Connections

You look out the window and frown. The weather is all wrong. Green grass and palm trees, but it’s the middle of Canadian winter!

            Then you blink, and the landscape outside is a roaring blizzard, rattling the windows and whiting out the cars passing by. That’s better… kind of. 

            You sigh. It’s going to be another long trip to work. 

            Work? Says a voice in your mind. In that? You Canadians are crazy. ˆ

            “Oh,” you say out loud to yourself. How easy it was to forget. All of humanity had become mentally linked just yesterday, seeing, experiencing and understanding the world through billions of different views at once. 

            You’re in Jamaica, you reply to the voice. 

            Yes, and it’s much nicer, here. No roarin blizzard. Good luck driving through it. Then the mind is gone. 

            You shake it off and fall into a morning routine as more minds leap into your consciousness. Some getting ready, too. Others already at work. Some, halfway around the world having dinner with an animated family. Some jogging. Partying. Drinking. 

            But no fights. No crimes, shouting, belittling or exploitation. As soon as humanity became linked, all conflict stopped. 

            Everyone is still an individual, but linked to the rest of humanity at the same time. There isn’t exactly an ‘I’, anymore. But it also isn’t really a ‘we’. So, humanity collectively decided on ‘you’. 

            You were still you, but also the ‘you’ in the next house over. The ‘you’ down the street. The ‘you’ halfway across the world.     

            Amazing, how easy it is to get used to.

            Even more amazing, is how much you know, now. Every language, subject and piece of remembered history, shared and personal, wonderful and tragic. A colourful weave of human experience in which you see yourself as a single thread. 

            The entire world is still amazed by it. Well, except London England and New York. Most of the people there just acknowledged it as something very interesting and lovely, while getting on with business as usual. 

            You laugh, and a thousand people laugh with you. But you’re a bit of a workaholic too, you suppose, while trudging out into a blizzard with your hand in front of your face. Frigid wind and pelting snow turn your skin red and half numb in an instant. Valiantly, you pull out your brush and wipe the snow off your car. Scrape a hard layer of ice off the window. 

            Geeze. It’s so cold. A thousand voices comment. 

            But at the same time, as you wipe and scrape, you’re on a beach in Greece. Sipping hot cholate in front of a fire. Crouching at the edge of a volcano picking up samples of rock and soil. Somehow able to be in thousands of places at once without losing sight of your physical self, or what you’re doing. 

            It seems confusing in theory, but it actually makes everything clearer. 

            You finish scraping down your car and hop in. Confidently rev the engine and drive onto the road, snow crunching under your tires. 

            You can see what you’re doing perfectly, but can also see what everyone else is doing on the roads around you, both in and out of sight. 

            Just around the corner, a car swerves, so you slow as you round it. Alright, buddy? you say to the guy in the car, who’s view you just looked out of. 

            Yeah, comes a reply, at the same time that the car steadies, straightens and continues on the road.                    

            You and everyone on the road, have the driving skills of the best Nascar racers and patrol officers. There hasn’t been a single accident anywhere in the world since all of humanity became connected. 

            It’s amazing. You think. 

            It’s lovely, replies a writer in the UK, who has a view from a high building with a 360-degree window. Now kindly get out of my mind. I don’t want the entire world to know the end of my book before it’s even published. 

            You focus harder, and find there seems to be some kind of wall up in the writer’s mind, blocking you out. 

            So, people could still have privacy. Leave it to a Londoner to figure that out, first. 

            You smile and merge onto the highway while catching glimpses of lives all over the world. A tapestry of experience that makes even a drive to work interesting. 

            But then a jolt of terror rips through you. Frantic, animalistic and all-consuming. 

            A surge of energy and adrenaline, and you’re suddenly racing over a grassy savanna faster than any human could run, muscles in your sinewy legs coiling and retracting like springs. Four legs. Hooves. Head of tiny antlers. Heart hammering so hard it sounds like the buzz of morning insects. 

            You slam the breaks and your car skids into a tailspin. 

            A stab of pain shoots through your flanks. A heavy weight makes your back legs collapse and you bleat in protest. Arch your head round on a long neck to see a blur of claws and fur. The heavy must of a lioness and the smell of blood fills your sensitive nose. 

            Cars skid to a stop and swerve all around you as you continue your out of control spin. 

            Your herd members bound away into the distance, as the weight of the lioness drags you down. Hot blood runs down your flanks. You kick and struggle, but the lioness only grips you tighter. 

            Your car slows down and crashes into a snow bank. Not hard. Just a bit jarring. But your heart is racing fast as the animal who’s eyes you’re seeing out of. 

            An antelope? 

            The pain fades. You weaken and your legs collapse. You can hear other lions closing in. You can smell them. Your heart is still frantic, your breath rapid, but a strange numb calm has come over you. The lioness tearing into you, nothing but a dull pull and a bit of heat. Your heart starts to slow....

            You jerk out of the antelope’s mind as a dozen cars stop and people stream out in parkas and touks, trudging through the blizzard to reach you. 

            You see yourself through their eyes as you stumble out of the car. You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.           

            Did anyone else experience that?

            “I saw through an animal’s eyes,” you say, both out loud and in your mind, as the group approaches.

            “You did?” Says the first lady to reach you. 

            I saw something like that, too, says a mind from somewhere in Iraq, and a thousand other minds hear it, too. 

            The people stop and look at you with wide eyes, as they start to relive your memory of the antelope's last moments. 

            But as they do, you’re somewhere else, again.

            Ripping into the flank of a fresh kill, blood still warm, your pride all around you. Hunger overtakes everything. A desperate gnaw that demands to be filled, by any means necessary. 

            “How do we live if we see in the mind of every animal, too?” says the woman in front of me. The blizzard is still roaring, but we barely feel the cold.                            

            You barely feel it, still hot and panting on an African savannah. 

            “I don’t know,” you say.

            But as the lioness…. she… you, fills your belly and calm takes over, a twinge of regret hits somewhere in your survival-driven mind. You didn’t want to hurt that antelope. You would gladly pad among them in peace if you could. 

            “Maybe,” you say to the people around you. Your voice is drowned out by the blizzard, but they can hear your mind, too. “Maybe now we’ll all understand each other even better.”

            Animals and humans. Every living thing on earth, connected and interdependent. 

            A kaleidoscope of life with lights blinking in and out of existence. 

            You are part of something much bigger and more intricate than the ‘I’ that you used to be could ever imagine. 

(Inspired by the book ‘Triggers’ by Robert J. Sayer)