"...let me introduce to you the concept of Homo Spectatoris, completely deprived of any spark of its own imagination, evolved to consume information at incredible speed, often multiple sources at the same time, and to convert these stimulus into consumeristic impulses and also…” for some reason, these words from the Professor caught my attention. This lesson was so boring; I had heard the same Homo Erectus, Homo Sapiens, Homo Super Sapiens story a million times, but this new take on our evolution left me intrigued.
Did we really evolve into such simple creatures? I would have called that Homo Pavlovian, but the Professor’s connotation was more geared towards being unable of being creative in any way. Sick.
I wanted to experiment with this. I unplugged my Visor after peeking at the uptime timer. Wow! I had been logged in for 673 days straight without reboots. I even had some critical updates to install that I had muted, terminating the process against the Netizen Manifesto. I took the opportunity to update my trusted companion device and to look around the Offline World. Most people couldn’t handle it; they were just addicted to content. I had a form of Schizophrenia that made me totally immune to Dopamine, pretty rare, but my parents didn’t want me to become a lab rat, so they falsified the mandatory prenatal DNA screening.
Obviously, my logoff was recorded, and I had already received yet another admonition from the Professor, but I mean, it’s just an AI. What is it gonna do? Hit my hands with a stick? I pay way too much money for these courses; they can’t afford to lose me! That notification stayed in front of me for a couple of minutes, slowly blurring, like when you stare at a bright light for too long and then look at something else.
As my eyes adjusted to the different light and, more importantly, to the depth of field, I was shocked. Holy Voxel, this is insane; I have never seen anything like this. People looked like zombies, like our ancestors always staring at their handheld devices, but this time around, at least, they had better posture; they were just staring into the void in front of them. They all looked like puppets controlled by some invisible puppetmaster inside their head. Well, technically, next to it.
So, in the past, we used to look down on the so-called “smartphones”. Fun fact: my grandparents had met via a matchmaking software on these bricks with a screen attached to it. I can’t believe my DNA survived the Great Wars and the Purge!
Now we just stare in front of us. I think in the future we’ll just look up! What’s left otherwise?
So, that I did. I looked up and, to my surprise, again, I have seen things that I had never noticed before.
The sky was made of some ancient screen tech, like the ones used in the Sphere Museums of Lost Vegas and Old London. Obsolete, but pretty high definition for the human eye. Nobody looked up anymore because it was just ads all the time. Ad blockers were pretty standard installation, but now without a Visor, I could see what was going on. I could see the sky!
What? Why? I kept scanning it in awe until I noticed a dialog window. Ha! It must be an ad. Let’s see what I should buy but I won’t... I thought, approaching the pixel area a couple of blocks from my position.
"If you can read this, you must act now. We have been invaded, our minds are trapped, you can’t free us all, we are doomed. It's OK. You and your kind must survive and prosper, land and resources are waiting for you at 1°24'36.2"S 102°51'02.2"E."
The message disappeared, only to reappear a few blocks away from me. So, there’s a chance that someone else like me has seen it... I had to figure out how to get there.