Story of the future

It is the year 2007. A man finds himself busy in the space that is as familiar to him as his home where he lives with his wife and his two children. Unlike his home (which he has nearly fully paid for), he does not own this space and he is not even fully in charge of this space. But there he is, busy as usual, performing the same minute gestures with his hand, straightening his back, tilting his head in order to think, peering ahead of him purposefully despite the knowledge that his wife and children miss him.

Around him the metallic, intersecting partitions form a deliberate web of gateways and blockages for the orderly positioned group of people who, like him, have come to blend the thoughts from their other lives (“my real life”, he thinks) with the visions and gestures that constitute this office. This man, who in these respects is no different from the others around him (although his name displays on several framed certificates of distinction, ordered in a rectangle near him) carries a significance – an awareness – that goes beyond him. And in this he suddenly has the potential to survive his own consciousness.

He ponders the possibility that the actions he performs will “reverberate in eternity” like those of Odysseus and Achilles whose brave energy influenced untold generations. All those that still silently strive to emulate them.

He has to admit that his actions will not be emulated because they are heroic, or even original. He concludes that he will be emulated because of an inevitability, that is to say, because he is aligned with the future. “This thought”, he reminisces, “may have been someone else's delusion of grandeur once. Now it is mine.” Certainly no one else noticed his new ownership. His gestures didn't change, nor did those of the people standing around in the corridor, or those of his neighbour in the same cubicle - a younger, more energetic man whom he has actively avoided lately.

But he has one last chance to ponder his immortality while his neighbour mumbles to him with a nervous grin. Then he loses his thought amidst the realisation that his selfish neighbour has connived the cunning move that will cost him his ambition and also the love of his wife.