Flowers and Light

-
"Up is down, down is ground and sky is where I look."
Sophie mouthed the words in her mind as she stared out at the afternoon like sky. She wanted to get up, she had been wanting to get up for as long as she could remember. It didn’t seem as strange to her as she thought it should. She knew she was on the grid in After Life and part of her was still struggling to understand why she couldn’t wake up from this dream state.
She struggled to recall how she had conjured up the login screen where she felt herself getting to this point, but could not get beyond the stage of remembering the white prompt on the dark gray screen. She concentrated on the bluish haze of what she knew was a virtual atmosphere and followed the line of sight and light that outlined the tops of the flowers in the meadow she had been laying in. She repeated the poem “Up is down, down is ground and sky is where I look.”
Silence in a digital world is deafening, Sophie thought, and at that moment an ambient sound file began to play and she smiled at the reassuring soft din of chirping birds and crickets. She knew it was a sound file because she herself had created it back in 2008 when she first came across a loop sound and play seamless ambient script in the OS scripting Library. Sophie closed her eyes and stretched her hands behind her head as she lay back down into the grass, more satisfied than scared now. 
The light began to fade in and out and played across her closed eyelids as if the digital world she knew she was in was reading her very thoughts and had all of a sudden written a line of code for clouds and atmosphere.
Shadows are such unpredictable creatures. They creep over a surface in exactly the same manner that light does, only they appear to lend depth to every crack and crevice of a subject, immediately rendering whatever they come in contact with somewhat more so than what the brightest light could ever illuminate; Or, they completely obscure it into a corner of ambient nothingness.
Sophie's thoughts were like that now. She was nowhere near the light or the darkness, but somewhere closer to the in-between gray of a shadowy corner. A faint memory kept teasing her in the form of a craving, but she could not recall which sense fit the feeling, or how to use such things as smell, taste, touch etc, to express herself. She could not recall how long she had been laying in the tall grass of the meadow she was in, or if the afternoon like sky had been morning at one point, but she knew for a fact that she could smell absolutely nothing, and she thought, above all else, that THAT, was extremely odd.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

hall of Doors Viewer

-
Image
In the early days of Henry Markram’s Blue Brain project research and later the VR industry, people dreamed of one day being able to emulate or record their consciousness and upload it into an avatar. Bio hacks and scientists alike were for the first time perhaps, going to great lengths vying for a strong foothold in what could only be described as a weird combination of Frankenstein singularity and organic biogenetics. All the eyes that had previously been on the neuroscientists in Sweeden were darting back and forth between Virtual Reality headsets and Markram’s research progress waiting for the peanut butter and chocolate to finally meet in a delicious prepacked cup of perfected product. It was not unheard of for a group of hacks to be at the same sort of backroom bio hack party with accredited professors, neuroscientist’s and pharmaceutical administrators morbidly testing the waters and boundaries of using humans as lab rats. A biohacker is any person that combines biolo...
Read more

Beyond the Glasses

-
Image
At first, no one thought that the current form of VR and bulky devices worn over the head or as glasses were anything but prototypes for the scaled-down version of what the fictional nanobots could erect and destroy inside the eye itself. It was considered science fiction and many futurists resisted the idea of using the liquid monsters to connect a person's core. In fact, any mention of the molecular machinery of any type had to be carefully worded and was regulated to the more serious realm of medicine and neuroscience. The idea that an LCD screen could form as easily as an eyelid and recede just as quickly with, well within the blink of an eye, was scoffed at and venomously disregarded as futuristic geek speak or worse, monster strong AI. Regardless, S0phie poured the liquid into her eye before Bailey could tell her anything more about what was inside the Visine bottle and finished the phrase “Bottoms up” before her now frantic and panic-stricken assistan...
Read more

The other side

-
Image
  Tobias never had a sense of belonging. When he was a child the other kids always made fun of him for being different and he carried that into the framework of his reality in this world. He could never shake the fact that he wasn't the right person for his own skin.  On October 3rd, 2021 at 3:45 one beautiful fall afternoon, however, very little of what was the person named Tobias BlackElk remained as he lay a broken and mangled heap in the road. The delivery truck that had hit him remained almost pristine, parked out of the way of traffic with its hazards on. Tobias had been mercifully covered with a drop cloth that the driver found in the back of his cargo hold and only the dusting of some brush and leaves competed with the muffled sounds of a distant police radio and delivery driver recounting the accident. What was left of Tobias's consciousness drifted away towards the west. His thoughts carried him past the heap covered in dusty drop cloth, and beyond the huddled men, d...
Read more