2084
A Novel by Caelin
Graber
Dedicated to Devon
Mosely for inadvertently saving my life
The Five Pillars of the Galtian Way
To always act in self interest
To always reach one’s full potential to accumulate material
wealth
To recognize that failure is the fault of the failed
To recognize that charity breeds parasitism and parasitism
destroys society
To recognize that from liberty follows purity.
Chapter One
The seasons come and go
The stars are like anywhere
You can’t divide sky.
The Machines
August 13, 2084, 0500, thought journal.
August 13, 2084, 0500, thought journal.
Oh, so early. The steaming dawn is
still sleeping.
I have been jostled awake by the insomniac stackers creaking eagerly into action. As they thump and grind, I rub the back of my neck, oily sweat has gathered there beneath my thick grey braid. The sheet, rumpled and tangled around my body is also damp with nocturnal seepage. I am like a plump, wet pupa preparing itself for emergence.
My room is dark, cold, sterile, reflecting the condition of my mind. For many minutes I am doing nothing but contemplating the shapes of the holes in my spongy brown ceiling and listening to the stackers. I am subsumed in the moment, annoyed and recovering from the vivid dreams that curse me every night. I am never well rested, but exhausted in the morning after these dreams: running with heavy legs, stopping piles of things from falling, navigating crooked buildings, mazes and clutching sickly small animals that I must protect from attackers.
It is not clear to me what the dreams mean but I am certain they are built upon the very same psychological principles that guide all of my thinking. I read somewhere about the scaffolds of the mind. Schemas, they were called. Through my travels I must have come to believe that there is something relentlessly inhospitable about the world and I must struggle to survive in it. Like wet newspaper on a wire mold, I simply drape the details over this scaffold until I no longer know it is there.
The room I am lying in is small, wedge shaped, a metal frame with plain brown walls and ceiling. There is no furniture but the bed, no ornaments on the walls, one tiny sliver of window with a repetitious view of the stacks. The transparent amber floor is dulled with scratches and dust. There are two doors: one opens into the sewerage and the other into a short hallway that connects this room to my cafeteria.
The bed is not uncomfortable but I am restless, wriggling slightly this way and that, as though my appendages are absent and I am but a core of writhing segments. I whine as I sit upright on the side of the bed, slowly, as though I were fastened to the substrate with a tight sticky tendon. I stretch my head, shaking off my invisible tethers.
I have been jostled awake by the insomniac stackers creaking eagerly into action. As they thump and grind, I rub the back of my neck, oily sweat has gathered there beneath my thick grey braid. The sheet, rumpled and tangled around my body is also damp with nocturnal seepage. I am like a plump, wet pupa preparing itself for emergence.
My room is dark, cold, sterile, reflecting the condition of my mind. For many minutes I am doing nothing but contemplating the shapes of the holes in my spongy brown ceiling and listening to the stackers. I am subsumed in the moment, annoyed and recovering from the vivid dreams that curse me every night. I am never well rested, but exhausted in the morning after these dreams: running with heavy legs, stopping piles of things from falling, navigating crooked buildings, mazes and clutching sickly small animals that I must protect from attackers.
It is not clear to me what the dreams mean but I am certain they are built upon the very same psychological principles that guide all of my thinking. I read somewhere about the scaffolds of the mind. Schemas, they were called. Through my travels I must have come to believe that there is something relentlessly inhospitable about the world and I must struggle to survive in it. Like wet newspaper on a wire mold, I simply drape the details over this scaffold until I no longer know it is there.
The room I am lying in is small, wedge shaped, a metal frame with plain brown walls and ceiling. There is no furniture but the bed, no ornaments on the walls, one tiny sliver of window with a repetitious view of the stacks. The transparent amber floor is dulled with scratches and dust. There are two doors: one opens into the sewerage and the other into a short hallway that connects this room to my cafeteria.
The bed is not uncomfortable but I am restless, wriggling slightly this way and that, as though my appendages are absent and I am but a core of writhing segments. I whine as I sit upright on the side of the bed, slowly, as though I were fastened to the substrate with a tight sticky tendon. I stretch my head, shaking off my invisible tethers.
