The Internet Never Changes

My eyes fluttered open.

I find myself in the couch. My palms are as cold as ice. I am totally not used to sleeping in an air conditioned room.

With much difficulty fighting off the sleepiness of this frail body, I rise. Looking past the glass wall, I see that the sun just set and the night sky was slowly creeping in. I truly have slept through the day.

I had a hard time sleeping this morning. Aside from letting the weight of my situation slowly sink in, I was not used to sleeping with daylight creeping in. It was such a horrible experience.

The city lights up with a bright neon glow as the remaining vestiges of sunlight leave the sky. I yawn and recall the conversation I had with Anna this morning.

Last night while Anna and I were eating bread, I pestered her with questions about my existence and what happened. Information is very important after all. Thankfully she seems to be happy to comply. When I proceeded to inquire more regarding the topic of the world's history this past 2000 years, she mentions that is not really her forte and that she is also getting sleepy.

Instead, she spent the remaining of her waking time to teach me about the tablet. She teaches me how to access the internet in order to know more about the information I want to inquire about. While doing that, she also mentions that this tablet is quite an ancient technology but she prefers it since she likes holding into something solid instead of the much newer holographic smartphones. This thing is not much different from smartphones and tablets of my original timeline. It did not take long for me to grasp most of the functions.

Conveniently, Anna also has installed a set of old languages translator extensions on her browser. The said extension automatically translates the contents of the webpage. It is quite a universally useful thing to have stood the test of time. Though, she mentions it is prone to a lot of grammatical errors since unlike the more popular translator extensions of present-day languages, it is not maintained by an artificial intelligence that automatically adapts to new jargons and new references to pop culture. Instead, it is quite an outdated translator that was last updated by a now defunct company comprised of very old androids. Fortunately, it is advanced enough to even have a functioning voice translator that can be used for videos.

Thankfully, the letters in the keyboard have not changed. Although, there are all sorts of new symbols and emojis I can not comprehend. Still, I could type anything I want in Modern English and the translator automatically translates it in the English of today.

Then after seeing me fiddle around the internet on my own, Anna yawns and excuses herself. She told me "You can sleep with me if you want. I mean, I used to use you as a body pillow for a long even before you have a working mind."

I responded with a, "That would be hardly appropriate for someone of my age. I will be sleeping on the couch" which she responds with a nonchalant "Feel free to enter if you ever change your mind. I really do not mind." She then tells Meep to fetch spare pillows and blanket give it to me. Afterwards she enters her room and is never heard again until now.

Then there I was, while the room was enveloped with warm morning light, I was on the couch browsing through the internet. If I had a look at my position, I would definitely resemble the state of my sister each Sunday morning. She is particularly fond of waking up early as if she had work, and then proceeds to lay down in the couch to do nothing until it is near noon or gets really hungry. All she will do is tap and swipe on her phone like some child.

Contrary to my sister who is mostly watching vlogs and playing games, I am currently with the noble purpose of learning. Or so I thought.

Anna completely did not warn me of the dangerous distractions that lurk in her tablet. At first, most ads were about electrical stuff bargains, cute companion robots, and online universities. However as I browse more and more pages, the ads shifted to things I am very much interested in.

From there on, every few minutes I spend watching video about world history, there are advertisements popping in about seminars, courses and documentaries about economics and politics. Some of these ads are even longer than the videos I watched and I could not skip until I have watched a minute of it. Sometimes they even appear three in a row. I am greatly annoyed of this but I need to make do with what I have. The advertisements were also well-made. While I was surely sidetracked by watching through several of them, they were strangely informative if I just ignore their invitations to partake and methods for payment.

Articles which can be found in the web was not any better. In fact, they were even worse. Aside from the advertisements, there were consent forms regarding data sharing which only has the 'agree' option and several pop out ads which will open three tabs of various sites.

While I had my fair share of experiences in the internet, either as required by my job or for something recreational, the internet back then was not annoying as it is today. Though, I presume this may be because of the inevitable shift of television commercials to internet commercials. TV commercials were very long back then, but no one really minded them. First, everyone was used to them and second  since provided the much needed time to take bathroom breaks.

Until exhaustion, I continued reading and which much difficulty, I obtained a decent enough overview of what has happened in the past two thousand years. There were a few absurd events but nothing too far from the inevitable.

It was already past noon when I started to feel sleepy. A middle-aged man like me likes afternoon naps after all. I felt a pang in my heart as I realize that I have been separated with my sister by two millennia worth of history. Fighting off the drowsiness, I tried searching the information about my sister.

After a short while of looking through forums, I found an extensive archive of old social media accounts. It was complete with their conversations and several personal data. This surely felt like an invasion of privacy. However, this might be because these people are deemed ancient. Long gone are the company and the government that was tasked in protecting their data.

They should be nothing different from the excavated mummies of ancient Egypt. They are treated as relics of the past. While referred to as actual humans, any personal possession they have will likely be seen objects for study and curiosity, with little concerns for respect and privacy.

I sigh while thinking one of these archived social media might have been my very own.

The only comfort I have is the sheer number of archived social media accounts. The forum said there are 50 billion stored in the archived. Also, it is not like I have saved the world, lead a nation to independence or invented some revolutionary mathematical equation. Despite being more famous than an average person, I was still no one. I was notable enough to have my name in a few online encyclopedias and databases nevertheless.

If I may be any poetic, I was akin to a star. Despite having worlds revolving around me, I was a mere speck of dust swirling around a galaxy. Such galaxy was also a mere speck in its cluster, and even such cluster is negligible in the scale of the universe.

After a decade, century or a millennia after my life, no one would be concerned at all to be bothered to check my social media account and all the private conversations I had. In that way, my privacy and several other should be protected. By being part of a collective, our existences becomes obscure.

With a strict code to only read public posts and pictures, I proceeded to get a glimpse of the life of my sister, from her posts of grief, to her marriage, to her kids and career. I also looked at the lives of my friends, acquaintances and even political rivals. They lived such fruitful and long lives but I guess that is a story for another time.

I truly have missed out a lot of time.