Elon Musk was on the telly, his dead face glistening under the studio lights.
“Rrrrrrrrr” he said, as the motors that powered his jaws slowly powered up. “Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”
A single drop of blood welled at the edge of his final human eye, seeming to defy gravity at first until you realised it was a fake, made of resin or wax or plasticine or from carbon nanotubes or jam or something, created to evoke a sympathetic response in the viewer. “See,” your brain went, “he’s human just like you.”
You hated your brain but it was the only one you could afford.
His other eye pulsed through sixty trillion colours a second, each one newer and more expensive than the one before.
“If we’d kept the old tv, we’d never have been able to see them all,” your brain said.
“I like that one,” your mother said, freezing the image and then cycling back through the frames until his eye was teslorange (a sort of purple). “I wonder if I could get some antimaccassars that colour.”
You pressed his eye and the catalogue opened up directly into your brain and crowded out most of your other sensory inputs until it had loaded the page.
“They cost $87348732.21,” you said, glumly.
“Oh, that’s quite a bit,” your mother said, but by the end of the week you knew she’d have one over the arm of every chair in the pod.
You wondered sometimes where the old antimaccassars went, but you never quite dared ask.
The image on the tv unfroze. “Hsssssk,” Elon Musk concluded, as his hour came to an end. “Hsssssssssssssssk.”
It was Mark Zuckerberg next, the camera centred on his jumper, the top half of his head protruding out of the shell of the telly and half way up your living room wall.
“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaater,” he began. “Proooteeeeeeien.”
Your mother was entranced. You feigned disinterest. Later you bought four decilitres of water and several unsorted proteins.
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Notes:
1. Written on September 3rd, 2018
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