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The Interplanetary Refugees
I’ve often thought about the impact of artificial intelligence and other technologies on human history out into the future. I’m by nature an optimist, but can also see how things can go wrong. But what if, because of our reliance on technology becoming a symbiosis, we slowly lose the capability to know what reality is?
June 11th, 2123, Gregorian Earth Calendar
I walked up to the edge today. Looking up at that sheer plexiglass wall always gets me dizzy. Up close, the projections appeared incoherent, pixelated messes.
An image of a mountain valley bisected by a river and framed by snowy peaks is nice in the winter cycle, but there it disappeared into a morass of general notions of color and shape.
Of course, we all know these scenes are fictions, but they are a comfort. It’s strange, almost like an instinct, because I’ve certainly never seen them.
When you turn around, there is a sense of surrealism. You see past that greenbelt of wildflower fields and live oaks to see those brutal concrete supports of the elevated rail, and my apartment block beyond that.
Civilization passed to wildness to the edge of the habitable world in the space of a mile. Up above, clouds drifted by across a simulated sun. The true sky was too bleak and dark and hostile to live under constantly.
