Unbalanced

The first sign that anything odd was happening was when Velib went broke, followed by many of the other city cycling schemes. Of course, it was in the depths of winter, at first it was assumed it was just the bad weather. However, after a few foolhardy (or perhaps brave) types tried and fell, it became apparent that something had caused every one in the world to lose their sense of balance.

Pretty soon, the condition became sufficiently serious that many ancient customs (carrying books on one’s head at finishing school, delivering trays full of steins of beer during the October festival, for example) had to be dropped, as otherwise dropping of a more painful kind would be occurring.

Web sites and social media conspiracy theories sprung up rapidly. Was the syndrome due to magnetic fields emitted by batteries in the now pervasive Electric Vehicles on all the streets? perhaps deliberate (to eliminate competition), or was it a side effect of the new mRNA  based identity system given to everyone at birth? Debates were polarised between those who thought it was an accident, the worst of nature, and those who believe the worst off humans and that it must be some deliberate new bio-cyber war weapon being tested.

Then things got worse. It became clear from the appalling scenes in the great tennis and cricket tournaments that people were starting to lose their sense of perspective, and were no longer able to judge distances properly.

In the end, it transpired that the whole situation was something that required a new discipline to understand what was happening. The world was so over-burdened with metaphorical bias, that it had spilled over from virtual discourse into biology. What we have here is now known as Informational Epigenetics (or IE for short), and is an example of what happens when humans get too clever for their own good.