The Future We Left Behind Read Online Free Page B

the population.
    My father calls the new developments
the diamond ghettoes
, and the Strakerites superstitious primitives. He blames all of society’s problems on the Strakerites, as if they are deliberately making his life harder. His opinions arereinforced daily by LinkStreams transmitted by people who already agree with him.
    I’ve started to doubt the wisdom of drawing one’s opinions from the same data well every day. But my father refuses to acknowledge that there
is
another way. You either agree with him or you are wrong.
    My walk had taken me around New Lincoln Heights and on to the Middle Beltway that served as a dividing line between the ordinary and the Strakerite neighbourhoods. Rush hour restrictions meant that the beltway was reserved for solar gigs and battery carts, but even taking all other vehicles out of the equation there were still four solid lanes in both directions standing at gridlock.
    We came down from the trees, built cities over paradise, and suddenly we’re all sitting in traffic.
    It seemed absurd, as if the more we progressed as a race, the smaller our lives actually became.
    Maybe that was why I was turning to English lit. To try to find something larger for my life.
    Or maybe it was simply that my mother loved to read.
    She had owned a small collection of
real
books; wondrousold things that smelled of dust and vanilla and almonds and wood. Some of my earliest memories are of her, sitting by the side of my bed, an impossibly old volume held in one hand, while the other turned the pages as she read to me.
    Wonderful memories, but they always left me feeling sad and bewildered: tainted forever, I guess, by the fact that she is gone.
    My father must have disposed of her books. I remember him disapproving of her reading.
    I carried on moving towards home and I thought of Lemuel Gulliver making his way through lands that made no sense. Before long I was smiling.

Strakerite
    From Linkipedia, the everywhere encyclopedia
    A Strakerite is a believer, practitioner or follower of Strakerism, a movement of people who believe that human beings are, at crucial points in human history, upgraded by alien programmers .
    The term derives from the Kyle Straker Tapes, a set of audio cassettes believed to have been recorded by Kyle Straker, a fifteen-year-old boy, in the early years of the 21st century. Much controversy surrounds the tapes themselves and their later transcription, which was published in book form as Human.4 .
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    File:
113/44/00/fgj/Continued
    Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal
    
    I walked and the people of the city flowed around me, lost in their own interior worlds. Faces passing, eyes open, but distant. Most of them were surfing the Link while walking.
    The Link, we are told, is our friend.
    It allows us to work, chat, swap data, study, shop, play games, watch films, listen to music, connect with friends, take a virtual vacation or augment reality with filters, menus and even animations – the same things we have been doing for thousands of years – on the go. The Link is there in our heads – there’s no onboard hardware and the software that runs it is external, carried through the air.
    It works, we’re reminded, because of our marvellous capacity for filament networking. Yes, we’ve always been able to swap data through our filaments; the Link just provides a constant connection without the need for physical contact. It’s not actually as intense as doing it by filament networking, it is a lot less immersive, and that’s why people can be plugged into the Link and go about their daily business.
    The Link helps by screening out the unnecessary details of the environment.
    Like, well, the environment.
    It makes us more productive.
    More useful.
    I rarely use it for anything but listening to music when I’m out and about. That and keeping my LinkDiary, but that takes no effort, or even conscious thought. LinkDiary just happens when