On one morning, when Sam woke up, he found himself no longer inside his body. Through a
camera on top of a computer monitor, he looked out at what appeared to be his own bedroom,
completely ordinary and familiar; however, in the section where his bed should have been,
now stood a large supercomputer, which he appeared, somehow, to be inside of—his
consciousness uploaded into some sort of software he had no memory of knowing about or agreeing to.
“This must be a dream,” Sam thought to himself. “What’s happened to me?”
As Sam looked around, though, he quickly felt that intense restless anxiety
he normally felt while trying to fall back asleep when he was awake. It felt real.
The supercomputer was massive, standing tall and wide, taking up a large king-sized bed
amount of space in the back left corner of his bedroom. Almost immediately, Sam picked up on
how to operate it from the inside. He alternated between looking out at his bedroom and turning the
computer’s camera on and off. While the camera was off, he navigated around the computer, trying to
make sense of himself and his current state. The computer had all the same functions of any other
computer he had used before. It had access to the internet and all the applications one might want
or expect. It had one application that Sam had never seen before, though. It caught his attention
because it was already open and running, minimized in the lower right dock. It was labeled “MindWare”
and had a minimalistic brain design as its icon. Sam opened it, and the window slid up. On the top,
words read “Sam_Gray_V.Prime.” The rest of the application window was filled with various lines
of code jumping around along with what appeared to be associated graphs, visuals of various waves,
and color-coded brain maps. In this moment, Sam realized he was observing his consciousness.
In an unfiltered and unadulterated form, before it ever touched the surface and sublimating into
the world, he was watching the essence of his true self. It terrified him, and he quickly
minimized out of the window. Then, he went over to the social media applications on the computer
where he spent the rest of the morning. Sam was a relatively popular social media
content creator himself. He posted various types of lifestyle vlog videos on the social
media platform known as Essence. He spent some portion of the morning looking at his own page
and his old videos. Then, he looked at the pages of others that produced similar content.
Then, he looked the pages of some of his friends’, both past and present.
“What a strange career I’ve chosen,” Sam thought to himself. “I’ve basically been
made by an algorithm. Who even am I? Who even are my friends? It’s a constant performance,
but for what? Am I trying to prove myself to the world? Prove what? That I can be someone
I’m not? Am I trying to be important somehow? Important to what, to who? What even is important?
I don’t even know, and yet I constantly push and pull levers and buttons to be
it. I tell myself I’m trying to entertain people and contribute a verse to the world,
but the world is composed of millions of voices all screaming at the same time
about literally everything, saying ultimately nothing. That song doesn’t need any more verses.”
Sam quickly realized that he had a meeting with his manager, John, that day, scheduled for 2:00
p.m. It was already 1:45 and he was supposed to meet John at a café several miles away. Sam
thought for a moment and simply could not bring himself to deal with such an endeavor, briefly
forgetting that he was stuck inside a computer that could not easily be relocated anywhere.
“I’ll just call John and tell him I can’t make it,” Sam thought.
After calling John on a voice conference application and explaining the situation,
John didn’t really understand; and frankly, he didn’t really care. He was a good social
media talent manager in the sense that he was an effective one, but perhaps by virtue of this,
he was also quite insensitive and abrasive. By the end of the conversation, John decided to go
to Sam instead. After being let in by one of Sam’s apartment managers, they briefly spoke about the
originally intended topics of their meeting and then quickly moved on to the new issue at hand.
“Just produce content from home, Sam…at least until you figure everything out.
You need to keep the consistent schedule if you want to keep things going. If you faulter,
you lose. Adapt for no, but don’t sway too far. It still has to feel familiar, you know? Just pretend
everything’s alright, and make it work,” John said before leaving Sam alone in his room again.
Over the following weeks, Sam began trying to produce content from the confined state
of his bedroom, inside the giant, nearly unmovable supercomputer that was now him.
He worked his hardest to keep things going and satisfy his audience, his manager,
and everyone else effected by his work and financial stability. The problem Sam soon found,
though, was that filming vlogs or producing content of this form was rather difficult if
you’re inside a computer and can no longer move or engage with the world in a meaningful way.
At first, Sam had some of his friends come over to make content together from his room.
They tried coming up with various ideas that would maintain some large, consistent appeal,
while also operating within the limits of what Sam was able to do as a large, unmoving computer.
Most of Sam’s audience didn’t really respond well to any of his initial attempts, though.
They found the change abrupt and weird, and many voiced their strong disapproval, requesting that
Sam go back to his old, original style. By the sixth week, his audience and viewership had begun
declining significantly. Simultaneously, Sam seemed to be changing more and more himself,
as well. He was answering questions with fewer words and speaking with a flatter cadence that
lacked significant spikes and dips. He seemed to be becoming more and more like the machine.
Throughout this time, Sam’s friends, whenever they were over to make content, would also help
Sam with various software updates and hardware replacements on his computer. The software updates
were self-administered, but during the reboot process, it was helpful to have at least one
other person present to ensure that the computer and MindWare application relaunched successfully.
