When I picture a circus in my head, I see a widow’s profile picture. Her hair is a mess; unscripted curls lay like extinct mushrooms unaware of their existence. The post has only one like and comment, both hers. It says, “feeling blessed” forgetting the hashtag. Maybe she has no use for it. Hashtags are useless. The circus represents a shared form of anonymous solitude which accounts for much of the confusion as what to select among Public, Only Me, or Friends of Friends in posting the photo. Maybe she has no use for the privacy settings. No need for it. The post goes by default. In her Timeline, everybody can see it; although nobody cares to see it. She’s looking for somebody in the first place. She’s interested in aliens. She hates posers. Posers deserve no prayers of which a single one is equivalent to one Like. When you swipe right, the next photo shown is of a crude chair where the widow’s funeral gown has been laid. No descriptions are written, no tags whatsoever, the chair is just there. Like a surreal still life subject if it is not so surreal enough. In three and half weeks from the day it is posted, a comment will be made under that photo. It will read, “You should have posted this on IG instead.” To which she’ll reply, “I hate filters, much like your avatar.” And the comments will flood, threads and threads of replies will come by, and the post will be shared by thousands and will go trending locally by the end of the month. The comment thread will be ended by a meme which shows a picture of a circus with faceless performers captioned: “Welcome to the world of faces no one you should trust.”

This is the age when you can be anyone else in just a touch in the air. The only problems you worry about: Is this account compatible with my interests? I can’t download it, I need to go Premium.

Without the Contact Lens Interface, LensAce as it has been dubbed short, we’d all be just the same, at least according to theories. Blind, androgynous, anonymous beings without history, without beginnings, bodies without a soul, no histories to rely on except such theories like we are merely supercomputers hovering around an abandoned cyberspace programmed with neglected online profiles of human beings who had lived ages ago. Even your Prima, your Primary Profile, doesn’t speak of your true identity.

Who am I after all? With all the accounts I have stolen, do I have to resign myself to the fact that I’m just a criminal with a personality disorder? Without my knowing it, my actions led me to become what society has branded as evil. I have become part of the syndicates who steal accounts, sell them to the corrupt and scrupulous individuals, especially those in the authority; they are the main market for these illegalities.

But let me make a stand on this, I don’t steal for profit. I steal accounts to find out who I am. Among this vast ocean of avatars, where can I find my real self? I’m convinced since long ago who I am now isn’t the real me.

There was an actor who got insane after he bought an infected account. The virus took over his MainFrame and consequently he couldn’t figure anymore what his real Prima was. He suffered a kind of identity crisis that led him to have mindlessly deactivated all his accounts. Left with a damaged Prima, he had left his Firewall open and the hooligans soon hacked his MainFrame and snatched away his deactivated profiles. Unable to function well without his hard-earned profiles’ capacities to help him pull through, the Prima soon expired, his LensAce melted due to inactivity, and no news was ever heard from the former actor again. He just disappeared like the mythical Taured Man.

Those who have been at the brink of death told stories of their near-death experiences. Although the narratives branch out to different scenarios, all share the same retelling when it comes to the vision of the “blurred zombies” – that behind the blurry vision are “zombies” seemingly falling in slow motion, or hovering, whatever is the right term, they were like bumping to each other and standing up again, on repeat, without end. According to theories found in Cyberclopedia, this “blurred zombies” vision is a parallel universe where human beings with no form or identity roam the offline world, the real First Life, the true world without the lenses. Other theories support this account but with the main difference that these “zombies” are not humans but rather supercomputers and they are called Anons.

What really is behind the blurred void astounds me, intrigues me the most, like what if it’s the answer to everything? Have we long forgotten the real world? When did we exactly take Second Life as the rather real? Is the offline world just a hopeless barren field? A limbo? What happens when you forcefully take out the lenses off your eyes, will you die in an instant? Will you finally see the hell, the Limbo, clearer? Even knowing that taking off these smart contact lenses means suicide. Nobody yet has resurrected from death to prove all these assumptions.

Our e-books about evolution say that the front part of our eyes used to be thinner, that an extraneous transparent fat had developed over the ages. The extra fat resembled the properties of a regular transparent contact lens. And when biologists discovered we can place hologram images inside these natural contact lenses, the world of digital screens has never been the same again. The world-shaping breakthrough brought corporations to drool over the prospect of transferring the screens of televisions and phones right onto our eyes, and thus violently transformed the idiom “right before our eyes” into the literal sense. Companies heavily invested in designs of interfaces and how people can navigate digital information in the air. The Touch and the Lens Technology converged, and shortly afterward the Contact Lens Interface, dubbed LensAce, was born.

And with this technology, I can almost immediately shift from one persona to another. I am a shifter, so to speak.

I have no idea who I am anymore.