By BOBBY "SOJU" TUTLE
Ahssa! Staff Writer
http://www.migukin.com
http://ahssa.blogspot.com
Excessive drinking has produced some of my best thinking.
This time was no exception.
I was in my bed, still drunk from the night before when I had one of
those weird drunk dreams that are so vivid yet fuzzy that I hope
they're not real yet in the back of my mind I'll always think they
might be. Or just think of the end of every horror movie in the last 30
years where the protagonist wakes up only to realize it was all a
dream...just as a claw is about to rip his/her throat to shreds.
Suddenly, I was in The Byrd Theatre in Richmond looking up at the
majestic ceiling tiles. I was sitting next to Coy, but it wasn't really
Coy it was someone who looked a lot like Coy but yet didn't.
"Dude, there is like no one where," Coy-Not-Coy said.
"Yeah. Where is everyone?"
"They're all watching movies like this on their IPTV equipped plasma
displays. They don't need to come to the movies anymore," Coy said.
"They have every movie ever published available to them on demand on
ginormous HDTV screens."
"Oh. You know, this reminds me a lot of a scene from..."
"...Wild Palms..."
"How did you..."
"Don't worry about it..."
"Anyway....so why are we here?"
"Well, I've just come back from a two year stint in the future and
thought I'd bring you up to date about our future," Future boy Coy
said.
"Uh huh. So how far in the future were you?"
"I spent two years 20 years in the future. It was pretty cool," Coy
said.
"Why did you come back?"
"Well, I was pretty content in the future, but I was forced to come
back because I was causing a rift in the space-time continuum and there
was a risk that I would destroy the universe as we knew it."
"Sound very Back To The Future II-like."
"Yeah. That's the thing. It started out all Sleeper and ended up like
Jacob's Ladder with a Matrix twist to it. Very mind bending," Coy said.
"I'll bet."
"Yeah, scientists can be such jerks. You get all comfortable in the
future, and then they rush in and tell you if you don't go back to the
crappy past your very existence will cause the universe to blink out
and darkness to rule the light."
"Did they really say that?"
"In so many words," Coy said. "By the time they were escorting me to
the time ****tal they'd managed to create, it felt very Event
Horizon-esque."
"Cool," I said, nodding.
"No, not cool," Coy said, suddenly. "I had a wife and two kids in the
future and now my wife is....just now being born."
I paused before saying anything.
"So, what's the biggest difference between now and twenty years from
now?"
"Well," Coy said, clearing his throat. "It's the datasmog aspect of it
all. That everything you see, everything you interact with as an IP
address. It's pretty cool."
"So, like, can you read each other's minds and stuff?"
"Uh, well, yeah. Folks as GoogleSoft figured out a way to connect
wetware to the Internet and now rather than use the Internet we just
jack into each other's minds and ****. Think that 1999 movie with Ralf
Fines...
"...Strange Days..."
"Yeah, Strange Days...but with a harder edge to it. You don't just look
at people's memories, dude, you look into their actually real-time
minds!"
"Woah," I said in amazement. "Too wild."
"Yeah, it took me a little while to get retrofitted with all the
equipment and stuff, but before too long I was swapping files from
other people's minds pretty easily."
"Did it happen over night, or was it a gradual process?"
"Well, it was after the Great Plague of 2010, and the concept of the
nation-state because quaint after China and GoogleSoft merged."
"Don't tell me, they call it The Company, right?"
"How'd you know?"
"Dude, I've seen the Alien series. I'm not stupid."
"Yeah, pretty much The Company runs everything in the future. Their
scientists were able to figure out a way convert wetware signals into
binary code and the Internet became a huge hivemind collective."
"Very Johnny Mnemonic," I quipped. "No one's brain exploded, I hope?"
"Huh?"
"Never mind, just talking to myself."
"What about the clash of civilizations? What about terror?"
"Like I said, that's kind of besides the point 20 years from now. The
UN is the only government organization that really means anything.
ChindiaCorp is what people have to deal with on a regular basis," Coy
said.
"How did that merger work how, anyway?"
"Well, it's a very, very long story, but essentially because so many
people had died during the Great Plague, the two remaining global power
centers --- Chindia and GoogleSoft -- decided to merge for the
Betterment of Humanity. That was even their company advertising slogan
-- 'For The Betterment of Humanity.' They gave everybody in China and
India shares of GoogleSoft and GoogleSoft became the only company in
the world to have its own nuclear-tipped military."
"Well, you could say Halliburton..."
"Don't go there, it's not worth your breath."
"Yeah."
"One thing you might find interesting -- Al Franken was the last
president of the United States before the United States was abolished."
"No way!"
"Yes way."
"It was pretty cool. He was so funny! It was like was like having Will
Rogers as president. He was dead set against aboli****ng the U.S., but
the weight of history was just too much."
At this point, time traveler Coy began to fade as the movie started.
I opened my eyes and tried to focus: would I make it through this day
without throwing up?
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