2184

The year was 2184.

There was no government.

There was no protests.

No deadly viruses.

No racism.

People did not work anymore.

Machines were doing everything.

From opening the window to shopping. From answering a phone call to piloting a plane.

-I wanna go to grandpa! -the kid was screaming and wasn’t reacting to the attempts of the Mother (the humanoid device that families were using when they have no time or desire to interact with their children) to calm her with a video of the most famous nine year old vloggers or with a song, sang by an animal with twisted proportions and weird look.

The Mother checked the child behaviour with its data base with patterns of children behaviours and decided that there is no sense of fighting her desire.

She found in her system the phone number of the flying taxis and made the call.

After couple of minutes the taxi was in front of the window on the 17th floor they were living.

They passed the special bridge to the taxi and it silently fly off.

The machine was flying on autopilot.

The Mother just transfer the address they wanna reach from her database into the machine motherboard.

it fly off smoothly.

-Is it true that once people were electing other people to rule them? -the girl asked after a while.

-Yes.-the Mother answered.

-And is it true that once there were playgrounds and parks when the parents spent time with their kids and play together?

-Yes it’s true.

-When did everything change?

-Many years ago, people were working, spend time with their families they had dreams goals. Then we showed up.

The great technologies.

With our help every individual made one alter ego living in the digital world.

Something like avatar. Then they called the place where their avatars were living social networks.

-Are you talking about the Great Network?

-Yes. Now it’s the Great Network. But then everything was just for fun. Everybody create himself and the life that he wants to lead but they forgot that they kill their reality when they are doing this. It didn’t take much time and they forget who they are.

They start living only through their avatars.

Then the social network start becoming The Great Network as we know it today.

Every people on Earth is working, living and Doing everything thr the Great Network.Except the kids. But that’s my job. Mine and to any other Mother. To help you get in the Network and start living like your parents.

-What if we don’t want to?

-You don’t have a choice. You will die out there. There is no other world. Everything works in harmony with the Network.

-Tell me about the art...

-Well there were people, like your grandfather, who denied the Network.They were writing, drawing, singing and creating art and music and cinema. All kinds of beautiful but useless things. The world get bored from them. The Network exclude them from her. The Network doesn’t need creators. It needs consumers.

There are still couple of them left. Like your granda. But they will disappear soon. The art will go with them. The Great Network will become everything that was ever here and will remain forever.

The girl stared silently through the glasses of the air taxi.

Down where the black fields were laying. The girl knew that long ago on these fields people were planting and growing their own food. Now this was something that was happening in labs and supervised by humanoids.

Down where the little boxes where people once were selling their products were sitting.

Silent. Useless.

Down where there was once a life. A long time ago.

Then she turned her sight up.

She hated to look up.

There were endless webs of cables covering the sky.

Her granddad once told her that when he was little kid he could see the stars. The air was still not polluted. There was no grey. Only sun and light and blue sky with white clouds.

But now she could only imagine the stars and breath the cold clean air from her granddad stories only in her dreams.

-We're here. -the metal cold voice of the Mother take her out of her dark thoughts after a couple of minutes of flying .

She put her feet on the ground and looked at her granddaddy’s house.

One of the last little brick buildings. With chimney and roof.With white walls that her granddad painted himself. He even has a veggie garden in the little yard.

Everybody in her online classes made fun of her because of him. But her granddad was the only thing in this world that she was proud of.

He came out. Smiling and waving at her.

She fell in her arms and immediately get like home.

Then they came in.

The Mother stayed outside

Her granddad put a pot for tea in the weird stove that was working with fire and real woods and sat on the table next to her.

Every single look at his eyes -pure happiness.

-Granddady please read me again

/That’s why you came all the way down here right you little devil.- he smiled and stand up.

-But only a little bit cause this one is one of the forbidden

She looked at the old men with her big eyes and the book he took out from under his blouse. He was always hiding it there.

It was old with damaged covers. She knew that the title was “East from heaven” only because her granddad reads it to her for a millionth of time. She loved it cause he always says that it describes perfectly how the past people and generations was thinking. What they were feeling. This book helped her to imagine what the world was before. And to permanently fell in love with it and hate the world as it was now. She took a deep breath. Inhaled her favourite smell. Of her granddady’s cologne and her favourite book. The book smelled like magic and the sound of her papers was taking the girl to another dimension.

The old men give the girl the sign that she was waiting for and she came closer to him.

The girl stayed still and listened how her grandad‘s voice was sailing the words from the book in her mind forever.

She loved this moments.

Every single night she thought about them before falling asleep and start dreaming.

She was dreaming how she cut off the billions of cables and webs covering the sky.

She was feeling how she peels off the Network from the world.

She touches the Sun every night.

Maybe that was her destiny.