(The following is an excerpt from a longer work titled Dreaming During the Pandemic.)
In the 1960s, Baby Boomer teenagers overwhelmed the California high school system. In Fremont, California, they responded by quickly building a new high school, which was filled beyond capacity on the first day. Judy was one of the new teachers. With not enough space, she taught her first geography classes in the bleachers, to students using clipboards as desks. Nope, not ideal.
Now in 2020 the school has been razed to the ground and replaced with the newest of the new high tech schools. It is named after the predominant technology guiding our experience, A-2K High, which stands for Animator 2000s High School. In this dream I am a transfer student to A-2K in 2020.
We don’t have books, only a screenpad, which we use for everything. Upon entering, the pad is placed on a tripod and it scans our face, turning it from a photo (used for identification purposes) into our personally animated icon. It is an absolutely absorbing, addicting toy. I’m still 72, the oldest known high school student and the animation has automatically taken 20 to 30 years from my face due to the simplification of my animated self. (I choose to restore some of my aging.) I can appear as anyone I admire: artist, actor, writer, athlete, neighbor, friend, movie character, etc. I can sound like them, too. I have chosen a very superficial looking Albert Einstein with a slight Woody Allen accent. Continue reading “The A-2K High experience”