The silence is maddening.

To a visitor from the past, my time must have seemed like a paradise. No pollution, no crime, and a strange, soothing silence. Old Herb must have thought he’d fallen through the pearly gates, but he didn’t know half the truth.

In the future, the noise is all in our heads. Instant messaging, internet connections, popup ads, all old terms for a time before multitasking became maxi tasking. I lied to Lois when I talked about a hundred channels and nothing on.

What I meant to say was a hundred channels at once, all vying for attention at the same time. My world doesn’t have crime because nobody has the time. If Herb had been inside our heads, he’d have seen the hell that we made for ourselves when we allowed the world wide web to become the headnet.

Lois and Clark think of me as a villain. I’m not. I’m really a freedom fighter, fighting to keep the world from becoming the sort of place where people are so overwhelmed by a thousand ideas that they sink into helpless apathy, accepting anything as a lifeline to keep them from having to choose.

The irony is that the freedom to choose usually leads to no choice at all. People are cattle.

It’s easier just to accept what you are told.

In the first few days after I was disconnected from the headnet, I might have gone a little overboard. I hadn’t lived with my own thoughts in so long that I didn’t know what they actually were. Shooting at a store owner, trying to kill Clark Kent…it all seemed like one of the four games I usually play in my head.

In my world, reality is subjective.

I actually enjoyed the silence for a while, a chance to enjoy peace from the cacophony of my own world. Dealing with the minor indignities of primitive life like toilet paper and toothbrushes seemed like a small price to pay.

Eventually, though, I found myself missing a little of the noise. I think that might have been on the two hundredth day I was stuck in this cell. Smallville 1997 may have been a drag, but Smallville 1867 is practically the stone ages.

What I wouldn’t give for an eight dimensional tetris game, an obsolete Diablo 3000 or even a a simple game of Lord Nor’s Revenge.

Instead I’m stuck here in the silence with this simple set of cards.

An ace of clubs. Damn.

The silence in my head is deafening, but I wish the idiot in the next cell would shut up.