Skeletons in the Cupboard

Like Seeing Everything at Once

April 2017

It is an easy manner, to sit in front of your screen and pull out the deck and access the information centre of the world, right at your fingertips. You know this place, you live and breath in it since you learned how to read, and you learned more so soon after, when you learned how to enter the cyberspace. Thousand upon thousands of bytes lurch into your mind, and you rearrange them with ease. Visuals here and numbers there and everything else in between. Within seconds you find what you’re looking for, within minutes you’ve compromised a gate, found a string of information you weren’t supposed to know, but you do now. Easiest job you’ve ever had? Well, at this point almost everything is. You know how everything works, and few else does.

When you jack out, it is as effortlessly as when you come in, the unread information streaming back to their place. Your mind takes only a second to put everything as it were, and just like that, you’re sitting in your small room with a gigabyte more in your head. There’s enough space there for it and a whole lot more. You know how this works. You know how to handle it.

You still have a problem, however. Cyberspace can satisfy nearly all desire, but physical energy is not one of them. You glance at your table and see it empty. You stand up, and the physical stress is immense. Thankfully it only lasts a second until you reseat yourself at the wheelchair nearby. Your arms are strong. Before you can uplink your brain, you use to type on your keyboard, as everybody else does, and somehow you can’t let go of the habit. Rewiring the wheels was harder, but not by much.

You roll out of the room, to the living room, to the dining table. A note is stapled on the notice board. Your housekeeper is out for the day. You curse. How can you forget? Her sister is getting married and she’s attending. Of course. You briefly wonder why you aren’t invited, but the thought is silly. Silly, silly, silly, you wouldn’t survive out there.

But going out there is what you should be doing right now. Your stomach churns. Human beings can’t live long without sustenance. Even with the augmentations we have now, we still need physical nutrients. You sigh. What else to do? You roll yourself out of the door, trying to find the location of the nearest food place—what do they call it, restaurant?—in your mind. Carefully, you find your way out.

People. Of course there’ll be people out there. Not everyone are like you, hunched with your deck, exploring the cyberspace. You were learning the identities of these people, shifting through their data; it’d make sense if they also exist in meatspace. Don’t you exist in meatspace also? You roll, you try to ignore them as they talk and chatter, and they click or step or clack through the glassy floors, each footstep a sign of their gait and stature, each mutter a piece of information that you’re missing. So many information, so little way to take them in. Your head hurts, as if your neurons are hard at work creating space for data that will not fill it because you have no way of retrieving them. Not from meatspace, no. You roll your wheelchair faster.

Eating place. A table, a plate of bread and assorted fillings you’ve chosen out of the digital menu. You sit near the window, because the other choices are at the centre of the room, surrounded by people, data you can’t retrieve. You eat your sandwich in relative silence, the stereo playing a song that you recognize as a classical, from the nineteenth century, a long time ago. It bothers you, just a bit, at how little that you’re receiving. The taste of the sandwich, and how it feels to have it sliding down your throat. Your ears are catching the music, and a smattering of conversations you can barely make out from the other guests. And you’re looking at the empty chair in front of you. Not to the window, no. Not to the landscape that expand below you: a deep blue sky like a dome over, trees below, younger than you are, but fiercer, somehow, like they believe they have outlived and will outlive you. Children playing, throwing things, receiving them and throwing them again. Children, whose mind, if you can admit, are stronger than yours. At the very least they aren’t bothered by all the space, or lack thereof. Their senses aren’t yet wide enough to receive it all.

You eat, until you perceive that you are full, and find your way back.