A middleaged woman with a microphone paced on a big red circle on the floor in front of the TED talk logo. Cameras panned and the audience clapped. She was tall, athletic, regal, with arched eyebrows and a long thin nose and olive skin, coarse straight black hair flecked with red, and dark brown eyes. Clearly ethnic, but impossible to place what ethnicity. Not Moroccan or Tibetan or Chilean. More distinctive.
"When I was a girl," she began as the applause died down, "I lived in a house on the edge of a forest." She spoke with a Kentucky accent. "I dressed in clothes made from animal hides," she pulled on the sleeve of her black leather jacket, getting some laughs, "and from woven plant materials," she pulled at her denim jeans, more chuckles. "The winters were hard, but it was fine so long as we kept the house warm and dressed for the weather. Just like you." The audience grinned.
"But." She paced. "But I was a girl twenty five thousand years ago, in what is now Ukraine. My name is Kywoo!ka. My house was a hut made of rhinoceros skins and the bones of the !amgo, the mastodon. Whenever the herds moved on, we'd pack up our skins, follow the herds, and build a new hut. My home, my people, my language, are all gone. A dead end. Totally gone." She paused to let that set in, looking sad.
"How am I here now? Easy. I was diving in a lake in the fall to pick clams, and when I came back up, the world was different. How did that get me here? I have NO CLUE. Strange people grabbed me, put me in a lab, poked me with needles, taught me a few modern languages, and here I am."
"People keep asking me, what was it like living back then? Back when the whole world was open and wild?" She paced. "Well I could tell you. I've spent a lot of time talking about that. But that's not what I want to talk to you about today."
"What I want to talk to you about, today, is what it is like for YOU to be living RIGHT NOW."
"When I was a girl, we got through the winter by hunting. There were hazelnuts and greens and fruits during the summer, we just went to where they were and picked them. I hear some of my knowledge of local plants has been a revelation. But. When we had used up an area, we had to move on. It's a good thing the world was open and wild, because otherwise we'd have been living in our own shit."
"Today, you stay in one place, SOOOO many people, all packed together. In houses of wood and stone. And asphalt and concrete and glass and steel and PLASTIC, materials that never existed, that you created yourself."
"You don't have to hunt for where the fruit is. You plant it. And feed it. And breed it. You SPECIALIZE, with farmers growing tons and shipping it to supermarkets. I hear a lot of you believe fruit comes from supermarkets! You've got SO MUCH food, so much VARIETY, and you've got so much CONTROL over it. Oh my god, if we had potatoes!"
"You don't even live in your own shit. You've invented TOILETS, and SEWER SYSTEMS, where it is all taken away and processed, so you can all live in one place packed together and it's just fine."
"You have WRITING. You don't know just what your grandma remembers, you know EVERYTHING that was learned in the WHOLE WORLD for THOUSANDS OF YEARS. And you've got science and technology, where you purposely go about inventing new knowledge."
"When I was a girl, we had disease. Lice. Fevers. Cancers, wasting. Injuries could lead to infection and death. Today, you've got FICTION STORIES about ZOMBIES, to scare you about some disease that is contagious and could kill you! Let me tell you. Leprosy, tuberculosis, AIDS, guinea worms, kuru, smallpox ... these are all zombie diseases to me. And you live all packed together so incredibly densely, and hardly anyone catches them and you've cured most of them already. Heck you don't even have lice. If you found a zombie disease, trust me, you'd isolate it and cure it and move on."
"Today, you worry about global warming, about the world changing. You worry that the world is too full. That would be the end of the world, wouldn't it, if the world changed?" Kywoo!ka paced and shook her head. "The world has already changed. There are no more !amgos, anywhere. Without !amgos we could not survive. Yet the world is ten times fuller of humans than I could imagine, then ten times beyond that, then ten times beyond that, and again and again and again."
"How is your world possible? It's because you aren't trusting the world to provide anymore. No, you know if you are going to survive and thrive, it's up to you to figure out how. So you do. And you thrive. Even if it looks like impossibility stacked on impossibilities to me."
"What does the future hold? You look out at the stars. And you see they are open, and wild. And you reach. And you. Will. Grasp."
"That is what it is like for you to be alive today. Thank you."
This was in response to a prompt on reddit.com r/WritingPrompts, "A caveman gets transported to the future."