@ Zenpai
2025-01-20 22:04:36
They took her around the city grounds, showing her all the latest improvements. This was the center of innovation, they said. The finest architecture; it seemed like the perfect city. Futuristically advanced cars, roads, and venues. Everything one could ever wish for. Unlimited pleasure; that ancient feeling of boredom was completely eradicated. Virtual Reality simulators for you to indulge in any fantasy you desired. Still, deep down, something was amiss; her intuition screamed silent cries of evil. She didn’t have words to put her feelings into; it frustrated her. She knew she was encased in a box, yet didn’t have a concept of its walls. It was the only life she’d known; she’d been raised in it. Now, as an adult who’d risen through the education system, she attained a role as a district advisor to oversee city operations. The government officials were showing her the city she’d soon inherit.
“Our greatest resource is human attention. The more we flood it and capture it, the more profits it generates for our city. More profits mean more pleasure, and who wouldn’t want more of that!” said the head official.
He was an old pencil-thin man with a gut protruding from his belly. It was an odd sight. He spoke with an air of cockiness and pride that was off-putting; one wanted to plug their ears when he spoke. Balding, with hair on the sides, his face wrinkled and drooping. He lived a long time, but his youth died many moons ago.
“We figured it out long ago; the human brain has a limit to the information it can receive. If you succeed in filling the limits to the capacity, you can effectively take up one hundred percent of the thoughts in an individual. First it starts small; we take up a small percentage of the human attention engineered by scientists to be irresistible. That small percentage is enough to create desire in the absence of stimulation. Like a virus, it begins to spread and take up more capacity. Eventually, the original pure thought of humans is eradicated; then all that remains is our program. Once it’s set in place we can carry out any agenda we wish to.”
She listened, her gaze fixed ahead, while a slight nausea bubbled up in her stomach.
“Our number one goal is improvement, constant improvement; if we don’t improve, we die. We must improve our joy, our happiness, our pleasure. If an action does not fall into that category, we eliminate it, simple enough, isn’t it?”
“The number one threat to our society is silence. As soon as a human being has silence with no stimulus, the effects of our program begin to fade away. Then they start thinking and having all sorts of original ideas. You can see how this is a problem; if they have an idea that we didn’t generate, how could it fit into our plan?” added another official. He resembled the other but had gray hair and yellowing teeth.
“We’re a copy-and-paste society; our ideas are the ideas of the people.”
She cut off the official: “Where does the city end?”
The officials looked at one another in disbelief; they couldn’t comprehend the nature of the question.
“End, what do you mean by end, like a point to leave the city?”
“Precisely.” She said coldly.
“I don’t see why that matters ma’am.” The official said, giving an alarming stare to the other officials.
“As the district advisor, I need to know where our city begins and ends; show it to me at once.” She stated
With that, the officials called the floating taxi to take them to the edge of the city. As they rode up to the edge of the city, there weren’t any walls enclosing the city. It looked like there wasn’t anything on the other side, just a drop-off; behind them, the colorful, overstimulated city buzzed in noise.
“Leave me here; I’d like to walk the grounds. You all can go about your business.” She told them.
The officials stared at each other blankly and then took one of the floating taxis back to the city.
Standing at the edge of the city limits, she began to have thoughts accompanied by the feelings that made her sick. She became conscious of the idea of a prison, walls encasing you, trapping you. A city of people stuck inside it without ever knowing they had walls surrounding them. At the same time, people were stuck in an endless cycle of improving the contents of the prison. What they saw as progress was horizontal movement in the prison; at the end of the day, the prison walls still trapped them.
She threw up all the contents of her stomach. She got into the floating taxi and pushed the pedal to the floor. At two hundred plus miles an hour, she shot toward the unknown edge of the city. Instead of dropping off, she punctured the invisible floating wall; it seemed to have a deflating effect, and a loud gust of air began pushing her further away from the city. She was now suspended in space.
She looked back. As she thought, rusty gray prison walls stretched wide. They were a stark contrast to the colorful insides of the city. The hole she punctured was deflating the city, tearing down its walls.
All she could do was burst into laughter.