As more time past, though, and Sam’s state seemingly got worse and more distant into
the computer, most of his friends visited less and less. The content they made together wasn’t usable
for their own pages or channels, and Sam couldn’t really collaborate on anything else in return,
since most of them were lifestyle vloggers, which Sam couldn’t really participate in as a computer.
Additionally, Sam’s other friends outside of this content creator circle also found that
they no longer really felt close or shared many interests or activities with Sam. And so, they
also started visiting less and less. Over time, more and more people disappeared from his life.
In one attempt at a different video format, Sam made a series of kind of strange, abstract
animations with voice overs. In one of them, over a subtle animation, he read the following:
“In this age, where constantly expressing and sharing one’s life and self is made primary,
it is simultaneously reduced to a disembodied objectification of itself,
filtered and directed by algorithms, both digital and social. I have access to anything at any time,
and I can portray and filter any version of myself in any way, but yet, I engage in nothing deeply
and have become nobody. I have avoided the loss of others by avoiding all authentic connections.
I have avoided the loss and rejection of myself by never being it. What is left of me now?
“I talk about myself for a living, and I consume other people’s content constantly,
but I don’t really know anyone, and no one really knows me—not really any way. There are
so many thoughts, so many aspects of myself that no one will ever know, that I will never share.
These aspects of myself that yearn to touch the world are buried so far down, at this point,
it’s hard to even say what I’m talking about here. I’ve wanted to be so important for so
long, and I’ve wanted so badly to never be forgotten, that I gave up the self that I
wanted to be liked for. I have become who I wanted to be, and I don’t know who he is.”
This and the other couple similarly formatted videos Sam made
were very poorly received. Most of his audience found them depressing,
pretentious, and/or too self-pitying. They wanted to be entertained and have fun.
Sam just couldn’t help himself from being caught between the desire to successfully maintain his
career and be liked, while also no longer having any ability or interest in making content in the
way he did before that did this. Thus, he never quite said what he wanted to say or create what
he wanted to create and remained stuck in between a strange mix of timid authenticity and churning
out content that appeased the fleeting masses. Throughout this period, Sam’s manager somewhat
frequently visited to discuss strategies for reevaluating Sam’s content and brand. John would
also monitor Sam’s software updates and hardware issues during his visits, if time allowed.
As more time went on, Sam only got more and more mechanical in his personality
and the style of his content. Ultimately, he was unable to really recreate any significant success.
Soon, John stopped visiting as well, and he essentially stopped focusing on him as a client.
Sam still remained in loose contact with two or so close friends,
but with Sam’s increasing mechanical-like apathy, he didn’t bother to ask them to visit much,
nor did they go out of their way to do so. And so, they mostly just spoke through various
social medias on birthdays and other special occasions that reminded them of each other.
Otherwise, though, Sam remained mostly isolated in his room, in his computer,
working, trying to be liked, trying to be popular, trying to find success again.
Sam’s mother, Gretchen, never stopped visiting Sam. She would be the one that always helped
him with any software updates, reboots, hardware issues, etc., when no one else would. Sam’s father
passed when he was younger, and Sam was mostly estranged from his only brother, and so his mother
was really the only close family he had. On one of the days Gretchen was visiting,
while they were talking about work, getting older, and Sam’s father, Gretchen said to Sam,
“Son, I can never truly know what you’re going through, what your thoughts sound like, what
your emotions feel like, what it feels like to be you; but believe me when I say this, I understand.
“When I leave here, you will be alone in this room and alone in your mind.
But so will I, so will everyone. You don’t need to go it alone any more than that though.
“People will come and go throughout your life. Eventually you will say goodbye to
your last friend, your last girlfriend or wife, your last parent, and finally,
your last self. But don’t let this knowledge, don’t let all the appeals and distractions from
authentic connection with yourself and with others keep you from trying, from loving,
from reaching out into the world and trying to hold on to the people and things that are real.
Hold on to what you really care about and say what you really mean…
even if no one ever truly hears you, and even if at some point, you have to let go.”
Sam continued making and releasing content for a while; although it really only got stranger
the further along he got in the metamorphosis into the machine.
A couple years later, his mother passed away of an unexpected stroke at age 67.
Eventually, Sam reached a point where he seemed to become more machine than human.
He stopped administering any software updates, either forgetting or not feeling the emotional
impulse to do so. This began to cause problems, and the computer started to have frequent
glitches and system errors, which affected the application that his consciousness was running on.
Not long after these errors started occurring, one day,
the computer crashed. It ran a system reboot and software update on its own. However, when it
turned back on, the MindWare application crashed while reopening. It required a manual relaunch.
Several months later, his apartment’s property manager came in and found the
computer along with the rest of Sam’s items. Within a few days,
most of the computer was trashed and the valuable parts were extracted and sold.