If you could be anyone, anything, anywhere, anywhen — thus starts the cascading effect of infinite choice that makes life impossible to live, at least in the sense of doing what life has always done: finding purpose in the beautiful shared struggle to secure the blessings of sustenance, warmth, love…
No more, not since the Overlay found its way into the stream. You think about all the poor souls making notes in the margins of spiritual tomes looking for salvation or shelter or meaning or climax across eons of human existence, the angst and fear and constant disappointment of tastes and fates falling short of ecstasy…
We fixed that. The fix is in vogue and on demand. Simple: insert credits, upload scan, select extensions, integrate. Why have just the one brain that destiny befell upon your wretched skull when you can have them all: animal, vegetable, mineral; stars and poets and visionaries; sleazeballs brimming with unrepentant charisma swimming with master sharks drawn by singular purpose; vast rhizomatic networks of fungal intuition where thought travels faster than darkness; the last bear on the last ice in the last ocean during the last days…
Don’t overthink it, please. Go with what feels right. Let loose the hounds of despair and delight. All you need is a mind open to extraction and infusion, the two-way street of shared consciousness. You can be whatever you want — except you, which you never really wanted to be anyway. That’s why you’re here. Jiggle the knobs and slip the surly bonds of ignoble self-reference in favor of every mind of all time…
Inside the infinitude, the vast regression of thought, your essence percolates in a miasma of neural stew wafting tinges of uniqueness and universality, becoming more you as your own mind dies ten billion deaths only to get reborn a trillion times, a portal of impulsive connections brimming with the bravado of unleashed ganglia sparking to life against a jet black void…
Too much? No worries, try the starter pack sampler: choose any ten extensions and get the eleventh free! Enough voices for a drizzle but not a deluge. Enjoy the discordant harmonies in your head, your headless spirit galloping through the galvanized forest of doubt — ride with the herd to nirvana…
Still too much? Today only, get one free add-on implanted. Quiet the loneliness with another voice. Choose a lover, an antagonist, a guide, a pet. Be one with a tree, a bee, a chimpanzee. Go for carefree sex or giraffe necks or a witch’s hex. You’ll never want to be alone again, trapped by one voice…
Side effects may include: sudden onset schizophrenia, amygdalic fragmentation, loss of appetite, failure to thrive, collapse of free will, end of days, prurient dysfunction, hives, incorrigible antagonism, gout, goiters, gangrene, greed.
The Overlay. Braindrops that keep falling on your head. Change the world by changing your mind. Use as misdirected.
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NOTE: Just waxing, or perhaps waning, non-prophetically into some Gibsonian back alley where on-demand deliveries are dropped off every day. It’s not around the corner or at the signpost up ahead; it’s right there in plain view embedded in the viscera in vapors left behind by the magic erase function. You know the deal. {image: pixabay}