Realities?

The following is a work of fiction... a statement of potentials, and perhaps a caricature. I leave it for you to decide, reader, in a world filled with fear.

For the greater good: By Triedbyconscience.

The human race is dying. Sure, there are more of us than ever before, and we breed just as fervently as ever... but we are dying. Islands of sanity become more and more rare, acts of kindness and conscience, forgotten. In the daily news, story after story of rape, murder, and torture abound.. but do we ever see it anymore?

After a while, the eyes close, the heart hardens. Too many twists on the heartstrings, and they break. The part of the human race that dies is not the biological, but the spirit. We have no hope, only the momentary passions and fears, the hatred and greed.

The greed keeps us alive. The passions keep us from extinction, but are we truly human anymore?

A click of a pebble. I pulled out my pistol, looking toward the yard nearby. It was only a twig, fallen into the dirt. A twig fluttering with dead leaves. At least they weren't here, yet. It was only a matter of time.

I returned to writing, the computer shielded carefully in aFaraday cage made of old tin cans, and scavenged copper. I had disabled the ports I knew of, but... I hadn't survived this long by being so uncautious as to think I knew all. Even here, under the old concrete of an abandoned, burned-out service station, I could not afford to be complacent. They were watching.

"But what is greed?" I wrote "without hope? How did we get here in the first place, what led us to... death in life? The controls bound upon us, what happened to us? The only light in the universe that we knew of, blessed to life by some creator, in the old stories... yes, creator, I write this. Mock as you will, you have given up the reason for your creation."

Perhaps I am mad. I talk to my computer more than people. People are unsafe, they are dangerous. They would turn you in, in a moment, to get an instant away from their drudgery. Writing itself is forbidden for the most part. Reports and statistics are all that is printed, save for GovPress.

"You mock god.. I mock godlessness. To be free from god, you choose to abandon the idea of god, but in that abandoment, you have given up your freedom. If rights are not given by god, they are taken by man. They become privileges, writ in pencil to be erased at a stroke. They become empty ashes of promises, lost in the wind.

We talked once about freedom. We talked about a world where we could walk down the street, whenever we wished. Now our schedules are written as prescriptions by the government, for our own good, to follow them. After a time we came to accept this. Subversive ideas were dangerous, and so we burned the books. After a generation few remembered the history. The govcasts were history. It had always been thus, according to them, the beneficial government guarding and guiding the people, and if the conditions were brutal, it was the fault of the people for not working harder.

Pah. I spit on their kindness. Kind enough of them to provide cradle to grave, and if you refuse to eat of their provisions and poisons, you committed to being their flesh. After all, the medical service had to harvest spare organs from somewhere... and nobody would miss the subversives that might take away their dole.

But again I digress. How did we get here? With all the best of intentions, I believe. I found old books in abandoned caverns. I am not sure what happened to the people, why they hid them and never returned. I left them locked there. Perhaps someone else might find them, and know the damnation to which we're exposed.

The valley below me is full of smoke. That's true of everywhere anymore, the actinic scents of lightning and fire, the scents of the burning. Why care about the environment when your number could come up in either lottery tomorrow?

Why educate yourself, when it counted against your dole? When you had to work harder to maintain even the standard of living? Thence came the Wolves... people on the outskirts of society. Refusing both the dole and the lotteries, the Wolves were outlaws. They hunted the last of those down long ago.

Now we have the regressives... like me. People who educate themselves outside of the System. But are we regressive? Are we Wolves? Or are the Wolves those who feed upon the sheep that live in the society?

Long ago, there was a group. The name of the group isn't important, and wouldn't have any meaning today. Their crimes have become impossible. Nobody would care about them, when the thrill of watching someone fry for becoming rich due to the lottery has become boring. Sex and sex offenses... how long ago was that morality? The hysteria?

It made a good tool, though, for those in control, those 'politicians'. In the name of protecting the people, they isolated them, segregated them.. and nobody cared. They were just those offenders. They were all guilty of horrific crimes, they knew. They'd always do it again, and were a drain on society in general.

But were they really? Historical records indicate otherwise. Yes, some did horrible things, some offended, some reoffended... but the waste, the hysteria, the drain on society.. was from their politics in how to deal with them.

Left alone, I imagine some would have ended up in the prisons. A prison is... well, we call them work camps today. Imagine a work camp, though, where someday you could leave. Yes, I know, hard to imagine. Even know my soul is repulsed by the thought of meeting such a person after a work camp. The psychic scars are evident, even on my soul, when I'd at best be labeled a subversive, and burned on evening 'cast.

