A Day in My Life, 2025

6:00 a.m. Can’t sleep in. My wife’s away on business but has beamed in a holographic projection of herself to nudge me awake.

6:05 a.m. E-mail scrolls across the bottom of my shaving mirror. I cut myself, twice, after reading that my holographic boss, Bob, wants to see me first thing. I wonder if Bob has a bug.

6:15 a.m. My shower notices my scalp is a little dry and suggests using a moisturizer. (Hair, incidentally, is no longer fashionable. Lucky break for me.)

6:30 a.m. I pull out my favorite blue shirt. Alarms whir, strobes flash. My closet isn’t happy. I’ve worn this shirt three times in the past two weeks. Whoops.

7:00 a.m. The BMW is charged up and I’m off to the office for the first time in six months. Fortunately, the car remembers the way and navigates the traffic while I chat on my video pda with my brother who’s vacationing at the Lunar Hilton. (The reception is fuzzy. Network congestion.)

8:00 a.m. Bob is upset. Apoplectic, even. He says I’ve forgotten to update his processor. (Which isn’t the case. The Pentium 34 isn’t due out for another couple of weeks.) This furthers my suspicion he has a bug.

9:30 a.m. As long as I’m in the office I decide to have I.T. install the new Microsoft Office suite. It’s a chip implanted behind my right ear. I can think through proposals and e-mails without ever having to type. (I’m not even sure I remember how to type. Schools stopped teaching it years ago after the Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Association filed a class-action lawsuit.)

10:15 a.m. My grocer beams in to tell me there’s a special shipment of organic beef. It’s contraband, but I’ll take it! Ever since the Mad Cow Plague finding real beef has been impossible.

11:45 a.m. I’m meant to play virtual golf with a friend in Sydney but there’s a line to use the holographic projector at my local corner deli. (The guy in front of me is in Bangkok. For more than an hour!)

12:20 p.m. Katie, my daughter, overrides the “I’m in a virtual meeting” message on my video visor. She’s ticked. Sam, her clone, has been teasing her.

1:50 p.m. I.T. says my boss is, in fact, buggy. He’ll be off-line for a full day!

3:15 p.m. Playing hooky. I’m off to a simulation of Central Park at the Museum of Natural History. (The park was closed years ago when a previous administration decided to drill for oil there during the 2001 energy shortage.)

4:40 p.m. The new Office chip overheats. Too much e-mail. My PDA says the chip has been recalled.

6:00 p.m. My wife is home. Dinner at the Bubble, a local restaurant that blocks all wireless transmissions. (Bob won’t like this but, hey, he’s off-line.)

7:30 p.m. An hour with my virtual therapist. I try to explain why I miss interacting with real people, but she doesn’t understand.

9:00 p.m. I log off for the night. The silence is deafening.

Inspired by suggestions from timeinteractive.com readers