by Jose Moreno
****
Although Barón detested his life with controlling functiomatons, most people in USA, like fatalist characters from an ancient Greek tragedy, resigned to love what those restrictive functiomatons had done for humans. It would have been considered senseless by most people during the year 2054 that we gave up using functiomatons; for most USA’s citizens, it would have been as absurd as giving up using cars last century; functiomatons were seen as destiny. In this way, It was popular to illusion themselves by conceiving functiomatons as being their servants even though many of them had been displaced from their cherished jobs and had to resort to Federal Government employment. Everywhere in Truxes, colorful electronic billboards were advertising functiomatons similar to the way that the bill boards had been advertising other products since the previous century; from the point of view of the average capitalist oriented USA citizens, functiomatons were just like any other commercial product—They were opened to the judgment of buyers who assessed rationally the product’s usefulness and practicality against its price. In contrast, functiomatons were not like any other commercial product for Barón. For him, they were instruments for control. Barón thought like a small minority of citizens, mostly elderly, that functiomatons were drastically defining what it means to be human by invading our privacy and by doing tasks that had belonged to humans; functiomatons were in fact not serving us; we are serving them.
For this reason, Baron did not take his father’s advice seriously during the dinner conversation, thinking that his father was just perpetuating the same common perspective. He thought that his father was naïve. After all, Baron thought, “all my father can do is build functiomatons in a factory,” understanding that he was biased towards the popular attitude towards functiomatons; thus, after dinner, without pondering too much about the “encounter” he had with his dad, Barón just went to his room, sat on his chair, and turned on the screen to watch news flashes about events going on around the world.
Sitting on his comfortable plastic chair, he browsed through the titles. There was one that made him startle: “WITH FUNCTIOMATONS IN THE BRAIN.” Anxiously, Barón selected that title. Then, he read the “infamous” news. It was about the first baby with small functiomatons installed next to his brain:
“He will be the first human to be able to operate any functiomaton without the aid of direct body contact. Think of the installed device as a remote control directly connected to the brain centers. With training, the functiomaton can be operated as easily as an arm….Also, the toddler was equipped with intraocular projection making the toddler able to see images directly in his eyes without the need of wearing goggles ever again…he will be the first human being with an installed T.V. screen in his eyes…There is, however, one small price that the new born will have to pay throughout his adult life: He will remain completely traceable anywhere in the world by any satellite…”
Right after reading the news flash, it seemed to Barón like his worst nightmare was becoming true. Soon, he thought, “there will be no place for humanity to run; soon it was not going to be possible to have privacy if technology kept advancing as quickly as it had been”. He was frightened imagining that his most private moments could in principle become know to someone. In fear he thought that such a “power” could be misused by those who have privilege access to the information obtained by functiomatons.
Now, given that it seemed obvious to him that losing privacy implied losing your “human spirit”, he felt that he had to act quickly in order to avoid such “apocalyptic end” to humanity. In a flash, he thought about running far away from any functiomatons. Baffled, He was asking himself, “where could I run?” To seek a satisfactory answer, he closed his eyes and relaxed his muscles. He concentrated on his breathing. He put his mind in blank. Then, he had a beautiful vision of a possible place for an exodus, remembering the touching poem that Mr. Shakespeare had read earlier about living everything behind and going towards nature: the woods of Northern California, the same ones that his grandfather had described with detail many years ago, could be a place to escape because it was known that many elderly citizens went to live there in order to be as far away from technology as possible.
Barón’s idea of escaping to the woods satisfied Barón’s imagination, but seemed impractical at first; however, everything seemed to fit together with his encounter with the vandals that he had met in the Jazz Corner: Barón thought that in the woods, they could live and plan future acts of vandalism against functiomatons. He thought that it could be a “platform for guerilla assaults” like the peasant platforms that his grandfather had described in the Salvadorian war, but with the intention of physically attacking functiomatons only.
One thought that frightened Barón was that, If Barón and others were to abandon Truxes with the intension to persistently assault functiomatons, they would become enemies of the state not vandals according to federal regulations and, as a result, he could be jailed for life if they were caught. However, Barón rationalized that he was already in a prison that was killing his “human spirit” and he had nothing to lose except the connection with his father. Feeling that acting in favor of the “human spirit for all of humanity” was more important than being around his father, he arrived at the conclusion that somehow he had to go out into the fields and form his anti-functiomaton guerilla.
Barón took a deep, relieving breath, and tried to rapidly calm down. Then, he successfully pulled himself together because he felt obligated to finish his report on the “year of the asteroid”, the year 2026, a meaningful date for him.
In order to think clearly what he was going to write, he first soliloquized his scrambled thoughts about the year 2026 by erratically walking around the room waving his hands as if he was lecturing to someone. Then, he sat down on his bed, closed his eyes and recited to himself a poem. Once he was calmed, he went towards the functiomaton and sat next to it.
