What Todd takes for granted part 1

When I chose to tell the story of The Face in the Mirror: a transhuman identity crisis from a first person perspective I ran into a problem. The future is going to be a rather strange place by modern standards. Unfortunately I couldn't really show much of that strangeness because the point of view telling the story takes it for granted. Imagine the difference between how you would describe your typical day to a contemporary and how you might describe it to someone who lived a hundred years ago. You'd probably spend a lot more time having to explain the little details to your past audience than to the contemporary one. Some things just wouldn't translate well at all. Imagine explaining playing games on your cell phone to someone who'd only ever used a party line (some of you are going to have to ask your grandparents to explain what a party line is I suppose).

When I wrote the story I had to explain a few things in detail because they were central to the story. Examples include the nature of neos and lab grown replacement limbs. Other things that weren't as important got a hand wave at best or just ignored. One example of something hand waved is the nature of computers in the Reflections setting. Several times I refer to someone rolling up a computer and to them being used like cell phones. I extrapolated this from the increasing capacity of Smartphones and experimental flexible display technology in the real world. The underlying assumption is that Smaphone technology computers getting lighter will get to the point that they merge. Today the limiting factor in this merger is display size a big enough display for general computing is too cumbersome for a phone. Add flexible material though and you can roll or fold your computer into a more manageable size when used in phone mode. I envision a typical computer in Reflections to be roughly the size and weight of a heavy hand towel with almost as much flexibility. The ends are rigid however and usually jointed in the middle so you can prop the unrolled computer up and use half as a touch screen keyboard while half serves as an upright display or you can leave it flat like a tablet. The rigid ends also house microphones, speakers, recharge ports, cameras and any controls that can't be on the touch screen portion. Of course once this is linked into an augmented reality system or full sensory virtual reality you get a whole host of capabilities that will be even less familiar to people today. The simple fact is the computer that you can roll up and put in a large pocket is the casual end of computing capability in the Reflections setting. I'll talk about some higher end functions later.