The gaunt middle aged man tosses his smoldering cigarette butt to the floor and twists it out with a sneaker that has seen better days. Looks up at the circle of people sitting in their folding chairs and winces, realizing this was rude. He should have asked for an ash tray.
Really he shouldn’t have been smoking until the first break.
It’s his turn to share.
The man clears his throat. “After a million years of shining sanity, they could have hardly understood what power was destroying them.”
He looks around the circle and sighs at the blank stares. He’s the oldest one in the circle.
“Monsters from the id. An old movie. The movie that became Star Trek? Sort of? You know about Star Trek? But you never watched Forbidden Planet…”
The man takes out another cigarette but doesn’t light it, only stares at the unlit tip.
“The movie is based on The Tempest, but the part I’m talking about isn’t in the Tempest. It’s new to the film. Something gained in translation—”
The man is interrupted by a sigh of comprehension from across the circle. “Invisible monsters. That robot that was in all those Twilight Zone episodes! Um,” the woman in her thirties looks at the man, skepticism and compassion at war on her face.
The man nods. “The monsters that destroyed the Krell, the alien species on that planet, were unleashed by tech which set free the darkest impulses of the subconscious. The monsters were thought into being.“
“Oh. So you’re talking about the internet? Social media.”
The man smiles. “I worked in the first tech bubble. I was a believer. I laughed at luddites! A world without gatekeepers would be a better world. A new anarchic, meritocratic, democratic commons. A new marketplace of ideas! A wave of intelligence and compassion lifting all boats. A new golden age…”
The man lights his cigarette and takes a long, deep drag, and closes his eyes. The smoke streams through his nostrils as he smiles.
His eyes fly open and the circle of faces around him flinches as one.
“Guilty! Guilty! My evil self is at that door, and I have no power to stop it! Stop! No further! I deny you! I give you up!”
An awkward silence falls. Someones phone set to mute wriggles in their back pocket, making the metal folding chair buzz.
The thirty something woman smiles as she breaks the awkward silence. “Dude. Relax. You were in marketing in the first tech bubble. Genies out of the bottle anyway. The question is what do we do now?”
The man lowers his cigarette. “I’m out of ideas.”
A smile at that. “We can tell. Why don’t you listen instead of talking, for awhile?”
The mans nostrils flare. “Okay,” he says, after a painful beat.
He drops his cigarette next to the first one and puts it out with a sigh.