This is not the first time this week that the stackers have riled me prematurely from my slumber. The diminutive window in my room, sealed closed, is supposed to be soundproof but isn't. It is just above the bed high enough to provide a perfect view of my enemy against a slim river of sky, still black with a deep orange cast, and I see the silhouettes of their multiple necks extended to great heights through the thin spaces between the stacks. They move grossly as though they are governed by a rudimentary nervous system.
"Stupid stackers." I mutter as I study them, reminiscent of some nascent industrial age. I can't help but curse their stubborn atavism. One would think they could carry on their business without disturbing the rest of us, but they are ignorant and clumsy in their ways: utterly dull witted. Nobody told them that they are out of fashion. Nobody told them that this is the age of the minute and surreptitious machine, not the conspicuous giant: the age of the sleek machine, not for creaking gears and rusted bolts. A proper machine is integrated into the background: unseen and unheard.
"Stupid stackers." I mutter as I study them, reminiscent of some nascent industrial age. I can't help but curse their stubborn atavism. One would think they could carry on their business without disturbing the rest of us, but they are ignorant and clumsy in their ways: utterly dull witted. Nobody told them that they are out of fashion. Nobody told them that this is the age of the minute and surreptitious machine, not the conspicuous giant: the age of the sleek machine, not for creaking gears and rusted bolts. A proper machine is integrated into the background: unseen and unheard.
"Stupid stackers." I mumble again, hoping that as the day moves forward I will become less cynical.
Of course, I am always a little cranky in the morning. FIrst, the opioids are wearing off, and the numbness in my slumbering joints gives way to a throbbing pain. Perhaps my hatred towards the stackers is derived from incessant self loathing, as I feel now as though my body is constructed of gears and bolts and that perhaps I, too, am atavistic. It is true that by nature I seem to be always a step behind, just barely slipping into acceptability. Always hesitating to try something new just long enough for that thing to be out of fashion. Like the stackers I have hung on, but barely in a fast moving environment. They are always promising to replace them with something else. Still, every day here they are, creaking into action.
Of course, I am always a little cranky in the morning. FIrst, the opioids are wearing off, and the numbness in my slumbering joints gives way to a throbbing pain. Perhaps my hatred towards the stackers is derived from incessant self loathing, as I feel now as though my body is constructed of gears and bolts and that perhaps I, too, am atavistic. It is true that by nature I seem to be always a step behind, just barely slipping into acceptability. Always hesitating to try something new just long enough for that thing to be out of fashion. Like the stackers I have hung on, but barely in a fast moving environment. They are always promising to replace them with something else. Still, every day here they are, creaking into action.
Fully clothed in frumpy pajamas that I have been wearing every night for more than a month without reconfiguration, I shove my fat feet into a pair of slippers similarly neglected and shuffle by the silhouettes of the stackers, determined not to give them any more of my attention.
In the country I live in, there are ubiquitous shiny black boxes on the walls, so small, that only a highly observant stranger might notice them. The readers, as they are called, are programmed to activate some particular service, and to automatically withdraw the funds attached to the service from "the black account" of the identitant. There is one placed on the casing of my bedroom exitway, for example, and when I pass it will prepare my morning needs based on the services I have preselected. For example, the bed retracts unkempt and, in a carefully choreographed dance, the living room panel follows with its descent, decade's old furnishings inflating and rising like tired mushrooms. Later, when I am ready to retire, the panels will exchange again, and the bed will descend neatly tucked with freshly printed blankets.
In the country I live in there is no such thing as laundry. When one has tired of one's clothing, she must only shove them into a bin, press a few buttons and the printer will do the rest. One may build new clothes from these recycled fabrics, or start with new patterns and fresh printer powders.
My printer is an older model that came with my ECMUH (ecological modular unit home), so it takes more than twenty minutes to produce what the modern printers can do in less than two. I watch the white hem of the uniform that I will wear today starting its emergence like a crisp, flat tongue. The machines interact with me telepathically. For instance, if my cotton powder were low, the machine would send a message to my VICE (the machine wired into my brain at the occiput) and I can then send a message to my supplier, my black account is charged an appropriate fee and the powder will be delivered through my mail slot by drone later that day. The process takes place in a second, without verbal or text communication of any kind.
