Elan Mastai - All Our Wrong Todays

T om Barren wakes up into his own dream.

Every night, neural scanners map his dreams while he sleeps so that both his conscious and unconscious thought patterns can be effectively modeled. Every morning, the neural scanners transmit the current dream-state data into a program that generates a real-time virtual projection into which he seamlessly rouses. The dreams scattershot plot is made increasingly linear and lucid until a psychologically pleasing resolution is achieved at the moment of full consciousness...

Im sorryI cant write like this. Its fake. Its safe.

The third person is comforting because its in control, which feels really nice when relating events that were often so out of control. Its like a scientist describing a biological sample seen through a microscope. But Im not the microscope. Im the thing on the slide. And Im not writing this to make myself comfortable. If I wanted comfort, Id write fiction.

In fiction, you cohere all these evocative, telling details into a portrait of the world. But in everyday life, you hardly notice any of the little things. You cant. Your brain swoops past it all, especially when its your own home, a place that feels barely separate from the inside of your mind or the outside of your body.

When you wake up from a real dream into a virtual one, its like youre on a raft darting this way and that according to the blurry, impenetrable currents of your unconscious, until you find yourself gliding onto a wide, calm, shallow lake, and the slippery, fraught weirdness dissolves into serene, reassuring clarity. The story wraps up the way it feels like it must, and no matter how unsettling the content, you wake with the rejuvenating solidity of order restored. And thats when you realize youre lying in bed, ready to start the day, with none of that sticky subconscious gristle caught in the cramped folds of your mind.

It might be what I miss most about where I come from. Because in this world waking up sucks.

Here, its like nobody has considered using even the most rudimentary technology to improve the process. Mattresses dont subtly vibrate to keep your muscles loose. Targeted steam valves dont clean your body in slumber. I mean, blankets are made from tufts of plant fiber spun into thread and occasionally stuffed with feathers. Feathers. Like from actual birds. Waking up should be the best moment of your day, your unconscious and conscious minds synchronized and harmonious.

Getting dressed involves an automated device that cuts and stitches a new outfit every morning, indexed to your personal style and body type. The fabric is made from laser-hardened strands of a light-sensitive liquid polymer thats recycled nightly for daily reuse. For breakfast, a similar system outputs whatever meal you feel like from a nutrient gel mixed with color, flavor, and texture protocols. And if that sounds gross to you, in practice its indistinguishable from what you think of as real food, except that its uniquely gauged to your tongues sensory receptors so it tastes and feels ideal every time. You know that sinking feeling you get when you cut into an avocado, only to find that its either hard and underripe or brown and bruised under its skin? Well, I didnt know that could even happen until I came here. Every avocado I ever ate was perfect.

Its weird to be nostalgic for experiences that both did and didnt exist. Like waking up every morning completely refreshed. Something I didnt even realize I could take for granted because it was simply the way things were. But thats the point, of coursethe way things were... never was.

What Im not nostalgic for is that every morning when I woke up and got dressed and ate breakfast in this glittering technological utopia, I was alone.