Cloud Era by Jeff Moscaritolo
Finalist for the LAR Short Fiction Award
By the time the human race on Earth ended, we were already living entire lives in the Cloud. Server maintenance had become automated by then, and renewable energy kept everything running without human hands, so when the last plague hit, we survived. Sort of.
Wars haven’t stopped, but they’ve certainly changed. The land is still there, but there’s no need to fight over it anymore, because land is not where we live. They made two Jerusalems™. Both are thriving economies. Nice weather all year round. More than enough space for everyone in each version. Priceless architecture destroyed during the Land Wars has been rebuilt, stylized to each side’s aesthetic desires. And the funny thing—the cultures aren’t segregated. As soon as they realized they could make a duplicate space and fill it with whatever they needed, as soon as they figured out the separate-space problem, they integrated populations peacefully. Voluntarily. They made an Israel, they made a Palestine, and they shared them both. It was amazing to watch. Radical forgiveness alongside a radical acknowledgment of past atrocities. The vengeance impulse disappeared, along with guilt and self-hate. The old wounds finally closing up.
Same thing all throughout the World™. The rich and the poor, the differently-colored, the differently-crotched—we all became equalized, because whatever we wanted we could encode. No shortage of anything, no need for luxury. In the Cloud Era, the species expands not outward but inward.
This is because we are all constantly aware of our own not-here-ness. We all know we’re not Real™. It’s pretty neat. We each stroll through the dream, knowing it’s a dream, and also knowing no corresponding nonfiction exists. Nonfictions only exist in our imagination.
People go to Real™ arcades and spend hours and hours in there, pretending to live on land. This is the only way wars still happen: simulated, consensual recreations. No one is coerced. They’re not fighting for anything, and the fighting never has to end because no one dies for real. You simply witness, learn, and heal. There’s always more to learn, and the learning never ends.
(Technically, everything will end at some point because the physical universe is impermanent, but most of us are linked to an Infinite Loop of Perception®, so for us, nothing will end unless we decide to sever the Loop®.)
Real Wars™ and Real Atrocities™ are very popular, and they promote Empathy™ because of how dramatically they increase Understanding™. We all went back to Gettysburg™ and participated in the bloodshed. We died bleeding in the woods and on the grass. We were impaled and shot and blown to bits and then we buried the bodies and everything made sense. We rode on Slave Ships™, packed back-to-front in the holds, hungry and dry-heaving and terrified. We went to Auschwitz™ and removed our robes and stood emaciated in the chambers, and we were also the soldiers dropping the pellets that emitted the cyanide on which we suffocated. We mined for diamonds in Sierra Leone™, and our hands were hacked off, and we were both the hand and the blade. We knelt in the desert and felt Allah™ pulsing through us and we readied our weapons and we screamed our rage and we raped ourselves, and we went into battle and killed and died, and then we understood. We rode with the Ku Klux Klan™ and we played the Blues™ and we wept for the Dear Leader™ and we had sex with the President™. We meditated on the mountain and fought the cold with internal warmth, and the snow steamed off our skin, and we felt absolute Oneness™. We arrested criminals and we were victims of torture and we paid for sex and we fled collapsing homelands and we met our soul mate and we died of breast cancer and we fell off a cliff and drowned in the sea, and we read books and farmed land and made toast and were born.
At night, which happens whenever we want, we go back to our homes. Some of us live alone, some of us live with others. Some of us live outside. Some of us are children. Some of us are old and require care. We visit each other’s homes, we hold parties, we recite poetry, we paint murals, we get in silly political spats, we play chess, we tinker with an abacus, we put on yoga pants and eat ice cream and swim naked in glittering lakes. We go alone to the basketball court down the block to shoot hoops in the setting sun. We have lunch on a hillside under an unmoving sun. We skydive. We hike wooded trails and we gaze at geysers. We pray, in whatever language we want, to whomever or whatever we want. We fuck for fun, smile at each other, get in small fights, and say I love you. It’s all an illusion, but we don’t stop. We hide from nothing. We enjoy it even when it’s painful because simulated pain brings us closer to what we used to be.
Every limit toward which we’ve tried desperately to grow, every benevolent fate for which we’ve prayed, every Heaven™ toward which we’ve worked—we’ve already reached them all, out here in the Cloud, with no bodies weighing us down.
We are the hurricane before it forms, and we are the blinding light after the hurricane has died.
We are PeaceLoveKnowledge™.
We are the ground beneath our own feet, and we float forever through our imaginary everything.
Jeff Moscaritolo holds an MFA from George Mason University. His fiction and other writings have appeared in Indiana Review, Carve, Paper Darts, and Lincoln Journal Star. He teaches writing and literature at Doane University.
Conceptually creative. An onslaught of juxtaposed contrasting details surprises and intrigues the reader. Makes an impressive impact.
What an elegant piece, Jeff. I must comment though, that in general it makes me sad, and it is the quiet reflection of today’s “living” that gets to me. I think it’s not a future you describe, but more so the isolated and lonely lives of so many in the here and now. I love work that makes me ache, and this does that. Congratulations on another fine work.