", the naive brother would observe. Well, he'd better wake up to the fact that reality is in the eye of the beholder. The perception of the physical world is limited by your senses –that, we've known for millennia. You think that something is there because you see it, touch it, smell it, by the tiny electrical signals sent to your brain. If the signals are there, so is reality. But there's still something missing. No matter how great your artificial universe and your experiences in there, you always remember who you are. So people feel that if your name is Jerome, come from the rough end of the ghetto and your momma was killed last week on a heroine deal, you could never really enjoy being a 17th century King of France being blown in succession by three Austrian princesses. You have to be able to download your past, also. Or rather, many different ones, at will. With this, you can. And your present past, if you will forgive the pun, can be overwritten. Permanently, if you want. So, you asked me who I am, brother? It's really simple. I am whoever I want to be. Now, you gonna buy one of these?

Yannis Andredakis