Please turn on your cellphones

 I like to go to movies alone because I like to smash popcorn directly into my face without being judged. I also like to go alone so I can watch movies I would never admit to seeing. Because I’m a snob. Movies about sensitive vampires and men who vomit and sexy ninjas who fight zombies in sci-fi action flicks that are based on video games and look like video games but are better than video games because I don’t have to play them. I can just sit back and pick corn out of my teeth.

I went to a movie alone last year, right before I sobered up,  and the man sitting one seat over from me,  because there should always be a safety seat separating two grown men who are at a cartoon movie about talking lizards by themselves, the man was playing a video game on his phone. During the movie. He was playing that game about birds committing suicide. The glowing light was annoying me and I gave him a sharp look. One that said “And just who do you think you are?” But he kept playing and finally I leaned over and coughed. Not a passive-aggressive cough. An atomic one thick with radioactive phlegm. And he glanced over at me, smirked, and whispered “Get used to it.”

You know, he had a point.

I think he was from the future. Or the present. For all I know, I could be the zombie and he could be the sexy ninja. We’re not always the sexy ninja. Sometimes we’re the zombie in someone else’s game.

One day, very soon I think, the phrase “Please turn off your cellphones” will be laughably out-of-date. Almost quaint. We need to get use to the fact that one day, our technology will never turn off.  We might be one of the last generations of people whose gizmos and gadgets were clumsy buzzing locusts we kept in our pocket.

There is going to come a point in human civilization where everything changes, an evolutionary pole vault, and the odds are we’ll all be alive to experience our obsolescence.  We will stare into the eyes of our children, Neanderthal dully regarding man. This extinction will be recorded and uploaded and broadcast. Our children’s children will remember everything. They will build and live in worlds we can’t even begin to imagine

Scientists predict this moment is coming. A moment when our computers become smarter than we are. It’ll be like the invention of fire, the wheel and Velcro all rolled up into one monumental event. One day we’ll all be squishy fleshy humans, the next, we’ll be made out of math. Memories will become play-doh, malleable balls of data, details recorded by the senses: the pink and yellow dawns, soft warm bread, a baby’s happy squeal.

The machines won’t take over. They’ll be invited in our bed and we’ll spoon them like a lover. Alien octopi won’t use our bodies for energy and keep our minds enslaved in a virtual reality. But we will build simulations of reality. Of your reality, of my reality, of all realities. These simulations will build simulations of their own and those simulations will eventually, in the course of their own evolution, will build their own simulations. Right now, someone in the future, their present, is running a simulation where I’m writing about simulations in the future. They’re playing a game where maybe they go to a movie alone and play a video game and that prompts me to write  to you about video games. Maybe I’m running this simulation? An elderly man kept alive by humming  plastic machines living his life 100 different ways. Enjoying the new world he is being given a small taste of. I hope I can create simulations of what would have happened had my dad lived just ten years more.

This isn’t science-fiction. I’ve smoked a small forest of marijuana in my wayward youth. I know how this must sound. Yes, yes, I know “what if our entire solar system is just one tiny atom in the fingernail of some other giant being.” But that’s all stoner metaphysical crap. It’s not “ all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” One day, soon, dammit, every love you proclaim will exist in a game within a game.

Thirty years ago, the earliest video game consoles, big boxes that squatted on top of television sets, had 4 kilobytes of memory. My nerd device has eight gigabytes of memory. There are one million kilobytes in a gigabyte. Thirty years from now, millions of gigabytes will fit up your nose. Your consciousness will be a swarm of 1s and 0s.

No one will remember that once upon a time Granddad and Grandma had to physically silence an enormous handheld computer that was used to convey message of monumental importance like “Hey” and “What up” and “U wanna hang.”

Ringtones and beeps and electronic chimes are the crickets of the modern wired world. One day that jungle will be inside our heads.

Wooshes and bleeps will join sighs and heartbeats. Our skulls will be full of ladders and floating cherries and mushrooms wearing vests and dark passages that lead to secret doors that open to reveal fairies that weep jewels. You will never be alone. You will play games, you will play games and those games will break your heart.

So turn on your cell phones. The future belongs to Robocop.