Artificial

It's morning. Just as the clock hits 7am, a unique and futuristic alarm can be heard, pulsing in rhythm, emitting a sound that has been designed to recognize the brain's sleep cycles, going off only after it recognizes the end of a sleep cycle, preventing morning fatigue.

It was bright. It was majestic. Its presence filling the sky with a warm light and illuminating every detail of the land it basked its rays over. I looked up, and had to put my hand just beneath my eyes to prevent is incredible brightness from dazzling me too much.

It was beautiful.

I had only heard stories of this great light, and they had filled my nights with dreams and wonder of how it must have been to live amongst its presence. In my dreams, I would be filled with all of these fantasies, only to never find out where it came from, or why it was there; or why these rumors I'd heard filled my mind with so much wonder and curiosity.

It was at that moment, that my dream went black, as my alarm went off at 7am.

The morning was like any other. I laid in my bed for a few minutes, contemplating the week ahead. Outside my window, it was still dark, as it had always been. My room was simple. Adorned with my bed by the window, and on the other side, a desk, filled with tinkers and sketches from previous experiments. Since I was a kid, I had always had a curiosity about how things worked on the microscopic level. Now that I was in college, I had made it sort of a hobby; mainly because the stories I had heard about this mysterious light that had intrigued me so much when I was younger. After staring at the cluttered desk for a while, I had decided that spending the day in bed wasn't something I wanted to do.

I made my way to the bathroom, lazily, and I looked in the mirror, rubbing the last of my sleep out of my eyes, and I went about my morning routine. After a shower, I picked out my outfit. I checked the clock again, making sure I wasn't falling behind schedule. 7:45 am. Right on schedule. Checking the clock was second nature to us. It wasn't so much a habit, but rather, it was an instinct. It was how we grew up. It was how we were raised. It was a part of how we lived our daily lives from birth.

When we're born, each and every one of us is engrained with a chip, which enables us to tell the time numerically, without the need for a visual aid. We're taught how to use it in pre-school, and as we grow up, the idea that we have a computer chip in our brains eventually fades, to where it becomes a natural part of our thought process, although for the rest of our lives, we're always acutely aware that a part of us is, not really us.

I got back into my room, and I opened a special door. Behind it was a small room, the walls lined with warm, soothing colors, and positioned in the middle was a bed, adorned with a single pillow and lining, positioned beneath a large light hanging above that emitted a light that was specially designed to stimulate essential vitamins and minerals within our bodies. We are required to do this every day for 20 minutes to keep our skin healthy. Anyone who missed more than one week would have to go to the emergency room for Vitamin treatment. Without it, we wouldn't live very long. Of course, that was just another part of daily life for us.

In the stories I've heard, no one ever mentions anything about time. In fact, I never seem to think about it in my dreams. It never seems present. It seems natural. It was when I had my first dream about these fantasies and myths, that I started to wonder why they were so captivating to me.