I am coming to you from a high atop your city skyline, in a fortified bunker I’ve dubbed Radial Matrix Tower for reasons I wish not to disclose. This is a dispatch from the future.
I have to admit, first, that I’m lucky to be here at all. The journey to this discrete location is long and arduous. I do it because I feel a compulsion to speak, to yell even, into this microphone and regale you with the latest news you won’t hear from official sources. I also do it because it’s the only time that I get to venture out and cross various zones. It can be dangerous, of course. People without the right credentials or who don’t know the right people haven’t been able to legally cross zones since the last Freedom Council mobility bill was enacted into law. Not that anyone was eager to be outside anyway. I do it mostly for you. It’s the curiosity in me that gets me going most mornings. I push through the restricted areas with my wit and guile because I think it’s important for you to know the truth. I’m the messenger and probably the sacrificial lamb that will necessarily fall on the sword when I’ve stopped serving any purpose.
Which brings me to the topic of today’s dispatch. I want you to know what’s going on inside each of those zones. We can all “travel” through the finest interconnected digital network the world has yet to muster, provided of course by our benevolent and all-seeing benefactors and their partners within the Council. We may “experience” different cultures and foods without any real effort, within the confines of our homes, firmly in control and safe from the chaos that manifests when we give up even a bit of control. Maybe that’s fine in the aggregate. Maybe that’s enough for many. I’ve learned the antiseptic version of things we all experience in the synthetic dreamscapes are very different from the real McCoy, as they used to say on an entertainment stream I used to enjoy before I learned it was a copy of something made many years before and warmed over for us to savor over and over again. Knowing it was a copy of a copy of a thing ruined the connection I felt with the entertainment. It cheapened the effect. It made me feel like the kind of easy mark who loses themselves in the rhythms of a pleasant conversation only to find out they’ve lost the shirt off their back to a cheeky salesman with a cure for every ailment and ready answer to all of life’s most profound questions.
At first everyone thought the zonal restrictions were meant to maintain order, limit communities based on a variety of social and physical affinities, and even to “maintain an elevated level of security” – whatever that means. The phrase feels more like a justification for impeding freedom than enabling it, but that’s a story another dispatch. People debated these limits in virtual chatrooms back when they thought they were anonymous in the dreamscapes. I observed those discussions as an outsider looking in. There was always a few people on the extreme margins of the conversation, holding strong opinions about nefarious plots and weird coincidences, while the majority agreed, but much more timidly, and without making any overt connection between disparate events. They could see the unintended consequences of atomization, bunkering down within homes inside of communities inside of homogenous zones, as a trade-off for greater security without fully understanding what it was they were meant to be afraid of to begin with. It was a host of people and things and places that together amounted to a steaming pile of nothing. Conversations that went on for days and never reached a definitive conclusion. All noise and no signal.
I’ve seen some of it with my own eyes and it’s not easy to summarize. There is no central throughline or narrative to it all. The zones are too different for that. I’ve seen zones where lush green lawns, manicured to perfection, run up to pristine homes and people who’ve locked themselves indoors out of fear of an amorphous other. Places where white picket fences and two well maintained vehicles we’ve learned about in entertainment streams and dreamscapes somehow exist in reality without a sign of use nor maintenance. There is a zone that is nothing more than a blank canvas – empty roads, dotted yellow lines leading through fields of dying plants, past abandoned towns, and nary a soul to be seen. The zone just outside my window is a cauldron of activity and checkpoints enforced at the end of guns and people in faceless helmets. People who are transported into gleaming towers and guard posts from other zones through some wrinkle in the fabric that remains secret to everyone they encounter. What do the guards look like behind those helmets? Where do they sleep at night? They protect the presumably inhabited high rises that, I think, are the hub of the zones I’ve come to know, and probably home to the benevolent benefactors and governing Council, though I have to admit I’ve never seen anyone in the buildings the guards keep so secure. In calmer, nearby zones you can make out the silhouettes of inhabitants huddled around digital fireplaces and entertainment pods. The only thing any of the zones have in common is how they feel when I’m in any of those places. I always feel like an outsider looking in, trying to make sense of systems of order so different from each other but in the end perfectly the same. Everyone is disdainful of anyone they don’t know. Anyone that appears to not belong. Anyone that appears to come from somewhere else. There is a logic to how they all work and if you asked someone, anyone, to describe what it is they’d be unable to pinpoint it or even describe it in concise words. It’s a logic engrained through practice and repetition. Sometimes they appear to be organized in unison against another, neighboring zone.
What I don’t find, surprisingly, are overt acts of violence. Maybe the structure prevents it. We see it so much in our entertainment streams that I grew up believing it was everywhere around us, maybe lurking, maybe manifested where one zone abuts against the next. It makes me wonder which zone produces the content we obsess over and why we love it so much.
The more I learn about the zones and the people who live there, the more I’m confronted with my the knowledge that I know next to nothing.
GLAZ 