by Aarti Patel
Then one day the Sacred Touch Company, who had designed the first electronic news publication in holographic touch-screen tablet form, came up with the solution and did a public demonstration to prove it. The event was covered extensively by the media and so the scheduled nightly programming was interrupted on that fateful Monday to showcase a brave individual serving as the guinea pig for the highly prized new technology. A famous celebrity yogini, Hali Seltzer, had volunteered to be the first person to travel inside the screen and show the world what an enriching environment was contained within, and how safe it was to travel there and back.
Hali was dressed in flowing yoga pants with a jingly gold coin belt around her middle. Her hair flowed in long ringlets around her face and down her back. She supported spirituality in every way whether it was to a higher being, heart-centered, or even technological. Barefoot and smiling, she stepped onto the blue zoom mat as the lead inventor, Matt Stills, explained how the big screen worked.
Scientists had finally found a common thread between electric energy flowing through computer circuitry and the living electricity flowing through the human nervous system, Stills began. They had isolated a specific way in which both computers and humans could think, and therefore sense, alike. Sacred Touch had researched this emerging technology for close to a decade with much funding help from the government and undisclosed grants. Using their discovery, they had created a virtual environment inside the screen, much like in a very realistic three-dimensional video game. The environment ceased to be simply virtual, however, when the screen’s circuitry tapped into the human nervous system and introduced a subject’s sensory perception straight into the environment. It was essentially a bundling of two very advanced gadgets, Stills chuckled wittily, flashing a charming smile.
The audience roared in unanimous applause and in the broadcast, countless were seen giving Matt Stills a standing ovation for his speech. To understand what he was saying was to be intelligent and tech savvy, a mark of a truly enlightened individual. Hali nodded and clapped along, content that she was contributing to history and to the evolution of human beings into a more unified species. Stills then turned on the big screen to the hush of the crowd. He asked Hali whether she was ready to go, and in response Hali closed her eyes and pressed together the palms of her hands in prayer form. She lowered her head and softly uttered, “Namaste,” which translated from the Hindi language to mean, “The divine in me bows to the divine in you.” Matt Stills solemnly returned the gesture, failing to see that Hali had been conveying the sentiment toward the screen.
Stills pushed the power button to activate the system and numbers flashed on the screen, representing Hali’s height, weight, and dimensions. A thin blue neon line appeared, moving from left to right and scanning Hali’s teeth without her having to open her mouth. An environment suddenly flashed on the screen, a coffee hall with high ceilings, chandelier lighting, and knotted wood tables. A bar curved around one wall, and a diverse night crowd gathered in small groups to chat or show off pictures and videos on their phones. Hands started to shoot up in the amphitheater, all clambering to ask Stills questions about what they were seeing. He waved them away for the moment and pressed a remote control button, unveiling large screens all around the hall.
“What we see now is Hali moving through the coffee hall environment, actually experiencing it as if it’s real.” Stills’s voice echoed through the audience as their eyes turned toward the large screens. The scene on the screens looked like a movie, with the camera perspective shifting and turning as Hali wound her way through the crowd. Everyone could look through Hali’s eyes as she hailed a bar-barista and was handed a foaming drink topped with whipped cream and a drizzle of chocolate sauce. Hali’s voice boomed through the speakers as she gushed, “Thank you so much!” The audience observed Hali’s live body on the stage with mounting confusion, wondering how she was still standing upright.
The crowd was becoming antsy and a voice shot out from the front to ask, “Is Hali really drinking that?” Stills smiled. “She thinks she is,” he replied. Other questions followed, “Why is her body still upright?” Stills explained how her conscious human mind was mostly in the screen, while her physical body remained semi-paralyzed out in the real world. “How are people using phones and video features in the virtual environment?” Stills had anticipated this question and beamed about the research currently being done to make technology available to users inside the virtual environment. “How will virtual technology correlate with technology in the real world?” Stills explained how all virtual data would be stored in a master database connected to the real world. One day people would be able to hold full-time jobs in virtual environments. "Are the other people in the coffee house real?" Stills shook his head and described the simulated beings that would populate the screen until enough live members like Hali moved in and took over.
In Earl’s memory, one audience member’s question stood out more than any other. A tall bronzed young man with clear eyes and spiky black hair shouted out his question during one of the silent pauses and it cut through the amphitheater like a knife through air. Unlike the other questions that had reverberated in the big hall, his question was punctuated with a period and hung in the air like a taunt. “Who is she while she’s in the screen?” For the first time, Stills’s eyes roamed the crowd to see who was asking the question. An attendant pointed out to him who the culprit was. Stills looked down from the stage with his hands on his hips and answered matter-of-factly, “Why, she is herself, of course.”
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Earl sighed and slowly shook his head, “I got the order from Lydia a few minutes ago. I’m sorry, Shorty.” Earl had always called her Shorty as she stood only slightly above five feet tall. “It’s okay, Earl, I sensed it coming for a while now,” Misha assured him. They looked at each other in helpless understanding of the world in which their virtual selves now stood. “What now?” Earl asked her. Misha shrugged her shoulders, she really didn’t know. It had gotten increasingly difficult to find a viable job in this world without becoming a slave to the screen. She had never taken a liking to this environment and had tried to work positions out in the real world as long as she could, but they kept dwindling in number. Maybe she should apply for a waitress position at Minnie’s, thought Misha. What did this world produce anymore? What did it do for a living? Misha had learned a long time ago that endless questioning led nowhere.
