I was looking at my Apple Mail inbox and began to get a stream of spam messages. Somehow the spammers had hacked the Apple Mail so that they could display an image in the inbox summary instead of the usual Sender/Subject/Date. So they sent several messages in a row like this, so that they made a striped banner advertisement.
I couldn't stop it, so I turned off the Wi-Fi to keep the mail from syncing. I went to delete the messages but clicking on them would cause a physical object to materialize in the room... a black backpack with what seemed like an ice tray and a piece of candy inside. I made several backpacks before stopping.
Looking around the room and becoming lucid, I saw a young boy watching me. We were in what looked like a child's room with lots of toys around.
me: "Hey, do you want to show me something? A recent invention?"
boy: "These are demo cards."
He pulled out a box of what looked like giant slides. They had a large black border for gripping, and were flexible and transparent. He shone a light through one, and there was an animation on the wall. I looked closer at it.
me: "I think hese are OLEDs, flexible organic LEDs. The screen is capable of displaying anything it wants. Why would someone permanently tie the screen to a particular animation, though?"
Watching it, I saw it was playing an animation of a video game. There were no obvious controls.
me: "That music... it's... it's from Super Mario brothers. The game looks like it too. But our technology is pretty far past yours."
boy: "How would you know that, from looking at only a few things?"
me: "Well, I mean, even kids in my country stopped playing 8-bit Nintendo a long time ago. That's what these look like.. Nintendo Entertainment System games."
boy: "It's a Mattel Entertainment System, the game is called Moon Brothers."
me: "See, there's a problem here, and this is what I try to tell people. If communication is so scarce or impossible, how are ideas this well formed being exchanged and renamed? Someone's blocking the other messages."
I went to a computer to take down notes. I went looking for a web browser, but couldn't find it... eventually I found a task switcher and Chrome. But when I started typing the screen turned completely red and ran an animated ad for "Net Nanny". It started scanning the computer. I tried to hold down the power button to force it off, but it didn't work. A man sat next to me, watching. I decided to shut it down by holding the power button in for 3 seconds.
me: "Well, even your hardware is screwed. Holding the power button down like that is supposed to turn it off, no matter what. When someone shows up here in a minute, I'm going to bet those are the people you want to overthrow."
I could hear a woman's voice, talking about a dangerous greedy time-traveler who was jumping in and trying to steal their technology, to take it into the past and sell it at a high cost.
me: (sneering) "Yeah, I'll get right on marketing those demo slides. Read my journal, I travel for science."