Cyan Plans For Breakfast

It is enough to know that it is the future, and that one doesn't need a precise year to pin these events down onto. If you must have some frame of reference, and who doesn't, then consider these happenings as a part of the mid-22nd century. This is a safe enough distance from our own period, one would think. An even gap between the living present and the distantly imagined, a flag planted just beyond the horizon, a space of time that nothing human, not even the forty or so children born in the time it takes to read this sentence, will ever see.

And besides, as far as spans of time go, the mid twenty second century is so well pre-mapped...what's one more prognostification going to hurt?

This story concerns a young fellow by the name of Cyan, who was given his moniker by a generation of parents who, seeking something less routine than Mary or Jordan or Sue, became briefly infatuated with forgotten names from feudal lore. This fad was brief, and not well-taken by many of the populace of that time. Thusly, Cyan is mostly alone when it comes time for morning roll call, although the presence of a Henri spelled with an i does bring him some comfort.

Currently, Cyan is in his room laying quietly on his bed. Soft orange light borders the ceiling, its illumination a breath away from useless. The still darkness softens the lines of the furnishings and plunges them half-formed into the background; it is a deep sea dive, secure and silent.

Wrapped around the boy's head is an ingenious invention. A mixture of plastics and photons, pounded flat and infused with an eerie white/blue glow. According to the trademark request filed by AppleSig three or four decades ago, it is called a Flimsiplast, although it's more common term is the simpler, rougher "flimsy". You can't go anywhere in the metallic, humid world of the mid 22nd century without one. Or rather, you could, but then one would naturally assume that you're going somewhere you don't expect to return from.

These are things you can do with a flimsy: Draw a movie, program, or slice of music from the Aircom Network. Download programs, software, or files that would be of use in whatever task you have been assigned. Present personal identification information to the proper officials. Pay for goods and services. Activate a pressure point in the flimsy's computer fabric and make it go as rigid as a board. Press it again and make it shrink and curl around your wrist for easy carrying. A flimsy is everything we hope we will someday get to use.

In this dystopian future - a future which, from the vantage point of the far past would seem dystopian but from the perspective of said future merely seems ordinary and nearly traditional - information is held over the head of the populace like a sword. Use information with expedience and exactness and you are advanced. Do so otherwise and prepare for a life in a hazy, undefined world, where momentum becomes an uttainable, almost physical, desire.

Cyan has a grammar test in the morning. Grammar is very important if one is to communicate much in as little time as possible. It has only been since the turn of the century, Cyan has been taught, that mankind has truly concentrated on this fundamental aspect of communication. Look at the literature of the Time Before Reason. It is sprawling and mad, concerned far too much with context and imparting nothing. Pages and pages that reveal a vast wastehouse of the human mind, a room cluttered with unnecessaries, obscuring truth and opposing the virtue of clarity.

He reads these texts every night before he goes to bed and finds them as alluring as threatened. In his head, Cyan struggles to keep a high wall between the sharp lessons of succinctness and the uncontrollable bounds of the past. Tonight the struggle has put him into a depressed stupor. He wishes the test could be taken and everything be done with, but he knows that, pass or fail, there will be more rigidity beyond tomorrow's exam. More testing and re-testing.

In protest, his flimsy is wrapped around his head. Cyan imagines that if he goes to sleep, it shall relax and sink into his brain, and when he awakes he will have all the knowledge ever known. Available for instant recall, able to become dormant with a thought, able to co-exist with the jungle of imagination that threatens to sprout up through the cracks of a normal life.

Cyan closes his eyes and lets the glow of the flimsy lure him into a hypnotic slumber. If this does not work, he thinks, he will just have to eat the thing for breakfast.