As every morning, Sheldon was surprised by the noise the jungle could make. Be quiet and the jungle moves, move and the jungle is quiet. Breathing in the damp, heavy air, he squinted against the sunrays that broke through the canopy to hit his face directly and perfectly at 8:30 sharp.

He had hacked the climate controllers to produce such a high humidity. Even though it put a strain on many of his household devices and made his coffee taste weird, this was the way he remembered it. His ecology internship 10 years ago were the best days of his life. Reproducing Vietnamese inland climate in his London apartment gave him some precious moments between being asleep and waking up during which he was back in Ninh Binh. Too bad it kept reminding him of the fact that he hadn’t experienced anything better since.

As he got up, a gentle breeze moved through his apartment sweeping away the humid air, the photowall morphed to resemble the old family farm he grew up in. The weather in the artificial windows matched that of the only real window in the 5 by 4 meter space; piles of clouds with spots of sunshine, the usual.

As the smell of coffee slowly filled the apartment, his pod displayed an aggregate of worthy news items on the wall opposite his breakfast table. When he first got his pod, 5 years ago, it was pretty bad at finding the things he deemed interesting but over the years he had trained it well. A balanced mix of hackernews blog posts, mixed with some popular articles on mainstream news. As always, next to the news items the interpretations of various “media deconstruction” blogs were listed. Some people would call them crack-pot sites but Sheldon enjoyed the feeling he got when the alternative explanations of news events sounded just as likely as the supposed truth.

While the household bot got his breakfast from the oven he put on kaki jeans with a boring blue blouse but decided to cover it up by his favorite all-colors-of-the-rainbow jacket. He liked to provide some contrast to his drab working environment*. Or better: drab environment.* He asked his pod to order a car to pick him up at 9:30.

Even though the car provided ample ways of entertaining oneself, Sheldon felt guilty whenever he indulged too much. “You can either spend your time consuming or you can spend your time creating” was the mantra he lived by. Besides that, he enjoyed staring out the window, letting his mind flutter to whatever floated in. He liked to think that he was the only person left who allowed himself to get bored. As such he would one day rule the world through the innovative ideas that doing nothing would always give him. He’d use his power to instigate an entertainment-less weekend once every year. Unplug and get bored-weekend. It would do humanity much good. He let out a sigh as the car accelerated hard reaching over 500 KPH while joining the highway smart train arching over London. By the time he arrived at work he had stored 7 ideas under “follow up” on his pod.

Sheldon worked at the Human I/O labs. A small company filled with very talented, hardworking people relying heavily on angel investors. Human I/O labs was unremarkable but if it were up to Sheldon that was about to change. Sheldon had some radical ideas about the nature and function of pods.

Invented in 2029, the pod was the answer to the great privacy crisis of the 20’s. During the decade leading up to the crisis some wiz-kid had, just for the fun of it, spend his entire youth finding holes in popular encryption methods. By the time he became 22 he had compiled a huge database of person specific data. After milking it for about 2 years, trading data with personal investigators and the like for Bitcoin, he decided to dump the whole dataset on the public server of some Brazilian webshop. It didn’t take long before a Google bot crawled it and before anyone could react, the medical records, personal emails, voicemails, receipts and credit card numbers of everyone on the planet were public knowledge. The wiz-kid was never found, proving mass surveillance, which was partly responsible for the backdoors the kid used, was nothing more than a very, very expensive farce.

The outrage that followed was a violent wake-up call. For once governments were quick to act, probably because they were the focal point of the first wave of database queries. The complete and utter loss of a feeling of privacy of everything that had anything to do with the net was a greater shock to humanity than anyone imagined. Legislation was put in place which effectively made people masters of their own data. Governments around the globe were never going to allow companies to take responsibility for anything deemed private ever again.

Although decentralization was the buzz-word of the 30’s, companies were reluctant to get rid of their so loved cloud. The previously big players such as Google and Microsoft spend piles and piles of money trying to secure their cloud platforms. They claimed they couldn’t even read your data; the private keys are yours alone. But people had completely lost faith in remote servers of any kind. So the big players faltered. As is always the case with disruptive technologies, the final solution was concocted in a small lab. A three man startup made a device that was so dependable and small; it became feasible to carry all of your personal data inside your body for the rest of your life. They called their invention: Pod.  When you met with your physician, he’d interface wirelessly with your pod and retrieve every piece of relevant data directly from your body, after you’d give your permission of course. The three founders became the richest men the world ever saw and eventually donated all their patents to the public.

Worldwide legislation was put in place legally guaranteeing that pod data could never be read without permission and could never be used against its owner. The pod was an extension of the body and was treated as part of it in every way.

Pods were purely technological in nature when they were first conceived. But as the 30’s ended, experiments showed that they could interface rather well with so called brain organoids. The experiments with the small brain-like clumps of neurons progressed for several years when another ground breaking technology was invented. The first fully artificial life form (alf) was established in 2043. Single celled at first but using genetic building blocks inspired by nature, it didn’t take long before the minimal genome was extended to yield multicellular organisms with organs that could perform specific functions. Typically the size of a tennis ball, artificial multicellular life forms became the focal point of humanities research efforts.

Pods were placed inside alfs ever since they were invented. Lacking an immune system the alfs never rejected the technological inserts allowing for some interesting research. By the end of the 40’s, alfs and pods were communicating using specific neurons, designed from the ground up to interface well with digital systems. Animal experiments also showed that alfs could not only communicate with each other but also with non-artificial life forms. In parallel, alfs were used to replace damaged tissue in every corner of the human body. By using a special procedure, the cell surface immune markers of the host could be genetically imprinted onto an alf making rejection a thing of the past. Often alfs performed better than the human organs they replaced.

