Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus- Love in 2525

Sol, cradle of the human race.

Human life was not hard.

All that had to be done was to monitor it all. Monitor the system. As every child reached adolescence, and learned how things worked, each prepared to find themselves a task.
A bit of the infrastructure they would take responsibility for. A set of buttons, a set of dials, a screen to watch.
And otherwise, it ran itself.
Atomic materials from the sun in one end, then converted into energy or elements, whichever was needed. Raw materials extracted, processed, put into the infrastructure.

And out the other end- everything.
And all that human beings needed to do, was watch it. Adjust it when it went out of kilter. Or take steps to correct errors.
But otherwise?
Work was a thing of the past. The days when people actually had to work long hours to work the thing.
But people did not have empty lives. People would always be people. There were always those driven to know, driven by curiosity, driven by the need to make their mark. Those who spent their lives studying the inner workings of the infrastructure, finding ways to improve it even further.
Yet others spent their lives finding more efficient ways to send out more colonies out in to the galaxy, more efficient ways.
And yet others devoted their lives to studying the biggest questions of all. The actual structure of multi-dimensional space. Ways that the far flung worlds of humanity that now could only answer a question from another star that the other star asked years ago, a star it taken two centuries for humanity to journey to reach, ways that these long separated human cultures might indeed one day be able to travel to eachother in realistic timeframes.

There would always be those who chose to devote their lives to DOING something.

But many chose to live simply do their tasks and live the rest of their lives in leisure.

He was from Mars.
She was from Venus.

It was so long since the internet was created that the idea that once people only felt the presence of people if their fleshly bodies were in proximity was hard to imagine.

Because he felt her to be a permanent fixture of his life. Always there. At no point was he offline to her, or she to him. He could bring up her hologram at will, whatever image she chose to show him. Sometimes it would be a live image, as live as a twenty minute communication gap could ever be, sometimes one of her recordings. And he to her. There were obviously times when he would not want her to see what he was doing. But it was always possible for her to feel he was with her, and she to him.



The internet. It had become the hub, the central nerve system of humanity in the twenty first century, as disparate strands of technology merged. As the technology to generate holograms from Lasars made it possible for people not physically in proximity to appear physically in proximity. For a person in reality alone in a room, to bring the holographic forms as many people as he wanted into the room with him. The coming of the internet to the mobile phone, and the development of the mobile phone in wristwatch form had meant that any person, anywhere, could be in the presence of anyone else, anywhere, in virtual form.

And virtual locations proliferated. Every human being found their access to other human being increased tenfold. The virtual friend became as real as the real friend. Physical proximity ceased to matter. Whole groups of people considered themselves friends, socialised together, drank together, spent every evening together who hardly if ever met in the flesh, and indeed the chances of them ever ALL meeting up in the flesh together were highly unlikely.

What he had with her, was special. In a sense, he felt the same way about her as a twentieth century man might have felt about his lover. Certainly, she was his best friend. Which is why she was never offline to him. Every time he wanted to say something to her, he could. Though it would be a while before he heard back. Fifteen minutes for his thoughts to cross from Mars to Venus, then she would reply, then the answer would return. They had got used to avoiding one line transmissions. Knowing the time gap, they spoke in paragraphs. He had never spoken to her in any other way. He heard her voice say the words, he could even see her say it, but when he heard it, it was fifteen minutes after she had said it.

There was no doubting that she was indeed the most important person in his life. And yet there was something about their relationship which would have puzzled a man or a woman of the twentieth century. The fact that two people who loved eachother with probably more genuine sincerity and who were honest with eachother in a way generally unheard of in the twentieth century, had never met in the flesh and probably never would.
What was the point?
There was no real purpose his taking the five week journey to her world. They had eachother all the time, in the way that mattered. Sure, their conversations involved time delays, but they could see eachother and hear eachother's voices all the time. And they were used to conversations being that way. They didn't feel, as a twentieth century person might, that a real life in the flesh conversation was superior.

A twentieth century person might have wondered if they didn't desire to physically consummate their love. They would both have laughed at the twentieth century belief that sex and love were tied in that way. They would have pointed out that sex was just sex and that a hundred and twenty million miles was a long way to go for physical intimacy, when both of them lived in cultures where sexual promiscuity was a way of life. Neither of them was ridiculous enough to think that there was much point to that, and both were quite happy that the other had a full and satisfying sex life with people actually in their physical proximity. Both felt close enough to the other to still stay online to the other even during the occasions they were being physically intimate with others.



They didn't need to ever meet to share what they did. They talked non stop every day about art, about history, about philosophy, and yes, about sex. Not about what it would be like if THEY had sex, though they loved eachother very much. But about human experiences of it. And they took stimulants together, they co-ordinated their sleeping patterns so as to go to bed at the same time, they tended to eat at the same time, they were always there for eachother, always updating the other on their life.

They each had several children, though none together. They each had many sexual partners, but would never have sex with eachother. They would never touch eachother's flesh, never taste eachother's lips, never see the real life form of the other unless broadcast.

But was their love real and were they together?

They were. Theirs was true love.

And it was perfect, every day of their lives.