The year is 2113. On the island of Malta lived a simple man named Jack Sullivan. At first glance he seems quite ordinary: a 57 year old journalist, married to Mary, a paediatric doctor, for 31 years, with three adult children, Sophia, Luna and Archie. But Jack was about to embark on an adventure that would shake the foundations of what his world had become – and it began, as many great adventures do, quite by happenstance.
We had long since outsourced the storing and organising of our memories and complex intellectual labour to our smartlinks. What began as a mobile phone almost a century and a half ago slowly sunk its roots deeper into our lives. After it had evolved as the smartphone to engulf the alarm clock, camera, TV, mp3 player, gaming device, internet device, when AI continued to develop in the early 21st century it engulfed it too in its pocket-sized form. And so the device grew ever more subtle, and ever more powerful. The smartlink granted us dominion over all information while binding us ever more tightly to the algorithms in our pockets. While most of humanity was suspicious of having AI chips implanted, the smartlink never needed to breach our skin to colonise our minds – it simply made itself seemingly indispensable.
In the 60’s everyone ended up shifting to the smartlink, what choice did we have? Who would want to be left behind? And yet no one really noticed – or those that did, didn’t make enough fuss about it – that as smartlinks got more powerful other things faded away. What things you might ask? I would tell you, but I can’t remember what I don’t know, and since I don’t know, I’m sure it’s not that important anyway.
Where were we? Ah yes! Jack the journalist in Malta, and where shall we begin? Monday seems like a good day to start, Monday 27th February.
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