“Earl—thanks for being my friend,” Misha concluded. Earl nodded, adding, “Likewise. I’ll miss your visits.” Out in the real world, there was little chance of them bumping into one another. Earl took Misha’s nametag and stuck it in the obliterator. It was as if she had never existed at this company, according to the system. Anything tied to her identity would be destroyed or if it proved useful, would be archived in the master database. “Misha, call me if you ever need anything. I have a phone too.” Earl handed her a business card and winked, and she turned to leave the basement forever with five minutes left to zoom out to her house. Back when she was in her more sentimental years, she would say goodbye to spaces she would never see again. The offices of Mind Memo left her no such desire and she stepped onto the blue mat by the elevators without ceremony.
Poof licked Misha’s fingers on her return. “Thanks, you,” Misha patted him. Searching for jobs would now replace waiting outside Lydia’s office as her most loathed activity. For now, she decided to check her phone messages instead. Ever since Tsai had called, the old bug had returned to check the phone for any signs of life. Earl had told her once that when cell phones fully took hold of society ages ago, they were people’s best friends next to dogs. A citizen would be joined-at-the-hip with a portable phone and check it constantly, trying to materialize phone calls and messages. They would even get in car wrecks trying to interact with their phones. Misha felt some desperation today to receive more phone calls, knowing at the same time that society hardly used phones anymore.
She hov
ered her finger over the phone app, waiting for the familiar empty tinkle that indicated zero phone calls and messages. Instead, a solid ding sounded from the screen and showed Misha that she had fifteen missed calls. Misha stared at the news incredulously. Who was trying to reach her today, and for what purpose? She scrolled slowly through the call log and couldn’t believe her eyes. They were all from the same phone number, marked “Undisclosed.” Her nerves began naggingly buzzing at her, and she felt instantly worried. She pulled a pill out of her purse and gulped it down, sitting still on her couch.
Okay, she thought, maybe this is nothing. It could have been a wrong number, it happens. But unfortunately, nothing unexpected ever happened anymore. Within the big screen, it was highly possible to control it all—at least for most people. Misha suddenly remembered how neurotic she had been two years ago before she had started taking the pills. Her mind crossed over terrains of worst case scenarios regarding the phone calls, and then considered scenarios that were even worse than those. Her stomach did a full turn and her hands itched to reach out and fix the problem, whatever it was. She got back up and walked over to the big screen, which today resembled a curse. She wanted to smash it in with a bat and watch it cry out or exhibit some emotion. Real people were in that screen, why didn’t it feel anything?
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Misha tossed and turned in her sleep, waking up throughout the night to find her T-shirt drenched in sweat. Her dreams had been too vivid and real.
She had seen a laboratory. Stadium seating surrounded the steel floor and was filled with spectators holding remote controls. A chair stood in the middle of the room, an exact replica of the one in front of Lydia’s desk. Misha scanned the lab and found there were no exit doors. A man with silver hair grabbed her wrist and flung her into the chair. The chair had straps and a screen stood a foot away from it. Classical music filled the room and she could not hear anything else. She cried out with all her strength and felt a painful buzz rise in her throat, threatening to suffocate her. The silver-haired man’s countenance morphed from one face into another rapidly, without any expression to hold on to. Misha tried frantically to communicate with him but could never tell who he really was. His face crept closer and closer to hers, mouthing words like ammunition that were all deaf to her ears as the classical music became louder. Suddenly, only one large eyeball was visible to her and in it, she saw the cruelest form of laughter and ridicule she had ever seen.
Misha’s heart lurched her upright in bed with its pounding and she searched the room for the silver-haired man and the steel floor. With great hesitance, she began to realize she was in her own bedroom with Poof curled around her feet. Poof snored softly as if nothing alarming had happened and slowly Misha began to believe it too. Her guard was not yet fully lowered, however. She had never advertised the fact, but some of her past dreams had held uncanny resemblance to real life. Her college roommate, who had gotten to know her well, used to call her “Dream Child.” It was funny at the time, as Misha’s dreams held small levels of predictability. These occurrences had become stronger and more frequent over time and Misha found it less funny now.
Misha traveled uncertainly to the bathroom and threw some cold water on her feverish cheeks. She stared up into the mirror as if for help, and caught an eye twitch grab both of her eyelids. She gripped the edge of the sink. What was happening?
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It was raining the next morning as Misha got ready to meet Tsai. Misha was starting not to care about this meeting, an apathy that had been borne of disappointing encounters with friends in the past. Tsai was probably hitting a slump in her own life and craved seeing a friend worse off and more depressed than her. The other possibility was that Tsai needed something. In this world of big screens and gadget bundling, there were few people left to turn to for a simple favor. Everyone was absorbed by screen pixels and dispersed into the stratosphere. If Tsai had assumed Misha was one person she could still ask for a favor, she would be right. Misha sometimes wished it weren’t that way.
