Chapter One
The day was again overcast. The marine layer hovered over William as he rode the YST wagon to the heart of the tourist district in Old Town, San Diego. His fellow passengers had their noses in their video screen visors that covered their faces like helmets from the Middle Ages. “Knights in white satin,” William whispered to himself from a lyric he was hearing on the audio channels coming from the buds inside his ears. He preferred audio over video because it gave him a background soundtrack for his seditious thoughts. He was also able to see his brothers and sisters with much more clarity. William was turning 40 in three days, and he knew what was in store for him, but unlike all of these other digital monkeys, he didn’t trust a single word that came from Big Bro’s mouth.
Inside his Youth Socialist Hostel on Congress Street, it smelled of boiled ramen and yoga mats. At one end of the ranch-style building, at the end of the hallway, a huge hologram vibrated in 16,777,216 bytes of color. It was the gargantuan portrait of a man of about twenty-five, with a blond beard and ruggedly handsome features. William headed for his cubicle domicile four doors down the hall. The rest of the building was dark, as it was part of the “Put Nature First” drive to limit energy use. Of course, that didn’t prevent the infrared spy cameras from being used in every building, in every city around the world, William thought, limping inside his sparse apartment. His soccer knee was acting up again, and he took some pride at having injured himself playing one of the banned sports. On each wall of every apartment, the same hologram gazed at you, and the eyes followed you as you moved about. The voice from the poster rang out, and it could never be switched-off to save energy or to prevent global weather changes. BIG BRO IS MINDFUL OF YOU, the voice said, in a deep bass vibrato.
Behind his simple cot and clothes dresser, the wall display was broadcasting the party’s 24-hour news. It was showing the latest in digital gadgets from the party headquarters in downtown San Diego and how “mindful brothers and sisters were using the entertainment visors and meditation videos of Big Bro to reach new heights of sensory bliss.” Unless you’ve reached 40. Then, bliss might as well be taking a piss off Big Bro’s nose, William thought, remembering the gigantic statue of their beloved leader out in Balboa Park, next to the old statue of El Cid on horseback. William watched his own reflection in the monitor. He was a thin brother with a curly-black goatee and black racial features. Wide, flat nose with flaring nostrils, full pink lips and pink palms reflected back at him in the mirror image. William’s mother, Rose, who had Lewy Body Dementia, thought that mirrors led to another world. Just like Alice in Wonderland. “There are no races or categories of discrimination,” William smiled and spoke out loud to the spy monitor from Big Bro’s propaganda. We only discriminate against you as you get older, he thought. “Forty is the new twenty,” he spoke at the screen. Forty puts you on automatic Anomic Suicide watch, he thought.
Outside, the world looked cold. In the best equatorial spot on the Earth, the temperatures hadn’t reached 80 degrees in over ten years. Devil winds were swirling tourist trash into spirals in front of William as he walked toward his place of employment. These were the microcosmic versions of the giant tornadoes, hurricanes and tsunamis that kept the world on guard throughout the year. The oceans had risen to create new waterfront properties on every continent, and William could see the breakers coming into shore from the Pacific about two blocks away. The bearded bro stared down at you from every street corner, and he was the only color in this frigid world of dark shadows. The hologram on the building across the street was looking right at him and broadcasting: BIG BRO IS MINDING YOU, the voice said, as the image’s dark eyes looked deep into William’s own. Down in the street, another poster, this one of paper, was whipping along in the wind, and William could see the letters YSW across the blue-green image of the world. In the far distance, a drone hovered and then darted, like a dragonfly, between the low hacienda-type tourist traps. They were protecting the inner party members, those aged 1-39, who took in the sights and sounds of old San Diego, completely protected by the drones, which could call in an air strike or a “droid doom boom” in seconds, to disperse an unruly mob or individual. The drone patrols didn’t matter, however. Only the Mindfulness Droid Protectors, or MDP, mattered.
