Ken Liu - Broken Stars

As usual, the pundits were as myopic as bats hanging in a dark cave.

Apple first pushed for a revolution in education. They gave every child an iPad, and invested vast resources in making textbooks that were electronic, multimedia-enhanced, and integrated with social media. Schoolchildren, especially those in East Asia, said goodbye to their heavy backpacks. Their spines straightened; their shoulder and neck muscles relaxed; the deformation fatigue of the lenses in their eyes slowed due to broader viewing angles, sharper, more detailed images, and light sensors that automatically adjusted screen brightness.

The future seemed bright, until parents began handing the magic tablets to even younger children.

The youngest recorded iPad user was aged four months and thirteen days. The iPad’s direct manipulation interaction model allowed even babies to slip into fingertip adventures and become seamlessly immersed in them. Many uploaded YouTube clips of babies playing with iPads, and their pure, undisguised delight garnered millions of hits and likes. The amused audience did not quite realize the danger hidden behind the joyous scenes.

The first confirmed case came out of South Korea. Six-year-old Park Sung-hwan was diagnosed with autism, though fMRI and PET scans revealed no unusual neural variations. His symptoms included flat affect, language impairment, and lack of muscular coordination. He did not respond to the emotional states of his parents in an age-appropriate manner and showed a lack of interest in the world. In fact, the only thing he was interested in was the iPad. But all he did was repeatedly open and close apps, unable to actually browse the web, play a game, or otherwise engage with the functionality of those apps.

It seemed that the world, for him, consisted solely of the force feedback vibrations generated by fingers sliding across the screen.

An astute clinical child psychologist observed Park and compared him against other similar cases before announcing the shocking concept of “iPad syndrome.” The discovery struck a chord around the world, and soon tens of thousands were diagnosed with it.

The academic consensus was that this special type of perceptual dysfunction occurred because babies were exposed to the intense visual and tactile feedback of the iPad before their sensory neural connections were fully developed. Aimless hand movements led to an overabundance of concentrated visual and tactile sensory information, which had to be adequately integrated and coordinated with the rest of the body to form a solid foundation for the development of bodily self-image. This was precisely the key step missing in the development of those afflicted with iPad syndrome.

To them, the regular world was dim, blurry, low-resolution, unresponsive to the sliding finger and utterly devoid of wonder. Trained by early and long exposure to the iPad, their vestibular systems developed a special sensory signal filter that only permitted the intense signals of the iPad to enter the cortex and stimulate the neurons. Other signal sources, on the other hand, were simply shut out.

Parents of children with iPad syndrome filed a class-action lawsuit demanding tens of billions in compensation since Apple had not disclosed the serious side effects of iPad use on young children with prominent labeling. The case slowly wound through the courts until the two sides finally settled. Besides an undisclosed amount paid to the plaintiffs, Apple also agreed to invest significant resources into researching rehabilitation for the disorder.

As the impacted children grew up, they learned, through therapy, a unique way of life. iPads became extensions of their bodies. Through the tablets, they spoke, expressed emotions, and exchanged thoughts. Besides text and voice, they also transmitted information via vibrations as though they were sharks in the abyss or worms deep underground, by holding fingers or palms against one another’s iPads, experiencing sensations that outsiders could never know.

They were like extraterrestrials concealed in human society and, other than the minimal exchanges required to survive in a human economy, refused to interact with regular humans at all.

They formed family-like structures. Following rules and rituals unknown to others, they found each other, copulated, had children. After offers of large sums of money failed to produce results, some journalists tried to surreptitiously film the family lives of those with iPad syndrome. The result? The offending journalists disappeared.

Don’t worry; the worst was still to come.

There was a one-in-eight chance that their children would also inherit this more-than-pathological love for the iPad.

As changing beauty standards gradually decentered the straight male gaze, plastic surgery reached a peak of inventiveness in the mid-twenty-first century. But modification of the body’s external characteristics was no longer sufficient to satisfy the shifting tastes of a diverse population. A new—or more accurately, ancient—aesthetic trend came back into fashion spectacularly.

It was possible to trace this trend all the way back to the Three Kingdoms and Jin Dynasty period (220 to 420 CE). He Yan, the founder of the Xuanxue school of Daoism, developed a new medicinal formula called “Five Minerals Powder,” which was based on the famed Eastern Han Dynasty doctor Zhang Zhongjing’s cure for typhoid fever and made from a mixture of stalactite, sulfur, quartz, fluorite, and red bole clay.

He Yan himself had this to say of his invention: “Not only does it cure disease, but it also opens up and enlivens the mind.” Consuming Five Minerals Powder for its psychoactive properties became the fashion among scholar-officials. After ingesting the powder, the typical user became restless, anxious, flushed, and had to walk about in loose clothing to cool down as their mind wandered a different plane. Habitual use led to irritability, explosive temper, and a proclivity for trances—not unlike the man of legend who reacted to a nettlesome fly by chasing after the insect with an unsheathed sword.

The fashion for taking Five Minerals Powder in China lasted for almost six centuries, until the Tang Dynasty. “Rambling Powder” became a poetic marker for those of an elevated social class—a metonymic process similar to the social signals attached to marijuana or LSD use later.

Similarly, in order to satisfy the pursuit of morbid beauty standards, Medieval European nobles contracted tuberculosis or even consumed arsenic to give their skins that unique, white glow. The elevation of the symptoms of illness to signs of beauty was certainly not limited to any one time or place.

And now, technology could help.

Ligament tightening agents temporarily reduced the joints’ range of motion; combined with trace amounts of tetrodotoxin injected into facial muscles, the result was a simulation of the stiff poses and expressions associated with classical East Asian beauty standards. In the Roppongi district of Tokyo, one might often encounter tall Caucasian women whose hair had been dyed pure black, shuffling along with rigid smiles that carefully concealed their teeth. In fact, they were the executive assistants of multinationals who had decided to undergo periodic cosmetic treatments to induce partial paralysis in the face and a constrained gait in order to satisfy the demands of “cultural integration,” the morbid fashion of the social elite, as well as the fetishistic needs of their Asian bosses.

And then there were the Blinkers, whose name came from a neurological tic that caused them to blink irregularly as their orbicularis oculi and levator palpebrae superioris muscles twitched. People suffering from social anxiety disorder implanted under their eyes chips that could control muscle movement by stimulating the nerves. They formed a complicated, intricate read-decipher-feedback system, capable of communicating by blinking their eyes alone, without any need for spoken language or facial expressions. At Blinker gatherings, one could see a group of silent, blank-faced individuals gazing into one another’s eyes like lighthouses broadcasting Morse code at high frequency. Indeed, some could communicate with two interlocutors at the same time, blinking with each eye separately.