It didn’t take more than a few years until alfs were used to bridge the gap between technology and the human brain. Alfs that had successfully engulfed a pod were placed inside the body. The alfs surface neurons interfaced with the human central nervous system while internally they communicated readily with the pod. The pod, in turn, provided an array of technological interfaces and communication protocols to the outside world.  Powered by the same universal biological power molecules as the brain itself, pods went from data-carriers to full brain-coprocessors.

It was amazing to see how extremely well the human brain was able to assimilate the pods abilities as sub routines to its thought processes. Some people never got past the point of making the pod perform some basic mathematics but most people were able to make it send email by though alone. There were some exceptions though; Sheldon’s alf-pod became completely integrated into the neuronal network of his central nervous system. To Sheldon sorting and displaying news items was like moving his arm. He was even able to perform tasks subconsciously and in a fraction of a second. A thought was enough for almost anything that only 10 years ago required lengthy dictation. After having the pod inside him for 5 years now, he could no longer imagine life without it.

At work Sheldon asked his pod to sum up the most relevant new discoveries from his research field. Again the semi sentient, biological device did not disappoint. It had become nearly as good as he was at filtering relevant information from the terabytes of new data that his field of research produced every day. Only it was 100.000 times as fast. It could even be faster, when he would expand the pods primitive awareness to the hardware he had available in his office, but that was not necessary at the moment. He allowed the pod to output an overview to the photowall. It appeared that while he was sleeping, the rest of the world had not been much more productive.

He went to take a look in the lab. Rows of soft glowing aquaria stood on long and deep shelves. Inside them meaty globes the size of tennis balls were undulating slowly. Some were halfway into engulfing what can best be described as yellow printed circuit boards with purple, lighting like sparks moving in slow motion across their surface. The ones with optical sensory cells reacted to his colorful jacked by forming small indentations across their pale pink surface as he walked by. Marrying the organic, perfectly biocompatible pod technology with a quantum computer was the task Sheldon dedicated his life to. He imagined people being able to analyze and semi-instinctively extract value from huge datasets, being able to communicate securely using quantum encryption and perhaps even finally extent their consciousness to a pod. The work he did required the testing of an insane amount of parameters, he often lost track. Imagine being able to expand consciousness, to go beyond the limiting abilities of the brain. If only my quantum pod worked, this research would be much easier. He chuckled at the chicken and egg analogy; I guess it is up to my good old naturally evolved creativity for now.

“You seem to be in a good mood!” Startled, Sheldon looked up to see Leia, his heart skipped a beat. She wore ordinary white sneakers, blue jeans with a not-too-tight white blouse onto which her dark brown hair was loosely draped. She smiled pulling one side of her mouth up more than the other, her eyes smiled as well. “Hi” Sheldon said “how’s life?” Damn! he had already used the same sentence yesterday, grr! She didn’t seem to mind and said: “How about dinner at my place, have a car drop you of at 19:00.” Subconsciously his pod queried hers for the address, he received it immediately. “Sure, why not” Why not! Oh man I am such an idiot! Leia walked away, looking back one more time with a teasing smile, Good sign. Sheldon was still processing what had just happened. He had to admit that he had just been invited to Leia’s house. Leia was a bit younger than him but she was one of the founders of the company, it was always rumored that she was very pushy about hiring him despite his eccentric character.

He scribbled down some notes and discarded the pods that ignored his quantum chip. He initiated the cloning procedure on the ones that showed promise. Some small adaptations to their DNA would be included before they got their own aquaria. The rest of the afternoon was rather uneventful and Sheldon used the time to practice social small talk for the evening. He knew he would feel he was prepared for any subject and he knew he would be proven wrong at the first sentence. Nevertheless he was thoroughly looking forward to the evening.

She opened the door personally and Sheldon immediately worried that he had spent just a moment too long staring at her body. She wore a light summer dress, dark blue-ish above bare feet. Her hair was messy in a nice way, held up and together by two chopsticks. “Come in” She said, “I see you dressed for the local weather, but it’s going to be more Mediterranean tonight. Have you ever been to Greece?” “Yes I have” he said “To Crete actually, it was very nice.” “Let me take your coat then” she said with a smile. As he entered the main room he was stunned, he was looking at a thousand candles floating on a pitch black lake with the moonlighted outline of mountains in the distance. He could actually feel the warmth of the candles on his skin. “Nice! How did you do that?” “Well” she said “I probably voided the warranty getting the infrared to these levels.” The apartment was really on the cold side, a constant breeze, seemingly coming from the lake sent occasional shivers down his back. But the candles were more than compensating for the cold. “I have to get this for my apartment too”, “Maybe I can help you set it up if you invite me over” she said with a big theatrical wink. In about 20 minutes Sheldon was talking so enthusiastically that he almost knocked over the bot that brought them their food. They talked for hours as the ceiling displayed ever more stars. It was not the sound of timid waves that made them forget where exactly on the globe they were.

As he stepped outside his car was just arriving. He realized how efficient the anti-sound generators were at cancelling the city noises. It seemed like everyone was ordering late night pizza, the sky was filled with drones. He canceled the car and walked home. It rained but he didn’t care. When he arrived at home he told his pod to surprise him in the morning. The Vietnamese jungle had lost some of its appeal tonight.