On another building made to resemble a Spanish restaurant, the same YSW news was being broadcast. The screen could transmit and receive simultaneously, and William knew all the spy devices could pick-up even a whisper from a citizen in the street. A young party member of about sixteen walked toward him, accompanied by two females. They were walking amidst the hundreds of tourists who were taking their children on a walking tour of the pseudo-Mexican structures that looked more like Big Bro’s idea of what Hispanic culture was than what it actually had been. The three party members had their telescreen visors over their eyes, and yet the two women were topless and giggling, as the young stud between them masturbated in public to the pornography going on in his private 3D world of illusion. William shook his head in dismay as he passed them.
The world was now broken into pods of control called “Mindful Metro Campuses,” and William was serving in the southern quadrant of what used be known as North America. The cities kept their names, and there were vague attempts at cultural identification, as it was in Old Town, but there was no longer any central government other than Big Bro and the Young Socialists World Party. After the War on Terror was declared victorious by the bands of millions of unemployed youth across the globe, in what was believed to be 2028, a new vision for the future was declared, and there was a unique coming together of computer and android technology and the vision of a powerful youth, who decided to snatch the wealth of their more primitive elders and construct a new world order. Religions were banned for the good of the libertarian principles espoused by the new party, and so were any sports, recreation, business or other human endeavor that seemed to promote any kind of collective values or principles other than what Big Bro was declaring as “the only path out of the chaos and militant fear that was our past.”
Up ahead stood the tall skyscraper—the only one allowed—of the Young Socialists’ Ministry of Mindfulness. This was where William worked, and it was also broadcasting the libertarian message of the party, in ten-foot letters, running every ten seconds across the huge digital banner in front of the building:
WAR IS IN THE PAST
FREEDOM IS ALWAYS TODAY
IGNORANCE IS IN WRITTEN HISTORY
The Ministry of Mindfulness contained four thousand rooms above ground and corresponding fortresses below. Scattered about San Diego, as in every other major metropolitan city in the world, were just three other buildings of the same appearance and size. They were the giants in the land of Lilliputian structures and hostels, and they were the only buildings allowed to be constructed above one story tall. These were the skyscrapers that housed the complete apparatus of government for Big Bro’s Young Socialist World Party. The Ministry of Mindfulness, which controlled news, entertainment, meditation, education and the fine arts. The Ministry of Visual Reality, which ran the armies of drones and androids. The Ministry of Freedom, which concerned itself with suppressing any rebellions. And the Ministry of Living Bliss, which maintained economic affairs. Their names in Mindfulvoice: Minimind, Miniview, Minifree and Minibliss.
William knew that the Ministry of Freedom was the most frightening and sinister building. It had no windows, and it was kept in complete darkness inside, as everyone who entered was issued infrared gear and goggles to see. It was guarded 24/7 by android guards armed with laser bio-demobilizing rifles that could cause a human head to explode. You could enter and exit only after having been injected with top-secret computer chips from Big Bro’s office inside.
Chapter Two
As he came near the Ministry of Mindfulness, William stopped to go into a small store maintained by one of the few middle-aged shopkeepers allowed to sell anything to younger party members. He had one android helper inside who came up to William when he stepped inside. By coming to work so late, William knew he had missed his chance at a free lunch in the Minimind canteen, but the food there was like eating laundry starch. “May I assist you?” the droid said. “Give me some Mindful Weed,” William told him, “and one of those Big Bro Dogs,” he added, pointing to some revolving wieners inside the microwave hotdog creator. The soy dog was placed on the bun, and given the usual relish, onion and mustard. William bent over the public hookah and took two hits off the marijuana. It was strong, and he coughed, but he felt almost instantly hungry. “Can I use your meditation room?” William asked the proprietor, a short man with an apron and receding hairline. His eyebrows were curling up on the ends, reminding William of his mother’s stories of Mark Twain, the author. “Go ahead, young man,” the man said. “I have to start the Minifree timer, however, as you must be out in an hour.”
