You Don't Know

You gaze out the window, the buzzing in your head subsiding slightly as you mentally lower the volume on your mindnet. The last thing you hear before is subsides into silence is the overly energetic voice of a man offering you longer life through photosynthesis. You quickly prick the tip of your middle finger on one of the memory needles sitting next to your bed, and the advertisement is shot into the memory bank underneath your bed. Who knows when you’ll need another fifty years?

You.

Everything about you is printed on the label glued carefully around you. You could call these labels clothes if you even knew what they were. Your name, your brand, your registration code, blood type, nutritional value (in case of accidental death it continues if you lift the little flap that reads 'pull' these will allow mechdocs to use your available parts), and warning caption.

You rarely speak out loud, only to clarify something you said through 1337speak. Your voice is clumsy and too loud, but so is everyone else's so you don't know this isn't how it should be.

‘/0 814|{|2053 |/\|u7 +3|-| |-|311 _|00 |)01|\| QQQQ
oldspeak transl: yo blakrose wut the hell joo doin questionmark questionmark questionmark questionmark

The words flash across your eyes like a black ink, but you can’t make that comparison. You’ve never seen paper before, much less ink.

You quickly blink your eyes in succession, spelling out the reply for your mindamie.

+|-|1|\||{1|\| 800+ 81u|=|= 4|/\|1’/ one!1
oldspeak transl: thinkin boot bluff away exlammark exclammark exclammark

This time you go as far as to shut down the omnipresent mindfriend, cutting you off as completely from the world as you can be.

Which isn’t very much. Your mindnet is only ever seemingly turned off, but underneath that part that rests and lets itself cool down, the central network is always on, always wired to your brain, with the ability to control, in essence, your very thoughts.

You don’t know this, of course. You don’t know much of anything.

Once more, you let your eyes follow the lights flashing in the deep, dark night sky. You don’t really know dark, though, do you? The closest thing to it are in your memory bank, uncanny photos of a sky a pure unadulterated black, with pinpricks of light, like an old blanket frozen through time from centuries before.

The sky you see now is always grey, night or day. Sometimes, on especially good summer days, it will be so light it seems nearly white. White, like the marshmallows in which your necessary nutrients are pressed. White, like the lilies no one’s planted for decades.

Never blue, the sky is always lined with the smoke and chemicals pressing up into the atmospheres by the plants that create your mindnets and your food and your water. Not that you’ve ever seen these plants, either. After all, you’ve never even left your house before. Why should you, if you have everything you need supplied right into your head?

It's a free country, with its citizens given more choices than ever. Now they can chose whether or not to ever leave their homes. Home of the brave.

Now you focus your eyes on your hands, each finger exactly the same size as its match on the other hand, each nail cut perfectly round. They don’t grow, but you don’t know that they should. All you know is that pale, pale skin, and the blue veins you can make out clearly through this thin layer of epidermis. All you know is the mindnet, with its mindnumbing silent noise, with its poison rushing perpetually through your bloodstream, until finally all the frozen time in the world can’t keep your heart from stopping.

Not even the perfect body can keep the heart from aching for a natural life, for cells with natural mitochondria, for the smell of burning bread, for the pain from the prick of a thorn on a thumb.

But you don’t know this. All you know is how to flick your mindnet back on, how to wait impatiently for the buzzing to fill your head again.

}=1|\||) 73|-| |v|34|\|1|\| 0|= |_1|=3 1|\| 7|-|15 80++13 0|= 41|2 dot 57|2473 |=|20|v| 73|-| 8357 50u|2<3 1|\| \/3|\|u5 oneone1!
oldspeak transl: find the meanin of life in this bottle of air period strate from the best source in venus exclammark exclammark exclammark exlammark

When you feel yourself finally dying, will you wonder why?

Of course not. How can something more dead than alive know when it’s dying?