sneak peek of Path of Ink

The age of technology had surpassed all its creators had ever imagined: going above and beyond what all blockbuster movies and Japanimation could ever have dreamed of. Everything and anything that you could ever desire was accessible with the touch of a button and for the most part instantenously. Computers became even faster and tinier until they were incorporated into wearable contact lens controlled by your thoughts. Quickly came the day where internet accessibility was done seamlessly by your mind and holographic touch screens appeared wherever you stood. You could work from anywhere at any time. Robots were utilized in all manners, from large manufacturing plants, to inside hospitals doing complex surgeries, to being playtoys for the rich. If there was something you wanted and it wasn’t available a simple inquiry online would make it become a reality fairly quick. The world lived in an age where there were endless possibilities, endless needs, endless wants and no one to say no. It was a fast lane to paradise in the making.

But with all good things, we as a race turned a blind eye to the potential harm each advancement brought us. People lost the desire to do manual labour and those jobs were quickly turned over to the robots. Physical store fronts became obsolete and unemployment went on all time rise. People travelled less with the invention of virtual reality and human interaction begin to decline. People stopped forming relationships and the birth rate dropped drastically. Crime increased amongst those too poor to afford the newest technology and the prisons quickly became overfull as the poor realized that they contained the basic amenities that they did not have themselves. Humanity had reached a point where there was no one to teach, no one to educate, no one to further the path we no longer walked on. We were a slave to our pleasures and ourselves.

This went on decade upon decade. Until finally, due mostly to poor design and the belief of omnipotence, the robots began to fall apart. Fear of them surpassing us had prevented us from building robots that could learn and fix themselves. Their intelligence had been stifled from the very beginning all because a few robots had once created a language to talk amongst themselves that we couldn’t understand. As we got lazier our dependence on them grew, yet no one had thought to learn how to look after them. And like everything commercially made they weren’t built to last, but to fall apart relatively quickly so consumers would be forced to buy the newest and latest model. No one noticed that at some point there weren’t anymore robot designers. That the latest model was exactly the same as the last only a brighter, shinier new colour. They too had fallen prey to the luxuries of life.

One by one, people began to notice that their pampered lives were quickly disinigrating. Awakening from their dreams they found that they had lost their place in society. Few had left the sanctuary of their homes in years and found themselves physically unable to do so. Food was quickly becoming scarce, water was no longer being purified and no one knew how to help themselves, let alone each other. Old governments reassembled trying to figure out what to do. But their minds had been muddled by decades of laziness and self indulgence. No one could make a choice, let alone think.

In all of the movies once made long ago, the end of humanity had always been very dramatic. A plague would wipe them out, global wars with aliens wanting to inhabit their planet, the military accidentally releases chemicals that would turn us all into mindless, flesh eating zombies. Not once did anyone ever make a movie where we simply withered away. Where we would just sit and stare off into the space, wondering about what we should do next. Never, in all of humanities time, had we ever become so useless as a species.

Yet, there was a single ray of hope.