Inside the small back room, William turned on the LED lamp in the middle of the table as he munched on his Bro dog and turned on the spy camera deactivator that was issued only to party members who were aged 21-39. It was one of the perks of working for the Ministry of Mindfulness, and William used it for this purpose only. He then took out a black book from his inside coat pocket and opened it. His mother had taught him the craft of written language, which was strictly forbidden by the Ministry of Freedom, and he wrote the letters carefully, in block printing, as script writing had been prevented even in his mother’s time: April 4th, 2050.
William leaned back in the metal chair. He felt completely powerless and doomed. For one thing, he didn’t even know if this was actually 2050. It should be around that time, as his mother said he was 39, and he was born in the year 2013 or 2014. However, since the party had long ago destroyed calendars and any means of recording history, it was never possible these days to figure out what day it was within a year or two. Only the elders, like Rose, when she had her memory, and his father, John, could remember the past, and they were strictly confined to the Geriatric Units run by androids from the Ministry of Mindful Bliss and controlled by the Ministry of Freedom. William also knew that in three days he would be given the surname of his father: Drury. This was the moment chosen by the government to give all citizens a familial identity, as before that date, one was a completely free spirit who was supposedly not owned by any government entity or family unit. His father and mother told William that the slave owners had also given their slaves first names only, or they were forced to keep the owner’s last name, but the slaves gave themselves unique names that only they used. Names such as: Sabe, Anque, Bumbo, Jobah, Quamana, Taynay, and Yearie. These names were used only inside the slave quarters, but it gave them some dignity to have chosen names rather than the assigned names of their owners.
Who the hell will read this diary, anyway? William thought. The future, according to Big Bro, was now. The visual was the only way one could communicate, as books on paper were forbidden, and his words would only be of interest to those who could remember the past. After he reached 40, he knew, the past would become only the bliss of the Eternal Now.
He sat gazing stupidly at his new journal for several minutes, eating up precious time. He knew he wanted to write about his mother and her dementia and about his father and what had happened before. The story he had told himself had been a constant monologue in his mind for years, but now he was dried up. His knee was pulsing with pain under the table, and he didn’t want to be late for work. His mind was also a bit fractured from the hits of weed. He finally pulled out the sheet of paper that his father had written down for him to copy. William had smuggled it out of the Gerontology building four years earlier.
In an instant, he began writing, in panic, only half-aware of what he was putting down for history. His printing went all over the page and came in gasping scrawls. However, he wanted it there, and he wanted there to be some kind of historical record for all to see:
April 4, 2050. My father, John, gave me this story today from his confines in Minibliss Gerontology Unit 62. I want to write it down because these are his words, and he comes from a world of the past that revered stories and the words which recorded the paradoxical nature of the real world before Big Bro even existed. Here goes nothing:
After she read the story I had published in the college literary magazine, she announced to her sorority sisters that she was going to “marry that writer.” Rose took my hand as we stood under the stars after the football game. This was before everything became black and white, so I could still see the yellowish tint of the full moon. Her hair was straightened and black, however, falling through my fingers like the strands of corn silk on my father’s farm in Illinois. The colors were vivid that fall, red-orange leaf flames that whipped through the devil winds as we walked together. Day or night, our hands clasped together, back when it meant something to your heart’s content to be together. We were dumbfounded during those hours on campus, walking to the rhythm of the cicadas, until her brown eyes began darting back and forth, and her Baptist upbringing brought her back to the world.
“I must get back to study,” she would smile up at me at those moments, pursing her lips in preparation for the ritual kiss that our lips knew was coming. As my head moved down to meet those parted pillows of satiny moistness, a thought struck me, and I closed my eyes. Are my lips trained enough to find their way home to her? Is my love stronger than the pitch-black blindness of self-will run riot? I, too, wanted to run back to study my senses in front of a computer screen. The keys stretched under my poised hands like endless rows of QWERTY muscle memories. To reach my bliss, I had to always remember those lips of hers, and then I would plunge down into my subconscious to enter the raging flow of eternal sensation where colors meant nothing, and her body was mine in the dark.
