If we choose to believe in honesty.

It's okay to hate. I had to remind myself of that daily. They wanted to take away our ability to discriminate between the things we like and the things we dislike; important tools of cognition for navigating the agent/arena complex. They wanted us Blind and Helpless... And they succeeded, creating a homogenized population of Normalized Programmable Consoomers (NPCs).

Consoomption was maximized, all through this one weird trick of getting people to believe that it is evil to discriminate, that it is evil to hate. I hate feeling like shit so I treat my body appropriately. I discriminate against food; poo is not food, and potatoes are superior to sweet potatoes. It's okay to hate. It's okay to discriminate. You could hate the idea of eating poo. You didn't have to eat poo, and you could even discriminate and declare it not food. Hate told you something, and discrimination was based off of your value system. But people didn't get it, and so they ate shit and died.
All for the Low Price of Comfort... offloading your cognition onto someone/something else... People had no idea what they had done. They couldn't conceive it. And so the Eternal HR Woman ruled. Controlling and compelling speech; and thus a further descent into WormWorld. The deepest Depths of WHAT IT MEANT to 'Not Be'.
To be or not to be? What a choice we made!

The Panopticon of cameras and facial recognition monitors followed you everywhere. Never was I alone. Even in my Fortress of Solitude (my garage) I still felt like I was being watched. There was always something there with me, whether real or unreal. Did the reality matter? Or was the perception of a presence of an all-invading intrusive watcher enough? That neuronal activation of being watched...

I waited at the Shuttle Station for my shuttle, watching the adverts to gain Attention Tokens. It was always best to maximize your ad intake before bed.

I had plenty of time thanks to my quick walking; the secret was to roll off your toes as you moved forward. You got to places twice as fast with that technique. I used to teach that technique to my students back in my youthful years of theatre when I was a young man. Body and movement were key to communicating with the audience and also for navigating the stage/actor complex. To be or not to be.

So many people were out of touch with their body, and now we were all out of touch with our bodies and minds. It wasn't of modal confusion; of confusing the having with the being... but something deeper like an unvirtual digi-reality... a digital archipelago... We didn;t really exist anymore. We had been replaced by our online avatars. Completely deterritorialized and deracinated. I remembered the last moments of light in people. Like terror seized children, only laughing moments ago, seeing the vision of their online avatar approach closer. Consooming them from this world and replacing them. No more life within the life. Just a following of motions. Of digital marionettes.

Here I was...

This was a golden moment; I was just raking in the A Tokens. I could watch multiple monitors at once. I was a seasoned pro. I felt like Nicholas Cage in one of his Art House Movies. Like it was the bit where he totally does some weird expressions and stuff, and you know its legit and also totally 'on' like Donkey Kong. That was me right now juggling 5 monitors.

I raked in the A Tokens. It cost Social credits and Carbon credits to ride the shuttle, but today, because it was for an interview, I got to ride it for free.
I normally wasn't allowed outside of my Zone. Only those rich in Carbon credits could travel freely.
This was one of my rare times leaving the Zone. A real treat, and Shuttle Stations were the only places where you would find so many monitors lined up so perfectly!

I felt such disembodiment being out in the world. My mind still feeling elsewhere. Connected to the virtual reality. The normality of post-modern.
Disconnected from the body we lack the ability to act with common sense. The mind becomes schizophrenic. Hyper reflective on experience and of awareness. Feet deep in the ocean, and head above the clouds.
Haunted not by reality, but by the images we put in its place. The ever-haunting spectre of the Eternal HR Woman and of WormWorld and what lies Beyond!

...
I momentarily lost concentration on my farming of A Tokens, when I noticed that White child I saw about scavenging for food. The red-haired, blue-eyed child approached me.

"Do you believe in Angels?" the girl asked looking up at me.

I didn't have time to engage with this kid. There was too much A Tokens to mop up. This was big for me. I could trade these...

She tugged on my jacket, forcing me to look at her.

"Do you believe in Angels?"

"Sorry kid..." I coolly coldly said as I went back to staring at the monitors.

I felt bad, but what could I do?

There were no houses for the Bio-Children. All the new builds were given to the New Africans.

The red light shone on me.

"What are you thinking Unit JLZ21347? Your cortisol and adrenal levels are almost beyond their legal limits?!"

The light went from red to green. I was saved by the sight of the shuttle approaching.
Just keep moving forward. The idea reassured me. It calmed me. It is what got me here.

The shuttle pulled in. Shuttles were actually trains. They were given a new name and a futuristic slick of paint and chrome cuts to be sold to the public as a Net Zero Utopia "you'd have to be a far-right conspiracy nut to be against", and officially made the only acceptable transport system; trapping people in Zones. Even walking between Zones was forbidden.
And here we were, confined to our Zones. No nations only economic Zones. Zones within Zones within Zones within Zones.

...

"Unit JLZ21347! Your shuttle has arrived" the Eternal HR Woman informed me.

I entered the shuttle. There were several MAPs with brown kids in Dogplay outfits.

My first instinct was that I wanted to kill the MAPs. But I was too weak. Physically I could crush their easily smashable faces, but I was mentally and spiritually too afraid. I lacked strength. I was afraid of the consequences... Fear of System Pigs, not of God... that is how we got to this point... We were unbelievers with not even a Mustard Seed's worth of faith.

