Our Wings

Our Wings

We were a generation of invention.
We created spaceships that could go over 90% of light speed, farms stationed on satellites orbiting the Earth, and cars that literally ran on nothing but air. We sent people to the moons of Saturn and mapped out the darkest depths of the ocean. We cured the diseases that had plagued humanity for generations. We searched every forest, investigated every animal, dug up every fossil, and set out to preserve them all.
However, our greatest accomplishment were the wings.
Wing-packs, or just wings, began as one person throwing together the various technologies of our time to create a personal jet pack controlled by thought. The name came from the two great holographic wings that came from each side. They didn’t have much of a purpose; it was just the marketing gimmick. At the beginning, they could be picked from a preset list of wings, and they only had certain animations – that one for flight, this one for take-off, et cetera.
It wasn’t long before we started modifying them. First came the ability to move the wings on your own, then to customize them however you wished – simple things. It was so easy to, after all – that was what our generation did.
Meanwhile, the wings grew more and more popular. Sure, you couldn’t fly them anywhere you wanted, and you had to be above a certain age, but once that 16th birthday rolled around, wings were The Gift to get. They were a great form of transportation, and, be honest, who wouldn’t want to be able to fly?
Then, somebody had the idea to make the wings act more like a personal computer. All it took was one of those handheld electronics most of us had anyways and some features to make it easy to access with only your thoughts. So, just like that, we had our calendars, our email, our music, our pictures, everything, together with the wings.
We just added more and more and more. Soon, everybody had one, even the poorest of people. They were just so useful, with more features being added by the minute – wings that reflected your emotion or your personality, the ability to send various things to your friends… Communication just got easier and easier.
That was always what it boiled down to.
Why bother with going to somebody’s house when you can just as easily talk to them with a simple thought? Why not make friends all across the world, when it’s just as easy as talking to somebody next door? Businesses began to move over, too, in a way that even the computer’s Internet couldn’t rival; wings had their own type of internet, a mental landscape of pages and sites.
It was perfect.
Some people didn’t like it, though. They refused, staying on the ground, staying away. Even when it got economically infeasible, they refused. Those poor people. It wasn’t even the flight anymore – communication revolved around those wings. We couldn’t live without them.
And then there was The Feature.
Sure, there were a ton of features in our wings by the time that The Feature came around – some amazingly useful, and some completely pointless. But, The Feature was different, better. It made communications faster, immediate, broadcasting our thoughts as if we were in each other’s heads.
And we were.
There was just one mistake, one tiny mistake, and we still don’t know whether that made it so much better or so much worse. Instead of being just between the few people that would be expected in, say, a telephone call, we were all connected, all across the world.
Individuality doesn’t have much meaning when you hear everybody’s thoughts as your own. We ceased to be “I”. Everybody with wings could see through everybody else’s eyes, feel everybody else’s body. We were nearly every human on the planet, all connected, just through those wings.
And we could have been so great, and we were, just for a moment, but we were too different, too conflicting. We had the serial killer’s thoughts with the Good Samaritan’s, the devout fundamentalist’s with the militant atheist’s. All the different beliefs of the world, all the different people and ideas and prejudices and loves – it was too much.
We went mad. We are mad.
But we have a way to stop that, stop this insane existence. In less than ten minutes, the nuclear bombs will be set off all across the globe.
We only hope we will not be together in death.