Creating the Future

A rumble in your stomach reminds you that you haven't eaten since lunch. You'll either have to stop and get some dinner on the way home from the train station, or make something once you get home, and neither option seems particularly attractive.

The first thought that crosses your mind is to make it so you don't need to eat, but that seems ill-advised.

Instead, you have a quick brainstorm, and type into the app, "100% of the world's population has food replicators."

Almost everything changes.

You're still on a moving train, but you're no longer feeling the usual vibrations. The lighting is different. The seat fabric is different. The ad on the wall at the end of the car is, somehow, a moving 3-D image. Other than you, there are different people in the car now, with unusual hairstyles and weirdly-patterned clothes -- although you do see that the women still have bare midriffs revealing their pierced navels.

You look out the window and see one of the generic suburban neighborhoods through which this commuter train line travels. It looks mostly normal, until you notice a couple of kids on bicycles that aren't bicycles -- they have no wheels and appear to be hovering about a foot off the ground. And then you let out a slight gasp as a wheel-less car swoops in from above and lands in a driveway, settling itself on what must have been legs hidden underneath.

It's then that you realize your own clothes have changed, the shirt and pants both having a green-and-black geometric pattern that's giving you a slight headache to look at. But what's worse is that your phone seems to have disappeared.

In your panic, you manage to do something that causes a holographic display to appear in front of you. You take deep breaths to calm down, and discover that it just takes a twisting gesture with your thumb and forefinger to make the display disappear and reappear. The even better news is that you're still looking at the World Pop screen -- the app is still on your phone, or whatever the device is, even in this futuristic version of the world.