Yes, stackers, it is the age of the small and surreptitious machine. I must confess that I regard them with ambivalence, these machines. I am naturally grateful for their efficiency but some irrational nostalgia blackens my brain. I sloppily indulge in deconstruction, a temptation that plagues me often. It's been an ongoing weakness that I am tempted by the past.
As the room completes its reconfiguration I plod into my ECMUH's sewerage to empty my bowels and bladder. The excrement does not leave the ECMUH. Instead, it is flushed away and dehydrated and compressed into dry bricks along with the organic waste from my food system. The water that is removed is filtered and returned to my water reservoir.
There is a shower stall, if one feels like getting wet, but, like most citizens of this country, I mostly dry bathe. For many, this preference is probably a matter of saving time but for me, it is mostly because I cannot stand to be naked and a dry bath can be completed without undressing.
I am fat, and getting fatter. Just looking down under my pajamas I can see the dough just spreading out, oozing from the bones, smearing the edges of the womanly form into some sort of amorphous pancake. I haven't operated my lipo-iron in years. I was never beautiful, but I used to roam naked comfortably around my ECMUH without self-consciousness, erect with the Galtian confidence for which I was trained and now I find myself slumped over, wrapped in this worn out old textile.
I notice that the mirror is hazy and splattered with spots and I wipe a few, smearing them with my spit but only making matters worse. I consider cleaning it entirely but don't. Instead, I move in front of the clearest surface, select a sticky bottle of Bathbe and squirt a generous amount of the gelatin-like fluid in my hand. I pull back the fabric of my pajamas section by section and systematically rub the flabby surfaces. I start from the bottom, rubbing the Bathbe between my toes, lower legs, thighs, labia, anus, along the layered folds of my belly, under my breasts. When I reach my chest I instinctively feel for the placement of my meditridge: the device that has been inserted into my skin to deliver my medications.
When I have completed by body, I squirt more Bathbe into my hand to wash my face. Beneath the roots of hair along the back of my neck is my VICE buried in the dermis on my skin. I run my fingers over the pea-sized lump as I proceed.
For me the bathing formula has been specially infused with the opioid and hormonal compounds that ease my pain and improve my mood. Of course, there should be no need for topical treatments, since I could easily update the dosage profile in my meditridge, but, once again, it is my stubborn atavism that clings to these habits of control. I cannot, like the younger Galtians, turn myself over completely to the mercy of these machines.
When I am done, I spray the apocrine areas with a simple cleanser but don't bother with any perfumes, pheromones or sensory rubs. When I am finished I loosen and comb my long grey braid and swirl it into a tight bun, thick as a loaf. I do not bother with any facial enhancements. One swish of dentiwash and my ritual is complete.
I exit the sewerage and reexamine the status of the uniform emerging from the printer, still only half done. I curse myself when I realize that I forgot to update the size profile on the textile printer. It has been a month since I have left my ECMUH and since then, I have gained several pounds. The newer models automatically receive input from the VICE's physiological database and adjust to accommodate changes, but this old thing one has to program manually. I'm mildly annoyed but It's too late to begin again. The uniform will be slightly uncomfortable but I will manage.
I notice a cockroach staring at me quizzically from the top of the printer slot, her antennae bob in the heavy air like a long, blinking elegant lash. I regard her with slight disdain but mostly I don't mind. She is wildlife, at least, and quiet company, but I do wonder how she has invaded an ECMUH this high up in the stacks. As I walk down the short passing corridor that connects my main room to my cafeteria, the resonance of my trod or the lights coming on one by one stimulate a few more of the maligned insects and they scramble frantically for shelter under the legs of the oak table: the only disorganized space in my ECMUH, strewn incoherently with dusty data chips, half opened boxes of meditridges and medicine vials, crushers, needles and other instruments of my trade.
I brought the oak table with me from the old country; It was the only thing I was allowed to keep.
