Upload

It began with earpieces. We couldn’t live without them, on the way to work, on the drive home. That’s how it infected us, through the parts of out life that we didn’t  really care about. When your commute is just thirty minuets of dead space how easy is it for you to just slip on headphones and listen to music, or have a book read to you. But then it infected other parts of our lives, silently at first. We’d crave the headphones, the ability to plug in and listen to that song that was driving us mad all day, or find out what would happen next to in our story. Then it became more. Someone asked what if you could watch TV on the go, in the same way you could listen to books on the go. I remember the announcement, it was world breaking news, that we’d be able to watch TV on the go. In our eyes. They implanted them in us, tiny little devices, that projected an image onto the optical nerve of our eyes, and we’d be able to watch TV or a movie, in our head. Equipped with wireless power, so they’d never run out, and the ability to never be without entertainment. The world went crazy overnight. People like me did question whether this was going too far. But you don’t argue with the technology Gods. 

It took about a year before it was made consumable by the masses. The rich invested in the devices first and that allowed the companies to make the technology cheaper, and therefore more and more people got the implants. The age restrictions in countries got lowered, and lowered. About five years after the initial announcement came the next breakthrough. Social networks were brought into the mix. They’d already implanted microphones in our ears so we were never without music or sound. Now we had the ability of total submersion. Through another chip, somehow implanted deeper within us. We could enter a virtual reality space. So what you’d do is log in through, say, your phone, and then you’d be in a different reality. It was dubbed the first virtual reality. Initially it was a massive city, where you could walk around, and meet with other friends who were online. You could do this from anywhere. I’d walk through a carriage on a bus, and see people that looked passed out with glazed over looks in their eyes. But this was the new norm, no one but me looked at these people like they were weird. 

This new reality exploded. Online dating became something totally different, you’d actually meet in cyber space for your first date. You could change your appearance with just a few clicks, become thinner without dieting, and gaming became something extraordinary. Online worlds became actual worlds. But with these things came bad. When you met someone online, you’d have no idea what they were actually like, and it became a lot easier for people to convince you to meet in reality. You can only imagine what this did to the rape statistics. If you looked good in cyber space, then you became less bothered about your appearance in the real world. Obesity and diabetes sky rocketed. But gaming, I saw no drawback, it was brilliant, I imagined living my life in a fantasy world. They were building them all, Middle Earth, Disc World, Narnia. You could fall down a rabbit hole and go to wonderland if you wanted.

The world was going online, and less and less time was being spent offline. Everything became more real. Then one day, I read an article, from a shrinking group of people that didn’t go offline, saying that you could now go to a movie theatre in virtual reality. By now almost every major city had been rendered in this reality, but this kick was that people didn’t have to travel anymore, they could just decide they wanted to be somewhere, and then be there. So that dead space was gone. And now we were doing what we could have done anyway, but in another world. Because that’s what it had become by now. People had jobs online, I believe the first was a job as a journalist in cyber space. And then more and more people decided they’d rather never turn off. You can imagine that by now the companies were making humanity pay for their new addiction. But we needed money, and so we worked for it.

I could wander the streets of New York and meet no one. A massive class divide erupted. Those who could afford to stay online twenty-four seven, and those who had to work in the real world. Because the lower classes had to cater to the needs of those who wanted to stay online, they didn’t want to leave. But someone had to make sure our bodies, yeah remember them, stayed alive. But how were we still alive. It’s been fifty years now. Almost everyone is gone. I suppose people don’t remember that it’s the year 2092. I was born into an age obsessed by technology. I was born on the eve of the new millennia. And I have watched the world upload itself. Eventually we replaced what we didn’t like, we got rid of the lower class in favour of more technology. Robotics was a physical thing, so it took us a while to remember, but we did it. Now here I am. Probably one of only a handful of humans left with no metal in them. With humanity dying, and children being born out of bytes, what can I tell you. Anyone who is reading this. Life used to be different. Hardship makes us want to have better. But maybe we decided we already had better.

In a thousand years, I imagine that the system will still be going. That the cyber babies will have grown up to have cyber babies. And we will have reached the next stage of human evolution. Or we will have reached our extinction.