Author : Gavin L. Perri

Sometimes I wake in cyberspace and remember the wizened words of the old man, ‘When I was a one year old we didn’t have self-evolving tutorial programs, we had to learn by listening’. I try to picture what he looked like but all I get are a series of ones and zeroes, the discussion we had at eight, however, stays with me ‘Back when I was a lad we didn’t have spatial displacers, we had to walk everywhere we went’. Walking is such an abstract thought.

His words at my twelfth birthday for some reason stay with me ‘Pah! A telepathic communicator, when I was your age I used a mobile phone’ I create a simple program that recreates the genome of the old man but it does not show the creases on his age-old hands and it does not recreate our last conversation ‘When I was fourteen years of age we didn’t need time travel to find out about history, we just used the internet’. These words play around in front of me as I contemplate them. I will never hear the old man again, my program does not respond to wavelengths of sound and he never learnt to telepathically communicate.

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