[ WP ] Suddenly and without warning , lag and latency starts to happen in everyday life instead of just the Internet .

I do n't remember what my children looked like... 
 
 before I went blind. 
 
 In the year 2020, science had advanced rather far. Touting cures for hundreds of discovered cancers, HIV/AIDS, and, oddly enough, erectile dysfunction, human confidence in the face of disease was at an all-time high. Vaccinations and preventative medicine were our keys to presumably indefinite survival -- 
 
 but we got cocky. 
 
 Encoding the human genome was, apparently, an invitation to tamper with it. Improve it. Fix it. We believed natural selection was within our control, and there would never be any needless death or discomfort. Scientists, unified under the common goal of making everyone `` true homo sapiens'', started restoring senses to those without via gene splicing and stem cells -- burn victims were able to hold their children, anosmic people could smell the roses, 
 and the future was bright for the formerly blind... 
 
 *was* bright. 
 
 By the year 2026, this procedure ( commercialized as `` Common Sense'' ) was standard in all hospitals. And, while it was intended to simply restore senses to the senseless, patients gave rave reviews, particularly for the optical sector -- colors were vivid, glasses were unnecessary, and prejudice started to develop for the `` non-20/20's''. 
 
 So, naturally, 
 it started trending. 
 
 Nearly everyone was using Common Sense by 2028, magnifying their vision to super-human levels, and loving every minute of it -- as it was covered by planet-wide, universal health insurance. 
 But, by 2030, only two years later, something went wrong. 
 
 The first victim of degenerative ocular neuropathy was John Planck. And, while terrified, scholars had the foresight to convert his testimony of the disease to Braille so future generations could understand their inevitable fate: 
 
 * *'' Every person I'd meet would start to... lag. I know it sounds unbelievable, but I ca n't describe it any better. My eyes just would n't get the information at the same time as my ears. It started out very occasionally, maybe once a month, and now I ca n't go two minutes without being `` desynced''. It took [ about half a year ] to get to this point, and as it's happening you slowly start to feel a bigger disconnect...... some kind of disassociation with the world around you, like a computer game. Until you become totally blind, and then you realize that this is your life now. You're blind and you know that there's nothing that can truly fix it. `` * 
 
 Media started to dub it `` Algernon's Disorder'', named after the classic *Flowers for Algernon*, a fictitious tale of a mouse getting surgery to rapidly become highly intelligent, before quickly dilapidating into mental retardation. 
 
 Algernon's Disorder spread with the same virility as Common Sense itself, and mass panic started to set in, after 90 % of the human population opted for the optical procedure. 
 
 A race against time, humans had to adapt to a world without sight: 
 
 scholars began translating *everything* into Braille, understanding that future generations wo n't be able to read Shakespeare or *The Catcher in the Rye*; 
 
 the standard of beauty became concerned with the strength of natural, untampered senses, with the hope that some child in the future might be more fortunate than the rest of humanity; 
 
 and then there's me, quietly sitting at a typewriter, hoping someone will understand the foolishness of the human race, and the pain of not remembering what my children looked like... 
 
 before I went blind. 
 
 