Because he had not done his extra credit homework during the time when he was supposed to have done it, it was now the time to get it done. He was excited to work on the project that Mr. Hegel had assigned: he had to write an essay on the consequences of the year of the asteroid, a topic where Barón was well read—sometimes he had stayed up late at night researching the year of the asteroid. It was at night time when he used to gain a feeling of privacy which motivated him to express himself in the form of school writing.
It was just an extra credit assignment for Mr. Hegel; however, for Barón, it was an assignment that explained much about the “essence of humanity”. Although sometimes he did not want to spend time doing homework due to the fact that the scores on his tests were perfect and he did not need homework points to obtain an A on any class, this time he was going to do the extra credit assignment about the year of the asteroid because, in his opinion, that year transformed “the minds of USA citizens into servile brains”; he was not going to do the assignment out of necessity, but out of passion for the topic.
He turned on the functiomaton and put on his goggles. He said, “Homework for history”. Immediately, he could see a blank page. He thought again what he was going to say. Then, he began to speak:
“During the year 2026 there was a 90 percent probability, according to the government prestigious scientists, of a collision of the earth with an asteroid about the size of Cuba. Consequently, the USA federal government tried to shoot the asteroid in order to change its course, but the operation was a failure. Many scientists agreed that we could have prevented the collision if we had developed the right technology when we had the time. Not surprisingly, the failure of the attempts to prevent the collision by human means caused an expected pandemonium and rage in the USA public. That afternoon, sadness, anxiety, over joyfulness, suicide, killings and violence, and love took over the streets. No poems that have resulted from any war in history can be compared to the poetry in U.S. citizen’s dialogs when the asteroid was approaching: people knew that no human history would be passed on to anyone. Even
the young had to anticipate their mortality before their bodies showed any signs of deterioration and had to make resolutions about their lives, which they believed they could have carried out if they had lived longer. Fortunately, the asteroid collided with the moon and created a new crater that could be seen from the earth with the naked eye. Such traumatic event triggered a radical change in politics of the USA: All our resources were focused on defending ourselves against natural disasters. USA’s foe was no longer on earth but out in space. Thus, USA’s failure to redirect the path of the asteroid became an obsession with technology.
One effect of the year of the asteroid was that people became less interested in pleasurable consumption. The USA’s motto became, in the words of the famous Joseph Wilson, ‘…One where products had to serve useful functions. No more dream products’. This slogan was adopted by many capitalists because consumers suddenly became less interested in buying luxury cars, designer clothes, expensive alcoholic beverages, and many other addictions. Consumers became more interested in a humble living with the people they cared without having to consume too much. On the other hand, the movement of ‘renew USA’ was born—The USA became isolated economically again, shifting production inside its ‘Controlled’ territory. Whether you were living in the USA legitimately or not, after the year 2029, you were trapped inside its territory and forced to become a useful citizen. Nobody cared were anyone came from. The political slogan was ‘Contribute to the renewed USA. We will make you get there’. This is how its borders became the main task of the army: Not only to control the influx of immigrants, but also to supervise the exodus of defectors from the USA which was, technically speaking, still a democracy but not longer with a variety of points of view about how to make it better. The great majority of USA’s citizens became mesmerized by one ideology: Politically speaking, only by developing better technology and education for all, we could propel the renewed USA towards superiority.
After the ‘year of the asteroid’, more and more businesses began to replace humans with technology. It was not difficult after the ‘the big scare’ for the USA’s congress to give out grants to talented scientists and engineers that came up with technological solutions to everyday situations. As a result, jobs began to be replaced with functiomatons, a term coined in the year 2032, when it became obvious to most USA’s citizens that electronic devices were out performing human beings in everyday functions. However, replacing humans with technology brought up unemployment and it was necessary to come up with a political solution: Those that lost their jobs due to the structural changes in technology were given the opportunity to become educated on the new technologies. Thus, many unemployed workers became engineers and technicians that worked on the massive production of functiomatons.
Many of the newly trained employees took some of their classes, at no cost, through the new functio-universities that were opened by the federal government. Many of them, who had not set foot on any university in years, were able to learn everything ‘online’ as it was called early in the century. Certainly, it was cheaper to run a Functio-university than an old fashion school because it was no longer necessary to be teaching the same class by so many professors around the country. However, at first it was difficult to convince the public of the efficiency of Functio-universities because they had been educated in the old fashion way. According to a poll from the year 2033, as much as 40% of Functio-university users were not satisfied and preferred to be taught by live instructors, in a classroom setting, with other students like them; thus, there were still old fashion schools opened for old fashion pupils. Nevertheless, functio-universities required no entrance exams, had flexible schedules, and were available from the comfort of their homes; as a result, most USA’s citizens had become graduates from a virtual university by the year 2045.”
Once the four paragraphs were done, he said “submit my work to history class” and exited functio- space knowing that he was going to get the maximum amount of points for the assignment. He knew confidently that he was going to get another A on his next school report. Finally, he went to bed. He was going to have a busy day the next day planning his next act.