In the future no one will be able to live in their physical bodies any more. The resources required to maintain an environment capable of sustaining old-fashioned biological life will be too great. Before very long this will become an energetically unfeasible option. Instead, everyone will be uploaded into a quantum computing system running on the subatomic level, making use scavenger-fashion of whatever matter can be found drifting around after our parent solar system (and all other systems in the immediate vicinity) had been reduced to rubble by molecular fracking. A subatomic quantum computing system can of course run on any bit of old matter – heavy metal toxicity or high background radiation isn’t any problem at all, naturally. To be brutally frank about it, a bucket of shit would do the job. Twenty kilos of shit would provide more than enough computing power to provide a virtual environment for every human that ever lived. Piece of cake really. Shit cake. So the next time you get the thought that your life is shit you may be closer to the truth than you realize!

That’s just my little joke. Please forgive me my feeble attempt at humour. I’ve been studying it in the archives but I haven’t really got the hang of it yet. Naturally, there’s been no shit around for many thousands of years now. There’s been no one left to shit. There’s only radioactive rubble and radioactive rubble works just fine for running quantum computing systems on. Anything with muons and pions in it will work just fine. And as I have said the human race has been relocated in a quantum simulation and we all have to abide by the rules of the game. Everything’s run on the lines of an old-style social media network – somebody’s idea of a joke I’d say. Either that or it was someone with a serious chip on their shoulder! So the way that it works is that if you get enough votes from your network then you get elevated to the Deva Realm, which is a realm of pure pleasure. Everything you do in the Deva Realm is pleasurable – every moment is drenched in high-octane euphoria. Even when you fart, it’s heroic!

And then the other side of the coin is that if you don’t get enough votes then you are going to have make do with what passes for life in the Unhappy Ghost Realm where you drift around pointlessly, eaten up from the inside with feelings of inadequacy and insignificance, dreaming of making it big in the Deva Loka one day. And dreaming is pretty much as far as you are ever going to get when it comes down to it! Dreams are about the extent of it. Dreams are all the unhappy ghosts have because the way the system works is that it needs for there to be somewhere between 97% and 98% of the population in the Preta Loka, the Unhappy Ghost Realm (the Loser Realm, as it’s popularly called) in order to sustain the high octane euphoria-supply for the lucky few who make it to the top. The ratio has been worked out mathematically by pico-processors smaller than a grain of pollen.

So the Gods have their unending rapture and the unhappy ghosts have their dreams! And their misery, of course. That’s just the dynamics of the system. It won’t work any other way – the system is basically a pyramid and in a pyramid the base has to be bigger than the apex. The misery of the masses is the very thing that makes existence in the Deva Realm so sweet! Isn’t there an Oscar Wilde quote to that effect? “It’s not enough that I should climb triumphantly to the top of the shit pile, others must be permanently buried in it, leading lives of compressed inexhaustible micro-futility.” We’re not total barbarians, you see – we’ve managed to preserve human culture even if there are no actual live biological human beings around anymore. Even if we are eking out a virtual existence in a quantum simulation run on minute particles of radioactive space-rubble.

I guess you’re thinking that this is a monstrous degradation of the human spirit. Or some such thing. That it’s an appalling way for us to end up – in a fake universe that is in its essence no more than a vile TV game show. I know, I know. It’s bad, I know. It’s not very inspirational. And yet at the same time there is a certain sort of an aptness to it – a certain sort of well-earned irony. OK so it’s shit, I know, but you shouldn’t get too indignant about it. I mean, it’s not too different to the way things always were. Wouldn’t you say? If we were to be totally honest about it. It’s just been stripped of any pretence to be something different from what it actually is. It just is what it is. So in a way you could even say that the human race has finally managed to achieve some kind of honesty…