We didn't always have two hours required watching per day of executions. We didn't have the harvest shown, to get our dole. And we didn't always feel the anger that a person did something so foul that even their organs shouldn't be harvested.

No... that came into being fairly recently... two generations. I met an old timer hiding once. We talked for a long time. Even now it's hard for me to accept what he said, the StatePol programmed me very well.

Once there was blue skies. Once there were parks, and places for children to play, rather than creches they lived with their bio-parents. And the barbarism, they had guns, and used them. Sometimes on each other, sometimes on paper targets, sometimes on animals... but what a gift they had. Those weapons were the key to their freedom.

When the Sex Offenders became more vocal, the politicians became more aggressive in trying to silence them. When the restrictions reached a certain point, the offenders could no longer be ignored. It seemed that even the 'lowest of the low' had their limits in how far they would be pushed down, and they pushed back. They filed redresses, 'law suits' which were some kind of renumeration for inuries, and even attempted to enter the temple of these politicians, and show them where they were wrong...

It seems this angered the politicians, and they restricted them farther, pushed them into a creche, and ultimately, extended the registry to all. Yes, the citizen's registry came from a crime. We are probably more guilty in this than anyone in the work camps.

The hysteria was strong, the fear stronger. The politicians managed to whip up the people in hate against the offenders, and... *sighs* Even now, my brain says thanks to StatePol that they were right. Even when I know the truth. The truth is that they were normal citizens, in some cases. They were caught in wrongdoing, yes, but they were people. Some even had committed no crime at all, others henous crimes, and some recommitted horrific crimes. StatePol wants me to say that those who committed horrific crimes deserved what happened, and so did the others for having simply been associated with them, but... it wasn't always so."

A soft beep. Time to move. I closed my case, and nodded, looking around, and mounted my cycle. No, I didn't have the locator on it as required by law. I didn't have much of anything on it, that was detectible. The computer took care of all of that. I'd built the controls out of scrap. It would run father, on less power, for far longer than the originals, and even the police rigs. So much power was used for those tracking systems.

Better, it gave less signature to track. I dropped a package and moved out on the cycle, the hoverunit giving the softest hum under its Faraday's cage. Behind me I seemed to still be there, engrossed in my work. Hopefully the package would convince them. Hopefully.

With trepidation I activated the stealth field generator. It too was cobbled together from police parts. Yes, I'm such a regressive. Perhaps.. no. I won't go back to you people. I had come too far for that. There it was... a hiss and a streak of light, a crack. The building went up with an explosion. The StatePol would be here soon. I'd have to hide before that. An old tunnel was hidden nearby. I'd have to be careful to remain under the speed of sound. There was the first copter flying in. I flew a lot lower to avoid it, but higher than the laserlines down on the ridge.

There it was... an outcropping of rock. I shouldn't leave it, but... it was good sometimes to pretend I was free. I plummeted toward the rock, instincts screaming to pull up and away.. then through. The system recognized me, and closed the door behind me with real rock. Someday, I imaigne, they'll find me here... but I hope that day is a long time down the road. I have to commit an act.. an act so shocking that people will break their programming.

I sat down in the dark, and waited. The glow of the screen was dimmed by the cage over it, but even here I didn't dare remove it. The earth should nullify any signals, but how do you trust something made by StatePol?

I started to write again. "Yes, these politicians gave themselves the ability to lie to the people. The ability to look out and suspect each and every person. The people demanded more protection, they received mroe fear. And so was born, eventually, StatePol. State Politics, my friends.. came from the ruling elite grabbing police power. They were not granted it, they took it. In spite of what their programming wants me to believe, they did not, under their own rules, have the power to do so. They convinced the foolish, damned, gullible people to give it to them for their protection, even though they had convinced the other politiicans that the people deserved no protection.

Is it any wonder, as these people signed away their own rights, that they became ever more desperate for protection?

And now we live in a 'protected' world... where there are no rights, no joys, no hope... just more days of drudgery. When for being outside, we can be executed for increasing StatePol's health cost, when for having unprescribed sex we can be castrated. When for having a family, we can be executed. We're so much safer, aren't we? Aren't we?

So much safer, and so much more dead. StatePol.. safety from cradle to grave. They determine the cradle, and they determine the time of death. The whole planet is a prison now. We're all criminals under the eyes of StatePol, and nothing is safe.