The machine hummed. He began the long process of downloading records on Ancient Earth, a culture that fascinated him. Since the Earth of the past was a download away, he decided to do something quite profound, instead of digitally inputting the experiences of a dead world into his brain, he would read a novel. He remembered downloading the knowledge of a long dead novelist, whose brain had been digitally transferred into a mainframe computer. Such computers were, or rather I say are, capable of recording the life span of individuals. Every intimate detail is recorded with precision. He wondered what it would be like to read, instead of downloading. “How does one read a book?” he thought to himself as he looked out of his room on floor 352. He walked over to a large glass window and pressed a button. The outside view changed to that of a rainforest. He heard about the rainforest, but such things had become obsolete, there were now large air processing factories, which provided life similar to how plants functioned, the forest had to be cleared due to the population growing to 16 billion. All those mouths to feed, all those people to house, required maximum use of the land every square metre of land and sea was farmed; plants were genetically engineered to produce the most efficient use of raw material.


The view had a calming effect on him. Today he would be someone else instead of being a cog in a machine. The novel materialised into solid form by a process of digital mastering into printed sheets of paper. His eyes couldn’t believe that a novel was a construction of symbols, symbols that he knew only from downloads. He reached across and picked it up. It had weight, he ran his finger along the spine of the book, and he raised it up to his nose and smelled the paper. It wasn’t the usual smell that he was accustomed to. He opened the book…there was no title.