Now. Today, I only leave her to walk outside onto the campus. We worked many years teaching their children how to form competent sentences on the pages of computer screens. As keepers of metaphor and simile, we were their momentary baptism into the world of the senses. Our three unit course called “Poetry and Literature Made Relevant for the Return to Nature” was required for graduation. It was the only chance our students got to study Jackson and her sensuous lottery, Richard Wright and Flannery O’Connor and their psychology of inner phantasms, or Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville and their dark shadows of murderous insanity. But they were not inside books that can be held in the hands. They were inside the scrolling digital distraction that has become the god to us all. There were no more contemporary authors who wrote for the inner world of the senses. No. Never again would these words do their job of reaching deep into the reader’s sensual consciousness to manipulate the telltale heart, or to bathe in the mist of the rising great white whale, or to feel the strike of the first stone on the forehead of the chosen one. This was our job, and it was a brief one. When our students left our classes, they were once more enveloped in the “Mindfulness of the Real Moment,” where literal memory was used as one uses a doorknob to enter another neat office, never again to see it open into a haunted house on a hill or into a damp dungeon whereupon a man was awaiting the slow, slicing downward doom of the pendulum blade, to open his chest and expose the throbbing crimson passion of his own heart. Hearts were to be measured, monitored and strengthened by exercise. Hearts had lost their metaphorical power over minds in the year 2028. The seat of power had made a seismic shift over the years until it was now the digital brain that held sway over all, and all bowed down to its dominant scientific genius.
The edict came down after we had retired from twenty-two years of teaching. Rose had fallen that same day in the middle of the lawn between her classes. It was to be the first fall of many, as she had contracted what we later discovered was Lewy Body Dementia. The edict came out, and I received the following explanation on my phone after Rose was diagnosed by Neurology. These rather dispassionate words were meant to assist me in my adventure living with her from that day forward:
SYMPTOMS EXPLAINED
In this section we’ll discuss each of the symptoms, starting with the key word: dementia. Dementia is a process whereby the person becomes progressively confused. The earliest signs are usually memory problems, changes in their way of speaking, such as forgetting words, and personality problems. Cognitive symptoms of dementia include poor problem solving, difficulty with learning new skills and impaired decision making.
Other causes of dementia should be ruled out first, such as alcoholism, overuse of medication, thyroid or metabolic problems. Strokes can also cause dementia. If these reasons are ruled out then the person is said to have a degenerative dementia. Lewy Body Dementia is second only to Alzheimer’s disease as the most common form of dementia.
Fluctuations in cognition will be noticeable to those who are close to the person with LBD, such as their partner. At times the person will be alert and then suddenly have acute episodes of confusion. These may last hours or days. Because of these fluctuations, it is not uncommon for it to be thought that the person is “faking”. This fluctuation is not related to the well-known “sundowning” of Alzheimer’s. In other words, there is no specific time of day when confusion can be seen to occur.
Hallucinations are usually, but not always, visual and often are more pronounced when the person is most confused. They are not necessarily frightening to the person. Other modalities of hallucinations include sound, taste, smell, and touch.
Parkinsonism or Parkinson’s Disease symptoms, take the form of changes in gait; the person may shuffle or walk stiffly. There may also be frequent falls. Body stiffness in the arms or legs, or tremors may also occur. Parkinson’s mask (blank stare, emotionless look on face), stooped posture, drooling and runny nose may be present.
REM Sleep Behavior Disorder (RBD) is often noted in persons with Lewy Body Dementia. During periods of REM sleep, the person will move, gesture and/or speak. There may be more pronounced confusion between the dream and waking reality when the person awakens. RBD may actually be the earliest symptom of LBD in some patients, and is now considered a significant risk factor for developing LBD. (One recent study found that nearly two-thirds of patients diagnosed with RBD developed degenerative brain diseases, including Lewy Body Dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple system atrophy, after an average of 11 years of receiving an RBD diagnosis. All three diseases are called synucleinopathies, due to the presence of a mis-folded protein in the brain called alpha-synuclein.)
