Strange Creatures

I see them walking down the street with wires going into their ears or with apparatuses attached to their ears; the apparatuses are not earrings. I walk into a store and the clerks have wires going into one ear; do they get to choose which ear is wired?

Is there a mother ship communicating with them? Controlling them? Are their ears inspected for wax? Does wax impede or distort communication? Are they appurtenances of a great mind? Puppets? Are they able to generate their own thoughts or are they the equivalent of cloud computing in which the application software is elsewhere?

Is the abdication of thought and reflection an advance? Are the wires and the Bluetooth devices the mental equivalent of a body on a respirator? As the respirator breathes, in a sense, for the body the externally-provided content and control thinks and provides content for the brain – content that by its nature is often under the cognitive radar screen; which is to say that it does not lend itself to critical reflection.

Shades of C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength and of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and of Ray Bradbury’s 451 Fahrenheit. Fiction?