The young man on the bus was reading his lecture notes.
He was currently studying for a master’s degree in philosophy with an emphasis on what the great philosophers thought. He was shaking his head. He felt that they had never really got to the nub of the thing. The thing being life, and the way we live it. The entire system is based on structure; it is built on levels of status. Everything, from beggars to kings. We even have celebrities! Get it? Celebrities, I ask you. He thought this as though he was telling somebody about it. He knew that his disillusionment was giving way to bitterness. He went back to considering his options with regards to moving to another area of study, when he saw the flash.
Suddenly, there was a man sitting next to him on the bus. The student jumped. The visitor had the window seat, and he certainly wasn’t there before!
“Sorry about that,” said the man. “It comes with the job, I’m afraid.”
The student blinked a few times, in a daze, he said, “Yeah. OK.”
The visitor, just another quite ordinary looking passenger, said, “We gave ‘fading-in’ a go for a while, but we got even worse reactions.”
“I can imagine,” said the student.
The visitor looked out of the window. “How does it all work?” he asked. “How do they make it all work out there? You know, the people, what they do, how they manage?”
The student recovered quickly. “Oh that! It’s not complicated.” He shrugged slowly. “It’s all about conformity really,” he went on, voicing his previous thoughts. “I’m sure that around ninety-eight percent of the world’s population are in a comatose state, but they wouldn’t know it.”
“That many?”
“Oh! Yes, and all of the right conditioning is in place, for the life cycle.”
“Tell me more.”
“Well, again, it’s pretty straight forward.”
The visitor showed his interest by nodding.
The student said, “Look out there; what do you see? Young people like me going into workplaces, well, most of them, anyway. They work right through their lives, then they get too old to do whatever they were doing and get put into homes… where they die. It’s a cycle, you see?”
He heard the visitor whisper, “Yes, fascinating.”
The student let out a long sigh.
When he turned, the visitor had gone.
And like so many other things in his life, he had missed his stop.