SYMPTOMS EXPLAINED AFTER THE EDICT
Every person over the age of 65 now sees things in black and white. It is “understood” by the ruling youth party, the Young Democratic Socialists, that this is the most humane way to allow the elderly to adjust to the coming darkness of dementia, forgetfulness and decreasing energy caused by the depletion of dopamine and the crucial brain chemical acetylcholine.
My granddaughter, Esther, explained it to me one day while watching an old movie on her tablet. “Grandpa, you see old movies now, don’t you? Is this why old people see only in black and white?”
Of course, I couldn’t tell my granddaughter the truth. We elderly were being kicked to the side of life’s road because we were getting in the way. Society had become a limitless range of physical experiences that required all one’s senses in the REAL MOMENT. The state religion said so. There were no old religions that I could remember like Judaism, Islam, Buddhism or even my wife’s Christianity. The only allowed religion, after the world’s war on terror, was the secular religion of “Mindfulness.”
When Mindfulness first became popular, my wife was already beginning to be a pariah to the new youth society. She could no longer work her computer or teach her students. She had fallen that morning in the bathroom and broken her hip, and there was to be no more walking for Rose. I tried to explain the image of the Mindful to her, but her mind was too confused to process it. The fluffy mats extended for acres across the field of green grass, as the edict had not come into effect, and we were only 61. The figures of healthy young bodies in yoga tops and pants were in the meditative positions of the present. Some were in full lotus, others were simply on their backs, staring up into the clouds overhead. But, it was definitely visible to me that their diaphragms were moving, in and out, like bellows. Over the loudspeaker, came the voice of the guru:
BREATHE IN THE UNIVERSE, BREATHE OUT THE UNIVERSE. CONCENTRATE ON YOUR BREATH. KEEP CENTERED ON THE NOW, AS THERE IS NO OTHER REALITY ANYWHERE. NO TRANSIENT THOUGHTS. BANISH THEM LIKE THE FOUL, WRETCHED INTERLOPERS THEY ARE! YOU ARE CLEAN, PURE AND HEALTHY MESSENGERS OF FREEDOM. YOUR PRESENCE IS REAL, AND YOUR HEALTHY LIFE IS PRESENT IN ALL WE TOUCH, TASTE, SMELL AND VIEW. GOODNESS SURROUNDS YOU, AND GOODNESS IS WITHIN YOU. FOREVER IS NOW!
I stumbled over to the bed and looked down at my wife. Her eyes were wide, and she mumbled, “Help me, John. I might fall off.” Rose was in the exact center of the bed, but her mind told her she was on the edge. Who does one trust? When does one stop trusting one’s own mind? I am constantly telling her she has a disease that makes her mind tell her things that aren’t real, but I also know that’s my job. I attempt to convince readers that my fictions are real. I realize she needs my mindfulness right now more than any mindfulness that’s outside our home in that youth culture all around us.
I survive only as long as I can write the non-fiction stories they love, and teach them about how wonderful they are. They understand I am over the edge, at 65, and yet I am a bit of a darling to the Young Socialists. I suppose I’m rather like the pet Jews that were kept by the commandants of concentration camps in order to show to themselves they weren’t really monsters after all. But I am an atheist, and I believe only in the senses. I perform my daily routine while the personal care android assists my wife in her routine. This is the only reality I know. There are no future convergences with the Cosmic Whole. There are no heaven or hell or even a purgatory, and there are certainly no religious beliefs worth dying for. The culture of youth stopped all of that. All is now programmed to affect the peaceful presence of the Eternal Now.
It is now night, and I am going to attend to the only duty that makes me an anathema to the world’s youth. I am going to write my Report to the Artists. This is the only network communication that is allowed to be written in the “manner of the sensual lies,” which was the method of artistic expression before our world changed into what it is today. My son, William, heir to my name, today works for the Ministry of Mindfulness, and this fact allows me the freedom to create my stories to other artists.
