Going Gaga

He stopped, closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. Everywhere he looked, each person he laid eyes on looked the same. He couldn't tell one apart from the other. They were all identical. And he, against their backdrop, stood out like a sore thumb.

They all seemed happy. On the surface. But the smiles on their lips, it appeared, were glued upon the blank canvas of their otherwise expressionless faces. It was not true happiness, he realised, for it faltered if you studied it more closely. It did not light up their faces. It did not cause their eyes to sparkle. They were robots, and the thought saddened him. Even though this was all he had ever known, the young man couldn't help but suspect they'd been brainwashed. He could almost see them all, a vision of another life. But something was different. They were different. They were all different. Not one of them the same. They, like him, were different from everyone else. They were all distinguishable from one another, each an individual. He couldn't help but wonder; was he was going Gaga?

Left alone after everyone had returned home for the evening, to continue "socialising", alone in their rooms, on their computers, the young man wondered what the world of his dreams would be like. What if such a world actually existed? Where people were individuals, different from one another? Where the world did not seem to consist of countless robotic clones of the same person? The very thought caused him to sigh with pleasure. How wonderful, how very simple such a life would be. Trying to tell all of these clones apart, trying to pick one from another made his head spin. Were they going Gaga? The idea of being a unique individual was one that seemed so very appealing to him. He couldn't understand, not for the life of him, why they would all want to be the same. The thought of being another copy, the exact same as everyone else, sent him mad, and he wondered, were they already there? Had they already gone Gaga?

In a world where every person was the same, he'd been born to stand out. He was different from everyone else. An individual. The very idea sent them mad? Why wouldn't you want to fit in? Why wouldn't you want to be part of the group? The answers to their questions escaped them, just as the answers to his questions eluded him.

He wondered whether he was the only one who was different. Was there someone else out there like him? An individual rather than a robot? Distinguishable from everyone else? The others all spoke of the world loving them. "Someone still loves you," he'd heard them say once. At the time, he'd brushed it off. Yeah, that's them, he'd thought. But now he wondered, was there someone out there? Did he have a someone? Or, was he just going Gaga?

The question of who is really "Gaga" remained, but he was pretty confident it was them who were Gaga. It seemed to him that both he and the rest of them were miserable. But he felt less so, because his individuality had not been suppressed, and he wondered given the lighter weight resting on his shoulders, how sad must've they be, all the same? The world has gone Gaga, and they didn't even realise it.

The young man wondered whether he'd simply woken up into this strange world. He blinked, looking at the screen. He knew it had always been this way, but he hoped that someday soon, things would change and the world would be cured of their Gaga, once and for all. But for now, he pressed a couple of buttons on his watch. "To keep me from going Gaga," he said, to no one in particular, because no one was really listening, all too wrapped up in themselves to care. "I'm going offline." With one more tap, his screen went black and he smiled as he looked back up at the real world around him. "I'm disconnecting and embracing my different."