ut the normal proceeded as it always did, he spent the evening restlessly searching for distraction, but no cute animal vid, no funny pictrant, no vid fantasy could chase the growing heaviness that he carried into the next day, despite the Mind’s attempts to chase it away and move forward with the ordinary.
Miss Flagherty wasn’t physically there. But as she played the picto lecture, she moved virtually among the members of the classmind, answering questions as they arose while picto flashed across their mindscreens.
“Now class, where were we? Oh yes, the, seed crisis,” she fastforwarded through history the metemotions coming in disorienting flashes.
A view from above showed five white cropduster planes flying in tandem over row upon row of perfectly even corn crops, spraying an cloud of designer bacteria equipped to fight the constantly-evolving parasitic bacteria. The shot zoomed down past the planes, through the cloud, and stopped on a single green corn leaf, slightly withered, pocked by dark spots..
“…bacterial resistance continued to grow. Bacteria were evolving faster than scientists could engineers solutions.”
“Dude,” came the persistent chat from Billy. Attached was a pict of Jethro as a rubber squeeze-doll with popping-out eyes.
Isaac sighed and tried to ignore him.
The lecture continued, “This was the first unification, when the the government bought out half of Goople’s stock and mandated all scientists join the Mind to solve the most pressing problems of our generation.
There was still simply insufficient energy to feed the processor cores, and so with the food crisis growing desperate. Mexico was annexed for arable land, with the object of eventually adopting the oil-rich Andean region.”
A desert-tan tank bucked as it climbed a temporary metal military bridge across the Rio Grande, a line of tanks kicking up dust. A smiling United States president shook hands with Mexico’s shorter one, who manage a slightly throttled politician’s smile. The metemotions suggested a hard decision that was the right one, a proud decision, a strength to stay the course until the “mission accomplished” and to see it through, to forge a new future together with Mexico, our new adopted partner.
“Dude,” came the chat from Billy. The attached pict showed Isaac laid out on a white table, his eyes staring ahead with a look of fixed rage, his whole body frozen, his skin a sickly gray-blue. Billy was thawing him out with a hair-dryer, and in the metemotions, the heat felt good.
Isaac rolled his eyes and sighed again. It didn’t matter that the Mind had softened them all up in dreams. He felt as though the tectonic plates underneath their relationship had shifted.
And he dared not articulate that in picto, because he was afraid of the metemotions he’d show. After all, maybe the rift between them would close, maybe something else would shift. But he really didn’t want to try just right now.
“Man, I can’t talk right now. I’m trying to listen. But yes, I am pissed off right now. I need to think about it some more,” mouthed Isaac quietly, the words translating into audio over Billy’s inphones.
The pictfeed continued, skipping fifty years, giving a background to the current war with the Bolivarian states. “The Mexian Cancer Revolts were first directed at US corporate oil, grain, and natural gas infrastructure.”
Eight Mexican factory workers systematically poured gasoline on a conveyor belt in a corn factory while the machines plopped and hummed, spitting high fructose corn syrup into bags. They threw the empty red plastic containers into the machine, while the last systemically poured a line of gasoline to the door and struck a match. The screen exploded in fire.
Rocks rattled off riot police shields as children with deformed limbs screamed and threw. As Isaac watched, he felt the empathetic twinge for the police encoded in the picto, but he felt for the cancer-doomed factory workers rising up because of pesticides, oil, and fracking contaminants in their water.
“But then came the breakthrough, and the one-hundred-percent effective cancer meds were made available nearly free of charge. With military-grade thickspace projectors, order was restored, and the future revolts were staved off with chip upgrades and increases in access to free lucids.” One of the men who burned the factory was shot by a firing squad.
Isaac knew the rest of the stages already. When the dreaming clarity update rolled out, nearly everyone with the lucid upgrades fell into the Dreamer’s Depression, lost in the lucid dreams and unwilling to work. And then came operation. The dreams were converted to pay-per-view and America went back to work, operation paid for by the dream currency.
The great intelligent machines lay where they fell, as humans took up the work to earn the dreams they’d once gotten for free. Just like machines ourselves, thought Isaac.
“Dude,” came the chat again. Attached was a pict of Jethro waiting on their table, his face distorted like a braying donkey, fetching sugar packet after sugar packet with jerky, rapid-fire movements, but with an undertone that was an invitation to play chess tonight at Perkins.
Isaac cut off Billy’s channel abruptly.
Looked like whatever the work the Mind had done in Billy it hadn’t addressed his Billy’s deep-seated class prejudices. But what did he expect? It was the Mind that had built the operated/operator world with its psychic landscape.
What was Jethro thinking? He looked over at Jethro, who met his eyes.
Isaac sent Jethro a pict of Billy in space, surrounded by the starry void.
The earth was before him, the size of an orange. And he looked at it with greedy eyes, smacking his lips. He seized it in his hand, plucking it from orbit casually and peeling back the mantle to reveal the fruit beneath. Horror and shame rode with it.
The chat came, Jethro laughing,
Isaac chatted back, “Yeah. He would totally do that. I mean, he can be a real dick. Sorry about that.”
“No man, I’m sorry,” chatted Jethro. “I’m straining to keep a lid on it, I mean, I got to if I want to stay, but sometimes things are too much.”
A construction crew smiled, their eyes closed in dreams as they worked to dig the trench for the thickways with shovels and picks, while others carefully lowered massive fiber-optic cabling down with a complicated pulley system.
“The thickways were expanded deep into the rural regions, spreading thickspace and creating the energy needed to pump desalinated water back into the Ogallala Dust sates, putting the breadbasket back to work, too.”
“What are you up to tomorrow? You want to catch another game?” chatted Isaac.
“I mean yeah… but just you and me, right?” said Jethro.
“Yeah. Not at Perkins, though.”
“My place?” asked Jethro.
“Cool,” said Isaac.
After class Isaac was walking quickly to meet Jethro when Billy caught up with him, putting his hand on his shoulder and pulling him around in the crowded but silent hallway.
“Hey dude, what’s up? Have you been getting my pictos? We on for chess, or what?” he asked. Everyone passing looked at them, because they were the only ones talking. Billy looked worried and a little bit sad.
“Uh, man, I have lots of stuff to do tonight. I have a bunch of research and stuff tonight. I can’t really hang out,” said Isaac.
“That’s cool, man. Are you still pissed off or whatever?”
“No, man. It’s cool. I mean, yeah. We’re good. I just have a bunch of stuff to do,” said Isaac.
“Huh, okay. Well man, just let me know,” said Billy. Isaac expected some sort of flashy pict from him, but none came, just a forcetap as he walked away to Vac Studies.