Rose is sleeping, and her wondrous lips bid me farewell as she mumbles her RBD dreams. I kiss them, and I can see a smile form, like the rising of the full moon, and I am again yearning for the only sanity I have left.
As I walk toward my little room down the hall of our campus unit, I wait for my gait to become impeded. If I fall, if I hit my head, if my hip is shattered, I will be rushed like all of the rest to the local Emergency Room. Although medical care is now free to all, it has become biased toward youth. There are, of course, the duplicants, the androids, the ones who keep the world at peace each day. Without them, the culture of youth would not be allowed to flourish and prosper. The expense of repairing the elderly has become a burden to the world’s economy. We are no longer part of the medical android programming, except for patching us up and sending us on our way. Wisdom is no longer the province of the old. Instead, all that is good and sensuous is to be lived in the present moment and not in the heads of some old storytellers like me. Analysis and android workers are meant to keep the young strong and to keep the old moving forward to their inevitable doom.
I am one of the tokens left over from the past. I am the keeper of “fiction.” There is no word like that anymore. Once, when I was young, the world allowed the stories to be told at deeper levels than on the screen. In our books, we could experience the moment-by-moment sensual present as a masterful invention by authors. Today, my Blog of Sensual Lies is visited by those who are old, like me, and we share in my memories and in my fears. We are allowed to do this because the culture of youth no longer fears our power over the senses. Books long ago became relics from the Age of Fear, when history was manipulated by writers, and entertainment could be found in the intimate dance between writer and his reader. I can’t remember the day fiction books were banned because when I turned 65, I was given the implant that all the elderly must receive.
As I entered the darkened room, my study, I could see the screen once more. It was bold and white, opened to the word processing software from the bygone years when my stories meant something to me and to my readers. Today, my words were simply anachronistic writhing on the page sent out from my academic unit to soothe the tired minds of a dying breed: the artists. I have only 623 subscribers to my blog. I have never met a single one. They visit my virtual world only because they can, like me, remember those days when writers, visual artists and even poets, produced singular works that were theirs alone, and these sensually provocative creations were shared, or published, to others inside book stores, libraries, art galleries and over the Internet. The youth culture and the Mindful World of the Eternal Now have banished us to this tiny island of reality. My screen beckoned me, and I sat down again to create and to listen.
November 20, 2028, San Diego.
I sat inside the student center today and listened. The clicking of keyboards, the words of half-conversations, the chanting and breathing of those in meditation. There was no story there because my senses were in the real moment, the moment in my mind. This was like the moments I dreaded on the farm, back when farms were still places to manage and to provide for a family.
Rose stands beside the gate, posing for a picture. I brought her home from college to meet my parents. My father holds the digital camera in his big hands, and my mother is whispering to him. Rose was a city girl and a Baptist, and my mother’s mouth moved in rapid undulations, and I knew she didn’t like my new wife. I moved over to stand beside them as we watched Rose standing in front of the milk cows, looking behind her every five seconds to see what the cows were doing. Rose was not the picture of a farm girl. Mother’s smile broke out like a nervous reaction to the poisonous words she was whispering. ‘She’s a princess. A libertine. She’ll never make a good mother with her liberal attitudes and her literary snobbery.’