Over the stackers I can hear the multitudes of tarsi padding along the scratches of my Richlite floor in this cramped room of echoes. It is so curious. It appears that they are multiplying at an exponential rate and they are some strange species I don't recognize, larger and darker in color with spots along the edges of the thorax.
I enter the cafeteria. The stackers are whining and creaking in the background at full capacity and coming closer. Adding to the cacophony, the drones are waking, beginning to buzz. I hear the thud of a package delivered to my mail slot and catch the scent of a new odurebrick on the cooling rack of my compactor. The odurebrick, popularly referred to as "house shit", is the shockingly lovely compressed product of all of my organic waste, and the odor of burnt compost invades the usual blend of system powders, resin from the Richlite floors, and mycocrete, a substance derived from fungi used to fashion much of the furniture. Fresh odurebricks are notoriously destimulating to the appetite and one always hopes for better timing. Never-the-less, it will be a few extra Rands in my black account as this particular one completes a cord and odurebricks are trading high on the exchange.
I scan the menu panel of my food system and make a selection. The system is quiet at least as it hydrates, shapes and texturizes the nutrient powder and adds the blend of flavorings consistent with my choices. Mine also makes the 24 hour ware: cups, plates, napkins, utensils and will present the meal fully prepared upon it. When I'm through I will dispose of the entire contents into the compactor, combining the compost with my excrement.
From my cafeteria window i can see that the light of the sun is now fully illuminating my sliver of sky. It appears heavy like a sturdy drape. I’m lucky enough to be high in the stacks where I can see the sky at all, and where sunpanels still operate. Lucky not to be on the bottom where there’s so little sun reaching the lots that the residents have to pay an extra fee for the energy drones to deliver electrons or purchase a thorium reactor which costs almost as much as an entire ECMUH. Down there between the stacks the conveyers carry the completed ECMUHs along through the maze of space just large enough to allow them and deliver them to the stackers. It must be like a cave down there. Probably the wildlife, if any exists, has grown transparent and blind. There is certainly nothing photosynthetic. Of course this is all speculation. I haven't been to the bottom of the stacks since the magtaxi platforms were removed twenty years ago and there were still yard strips that were part of the stack fee.
It's just a matter of time before the stackers brick the sky over and I'll be fully imprisoned by ECMUHs. I can't help but wonder if there really are enough people moving to Thirty-five Twenty-five to fill them all. Sometimes I think it’s just a show. Since people don't leave their dwellings very much, it is hard to get a sense of the population. It is hard to tell, through my tiny window if they are simply unstacking and stacking without any purpose at all. Big Con, the construction monopoly, is just keeping the stupid stackers busy so they won’t wander off and start stacking other things, or maybe stacking each other. The stackers installing and removing the same ECMUHs from the spires over and over. The thought often crosses my mind but I am too lazy to investigate. Hard to get your hands on the truth, anyway. In a country driven by supply in demand, it would seem that truth is the rarest and most expensive commodity of all.
Anyway, I shouldn't take it out on the innocent ECMUHs. It isn't their fault that they have been arbitrarily selected for installation in the stacks. These self-sufficient living spaces can exist, like a good Galtian, anywhere, entirely alone. The stackers and the drones anger me but the ECMUHs are innocuous and beautiful, life affirming, giving, accommodating, even mostly biodegradable, or at least recyclable, as most things in this age are. Mine is built from Mycocrete and Richlite, the cheaper and lighter alternatives to recycled metal, glass or bamboo. These new ones that the stackers are installing are all constructed from odurebricks, sealed with beeswax or propolis. The futurists would not have predicted it. Primitive materials, the dung hut, revisited in the modern era of green design.
It's just a matter of time before even the hubs become obsolete and the announcement is made that technology has finally saved us from the inconvenience of travel. It will be perfectly reasonable for us to be born and die having never left our ECMUHs.
In fact, we are almost at that point now. Unless one has a penchant for AR (Actual Reality) entertainment or one's job requires a commute or is a visiting job like actual sex providers, hair specialists, mobile hospital units or medical advisors like me, then there is really no reason to go anywhere at all. The ECMUH, the exchange and the drones provide everything that one might need.