With a couple hours left to kill, Misha downed a pill and sat in her familiar position on the couch. The buzz encircling her eyebrows simmered down to a tolerable level that still promised its future return in a few hours. As Misha’s mind cleared, the question posed by the young man on the night of the big screen unveiling popped into her thoughts. Who are people when they're in the screen? Misha had asked herself the same overarching question from a young age, but there was no one to talk to about it. Once, she had tried with her mother and the result had been awkward. For a split second, Misha had thought she saw a glimmer of shared sentiment in her mom’s face. But the words that left her mouth amounted to, “You’ll see when you grow up.” But Misha didn’t come to see. She didn’t see in kindergarten, seated around other children who were inductees like herself into a new world nebulously called the Screen. She didn’t see as she entered her thirties and continued to work thankless and pointless jobs in the screen environment, not knowing a single soul around her. She had nearly become convinced that she simply lacked the wisdom to see, but was not fully sold on that either. In her mind, but also seemingly out in the world, it was forbidden to talk about it. Maybe she was crazy.
Or was she? There actually was someone out there to talk to. She had known it all along, but had been scared to act on the implicit invitation. Maybe now she could. Misha walked over to the fridge and rearranged magnets, photos, and receipts until she found what she was looking for. Standing in front of the big screen, she typed the necessary digits into the phone app. The line rang five times and just as Misha was about to give up and end the call, she heard a click and a familiar voice greeting her. “Earl, it’s me—Misha.” Earl replied immediately without the typical delay of most responses, “Wait.”
“I can call back if you’re busy,” Misha offered and Earl interrupted her quickly. “Hold on.” She had never heard this level of assertiveness or urgency in his voice and wondered immediately what was wrong. Had she been ill-advised to call Earl? “Turn over and read the back of the card,” Earl spoke softly after a moment. What was Earl talking about? Misha looked at her hand and the business card she was holding there. On the front of the card, it displayed Earl’s contact information at Mind Memo and the small light bulb logo that represented the company. Upon turning it over to the back, she found one line of large words hastily scrawled in pencil and scrunched into the small white rectangular space. It read, “Who is she while she’s in the screen?” Misha looked up from the card and saw small flecks of color enter her vision.
She wondered again like the night before, what was happening? Earl had known she was going to call. He had written her question on the card. She didn’t know what to say next. Before she could figure it out Earl continued, “We have to meet. Morton’s tomorrow at three. I’ll see you then.” He abruptly hung up. Misha could not take enough pills lately to stave off the buzz and it had now begun to return in small pangs everywhere. She yanked herself from reaching for the pill bottle and closed her eyes for a moment. It was time to stop. If the buzz was going to come, it was going to come. Her meeting with Tsai was fast approaching and time was ticking out on the screen’s reminder system. How did the screen know she had a meeting with Tsai when she had never entered it in? With all questions suspended in the living room, Misha walked outside into the brisk air that propelled her toward an uncertain future.
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The city streets contained technological stragglers who still worked jobs in the few remaining office buildings and shops. People were returning to work heavy-lidded after short and unfulfilling lunch breaks. Some services still had to be conducted outside the big screen, for now. Health care was one that had not made a full transition to the virtual world, as people could not find a substitute there for surgery, dialysis, or anything else that required a hookup in the hospital. Acupuncture had made an easy transition into the virtual world and was currently thriving
there. For the rise of the buzz in the population, the Centers for Disease Control had announced that increased time spent in the big screen would eventually normalize the symptoms and that everyone’s adjustment period was different.
Out of nowhere, a homeless man across the street yelled out to Misha, “Naughty girl! Naughty girl!” Misha avoided eye contact and started walking faster, yet the bum began to walk in her direction and kept calling her “naughty” in an uninterrupted string of words until it sounded like “teenaught” instead. He stopped in the middle of the street, shaking his head and giving her the ‘shame-shame’ hand gesture, running one index finger along the other like scraping ice off a windshield. “Naughty, naughty girl. Wandering the old streets of San Francisco. Naughty like Saran Wrap. Remember Saran Wrap? It never does what you want it to. Sarannnnn…”
Misha remembered Saran Wrap, and it was true it never did what you wanted it to. Only soccer moms and chefs knew how to expertly use it. For a moment, Misha’s buzz somehow felt calmed by the homeless man’s insights. She turned back once to look at him and he stood there in the middle of the street expressionless and seeming to discover he did not know where he was. The way he looked described how Misha felt today and she remembered that she still had to meet up with Tsai.
As Misha reached the intersection of the Embarcadero and Chestnut Street, she could see that only a handful of people were seated inside Minnie’s. One of them would turn out to be Tsai. Tsai had been a one-of-a-kind friend in her life, one that had redefined in Misha’s mind what a friend could be. Fifteen years ago, they had worked together in a tense and pompous office setting doing research for the most prestigious and trusted medical community in the nation, Ballard’s Holistic Medical Group. It had been the nation’s premier medical establishment that combined conventional and alternative health care into one approach, without the two groups wringing each other’s necks.
