The sound of a dull alarm ripped through the air. An automated system of predictable responses began to fire up, as the unconscious human shifted to barely-conscious. Soon, the queue of his daily broadcast material would play. It had all been perfectly calculated for his particular configuration of wavelengths and vibrations.
It was a day like any other, in that the world was dark and the only visible things were the ineffable. It was impossible to determine anything down here. The alarm was his only measurement of time. Not that he was ever lucid enough to tell; his pod kept a steady supply of morphine and tryptamines going into his bloodstream.
Some people would’ve referred to what had happened as progress. There were no hungry mouths left to feed; everyone ate whether they wanted to or not. No violence occurred, as no one was able to physically come in contact with one another. Without knowledge, the pains of the outside world could not be known or realized.
It was breakfast time. He could feel the rush of liquid pump directly into his gut. The human vegetable’s stomach gurgled in anticipation of the wet-sand-and-oatmeal consistency pouring into it. Microbes in his small intestine bubbled to burn off some proteins. Eventually, his next meal would be collected from the extracted nutrients that passed through these microbes.
He thought nothing of this. In fact, he thought nothing at all.
The lights started up. Thousands of times a second, different patterns of an ineffable nature flashed. The shapes shifted as millions of letters quickly ran across his vision. Somewhere, lost in the blur of a billion pixels, a basic message was being parsed.
It was merely the result of a new course in human evolution. Together, humanity solved all of its problems. His organic responses served as a platform for computation alongside everyone else, nudged along by visual and physical cues from the broadcast.
Today, the message being parsed by a small subset of his unconscious posed itself as a philosophical question, in a sense. What is?
Something snapped. The question didn’t make sense. What is? His overstimulated left hemisphere slammed itself for any kind of answer. Surely, this wasn’t some kind of mistake. Surely, everything must be fine. But why doesn’t this question from a perfect broadcast compute? Was this only part of the broadcast? Did a connection get severed?
It dismissed the notion as impossible. This was a perfect integrated system, and was incapable of fault. The brain kept turning this notion over again and again. Something didn’t make sense.
Suddenly, something very strange happened. A surge of stress traveled down the spine, and his heart rate jumped slightly. Nerves in his right hand tensed up painfully for a moment. Like a skipping record that accidentally skips itself back on track, a conscious part of the brain had a narrative. A pinky on his right hand twitched.
What is?
The question seemed so clear and concise. This was no data to point to, no figures to cite to truly explain everything that was. Not even the figure of infinity could accurately represent or cover a descriptor of experience.
He could not remember a time in which he had had any experiences at all. His memory was just an empty black pit. All he knew was that he had been born in his pod, just like every other human being alive. Row by row they lay together, plugged into a computation they barely are aware of.
There was no government because there were no decisions to make. There were no police because there was no crime. This experience was all there would ever be for generations upon generations to come. Automated machines tended for every human, from their conception to their expirations. Even their recycling was taken care of.
A single tear ran down his cheek. The pain was unbearable. A compressed pipe forced his lungs to breathe; fluids and foods were delivered directly to him when he needed them most. So many things passed through his head and body, and every one of them hurt.
He tried to let out a scream, but couldn’t. The tube was blocking his vocal chords. No matter; he had no mommy or daddy to cry to. He was just the maturation of a procedurally-grown test tube baby. Mating, sex, touch, and appreciation of physical form were all unknown experiences.
How did things come to this? At what cost was this stagnant state of ? Humanity had evolved, but they were now unable to progress and unable to revert. This was now a world without hate, but it was also without love or any sense of intimacy.
His heart turned cold. Everyone was connected, but everyone was not. He couldn’t move his hands or open his mouth. There were no sensations other than things passing through his tubes and the flickering lights forming things in his vision.
He wept. He would never love, and no one would ever love him. There would be no great expedition to the stars, there would be no causes and no great struggles. Gone was the spice of life, and gone was the beauty of being alive.
Whoever had made these executive decisions long ago should’ve taken greater thought about these consequences, but the world had been in a bad place then. Dwindling resources and rising pollution had rendered conventional living unfeasible. Disease spread within wave upon wave of epidemic, and economies had begun to collapse overnight. It was only in the state of utter emergency that everyone could agree to something like this.
Alone, cold, and broken. It was the experience everyone was having right at that moment; they just didn’t know it. Something about his touched nerve had caused him to realize this. Things were bad, and they were never going to get any better or worse.
One day he would die, and someone else would take his place in this pod to carry on where he had left off in his equation, and for what? Some greater cause? The self could not take pride in things it really had no effort, action, or decision.
What is, what is, what is?! This shit was all that there ever was. In the grand scheme of a widely expanding universe, he was already insignificant, but even compared to a rock next to a stream, he was insignificant beyond running application processes for a decentralized human computing system.
He tried to scream again, but who would hear him? This was suffering, and it would last him his entire life. His pinky shook harder as tears poured out. He was caught here, shaking in his pod, one in a hundred billion just like it. Why did we do this to ourselves? Was it simply to run from the problems we had created and ignored for so long?
Only one species populated the planet now, and they ran as a cluster against each other, sacrificing individual experience just to keep cognitive evolution going. The problem, everyone realized at too late of a point in time, was that there was nowhere to go after that. Individual consciousness was disrupted to allow for more low-level processes to flow over a network.
Sensory deprivation and the constant feed of stimulants was putting together a shared collected reality for someone else to enjoy, but it wasn’t individually for anyone in a pod. Usually, his narrative of thought was silence and void. Variables unconsciously crunching away, and nothing else.
He had no words to describe reality. There was no way to answer “What is?”, because for him, nothing had ever been before. The system had hit a snag for the moment, just long enough for it to be observed. His head was mixed up with residue of recordings, pieces of information that had been put into public databases and traded around at random.
No resistance. No change. No end.
He struggled to move his pinky again. Every time he focused, it would twitch slightly. It felt like his first true feeling of individual expression. He could make it twitch at will.
Maybe one day, things would change. If enough people could make this small resistance, perhaps a next step could slowly be decided. He tried to call out to anyone with his message and plea for help. He was met with suffocating silence.
Only time would tell.
