Favorite Toy

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In a certain city there lived a little boy whose parents just couldn't find him a favorite toy. They gave him toy cars, plush teddy bears, and colorful balls, but the boy only cried and screamed — no, I don't want that, I want a FAVORITE toy! And one day he saw a phone — and not just a phone, but a brand-new smartphone that Dad never let out of his hands.

"I want THIS!" Dad looked at the little boy in surprise. "What do you need THIS for? It has no arms, no legs, it doesn't roll or jump — how are you going to play with it?"

"I want THIS!" the little boy whined again. Dad handed him the phone, hoping he'd soon get bored of it. The boy joyfully grabbed it and began examining it with interest. After poking at the screen, he saw it light up, and colorful little circles and squares appeared on it. Randomly pressing these icons, he suddenly heard music and saw a mouse run across the screen, with a cat chasing after it.

The child squealed with delight and began watching the adventures of the cat and mouse intently. Suddenly a phone icon jumped onto the screen and a ringtone sounded. Dad snatched the phone and put it to his ear. The little boy roared so loudly that Dad couldn't hear a thing. He had to hold the phone to the little one's ear, and the boy immediately fell silent and began listening intently. After a few seconds, he pushed the phone away and grumbled resentfully — ugh, an ad. Dad looked at his son approvingly.

The boy took the phone again and started poking at various buttons. And each button opened a new world to him. He learned what the weather would be and what was happening in the world, and then he saw how tomatoes are planted at the dacha. There were so many buttons, and each one plunged him deeper and deeper into a world unknown to him. He found it interesting to watch fish swimming in the sea, antelopes running from lions, and children playing soccer. Finally he reached a button, pressing which he saw himself — riding a bicycle, eating watermelon with Mom, and swimming in the river.

"Wow, that's great, let this be my favorite toy!" he shouted joyfully.

Dad and Mom had no choice but to give their son a smartphone. They naively thought that now they'd get a break from having to constantly entertain the child. As if! The plush teddy bear was already covered in dust, the toy cars no longer raced around the apartment, and the books had huddled in a far corner. Now there was only one entertainment left — taking the phone away at lunch and dinner, during homework, and forbidding him to take it to the toilet!

And even when the son grew up, he still doesn't part with this toy to this day, because it has become an indispensable device of the 21st century. You may not have a car, a watch, a dacha, or a TV, but you must have a smartphone!

If you don't have a smartphone, then you drop out of social life — you don't sit in messaging apps, you don't get or give likes, you don't level up in games — and it's generally unclear whether you still exist in this world.

Yes, the favorite toy of childhood for the generation of the 2000s will be indispensable for life, until the functions built into it transfer into a chip implanted at birth. Then all calls and ads will go straight to the brain, bypassing eyes and ears. You'll play in a virtual cloud, and instead of a joystick, only your eyes and eyebrows will twitch, following the flow of thought. You'll watch video clips in the frontal part of your skull, and you won't have to squeeze your eyes shut during scary scenes anymore, since their absence in the videos will be taken care of in advance. And you won't look in horror at a dead phone, wondering how to charge it faster, because this miracle phone can only run out of battery together with its owner. Such is the brief history of the favorite toy. Mine, and most likely yours too! :)

Afterword

Everyone is probably wondering — what will happen to the phone given to the boy in a hundred, two hundred, or a thousand years? You can read about that in another story. Here's a brief beginning:

"iPhone story. The Tale of an Old iPhone."

Recently archaeologists published a sensational discovery. At a space burial site, artifacts of a prehistoric civilization that existed a thousand years before the appearance of the electronic brain were found. They are primitive devices made of metal and plastic, with the help of which our ancestors tried to communicate with each other.

Professor of Anthropology Dr. Ai-Phone-Dam reported that, in his opinion, at the early stages of development of the civilizations of the "Earth Cycle," these magical artifacts allowed people to communicate with the souls of tribesmen encoded within them, and received the tentative name "iPhoneosaurs," which are the ancestors of modern eye-ear-brain-emulators.

To be continued...