Life in a White Box

A Short Story, the Future that Kaczynski Saw Coming.

One hour, four minutes, and some unknown collection of seconds. That is how long I spent staring at the corner of my white walled room. At the conclusion of that time, I knew by heart every crease of the carpet, every mote of chipped paint, and every slightly discolored contour of that corner. When I did finally place the virtual headset back upon my crown, it beeped and showed me the elapsed time I had spent offline. Of course my mind had been a great distance from there, day dreaming I could say, a past time now often forgotten or ignored.

My small white walled room had, once, seemed to be a place away from the sprawling hive of city that extended in all directions. The throngs of humanity that pressed along sterile walkways moving hither thither remained each ingrained in their own personal world. Each of us connected to path-mapping applications that prevented congestion. Each of us connected to media of whatever form we liked, books, videos, commentary. Each of us, crammed together into the same physical space, while inhabiting social reserves more distant than continents.

My world, my social community, had been predominantly digital sportsmanship. I participated in games through virtual reality, but mostly I watched. My team was the Phoenix Gaming Collective. I knew each of the players, their preferred strategies, and had contact with a thousand or so other followers around the world who made up my circle. Theories, and strategies, all of us shared in a big happy family it felt like. Well, a big happy family that could be experienced only through crunchy virtual graphics. When I slept, ate, and stood, I did so surrounded still by my white walled room.

Conversations across cultural reservations were often stilted. Each of us being so engrossed in our own algorithmically fed world that linguistic drift occurred between subcultures to the point that communication could become difficult. While there was still a universally recognized form of English, much more than general communication required a degree of socialization sufficient to prevent most from expending the effort. There was a linguist who once tried to discuss the topic with me, but I found myself only able to understand a rather general idea based on what he was saying. I’m certain I could have understood more if we’d shared a proper subculture of one type or another to bridge our vastly different tongues.

It could be lonely, but I always had my digital friends and various communities. Had. Seven weeks prior, half of my community was banned from the games network. I didn’t know why, but feared asking questions lest I be banned as well. I hadn’t gone ‘offline’ for years and the fear of a ban was more than sufficient to ensure my silence. Around twelve years old my parents provided me with a virtual headset, and after taking a few weeks to get used to it, I rarely took it off. Most work could be done from home, so I rarely left. Food could be ordered, friendship could be had virtually, education took place virtually. Why go outside when I could experience all the vistas I wished through digital mockups? It was easy. Every one thought it was easy, every one did it.

I don’t actually remember moving out of my parents apartment. Most of my schooling and life was already digital, so it felt no different to have my own white walled room separate from theirs. It was by happenstance, I think, that the blackout coincided with the banning. I had just logged out from my digital community, and tried to entertain myself with other things. Easier to wait for the heat to cool before returning and potentially getting kicked myself. I think some one used a taboo word, though I haven’t the slightest idea which one. A racial slur or maybe some one tried to discuss why females weren’t seen as often as males in strategy sports games, or maybe just said something innocuous and offense was taken. Regardless, I was scared and thus extricated myself from the chat lest I be banned as well. The politeness enforcement algorithms tend to pretty broadly hammer home the rules, and you don’t want to be online when their attention is drawn. I tried to find something else to do for a while.

Then the blackout occurred, and my small white room went dark. The windows were all digital screens, thus they went dark as well. The entire system shut down for the first time in my life. Half my friends having vanished, likely forever, into the innumerable throngs of the network, I was left wondering what was going on, and why. I had never experienced a blackout before and had never really considered the possibility. It felt like some cyclopean god had simply switched off reality. It was as if the door to my apartment had been, by happenstance, swung open from the outside by something that I had no ability to understand. For the first time I had no idea what I was supposed to do, or say, or think.

What if the lights didn’t come back on? What then? What were my friends if they could be so casually ejected from my life in a moment by some thoughtless artificial system? What was my apartment, really, but a place for me to consume digital wares? What was I? Who made things this way? Strange questions I had never asked before.

Up until then, I had been satisfied with this small white room. A bed, a food tray, a door, a table, two chairs. Water food, and virtual amenities to satisfy any other need, sexual or otherwise. During the blackout, all of that was gone. I didn’t even know the layout of my room by memory as the majority of my life had been spent in a virtual representation rather than experiencing physical existence. I rented server time from the building manager to create virtual worlds, rented all the physical amenities I required, and rented vehicular access to other parts of this vast sanitized city.

At that moment, sitting within the space that was purportedly my own, I tried to imagine what the world looked like outside my white walled room. I couldn’t, there was nothing there. I tried desperately to remember something. Slowly, distant memories reached out to me from across a gulf of time. I remember the sound of running water, not some sound file running on a loop, but actual water with distinct acoustic variations. I remember green, and blue, wheat fields and stocks of corn. Were my parents hikers? I couldn’t tell, I barely knew anything of my childhood to be honest. I was twenty eight years old, how could I remember so little of my life as a child? I remembered the smell of pine forests, and dirt, and a space, between hills or maybe mountains.

Then the power came back on and I was momentarily blinded. I was again sitting in the white light of my room. I hadn’t moved since the power had gone out and now it returned, I felt no rush to resume a virtual environment. I felt cheated by the sudden the white luminescence of the ceiling lights. In the darkness, in the recesses of my own mind, I had, for a moment, seen something that I could not now unsee. I’d just lost friends, but also realized I’d never really had them in the first place. My access to the network was also not mine, and could simply be switched off. The power, the heat…