a flat disk? If we follow your logic, then we can come to this conclusion.
– Maybe elephants keep a turtle. By the way, I found this video about turtles…
This is how every conversation between Alexandra Apollonovna Kassandrava and her husband (and not only with him) ended. During the day, she is a world-famous scientist, in her hands are the secrets of the Universe and the distant future is before her eyes. And in the evening there is talk about the low salary and the emptiness of her research. If Alexandra believed in karma, wouldn’t this be a manifestation of it?
Graveyard of the Immortals
The photographs are arranged in a row. People smile on them, as if nothing had happened: they broke up for a couple of days. They will return and say again: «Hello.» Who will say that all that remains of them is this photograph, name and date of birth? The candle smells like soot. Slavik decided not to turn on the electric light; a dim light on a moonless night would be enough. Just not to scare off the one who can put her hand on her shoulder. He will no longer see her, he can only feel her. Slavik examined Marina’s profile for the hundredth time and left a bouquet of roses on the wall. Red ones, just the way she loved them.
Previously, only the talented remained immortal. You can still leaf through the pages of the books of great writers of the past and plunge into their dreams and passions. Artists live in their paintings, and composers come to life in operas. But these days, immortality has become cheap. Next to a piece of the poet’s soul in his imperishable poem there may be a part of the one who shot the video of the dance near a moving car. Next to the opera diva’s track is the edited voice of a beauty who doesn’t hit even a few notes. They will all remain to rot in the digital world until the end of internet times. But in the real world, all that was left of them was ashes scattered to the wind. Only the richest can afford a place in the cemetery. But why do they need this in the era of biotechnology, when they can remain forever young and live until they get tired of it? A short life is only for the poor.
There was a rustling sound in the silence. Slavik is sure it’s her. Maybe now she will respond to the painted roses that he left in her profile on the «Cemetery of the Immortals» website?
«Thank you! I love you!» – as always, a short message. She is always concise. Friends have been trying for years to prove that a chatbot is answering him. They don’t understand anything – Marina is now immortal, in this digital world. One day Slavik will join her. One day, all pages that have not been deleted on social networks will become part of digital immortality.
Cells. Revelation of the Immortal
The showers are over, and now it’s an impossible heat – a steam room, and that’s all. But this is outside, and now imagine what’s going on on the bus in the morning. Some of you may be wondering: why doesn’t the driver turn on the air conditioning? Neon signs and commercials depict beautiful metropolitan life, which will not come to our region soon. Maybe when 3D traffic of gravity cars is launched in the capital, they will give us their old air-conditioned buses?
You stand on the last step, but seven more people are pushing you from behind. In the indistinct mooing one can barely guess:
– Come on in, the middle is empty!
Hundreds of emotionless faces, buried in small boxes, from which short videos flow in a continuous stream, who know better how to live and what to do. They say that a couple of centuries ago people blinked like animals. They’re probably lying: in a moment, while you’re blinking, you can accidentally skip a couple of videos, and then nothing is clear.
«Look, I shared! Here they say that the Americans have again used meteorological weapons,» a guy of about twenty years old types with a long, mobile thumb. They say that a couple of centuries ago, thumbs were a finger that was thicker than others, but not longer; now the thumb is the thinnest, but also the longest of all.
«Yes, it’s all their fault! It’s Jon Petrowitz and Paul Bashirson again! We started our car, all the fruits first rotted under the downpours, which is why bananas are now cheaper than potatoes, and now we turned up the heat.»
«Or maybe it was the locals who decided to raise prices and profit from the weather on the sly? And the Africans are great, the prices for their bananas depend little on the dollar exchange rate, unlike the prices for potatoes and carrots.»
«No, ours have nothing to do with it. I watch videos all the time.»
«They’re lying! Where is the proof?»
«I don’t watch official videos. They say this in an underground channel, they won’t lie right away?»
«Both official and underground channels lead from the same office!»
I wonder what these two are chatting about so animatedly? Old films showed that people used to talk more often. Moreover, their speech was rich, their voices were sonorous and expressive. And now only specially trained people can speak normally; in the mooing of others it is hardly possible to recognize understandable words. Although, this is a logical course of evolution: why do we need a voice when we can correspond with friends and neighbors? Is it possible to transmit several megabytes of text information by voice in a second? Scientists suggest that our children will already be able to perceive a hundred megabytes per second.
The bald man, about forty years old, smiled. The only emotion I could discern among this crowd today. He also blinked frequently – once every two or three seconds, while everyone else could not look away from the monitor for even a second. I smiled back.
No correspondence – the rule is unshakable: all chats are carefully monitored. Only live speech in places where there is definitely no wiretapping. Although, recently, fewer and fewer people prefer oral speech, so the era of total wiretapping is also coming to an end.
We met Andrey a couple of years ago. For some reason, the people around me always seemed somehow insipid and emotionless. They are interested in a piece of fresh bread and a fresh spectacle – bright news or a new crazy short video on the Internet. But Andrey could recite Shakespeare’s poems by heart without an electronic translator! Tell me, who else is studying foreign languages now? There are electronic systems for transfers, but after the Great Division of Nations no one will be able to get abroad anyway.
Of course, I have always been different from other people; what is served instead of breakfast in the morning news report was not enough for me. I had difficulty finding forbidden old books. But after Andrei’s injection, it became even more sad:
– What happened to humanity? Where did our dream go?
Andrey looked into my eyes with a sad smile:
«But there are only a few people left – no more than a couple of thousand on the entire planet.»
– So now there are more than ten billion people!
– Are they still people? There are currently three intelligent species on the planet. You are familiar with people – you yourself are a representative of this species, and others would envy you. The second species absorbed the others. I call them in the old fashioned way – countries, because each of the forty currently existing states is a whole species, and the people in it are just cells. At birth, cells have the same set of chromosomes, only from birth they are placed in front of their eyes with a tablet that forms clip thinking. Cells are no longer people. They have not developed critical and analytical thinking. Cells perform monotonous work throughout their lives, taking care of the survival of the whole organism – the state.
– But each of us chooses the path to follow.
«Each of them,» Andrey made a significant pause, saying, «we are not them,» «chooses the same profession to which their parents dedicated their lives. There are transport workers, there are workers, there are even heads of state – but even they are just cells.
– As I understand