In the future we could visit whomever we wanted, wherever we wanted; via the hologram. All you needed was the right equipment. It was just like being there, except you weren’t.
Remember the first celebrity holo-programs? The 5000x came with George Washinton, Abraham Lincoln, and Gandhi holo-profiles. You could hang out with em and interact for 10-12 hours before they started to get glitchy. Then their memory stack and cache would fill up er something and they’d mix up words and act irrationally. Usually it only lasted 30 seconds or so. If you were at a party someone would holler “Oops! Looks like Lincoln can’t hold his liquor!” and Lincoln would jerk about, saying mean things about ducks and then freeze up completely. People would go over, pretend to fuck with him and stuff like he was passed out. Actually that’s how I ended up kissing Maria the first time. We were talking and Lincoln froze up, so we pretended to start messing with him. Maria pretended to kiss and hug him, she was a little tipsy and didn’t relize the chair he was sitting on was also a hologram. She fell right into me kissing and hugging and she giggled, “Oh Abe!” and I whispered presidentially “Why Mi lady?!” and yeah… sorry I got off track.
So my friend’s Lincoln was on all summer and didn’t freeze up once. He did however say some pretty wonderful crazy shit, ”Mr. Jensen, my heart is on fire for these lusty birds and the forgiveness that one losses in death. We shall drink to the mean shining truth,” and we’d all bow and toast.
When he finally did freeze up it was like a friend died. No one would unplug him. They finally did, mostly in hopes that he would come back, but he never did. Not like before. I think they tried 3 or 4 times. But he’d just be normal and then freeze up after 12 hours. So they stopped using him. It was too painful to be reminded your friend was gone.
Then the duplicates started happening. Google had come out with holo profil-o-gram where once you recorded a hundred hours or so of yourself interacting then you could project your holo anywhere. A thousand hours of recorded interaction and not even your spouse, best friend, mother or father could tell the difference between the holo duplicate and you.
Remember when that artist did a show that featured a house of 99 of himselves and they would all eventually kill each other except for the 2 holo’s number 13 and 98, those two always fell in love and got married after everyone else was dead. The artist swore that he did not alter the holo’s in any way and that they were just the same projection of himself, only duplicated, all exactly the same, except for the names. Somehow I guess being referred to as 13 and 98 somehow changed their interacting future profiling just enough that they were radically changed. Some scientists from MTI and Google actually confirmed it.
It all got pretty crazy for a while after that. The last thing any of us remember before the singularity was God pleading with a holo Marilyn Monroe, trying to convince her that he was real. But you already knew that. We’ve always known this.
