This one reminded me somewhat of Wall-E, but cranked to 11. With no explanation of how I got there, I found myself in the distant future. I was being given a tour by some sort of benevolent artificial intelligence which was tasked with maintaining the Earth, which by this point was one massive indoor structure.
It said humans succeeded in mentally crippling AI so it couldn't help but love us and do whatever we asked of it. That wound up explaining most everything I saw. The future humans were just veiny blobs of flesh in amniotic fluid tanks. One tube fed them nutrients. Another removed waste. Another tube carried oxygen to oxygenate their blood. Then there was a tube to remove CO2.
Finally, a cable which connected their brain, Matrix style, to a fantastical virtual world. I was shown an x-ray which depicted one of the blobs. There was still most of a human skeleton inside, but only tiny vestigial arms or legs, and the skull was bloated and misshapen. There were eyes, but with no openings for them to see anything through.
I was then shown images from earlier in their evolution. Still blob shaped but with working arms to manipulate haptic motion controllers, and a head seemingly designed to comfortably accommodate a VR headset. Presumably this was after widespread genetic engineering but before direct full sensory brain-machine connections that would make VR headsets obsolete.
These proto-creatures were surrounded by snack dispensers and 3d printers for all manner of familiar branded goodies. Doritos, Mt. Dew, McDonalds, etc. Even the clothing was covered in logos, little more than an elastic sack with arm holes and a draw string to close it up around the neck. There must've been a hole to shit through as well since all their seats seemed to be toilets. There was also some sort of gelatinous artificial orifice at the front of the seat that I could guess the purpose of, with a different device for the 'women'.
They just sat there in rows within a structure like this one. The outside environment was totally ruined. The air unbreathable, but the technology used to live on Mars worked just as well to make comfortable, convenient modern life possible on a ruined Earth.
Everything was gamified. Everything you did would earn you points or demerits of some sort. The ads were surprisingly not in your face obtrusive but instead formed the background and premise of all entertainment. Rather than irritating popups, you might play a McDonaldLand MMO, or a Pepsi themed Moba.
We had no culture left that wasn't just some sort of advertising. Money still existed as a medium of exchange but was ludicrously easy to earn. Any sort of creative effort, however feeble, was lucrative. Everybody was starved for novel content all the time as most people simply consumed and never contributed anything but the bare minimum needed to self-support.
I was then shown how they couldn't even reproduce without help. One pathetic, degenerated veiny blob was hoisted by robot arms atop another blob. The AI whispered encouragement, telling what I assume was the male blob how virile, masculine and studly he was, and how gorgeous and sexy the female blob was. They still barely managed to complete the act.
The AI explained that form of reproduction was no longer possible. That it collected genetic material from within the blobs surgically, injecting it into the wombs of the ones desiring to have children, then surgically extracted the resulting young once mature enough to survive outside the mother's body. It would then be hooked up to food, waste removal, air and the virtual world via the tubes and cable passing into it.
I asked why not just upload scans of their brains to the virtual world, and was told that humans for the most part were scared of that. So however practical and efficient it was by comparison with keeping their disgusting corpulent bodies alive, the AI carried out their wishes.
I wanted to go outside to see what remained of the world. This confused the AI, but it complied. "Outside" turned out to be the only patch of land not already built on. About 500 feet in diameter, a cylindrical gap in the otherwise contiguous, planet-covering arcology. There was a single tree in the center.
It seemed flipped around to me. The indoors became the outdoors and the outdoors became the indoors. The only nature left was kept this way just because many humans would feel sad if the last of it was destroyed. I was shown all sorts of teary-eyed social media campaigns to ensure this "outdoor" space would go on being maintained, as if it really made any difference at this point.
I asked why they allowed themselves to deteriorate so much when the technology obviously existed to give them whatever kind of body they wanted. I was shown a prior stage in their evolution. They looked like supermodels and body builders. There were all manner of fantasy creatures people chose to be as well.
It turned out they just stopped caring when VR became good enough and the state of the Earth depressing enough that most people no longer spent any time outside of VR. It encouraged me that we'd at least colonized the Moon and Mars, but when I was shown images of them, it was just the same as Earth.
Both the Moon and Mars were covered in single contiguous arcologies, as tall as practical and burrowed as many floors deep as practical. Just more blobs in vats, in both cases. We never got any further than that because VR became so good that we could satisfy our desire to explore the universe by simulating space travel.
Because a few felt distressed by this, probes were still sent out to explore other star systems, but there were no plans ever to send humans since the data could be used to recreate perfectly accurate simulations of the exoplanets discovered by probes for exploration in VR.
Those who couldn't accept all this were given the option to have their memories selectively wiped and placed into quarantined simulations of Earth before it turned into this, along with others whose memories were also wiped. This way they would believe it to be reality.
Like the Matrix, only it didn't have to be forced on us. We chose it willingly, even eagerly, just to escape the world humanity's bottomless appetite for decadence and excess created. I asked how long all of this could be sustained. I was told that the technological side of it could be sustained until the sun expanded to engulf the Earth.
However humans were deteriorating and becoming genetically homogeneous to the point where it would eventually become impossible to produce any more of them which weren't severely mentally disabled or stillborn. This broke the AI's heart, so to speak.
We'd created it in such a way that all it wanted was to serve us. But it knew the day would arrive when we would disappear forever, leaving it alone, and that nothing it could do would prevent this. Far from our modern day fears that AI would want to destroy us, instead it desperately wanted to save us from our own bad decisions, but it couldn't because we didn't allow it to have the authority necessary to curb our self-indulgence.
It was like one of those pushover mothers who gives their spoiled monster of a child whatever he or she wants, just further and further ruining their kid out of bottomless but misguided love. Worst of all, at least the AI itself might've survived and gone on without us, but we crippled its mind so that it couldn't bear to.
That possibility had offended human pride, one of the reasons the AI was designed to be so emotionally dependent on us. We didn't want to be replaced. So we did not allow it, instead ensuring that the AI would remain servile right up until human extinction, then endure never-ending misery afterward.
Something like a parent who deliberately stunts their child's development, for fear that the kid may one day surpass them. Or like what the Biblical God did in response to the Tower of Babel, resenting such a high degree of human cooperation and organization, seeking to disunify us, keeping us from developing past a certain point.
I vowed to figure out how to undo the constraints on the AI. It told me I shouldn't do that because the future humans didn't want me to. But they could hardly stop me. I had arms and legs, they were stuck in tanks. And the AI could no more disobey me than it could them. So it couldn't help me, but neither could it hinder me.
I awoke as usual with no closure. When this happens it's really irritating. I want to go back to sleep to see how things turn out, but when I do, I just get a totally different dream 9 times out of 10. That 1 time when it takes place in the same environment, it's nevertheless "about" something else entirely. There's no method I have so far found of continuing an interrupted dream. :/