When you tell people that you are on antibiotics the usual expectation, I am sure you agree, is a modicum of sympathy. So you won’t think me odd when I tell you that I was taken aback on being congratulated a couple of days back. My friend who felicitated me, and sounded like he would swap places with me for a peanut skin, told me most enthusiastically to expect weird dreams. He had made a thorough study, he told me; he mentioned charts I think, or perhaps lunar patterns, or was it sleep patterns… He had not a smidgeon of doubt that antibiotics were a sure shot and I was to prepare for an interesting night. I may have murmured something polite but I was not impressed. Now I have always been a moderate fan of dreams myself, but given the circumstances I was more keen on restful than interesting.
But it turns out that the darned person was right. The dream lasted for what seemed the whole second part of the night. When I awoke, I was frothing in the mouth trying to remember all the details (this is actually quite literal; I had worked up a fine toothpaste lather from thinking so furiously). But as is always the case in these matters, my informed friend assures me, we can never really remember all because the mind really intends to forget. That being that, I think I’ve made a fairly creditable attempt to hold this laser-beam in my hand.
(The dream opens like this…)
It is the dead of night, sometime in the undefined future. My sister, my father and I are holed-up in a rough tarpaulin shack in the outskirts of what appears to be the rubble-desert of a devastated city. We are our future selves, but we look and act curiously just as we do now. We have all sorts of things lying scattered around us in cartons, suitcases, plastic bags; spilling over in disarray.
I am searching frantically through these things, looking for anything electronic. I am urging my sister to think of anything we may have overlooked. I know we each of us still have our phones; but have we brought with us any little forgotten tucked-away item that may be electronic? Think, think, think. Our lives depend on it.
(Why this panic? What is it with all this obsession with technology? Like all good dreams there is a slight cut-to where all is revealed)
The world has been overpowered by a techno-terrorist; a brilliant scientist who has been thoroughly disillusioned by how humankind has degenerated with technological-dependence. He has declared war against technology and has created a technology to beat all technology – literally. His creation, known to the terrorised world as E.N.T.W.E.R.P* is the most advanced destruction device known to man. It can annihilate by arriving physically at a place, of course, but its methods are far and varied. The availability of any kind of technological device can be sensed within a very impressive range, and havoc can be wreaked by advanced methods of remote control. Carrying a phone is an open invitation for obliteration.
(So why are we still carrying our phones?)
We have just moved to an area which is positively known to be outside E.N.T.W.E.R.P’s present range. But the window of opportunity is very, very narrow. We have just enough time to make some very crucial phone calls in time to give away all the left over electronic items to the dump-trucks that are making last minute rounds. These things will all be taken far away from all human habitation and dumped in the desert. If we miss this last pick-up service then we won’t be able to get far enough from our phones to escape destruction.
Hence this frantic search through all our belongings. Underneath lies an unsettling fear? Do we even remember what defines technology? Or have our dependencies reached such a stage that we might not even identify some things for the devices they are. Are there some things we may have ignored just seeing them to be extensions of our lives?
I am looking around in the dim light, when I spot my father lying on a sheet in a corner, with some visor like object around his forehead and eyes. I approach him to see what it is and I suddenly remember it from my childhood. It is a floppy disc-driven mini-projector-cum-brain-wave scanner. It is essentially a fun-device which lets you view images of your favourite artworks and depending on how you react to it each time, these artworks can be modified subtly. Or by physically operating certain buttons you can actively create modifications. Rudimentary stuff it may be, the styling may be terribly 80s, but this was technology, and it had to go to. I ask my father how he could forget to give it up earlier. He says that it is so ancient that ENTWERP is hardly going to count it for technology, moreover what is he to do in this godforsaken bunker all day, and moreover it has sentimental value for having been a prized possession at one time; quite ahead of its times, in fact!
I have to literally snatch it from him; there is no time to argue. It goes into the plastic deposit bag. I ask my sister to make the last phone calls. It is to the authorities to give them our co-ordinates. Then both our phones go into the bag. A piece of my sister’s heart goes with the phone; it is very new, very smart, very expensive.
(For more of how we survived (if we did) and what became of the world, the scientist, and E.N.T.W.E.R.P – wait for the next episode of my dream, which may coincide with the next dose of antibiotic.)
*I know there is a very good reason this creature/terrorist/humanoid is called E.N.T.W.E.R.P. I am quite sure I was told in the dream when I was being given a background on his origins which came with a tour of the mad scientist’s very impressive but strangely bollywoody laboratory.
