Entry #3: Did I Dream of Electronic Sheep?

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! OH MY GOD! I just had the most horrible nightmare. Ok. Ok. Let’s see, how did it start? I remember… Yeah, I remember going down a hallway. I think I was chasing someone special, and then I saw this… thing. It looked like it was supposed to be a human, but if it was, it was a bloated, nearly formless, mockery, with arms, legs, and body the shape and softness of massive sausages.  He (I think it was a he) was set on some kind of mobile chair. The chair didn’t even have wheels, it was just floating along! The man-blob was completely oblivious to my presence, his attention fully devoted to talking to a screen suspended in front of his face, which was displaying the face of another member of this increasingly strange race. I was startled to hear the voice from the screen also come from behind me, and I saw that I was walking between the two blobs. Why couldn’t they just turn toward else other and talk? I would maybe understand if their necks were broken, but they were lazily swinging their arms.

   As I wondered about these two, the hallway opened up into a huge promenade, and that’s when I them. Hundreds, no thousands, of the beings, all of them swollen into nearly spherical proportions, all wearing the exact same red outfit, and all of them in the hover chairs with screens projected right in front of their faces. Every. Single. One. Dear god, they were humans, weren’t they? Had the entire human race turned into these amorphous beings, or was it just this colony? Either way, I had to find who I was looking for and get out.

   I kept moving ahead, under a flashing screen welcoming me to “Economy”. Apparently, this was the used-to-be-humans way of saying “Mall”, because next thing I knew, I was in a shopping center of some kind that stretched out as far as I could see. I think it even had a dome over the entire structure, complete with a fake sky and a sun with the letters B-n-L plastered over it, though it could’ve had a mural of demons copulating with farm animals, and I still don’t anyone else would have noticed it. This new space was littered with neon advertisements, some a dozen feet tall or more, and on most of them I saw those same letters, BnL. Over a loudspeaker I heard a pleasing, soulless, woman’s voice announce “Buy n Large. Everything you need to be happy. Your day is very important to us.” “Buy n Large” must have been the name of the company that sucked out these people’s souls and replaced it with lard and technology. This was starting to make me sick, so I pressed on before “Buy n Large” could find me and put me in one of those hovering prisons everyone else was happy to ride.

  I tried to go back to my search, but one of the chair-bound men started to tell me to take his drink. If he would’ve just looked, he would have seen that I wasn’t a waiter, but he couldn’t pull his eyes away from the screen until it was too late. He kept leaning over further and further until he tumbled off of his chair with an (admittedly satisfying) plop. A pair of robots appeared out of nowhere to section off the fallen man from everyone else, though I think it was mostly so no one else would mistake him for a speed bump. I felt sorry for the poor guy. He was still human after all, and he couldn’t stand up, either because his muscles had atrophied away, or he just didn’t know how to walk without a machine to help him do it. Of course, I couldn’t leave him squirming on the ground like a huge maggot, so I helped him back into his chair, then got away while he was still stunned by seeing the world without a digital filter. I wasn’t even sure the air was safe to breathe, and I wasn’t about to stand around answering questions until the authorities brought me in to become part of this madhouse.

   I saw the woman I was trying to reach, the only other person that wasn’t a part of this mess, get on a bus equivalent of the hover chairs, and I made it on just in time. Of course, she was at the back, past several of the chair-people. We flew past the large front window of a school, and I got a glimpse inside. Jesus! Even the children, just toddlers by the look of it, were already so round and red in their outfits that they would look more at home in a plate of spaghetti. The “teacher” of this class was another robot with a screen, no humans in the room except the children. In that brief moment, the screen was displaying “B is for Buy n Large, you’re very best friend.” Indoctrination, probably from birth. Does this “Buy n Large” even have a heart, or did they sell that ages ago for profit?

   The last thing I remember was an electronic  billboard telling everyone to “Try blue!” I don’t why this of all things would do it, but the ad caught the attention of the people on the bus, and probably everyone else, who all pressed a button on their chair’s armrest, and the outfits of every last chair-person in the center turned blue. Was it a hive-mind mentality? Brainwashing? Or were all of these people really so obedient that they were “individuals” in name only?

   Worriedly, I looked forward to the girl I was after. I had almost made it to her. There was just one more chair in my way… BRRRRRRNNNNNNNGG! That’s when the alarm rang, and I was here, at home, away from the not-human-anymore-chair-blob-people. Thank god it was only a dream. I’m sure human will never let the world get that bad…"

   One day later...

     

                                                                                                   

"It's already happening! Screens everywhere,nobody can look away! And no one cares! The dream is already coming true! REPENT! REPENT! IT'S NOT TOO LATE! TURN AWAY FROM THE SCREENS! TURN THEM OFF, BEFORE THEY STEAL YOUR SOUL!!"

   The next day, Charm was admitted to the Phoenix Home for the Mentally Unfit. He was last heard screaming " I LOVE MY LEGS! DON'T TAKE MY LEGS AWAY FROM ME! I LOVE MY LEGS" before he broke down sobbing. The doctors on duty commented:

 "With a little luck, we'll have Mr. Wilke well again in six months. Now if you'll excuse me, It's time for him to ride the lightning." We here a Grey Goo hope for his speedy recovery. 

PS. Those of you who might be confused by this post, please follow this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1BQPV-iCkU...

Also, I just love the message below.