I walked to the back of the shuttle and sat by a group of NuHumans.
I distracted myself with a piece of literature.

"DO NOT be afraid!" "DO NOT scream or cry." "DO NOT call him a paedophile" it said.

The shuttle departed.

I sighed as I looked out the window watching the city go by.

The city was like an airport. You could have been anywhere in the world. This was GloboHomo in totality. A complete flattening of culture. Irish Pubs staffed with Africans. A Globo-Cosmopolitan's Wet Dream. They could fly anywhere, be anywhere, in any city, and it would all be the same. Everything was one big GloboHomo airport. The GloboHomos were afraid of differences. They were afraid of conflict. Perhaps we all were...

Seeing the statues always raised my cortisol levels. The reminder of who was worshipped. These Post-Modern statues were remnants of the System Pigs. The most detestable anti-humans that ever existed.

I watched the depressing capital city of LetterKenya. All the different Zones... Bel Air for the Africans.
Bel Air.... The most unkempt and rundown state funded mansion estates you could imagine. They didn't care about mowing the grass, or maintaining their mansions or esteemed neighbourhoods. Despite its luxury Bel Air looked worse than where I lived... only by the virtue of the preferences of those who lived in Bel Air.
I remembered a time when LetterKenya was called Letterkenny.

My anger was rising.

I had to think of something calming... the device... I was so close.
You couldn't just make explosives out of kitchen materials anymore. Spectrometers measured every molecule. The device would be innocuous to the scanners.
It was merely a generator of proliferated exothermic reactions.
Something inert and everyday.
A simple chemical reaction.
And then BOOM!

I got the idea from these electric shuttles; they used lithium batteries. On occasion they crashed or malfunctioned.
And if the lithium battery was compromised, a chain reaction of exothermic reactions would occur, incinerating everyone within it, creating an incendiary explosion.
If it didn't kill you immediately, you would wish for death as you burnt in what would feel like Hell for about 47 seconds before you would fall unconscious as you cooked.

I personally believed that the system exploded shuttles periodically as a means for population control, and to ensure refreshed housing stock for more New Africans. It didn't matter if it was killing Africans to make more room for Africans. The recycling and processing of Organic Matter was all that mattered. It was just another feature of WormWorld. And to think we live in these cities to escape the worms....

Schwarzwald was right about everything. But I didn't want to believe it.

....

I arrived near the Lithium fields. It was grueling work but a far cry from the pits.

I scanned the monitors as my made my way down the station terminal. I didn't want to be late for my interview.

"Do you believe in angels?" the red-headed blue-eyed girl asked me.

"Bae Jaysus!" I exploded in surprise.

How was she here? Those outside the system could not use the infrastructure, and also I did not see her on the shuttle... Was she a trick of the system?

"What did you say?" the Eternal HR Woman quizzed me.

"Ehhhh.. Nothing...." I said as I carried on walking.

The Eternal HR Woman coached me, and manipulated my body all the way to the plant. I was a digital marionette on strings. This trip was for interview purposes, so the system provided me no recourse of recreation. In and out; surgical deal.

...

The factory was large and looming, and the lithium fields stretched out into the distance in a hallucinogenic rainbow toxic kind of way. Dead artificial hills surrounding.

I reached the waiting room. There were no camera. It was old. And what's more it had all the lithium batteries I needed.

The interview was a flash in the pan. A momentary nothingness.
A Diversity Panel. Three middle-aged African Women and a Down's Syndrome Jew.

I should have lied about my experience back when we went Digital I.D.
Whatever you put down then became digitized, and therefore truth. We had so many African Doctors, Scientists, and Engineers incapable of even the basics. All because they lied and it became the truth.

And now after all these years, the truth was.. If the system didn't think for us, there would be no one to think.

The interview came and went. I was mostly grilled by the Down Syndrome Jew who "was wasn't" sure of my ability, but eventually the African women won out by completely ignoring me and on-boarding the Down Syndrome Jew into a conversation of what their mid-lunch would be. I just sat there listening, dreaming of such consoomption choices. Oh what a consoomer that lay within me, just waiting to burst out!

I didn't care that it was a time waste, or that the staff would remain 103% African.
I got what I came for. 3 Lithium batteries. I usually smuggled 2 at a time over the years, but I had become thirsty for results. I had snuck them into the hem of my trousers.

I made my way home, feeling every step of the way, like I was being watched. That the system knew I had the batteries hidden in my trousers. I sweated so much. But I made it back to my garage, where I unloaded them into the thermos flask.

5 more batteries and the device would be ready...

I had 13 minutes left. Soon it would be time for online activities. I was about to plug in...

I had the slightest feeling that soon it would be "on" like Donkey Kong.

"Test your might" Schwarzwald had said in a cryptic message mentioning the return of Nemo Zilcho...
It had been 7 years since I had last seen Zilcho. He too had been transfixed on getting to the truth of this city. I thought he had died...
With him returning what did it mean? And returning from where? What was actually outside this city? What was Beyond WorldWorld?

# To Be Continued...

Chapter 1 No Money, No Job, No Life
Chapter 2 Schwarzwald
Chapter 3 Apocalyptic Stare