This series focuses on stories that are both enjoyable and do something that I find interesting from a technical perspective. This week, let’s commute with nature (pun intended).
Personal music devices, and later, smartphones, fundamentally changed the way we commute. We finally have the ability to push those weird people sharing the bus/train with us out of our minds and replace them with more interesting sounds and images, and, in general, humanity has jumped at this capability like a drowning man at a a life raft. And given that we work best in groups of roughly 150, maybe we really are drowning.
That doesn’t mean there’s no beauty in the world that’s drowning us, though. I really enjoyed “Stepping Out of Stream,” by Marie Vibbert and published on T. Gene Davis’s Speculative Blog, because it creates a plausible, near-future commuting world and shows the real pros and cons of that world. There’s a lot to be said for a system that uses a virtual world to gently prevent everyone from interacting with or disrupting their fellow commuters, but keeping our head down too much can cause us to miss the sort of beauty that makes life worth living.
In a narrow, technical sense, the dramatic tension regarding the protagonist’s choice of which path to take through that world is entirely internal to that character. What makes it compelling to the rest of us is its universality: if you use public transit, you have to make a similar choice every day now, and you may need to make an almost identical choice in twenty years or so when Vibbert’s world comes to pass.
So read it, and give it some thought. The choice the character makes may not be for you.