Five-Minute Fiction Story Prompt #3
As humanity dips a toe into the metaverse, begins to unravel the mysteries of quantum science, and inches ever closer to engineering a self-aware sentience, we quickly find ourselves with more questions than answers.
This is as it should be, of course, but I didn’t come here to talk about the presumption of modern science.
Nor did you.
The Prompt, Then
Consider for a moment what you imagine the world to look like after so many years of being connected to a “metaversal cloud”. Is it a futuristic spinoff of the World Wide Web, where different corporations host space and professionally developed content for society’s virtual consumption?
Or will it be, as Medium contributor Sapient Prince argues, an AR/VR hybrid? Augmented Reality does a better job of letting the real world in and applying virtual effects more subtly. As more people gravitate to the virtual metaverse for work, socializing, and entertainment, there will obviously be some instances where full immersion is desirable, and others where people stay connected while remaining physically productive.
Could it devolve into the Matrix, where our AI evolves and turns humanity into a huge mitochondria farm? Sure, why not?
And therein lies the rub — and our prompt.
A thought that has been touched on in the Matrix, Revolution 2047, and other works on the subject is that if the experience is immersive enough, does it even matter?
If you don’t realize it’s a simulation, your brain must be sufficiently stimulated, right?. So as long as there is some protocol in place to preserve the biological reproduction of the human species, is the ability to explore a greater abundance of life’s experience worth compromising the physical vessel?
Tell a story of any length that conveys your imagined future, and the role that augmented or virtual reality play in it. Don’t focus entirely on the gadgets, but more on how people use them in everyday life (work, home, play, etc) and any differences their widespread use has created.
Would you trade having a physical lifespan of only 40 years, if it meant you could spend 25+ of those years exploring numerous virtual worlds with a level of immersion comparable to physical reality?
Or use government to subsidize and regulate the technology, mandating strict logging of time spent connected to the metaverse. This would allow for a healthier society, not to mention one more capable of physical work and production in the real world — so perhaps a little closer to our end of the timeline than the Matrix.
What would the humanity of your future do?
I can’t wait to see.
