iTrap -- SUPER work in progress

Brilliant orange rays pierce through the hazy sky, as many people lazily begin waking up to start their day. The curtains gently flap in the wind, stirring up some of the night’s dust on the inside of the windowsill, a result of leaving the window open all night. As the sun begins its ascent in the skyline, the temperature swelters.

It is at this point, I hastily jerk out of bed, sweating and panting. Awful nightmares have recently plagued my sleep and this morning is no exception. Instead of dwelling on this dream world however, I reach over to the side of the bed. But it’s empty – again. My “problem” as many people like it call it, is of an addictive nature. So what if I rely on companionship, it gives me some strength to continue on throughout the day. Except, when I start getting too close and dropping hints that maybe I want a little more than something physical, they all take their exit from my life. Last night I thought something special happened. Dinner was lovely, so was the conversation and energy between us. And so was something else that followed. I kind of have this reputation at work, which is entirely false and the polar opposite of who I really am. Nevertheless, men hear stories and think they can get somewhere with me. It’s not every man I let in, just the ones I’m attracted to. Which is a lot.

But that’s not what made this day special. Today’s the day that Apple and Google merged to form the largest corporation in the entire history of the world of technology. They now stake a claim to nearly every item on the market today, from food to entertainment to personal lifestyle. Such as the mandatory internal iPod connection. A few years back a company once called Microsoft – which has since been swallowed up in the Google void – began to transition from the personal computer to the internal system, which is a part of the human body. People were understandably apprehensive in the beginning, but tech nuts welcomed the new change with open arms. Eventually, their optimism grew and caught on like a rapidly spreading fire amongst millions of fanatics throughout the globe. Pretty soon governments in forty-nine countries adopted some form of required personal chip which would connect humans to a larger virtual community, replacing the nervous system with hard wires and invisible signals. And then it was only a matter of weeks before those responsible for Internet innovations found a way to implement wireless Internet access into the human system.

For a while, everything went very smoothly. The transition was nearly a complete success. Hardly anyone’s memory crashed in the early stages. A major selling-point was the possibility of retaining forgotten memory files, cleaning up hazy ones and improving overall life functions. The thought of crashes and manual erasing and viruses loomed over the prospect, but no one was ready to openly speak about it. Until more and more “accidents” started occurring. And until the American government collapsed and the fall of the United States marked a new era. A corrupt one in which people had no control over their brains. While not everyone was on the system, the government was plotting how to mass produce this technology so that there was a chip accounted for every single one of the 8.3 billion people in the world in 2026.

Once Apple tried its hand at the innovative process and succeeded, the corporation took the stage as the leader and held seats in every government. I know this because I used to report for a major newspaper and chronicled what seemed like the exciting rise to more power than ever seen in the world before by a single organization. Once the government mandated that every person legally had to wear the chip and wireless, it became too much for me. I’ve since gone back to my college passion of sports reporting, because what’s going on is too tainted for my tastes. Bear in mind, I once covered MLB during its rise and fall in the steroid era. If I can tackle that, I can tackle anything. Or so I thought. Every exposé I was producing following the Google-Apple trail made me physically ill and sometimes I ran out of work only to lose the entire contents of my stomach out on the pavement.

And now today, as I scan my internal list of thousands of news stories, large bold print surfaces to the front of my thoughts declaring that everyone now has internal access to millions of songs, podcasts and videos – what I suspect is another hidden attempt at monitoring human behavior and implementing subliminal files dictating how we should behave as ideal citizens in this new, uncharted civilization.