skonen_blades: (Default)
Brad was so sick and tired of being stupid. He couldn’t wait for the new download.

He looked around his drab room. His parents weren’t well off but they worked their asses off to give him a good home. Unfortunately that meant they were almost never home. It was ironic they worked their asses off to keep a roof over their head as a family but were never there to enjoy it. They wanted to keep their family from living on the streets but their family seldom spent time together.

His retro posters of 2021 revivals hits patched the fake-wood walls. Reboots of reboots of sequels of commercial successes from way back. New Jaws. New Titanic. New Breakfast Club. It was the same with music. Sequel rock was popular now. Rolling Stones II, Led Zeppelin II, Def Leppard This Time It’s Personal or just DFTiP on the posters. Everything a remix, everything a sellout. Even 2Tube and Finstagram were getting in on the fashion.

His mind had the upgrades that were installed in all babies at birth. Autism had been capped and stamped back down. All people had the ability to take in the fire hose of information being shot at them right now. Fortunes changed in milliseconds. Fame was instant with the stars usually only finding out about their fame a few hours after it had already happened and after they could capitalize on it. Everyone had an agent on standby from birth out of necessity.

But the upgraded brain needed upgrades. The fast forward human life needed mitigation and filters and they needed constant adjusting.

Currently Brad was at Brain 86.2. The leap to 90 promised insight and thought caliber of a demigod. When everyone’s a demigod, no one’s a demigod. So the philosophers warned but they were all dead so who cares that they thought?

Brad put the jack into his skull and hit download.

He’d be asleep all night while it installed like half of the continent.

His brain had everything it needed, or so he thought.



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skonen_blades: (borg)
We called the rich kids ‘Upgrades’.

They were the ones that had been born with all of the benevolent tweaks and cellular advantages that money could buy. Longer life span, all possible congenital defects erased, optimum health, even faster mental response times.

You’d think that we would envy them. Well, we certainly envied their bodies. They looked like gods. Like they’d stepped out of commercials and into real life.

What we didn’t envy, though, were the mental changes that the parents felt justified in doing to their children.

The Pixelator was one such augmentation. The rods and cones on the back of the eye were enhanced for better than perfect vision. However, a filter was placed between the brain and eye to make sure that all nudity was seen as pixilated blocks of colour. It was put there to keep the kids from seeing naked flesh before they reached the age of majority or until the parents thought it necessary to remove the block.

Of course, it didn’t work. Kids were having sex anyway. The entire experience for them just became pixilated blocks of colour. They lied to their parents about being virgins.

When the block was lifted, some of the kids went and had it secretly reinstated. One glimpse of actual nudity, of actual sex, and they were turned off. Their entire sexual awakening had been in a haze of blurry blocks of colour and they wanted it back.

Playing with the body is one thing, but playing with the mind was always something I felt uneasy about.

I’m grateful that my parents never had enough money to change me.



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