The Corona Era
Its been a sultry hot day and all I can think of is lemonade and hitting on my console to finish the game that I have kept on turn based mode, but that has to wait, it seems. I have a Happiness Quotient test tomorrow and need to study some historical events to just find the missing neuron burst to get the perfect score. I plug my sensors to the system and pick up the dated sheets of papers which were then called "Books". The program has directed me to page titled 2020. Its a weird sensation feeling the pages and the hand movement is definitely consuming more effort than clicking pages in my system, but the program insists on doing this exercise. Apparently, it is recording the reactions. I try to sneak up to the Emotion Meter flashing on my screen, but don't really understand the maze of lines and bars.
Grudgingly I turn to reading the contents of the page. Apparently, in 2020, world faced a challenge called Novel Coronavirus. Immediately my program screen flashes giving me the structure of the virus and its family link with the previous viruses. I briefly go through the screen reference material to understand the family tree. Seems like the viruses have been there for centuries before this period and have been evolving much like all other species that have inhabited the earth. Whats funny is that every virus attack has been treated with gross unpreparedness, almost as if it was an arrow out of nowhere, leading to loss of lives and important genetic data. How can someone be so stupid and do the same mistake again? Did the program malfunction for them?
Parking my query in the QnA folder, I move ahead. Apparently the virus spread like a pandemic, and forced the entire human population to be confined to their fortresses and houses. My screen flashes again and tells me the difference between a fortress and house. There was a segregation matrix called rich and poor, have and have-nots, mostly all of it was to do with an imaginary currency which no one really understood. I personally feel the current way is better where the programs assesses our mind waves and gives us ranks depending on the scores that we get. But its damn difficult to fudge the scores. My disappointment reflects in the dip in the Emotional meter and I quickly gather myself out of my negative thought zone.
What came out of this pandemic was massive economic collapse and beginning of the currency called Happiness Quotient. I almost swear under my breath for the pandemic to be putting me through this ordeal but the program is much faster than me and gives me a BLIP immediately. With a jolt I get back to focusing on the task at hand. The pandemic brought about change in the dressing pattern with masks and gloves being permanent features. Its fascinating to know this part of the evolution and the program gives me an uptick. I was fixed with masks and gloves at my birth and I have never seen another human without one. We have magnets fitted into our gloves which when we shake hands or touch other humans, gives out vital inputs to the program. Our magnets also kill a range of bacteria or virus as soon as they touch any surface. All of this is very critical for the program to run and nobody dares to fudge with it.
As people were confined to closed spaces, they started thinking about the relevance of the currency. A lot of them struggled to adjust to social proximity in closed spaces. There were massive mental breakdowns called suicides and increasingly high number of depression cases. More number of people started to focus on peripheral traits of their personalities called "hobbies" in order to avoid being depressed. While earlier lessons had shown an increasing focus on money being the enabler of happiness, the current era made the money bit redundant. The era apparently is one of the saddest phases of human evolution as it threw them into unknown realms of self discovery. I cannot understand why the program is making me read this as it is only making my score dip further and I cannot escape a growing sense of emptiness that I feel at the moment. As if feeling my dangerous dropping levels of Happiness Quotient, the program gives me an immediate input release: find out if humans were happier before this era.
Grudgingly I turn to reading the contents of the page. Apparently, in 2020, world faced a challenge called Novel Coronavirus. Immediately my program screen flashes giving me the structure of the virus and its family link with the previous viruses. I briefly go through the screen reference material to understand the family tree. Seems like the viruses have been there for centuries before this period and have been evolving much like all other species that have inhabited the earth. Whats funny is that every virus attack has been treated with gross unpreparedness, almost as if it was an arrow out of nowhere, leading to loss of lives and important genetic data. How can someone be so stupid and do the same mistake again? Did the program malfunction for them?
Parking my query in the QnA folder, I move ahead. Apparently the virus spread like a pandemic, and forced the entire human population to be confined to their fortresses and houses. My screen flashes again and tells me the difference between a fortress and house. There was a segregation matrix called rich and poor, have and have-nots, mostly all of it was to do with an imaginary currency which no one really understood. I personally feel the current way is better where the programs assesses our mind waves and gives us ranks depending on the scores that we get. But its damn difficult to fudge the scores. My disappointment reflects in the dip in the Emotional meter and I quickly gather myself out of my negative thought zone.
What came out of this pandemic was massive economic collapse and beginning of the currency called Happiness Quotient. I almost swear under my breath for the pandemic to be putting me through this ordeal but the program is much faster than me and gives me a BLIP immediately. With a jolt I get back to focusing on the task at hand. The pandemic brought about change in the dressing pattern with masks and gloves being permanent features. Its fascinating to know this part of the evolution and the program gives me an uptick. I was fixed with masks and gloves at my birth and I have never seen another human without one. We have magnets fitted into our gloves which when we shake hands or touch other humans, gives out vital inputs to the program. Our magnets also kill a range of bacteria or virus as soon as they touch any surface. All of this is very critical for the program to run and nobody dares to fudge with it.
As people were confined to closed spaces, they started thinking about the relevance of the currency. A lot of them struggled to adjust to social proximity in closed spaces. There were massive mental breakdowns called suicides and increasingly high number of depression cases. More number of people started to focus on peripheral traits of their personalities called "hobbies" in order to avoid being depressed. While earlier lessons had shown an increasing focus on money being the enabler of happiness, the current era made the money bit redundant. The era apparently is one of the saddest phases of human evolution as it threw them into unknown realms of self discovery. I cannot understand why the program is making me read this as it is only making my score dip further and I cannot escape a growing sense of emptiness that I feel at the moment. As if feeling my dangerous dropping levels of Happiness Quotient, the program gives me an immediate input release: find out if humans were happier before this era.
Well-written - Hope this phase makes everyone re-think their priorities
ReplyDeleteThanks Gautam!
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