It was wonderful until politics got involved. The space between the creation of a full body health scanner, made affordable with nano scan technology, and the time it took the government to regulate it was glorious. My mom was the first to jump in line for one at Black Friday to help diagnose her back problems. The health scanner wasn’t cheap but it allowed a lot of people to understand their health problems fast and easy, with a virtual AI that connected users with a database of a hundred medical institutions. One only needed a scanner and a smart device to find out what ailed them. I was only in high school so I didn’t pay much attention to it until it made big news. And even then, I was less convinced that it could help anyone, just like the political parties that demonized it.

As far as I can tell the user takes a pill filled with nanos. The anti-scanners argued this was incredibly invasive, referencing religious doctrines and whatnot, but most scientists said it was perfectly safe. An app would read the results of the nanos that entered the bloodstream, the AI searching for any abnormalities and even gave nutrition recommendations. Anti-scanners claimed this put many specialists out of a job but these same people weren’t exactly the healthiest in the first place and were probably afraid of the results.

But it was the collective results of the country, of the people that did use, that provided the real fear of using the scanner. It was determined that every user of the app had shown evidence that a new, unknown parasite existed in their brain. This parasite was incredibly small and had zero symptoms, except for the extreme agitation, aggression, and therefore ignorance that seemed to pervade most of society. They called it the “bug” because no one even knew what to call it and some debated whether it existed at all. I knew better, from previous pandemics, to question the skeptics over the more enlightened of science.

Weirdly enough the bug caused sudden amnesia of it after viewing the results in the app. It seemed the only thing smart enough to remember was the AI itself. Researchers had to refer to it in vague terms to even discuss it without forgetting. They say its benign but I don’t know if I believe that. That would be what the bug would want you to think. Mass ignorance wasn’t exactly a new thing but pandemonium broke over it regardless. Hospitalizations were at an all-time high from the hysteria it created. People wanted it removed but the doctors couldn’t even figure where it was.

How could they remove it if the parasite didn’t want to be removed? The more hysteric believed this was a sign from God that proved the scanner should be abolished. What was it doing though and what did it want? My mom fell in with the crazy crowd and decided to get rid of the scanner, saying that she couldn’t figure out if it was good or bad, or even if the bug was real or fake. Politicians began running ads claiming they had insider info and that the scanner should be abolished, considering the mountain of disinformation spreading around. There was no one who seemed to have the right information. It was a mess until the government decided to make it worse. My mom’s health deteriorated with it.

The anti-health campaigns were cruel and unfair, judging the “health nuts” for being biased against the collective. “The good of the nation” they said, was to not reveal the truth of a pandemic that didn’t exist and causing more anxiety than already existed. But they neglected to draw the similarities to anxiety and depression, which had seemed to exist in everyone’s minds already. So their plan was to ignore it and move on. “Do you really want to know?” And “Think of our future generations.” were there slogans.

I couldn’t help though, to think of the previous generation, namely my mom who spiraled into depression, anger, and doomscrolling. She refused to leave the house and instead found a work-from-home job, ironically working for the main corporation that produced the health scanners.

And nothing changed. We all saw the signs that something was wrong. But we soon forgot and pretended like the bug didn’t exist. How could it? If we saw something and immediately lost interest, was it really a problem? I didn’t care anymore. It became too hard to focus on the truth anyways. We wanted our freedom but no complete freedom. Freedom from the truth. Freedom from scary thoughts. Freedom from mental health. Freedom from freedom. That was the true happiness. For ignorance truly was bliss.