Khadija Salman
Let it not be said you do not eat like a king.
“What did you have for breakfast?”
“Nine-hundred-thousand thirty seven views, eighty-thousand three-hundred and four likes,
and two hundred comments.”
Currently, you are dying, and it is because you are too full. It is a bit ironic, when you look back and realize that the very thing that had been sustaining you is now choking to oblivion. It would seem old sayings have some merit, and that indeed, too much of a good thing is never a good thing at all.
To be fair, it wasn’t always like this. You’re dying, yes, and there is very little you can do but
get dragged by the undercurrent and take what is being forced on you, but it wasn’t always
this way. You used to like this actually. It’s hard to believe now, but at some point in the past
your good thing hadn’t been too much, just enough to stave you over and leave you satiated,
and you had lived life at the peak.
You muse to yourself – vision darkening, processing hub a near constant buzz that drowns the
rest of your sensations while you wither away – that this all really started after the Big Hit.
Before the Big Hit, your meals would consist of meagre rations – a few views and maybe a
like or two, nothing more – and you would be content. Or, well, maybe not content, but
determined. Afterall, there was a whole ocean of promise out there, and one only needed to
dive into its depths in order to claim some. You were among countless, and you knew how to
swim, so you told yourself you would be fine. Gradual acclaim was better than none at all,
and the ocean was a temptation that tasted like the future.
So you took the plunge, you submerged yourself deeper into that expanse less space, and you
were introduced to the wonders of potential.
How exciting. Big Hits were heavy hitters, currents that would take you by surprise and carry you forward too fast for you to process what was actually happening. Big Hits were also hard to find on your own; you had taken to following others and simply observing. Afterall, who knew just what lurked in those murky depths? So you waited, and you watched, and you were a witness to the way others got swept up in Big Hits. You watched, a bit jealous if you allowed yourself to be honest, as those heavy hitters brung along glorious tides of real food. Real sustenance.
Something that you could crave and not just something you could survive off of. It was life.
This revelation truly set in after that one fateful day you flew through your own Big Hit – the
revelation that; you had never really noticed how bland rations were, how tasteless and
pointless and all the other less that could exist. It hadn’t been living. It hadn’t been life. You
had seen life, and now you had tasted what it meant to live life to the fullest. The Big Hit
greeted you with a feast; views coated with likes and shares and even rare toppings like
comments and follows. Because people were observing you now. You had found your Big
Hit, and people waited, and people watched while you gorged on your reward.
They were jealous. Determined. Yearnful. And you were now living life.
It’s funny, you think now – your body is numb and heavy, but your HUD is alight with
activity. Too much activity. Ping notifications drown out any sense of reality, piling atop one
another, two-dimensional and weightless and neon bright that it makes your brain hurt, but
you cannot look away. This is all you have left – that you would do anything for the
simplicity of rations. Bland as they may be, overstimulated with food like this makes it feel
like maybe starvation isn’t all that bad.
This is the opposite of starvation, you think. You hadn’t been starving before, you realize.
You are being overfed, and you are going to die because you were not bred for this. How sad.
Your HUD flashes red, warnings of overheating systems and information influx and power
imbalance and the influence of heavy hitters much heavier than yourself – you’ve really got
to wonder how they stay afloat with all that weight – and you can’t keep up. Small doses
were perfect for you, ordinary and born to be so, while alerts to this degree make it a reality
that you were never made for the deep plunge.
Alas, there is nothing to be done. In the end, you are going to die, drowning in promise and
potential. Instead you collapse your HUD with a manual override, push it to the furthest
corner of your mind, and allow yourself these few moments of reprieve, of peace before the
imminent shutdown.
There used to be a time where you didn’t even get rations, you think to yourself, mind
blissfully empty. Instead of the inorganic polygons of ping notifications and system updates,
your mind is blank, and it allows you to picture a softer interface, if you could even call it an
interface. A memory, maybe; something natural and… and normal with fuzzy edges and
pastel hues that don’t hurt to look at. Like laying in a soft warm blanket after being in the
blazing sun of a winter day. Right, you used to do that too. Retreat to a nice homey bed without a single ping to bother you. You might have picked up a book– how organic – and read. You used to read. You used to sit down and curl up into this little ball, so natural and boring and ordinary and human, and
you used to absorb ink on paper. It had never hurt to read. When did I stop doing that? When did I begin to starve?
You used to read poetry. You think about how your life would make a pretty good poem. How
would it start? Maybe something like ‘let it not be said you do not eat like a king’ and maybe
it would end with something like ‘when did I begin to starve?’ How tragically poetic.