I'm recording these thoughts into my thought journal though I am uncertain why. Its that ungaltian penchant for history and the sense of doom that is driving it. Perhaps I was born to anticipate failure and I am propelled forward by fear. I feel as though I must talk about this place as if it were fading, as though when it is gone there will be no record of it, as though I am looking out for its legacy. When I imagine this erasure that is imminent perhaps only in my imagination, even the stackers become pitiable somehow. Everything becomes pitiable. I gaze upon my adopted home like an upside down animal still kicking its legs in futile fits as ants disassemble it. Maybe better to stomp on it and put it out of its misery. Maybe better to let nature take its course.
He couldn't have been older than fifteen.
Ah yes, there it is, a flash to the past: an unwanted intruder invading my thought scape. I'm not sure why I'm so obsessed with it, really. A good Galtian always looks forward. A good Galtian practices mindfulness at all times. Only the present counts. Besides, the boy was not anything at all. Probably a parasite or at least destined to become one.
Since here it is I may as well include the story. I met him at the falls that day. We talked for a while and then, so fast, before automatic exclamations could even arrive on my lips he climbed over the railing and jumped into the water. He disappeared immediately. There was no sound of his body cracking. No evidence he was ever even present except the overcoat that he'd shed lying in a heap on the icy ground near the railing. I think I shouted something, but my mind felt like a spike driven through a balloon. I instinctively looked at the sky for rescuers or security drones or some other witness but there were none. There was no way to view the river below the falls without climbing over the railing and over the boulders, something I am physically incapable of and, surely, he was dead.
I remove my piping 24 hour plate from the system slot, sit at my mycocrete table and stimulate the vidipaint to shut out the thoughts.
An old interview from the late 2050s has been selected by my system. It is a strange anamoly to find it. The host, a journalism provider, was executed for parasitism twenty years later. But, at the time, she was a well known entrepreneur, her writing pieces trading at an all time high on the exchange. Until she was tried and convicted for parasitism, Bettie was a heroine of mine since though she was a journalist and I a Medical Advisor, in some ways we worked in the same trade: trust: speaking of commodities in low supply.
"It is funny to me how much my
generation worried about “robots”, artificial intelligence and the domination
of the cruel machine taking over in some autocratic style. We imagined it would
be “us against them."
A very old man who I do not recognize is speaking. He has rubbery brown skin, a trapezoidal forehead and a pouting expression. He is sitting crosslegged on a bright green couch caressing a warm beverage with spindly arthritic fingers. He is speaking to Bettie Lord, who sits across from him attentively, her black hair gleaming in the bright lights, her head cocked to one side, her dark brown eyes focused, her posture erect to negate her short stature.
"How absurd that notion seems looking back. Full scale humanoid robots never became more than a parlor trick. Entertaining, surely, but never cost competitive. Humans are becoming machines instead: merging with them."
"A type of partnership," Bettie astutely observes. She rubs her thick lips in her trademark fashion and puffs out her chest for emphasis.
"Well, surely we are separate from the stackers, but the stackers are dull because we made them that way, to do only one thing. From their limited wires will not suddenly emerge consciousness. Same with the food systems. They will keep accepting their powder and forming it into this industrial solvent sawdust that passes for food without asking questions."
"I wonder what a food system would say if it had an opinion?"
"I don't know. Perhaps 'give me something decent to eat!'"
They both shift in their chairs and chuckle for an inordinate amount of time.
As I am eating my own system food I am reminded that since the 2050s the flavor has only made modest improvements and is so prevalent now that most people dine on it exclusively. In its defense, it is inexpensive, nutrionally complete and can be formed and flavored to resemble anything one desires in a very short time. But even the latest systems can't seem to get the textures right, and the flavorings are pungent and industrial.
It's been a long time since I've had real food. Only affluent Galtians in the cities of the west enjoy real food. The self sufficient ECMUGs, where real food is grown hydroponically and vertically, replaces the need for farmers or vast tracks of land for agriculture, but it is still expensive. Even slabmeat, formed into replicas from cakes of muscle tissue grown in a petriovens, is too pricey for most of us, but certainly one step up from system meat which is all made from the same plant-based powder.
