Dr Musk gave the smooth, undecorated white classroom wall a sharp rap and instantly, before our eyes, the infographic map started rolling out in response, slick and confident, unravelling itself faster and faster, stretching its four corners floor to ceiling. It consumed the white wall easily. Bending slightly, its middle protruded like the bellies of the Great Obese from centuries past.

With the land’s own changing contours, the picture deepened accordingly. Selecting a different setting caused its mossy greenness to fade into a limited spectrum, denoting the socioeconomic levels of all the world’s states, from a belligerent red to orange’s warm glow, even a sad pasty yellow in some parts. The infograph loomed menacingly over the class, taunting us with its own ingrained knowledge. Bold and authoritative, it knew it was the poster child – literally – of our ideal. Conscious without being emotional, it was everything we wanted to be but were not, yet. Arrogantly leering at us through the empty space, it decided to let Dr Musk’s ego survive for another day, its crafty modesty crudely concealed as his lesson started. Knowledge was everything; to threaten one’s intellect was to threaten their entire sense of self.

As he spoke, it drew his words into images, making them palatable, temporary nourishment for the permanent hunger of our minds. With settings and tools and technology for everything, there was no lack of creativity. Or maybe there was no creativity. Our obsessive control of technology was dependent upon its controlling of us.

Before the ‘Bionic Boom’ – so garishly labelled by various media outlets – a substance ‘paper’ was used: thick yet frail, made white to turn black, education’s essential entity, apparently. To view what we were viewing, one would have had to instead draw out the image of a flattened earth using a carbon rod - crazy really; carbon exists only sparingly now, universally recognised as both extremely dangerous and extremely rare, with a 2.45% chance of leading to metastasis on direct contact – and even then, they would have fallen at the first hurdle. If we couldn’t do it, they wouldn’t have been able to, either: the earth is an imperfect sphere, in attempting its recreation using purely visual reflex and memory, one would stumble across a myriad of difficulties, particularly when scaling its average radius of three thousand seven hundred and twenty-one kilometres – if I’ve remembered that correctly.

I jest, the art of forgetting has long been eradicated; it remains in nought but thought.

The room was a colourless hue of relaxation, changing in shade every so often, but to what exactly, I could never pinpoint. My thoughts would race past those kinds of trivial dilemmas before they could drive me mad. ‘Drive me mad,’ I mused at the turn of phrase. I didn’t actually know if it was possible to be mad; books had certainly alluded to it, some sort of ‘Sacred Disease’ of centuries gone, but I had never met a mad person. Perhaps it had become extinct, like most of the Old Culture. Survival of the fittest was slowly being phased out and in its place, survival of the smartest was à la mode. You who could perpetually avoid the ignorance of the human world were destined for greatness.