To the cloud!

Late in the evening on Saturday, November 15, 2008, John and Lisa Baxter crossed through an invisible- and seemingly insignificant- milestone. They did so together, but unaware. The consequences would prove to be dramatic in the years to come.

John and Lisa had spent most of that Saturday holed up in their apartment, keeping out of touch from the incessant rain and whiling away the hours reading the newspaper, a few books, watching TV, cooking a meal and some cookies, and browsing a variety of sites on the web. It had been a quiet day of mostly solitary activities, loosely held together by a common proximity and the occasional outreached hand and off-hand smile.

Late in the evening, John and Lisa- both engrossed in their laptops- conducted a pithy conversation over Twitter. They traded sly comments, some inside and outside jokes, and sprinkled the metadata of their relationship across the ether.

Then they brushed their teeth and went to bed.

If one was counting, one would have observed that it was late in the evening on Saturday, November 15, 2008, that John and Lisa Baxter inverted the time-honored laws of inter-personal marital communications by spending more time communicating through intermediary means than by direct, verbal contact.

In other words, that night, the scales of John and Lisa's communications routine tipped in favor of the cloud, and away from the real world.

From that night on, the steady march to the cloud continued, and increased in pace.

It was not uncommon for John and Lisa to spend Friday and Saturday nights holed up in separate rooms, connected to the Internet through laptops or smartphones, relating to each other and their overlapping but unique networks of social connections.

This was happening all over the world, of course. And for some, the transition to the cloud was even more intense.

Lawton St. James (AKA N1krb0kr), a software developer and avid online gamer, was one of the first people to experiment with putting his body into "maintenance mode." This entailed a series of bodily catheters for the input of nutrients and the removal of waste, coupled with the hiring of a "cultivator," a combination trained nurse and personal assistant whose job description was to take care of as many of Lawton St. James' remaining worldly affairs as possible.

N1krb0kr spent roughly 21 hours a day in a conscious state, connected to the Internet through a series of computers and input devices ranging from keyboard to touchpad to microphone to gesture interpreter. There he consumed a steady stream of primary source news from around the world and the net, and meta-commentary on said news through blogs, social conversation networks, and the like.

He earned money through a combination of micro-payments accrued through social advertising resulting from people connecting to his online streams of output and commentary (and inferred commentary through his activities), and from discreet consulting services he provided to people for a variety of purposes.

He engaged in gaming activities and real-time simulations involving a wide variety of content.

And when he dipped out of consciousness, his pulse dimmed, slightly, from the vast grid in which he existed, causing a gentle slowing- but not cessation- of the various streams on which he fed.