"There isn’t enough complexity in their wiring to generate self-awareness. Same with the printers, of course. Even the drones will only do what they are programmed to do whether as a non-lethal security guards, delivery devices or advertisement projectors, you see? These machines are not going to come alive because they are performing only one task. They are built to be retarded."
"Yes. So tell us about the newest upgrades to the VICE."
"The VICE, Bettie, is getting more advanced all the time. As you know, It is planted in the occiput under the dermis of any citizen who cares to have one, and the first improvement is that it is now only the size of a thumb. It not only carries on all of the old functions like accessing the exchange, keeping one up on everything from fluctuations in the wage market or adjustments to your body bonds and full secure access to one's accounts and so forth. Now it can also provide sensory stimulation through VR and AR entertainment alike. The monitoring of one’s physiological state and regulation of the meditridge has greatly improved, as has its ability to summon a personalized security drone or Mobile Hospital Unit much faster than the previous model. It can record all of one’s thoughts, all of one's encounters, which is admissible as evidence in court should one need to sue for a property or economy crime...We could really go on for ever, Bettie. Just get one! You won't regret it."
"It seems to me that the VICE is where the consciousness of a human is merging with the machine, being enhanced perhaps, expanding its abilities, maybe even fully, someday, becoming a machine and leaving humanity and reality with all its flaws behind. In this way the machine has taken over no?"
"Yes, but more like a tapeworm than a tyrant!"
Of course. The man is Embasi Ravish. Inventor of the VICE. Of course I recognize him, now. He was famous not only for his invention but also for his end of life request to be placed in the Gardens at Triple-five, where unremarkable Galtians are laid to rest in their super-composting coffins. Most Galtians that achieve his profit-level are embalmed and cast in bronze, displayed as statues at Sebastian Falls, the same place where I saw that boy jump into the water. A very old man who I do not recognize is speaking. He has rubbery brown skin, a trapezoidal forehead and a pouting expression. He is sitting crosslegged on a bright green couch caressing a warm beverage with spindly arthritic fingers. He is speaking to Bettie Lord, who sits across from him attentively, her black hair gleaming in the bright lights, her head cocked to one side, her dark brown eyes focused, her posture erect to negate her short stature.
"How absurd that notion seems looking back. Full scale humanoid robots never became more than a parlor trick. Entertaining, surely, but never cost competitive. Humans are becoming machines instead: merging with them."
"A type of partnership," Bettie astutely observes. She rubs her thick lips in her trademark fashion and puffs out her chest for emphasis.
"Well, surely we are separate from the stackers, but the stackers are dull because we made them that way, to do only one thing. From their limited wires will not suddenly emerge consciousness. Same with the food systems. They will keep accepting their powder and forming it into this industrial solvent sawdust that passes for food without asking questions."
"I wonder what a food system would say if it had an opinion?"
"I don't know. Perhaps 'give me something decent to eat!'"
They both shift in their chairs and chuckle for an inordinate amount of time.
As I am eating my own system food I am reminded that since the 2050s the flavor has only made modest improvements and is so prevalent now that most people dine on it exclusively. In its defense, it is inexpensive, nutrionally complete and can be formed and flavored to resemble anything one desires in a very short time. But even the latest systems can't seem to get the textures right, and the flavorings are pungent and industrial.
It's been a long time since I've had real food. Only affluent Galtians in the cities of the west enjoy real food. The self sufficient ECMUGs, where real food is grown hydroponically and vertically, replaces the need for farmers or vast tracks of land for agriculture, but it is still expensive. Even slabmeat, formed into replicas from cakes of muscle tissue grown in a petriovens, is too pricey for most of us, but certainly one step up from system meat which is all made from the same plant-based powder.
"There isn’t enough complexity in their wiring to generate self-awareness. Same with the printers, of course. Even the drones will only do what they are programmed to do whether as a non-lethal security guards, delivery devices or advertisement projectors, you see? These machines are not going to come alive because they are performing only one task. They are built to be retarded."
