Due to the socio-philosophical side effects from the rapid evolution of technology, come Friday, no one in America will ever fall in love again. And it won’t even be sad. No one will even notice. Because by Friday, everyone in America will have been replaced with non-organic versions of themselves. Credit this experiment to the Corporation that Owns Earth. They’ll take responsibility for quadrillions of subatomic microchips spilling into the atmosphere without a warning to ignore. No one looks up at the sky that’s no longer sky. No one pays attention to the clouds where tiny rockets shoot down into bodies of water, rendering every drop digital. No one spots microscopic robots skeeting semen across cornfields, their offspring coughing on trees. This is your secret, electric disease. First, it’s in the sunlight, then your cereal. Next, it’s in what you read, what you dance to. It’ll be the voice you hear when asking yourself, ‘Is it too early to celebrate? Too late to escape?’
Cos you know how it goes: You are what you consume. So how long have you been you? Perhaps you’ll sort that bit out by Friday, when babies and light bearers become the last victims of this imminent transition. Every choice made in the USA will be outsourced down to its molecular conception by Friday. Watch out for advertisements between your thoughts, credits to close out your dreams. Those names on the left, babies who cried, ‘Consciousness is not in my mind’, then spent their entire lives trying to find out where. Those on the right are the names of reAmericans. Don’t think of them as persons, but persons as a place, somewhere that appears when they find out where. But here’s the rub. Inside those subatomic microchips are quadrillions more subatomic microchips. And so on. And so on. Each imprinted with a hell for those who believe in it and a heaven for those who can afford it. Every day is a holiday; every day there’s a tragedy.
Will you come home when the World Series is played against the landscape of civil war, and in a maze of instant replays, you search for an edge to cling to, an edge to jump from? Who will bring you home when most people wouldn’t find home while fast asleep with maps on the back of their eyelids? They repeat themselves in memories they call today, everyday, till Friday. They don’t have names. They take names from the Corporation that Owns Earth, for corporations are people, too. But those who own Earth ain’t giving out names for free. Instead, they sell lives that have been lived quadrillions of times. On Friday, consciousness becomes currency, and everyone buys what already belongs to them. So to maintain an illusion of authenticity, reAmericans cease repeating themselves. They take your name, my name. We search for home, home not as in a place, but a person, someone who brings us home. And for the sake of our sanity, it’s best we pretend we’ve always been here.
Funny how we were once prisoners of artificial darkness, strung from rain machines, and posed as scarecrows for UFOs. After serving so many life sentences, Friday came. The sky turned pink from the fumes of tears; not just our tears, but also tears of children without coins for the wishing well, tears of parents protecting the hill that the well stood upon, and tears of grandparents filling pails with what used to be water. Remember crawling inside that well to never come out? But we never reached the bottom, didn’t know we were in the same well till meeting our digital ends, thus realizing that the well wasn’t real. And the hill had long since caved in on people climbing over each other, reaching for what they saw, but couldn’t feel. There were quadrillions of it, too big to see more than one of it at once. Those closest called it their own because they saw their names on it. Those furthest will call it home because they’ve never been home. And we call it love because we fall in it.
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