I'd like a refund.
Yes I'll hold.
Yes, I will accept store credit.
The future I dreamed of as a kid was illustrated in plastic books that talked about sailing to Barnards star on a ship powered by nuclear fusion. A world of people sailing to work in jetpacks. Solar powered cities. Send me back to sleep Buck Rogers!
I looked up at the moon and saw the distance between it and me as a potential. A current of energy with which to could charge my imagination. Now that same moon, surrounded by a curtain of star spangled night, is cold as the wind and now unfriendly. I don't want to go out now. The moon's looking at me funny.
Then came Cyberpunk. People living in computers knew our secrets and would reach out to sell us insurance and offer us the credit to do so. If we didn't, anonymous people would share our data with the wardens of nascent social media. A place where we could connect with strangers that became a prison where we were held hostage by our own indiscretions, office party embarrassments, or credit card details.
Something very dark has taken root in our soul. Fattened on credit and junk mail invitations to a purgatory of debt. Dante's mortgaged inferno. We broke the world and we didn't know it.
Now we can expect government assistance, while it deigns to reign in capital for a time, to keep the Netflix connection going. Let us binge watch ourselves into acute respiratory collapse.
Periodically the Amazon driver will appear. Santa Claus for the Resident Evil generation; the postman from Chernobyl. With careful hands he will surgically insert the entertainment package I've ordered to keep myself from going crazy through the door. It may be infected. I may never know until I know. This is our world now. Boxed in by necessity, passing plates under the door. Daring to cook in a dangerous kitchen.
A prison of our own making.
Capital cannot be reigned in forever. Like an angry dog the master invites its bite, reminding him who's really in charge. It's all over Rover. Fiduciary Fido. Outside the virus fights the climate in a bloodsport of our own making. If only we could televise it.
I tell myself this is not the future. Hopefully it will be the past and in a few months, when America is suitably leashed to the whim of cognitively diminished calcified plutocrats, men, for it is always men, of limited vision, we will look back and laugh. Ha ha! But the humour will haunt us and our chests still ache. Oh how they ache.
The virus, like the Spotify ads I am forced to listen to as I write to keep myself from hearing the silence of this stolen tomorrow, will never be gone. The future is an infection. We have polluted ourselves and will never be clean. The very sky hates us. We have poisoned the earth. Sow the wind, they say. Reap the whirlwind. A steel breeze of depleted nutrients and toxic protein. I still argue with the recyling bin as it spills over onto the floor; I curse modernity.
Maybe the moon is all we have left, just waiting for me to plug in. A phone call to the universe. Hey aliens! Come and invade! This virus might let you live this time! Nope, I'm calling the cops, someone's trying to commit genocide. I think it's the Prime Minister! Yes, I can recognise that voice. Some maniac blathering on about wiff waff.
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