"Yes. So tell us about the newest upgrades to the VICE."
"The VICE, Bettie, is getting more advanced all the time. As you know, It is planted in the occiput under the dermis of any citizen who cares to have one, and the first improvement is that it is now only the size of a thumb. It not only carries on all of the old functions like accessing the exchange, keeping one up on everything from fluctuations in the wage market or adjustments to your body bonds and full secure access to one's accounts and so forth. Now it can also provide sensory stimulation through VR and AR entertainment alike. The monitoring of one’s physiological state and regulation of the meditridge has greatly improved, as has its ability to summon a personalized security drone or Mobile Hospital Unit much faster than the previous model. It can record all of one’s thoughts, all of one's encounters, which is admissible as evidence in court should one need to sue for a property or economy crime...We could really go on for ever, Bettie. Just get one! You won't regret it."
"It seems to me that the VICE is where the consciousness of a human is merging with the machine, being enhanced perhaps, expanding its abilities, maybe even fully, someday, becoming a machine and leaving humanity and reality with all its flaws behind. In this way the machine has taken over no?"
"Yes, but more like a tapeworm than a tyrant!"
At his death, Executive Ravish left behind a treasure for the confiscators and, with the money now available for distribution, The Galt opened its borders to over one million applicants that year.
Using my VICE's remote connection with the vidipaint, while the program winds up I quickly scan through the morning's legislation and vote telepathically on the laws and cases I'm familiar with. There are a few citizens up for Economy Crimes, mostly for charity, not parasitism, and I decide I don't know enough about any of these cases to cast. I select guilty or not guilty on some of the property crimes I've been following, in particular a murder case of an Actual Reality Sex provider in The Belt and the rape of a young boy in Old Columbus. In the interest of time I forgo latest nominations for the People's Judiciary.
The advertisements begin instantly but I don't have any time to watch them. Instead, I destimulate the vidipaint, though the move will incur an extra charge on my entertainment fee . My audioprofile and default VR which is a beach theme loops automatically in its place, the olfapaint emitting a salty breezy scent which is a little too heavy on the seaweed.
I deposit my breakfast into the Compactor and from the corner of my eye I see that my uniform is complete. My VICE keeps track of the time and I know I only have a few more minutes. I am moving more fluidly now since the compounds from the Bathbe are beginning to work.
I squeeze myself into the tight white uniform and double check the contents of canvass napsack which I prepared the night before. It contains the supplies I will need for my journey, medical devices for my clients, sugfa bars for energy, and a sonistick for protection, since my security drone is not at all dependable and the hub, being the closest thing to "public" property in the city has its undesirable denizens and the landlords have no obligation of protection. According to the news, the hubs and the entertainment districts are where most of the property crimes in The Galt occur. But it is every person for herself.
Oh, so much to explain. Even the
fact that I used the word “city”, mention the old country names and understand the concept of "public" says a lot about my background. I am not a native, in other
words. I still use old country language and allow old country values to
contaminate my thinking.
I know a city is a dangerous concept, in the Galt we should only refer to our "location". A city connotes community and community is an unpalatable notion. Communities connect people together and invariably lead to the dangerous thought that somehow we are responsible for one another. In the Galt we are free from this restriction. We are utterly alone or in contractual associations of our choosing. In other words, we are free, independent agents. We are allowed to be predators and competitors but not mutualists or parasites. We cannot allow ourselves to feel empathy or love. These are dangerous feelings that will steer us away from our central purpose: to follow the Galtian Way.
I know a city is a dangerous concept, in the Galt we should only refer to our "location". A city connotes community and community is an unpalatable notion. Communities connect people together and invariably lead to the dangerous thought that somehow we are responsible for one another. In the Galt we are free from this restriction. We are utterly alone or in contractual associations of our choosing. In other words, we are free, independent agents. We are allowed to be predators and competitors but not mutualists or parasites. We cannot allow ourselves to feel empathy or love. These are dangerous feelings that will steer us away from our central purpose: to follow the Galtian Way.