When the war on terror ended, in 2028, my mother, Janice, embraced the new youth party with enthusiasm. She sat around all day in the shade of our big oak tree, riding the creaking swing on the big branch, as the new androids rushed around doing all the chores on her farm. A week after the androids took over, my father, Gerald, was found inside the barn swinging below the entrance to the hayloft. Rudy, our farm hand, told me later that he found a book next to the milking stool my father used to push off from. It was a novel by Thomas Hardy called Far from the Madding Crowd. My father had always identified with the character of Gabriel, the shepherd. The cows were his sheep. “When Mr. Gerry saw that android herd his cows into the milking stalls, his face looked like the time you fell out of the oak tree and broke your leg. After the android hooked them up to the new high-speed WiFi milking machines, Mr. Gerry walked down the rows of cows and unhooked each of the titanium vacuums from the teats. He kept yelling, ‘Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, free at last!’ After the big android started up again the next day, with new programming to prevent Mr. Gerry from getting in the way, Mr. Gerry had declared all-out war. He had a big scythe from the loft in his hands, and when the android turned on the WiFi to send the titanium vacuums out like snakes to find the teats of those cows, your papa began swinging. But the android was fast, and it was strong. It blasted a big net that shot out from its metallic body and covered Mr. Gerry’s full human body. He looked like a fly in a spider web. When the milking was done, Mr. Gerry was still sobbing under that net on the floor of the barn. After the android left, I took the net off of him, and he stood up. He picked out all the hay from his hair and beard, and he stood straight as a lightning rod. ‘The new sheepdog has run my cattle over the cliff and into the sea,’ he said, and the next morning, I found him hanging in the barn when I was bringing in the cattle to be milked.”
PICKING QUARRELS AND PROVOKING TROUBLE! THIS WEBSITE IN VIOLATION OF YDS CODE 4628-25.
When I saw these words flash onto my screen, I stood up and tried to run to the door. Down the hall I heard the door open. The telltale whir and whoosh. The two android guards burst into my den and grabbed onto my arms. They were black and white, of course, but my memory gave me an inside picture of Darth Vader’s black, wheezing form instead of the moment-to-moment reality of the lithe, titanium bodies of the two guards. I could hear their humming processors, and I could feel the pressure of the hand of one of them as it came up behind my head. The puncture was like the diabetic injection I gave Rose twice daily. When the drug entered my system, I became attuned to the present, and my artist’s emotional reality became lost in the Eternal Now.
THE CLASSROOM LESSON
The Guru of the Present Moment turned to the class. He was waving a scanner over the prone body of Professor John Drury, who had the blank stare of dementia so often seen in victims of old age. Old Professor Drury had recently taught the antiquated class “Poetry and Literature Made Relevant for the Return to Nature,” which had now been exorcised from the curricula.
The new teacher was an android of the latest design, and it almost looked human, with its pink flesh, arching eyebrows and smoothly dignified gestures. But, if one looked carefully, the eyes gave its reality away. The pupils were blinking, off and on, with a pulsating rhythm of an inner perfection not known to humankind.
The voice of the guru sounded authentically human, and his slight British inflection made the students pay attention because it was just like the voice of the new reality show host, Prince Hal, who could speak in every language of the globe and could dance every dance popular over the Youth Wide World Jam Time Music Network.
“Learn to turn to each person as the most sacred person on Earth, to each moment as the most sacred moment that has ever been given to us. Then perhaps we are awake a bit more, perhaps breathing together with God.”
This was the oath of every health worker in the YDS from the new Ministry of Mindful Bliss. It was recited every time a new elder was being transitioned into the care of the android nurses in the Gerontology units.
These androids were managed by the students in this class, and Professor Drury was there as a demonstration of what humane care for the elderly should be like within these compounds. As the voice of the guru droned on in objective and analytical preciseness, the mind of the good professor was taking off on its own.
Up into the black and white room, his mind rose, over the heads of these human computers, through the walls that could not contain his spirit. The spirit of the mind of an artist was not bound by any science, formula or algorithm.
Above the campus, he looked down. The rows of buildings, perfectly lined and ordered, the fields of athletic youth playing for the joy of competition and not for the harsh preparations for war. It was very beautiful to him, and he smiled down on them. The chaos of his life had disappeared with the transitional surgery, and he was now ready for the final release.
But, breaking through this paradise came those same lips. She was down there, in one of the buildings, calling out his name, ‘John! I’m falling! Please! Help me!’
Down he sped, toward the glowing white-hot light inside the building at the end of the row. Rose’s lips parted, and she was speaking to him. The voice came from a spirit world that was perhaps destroyed on their level, but this new level of the unconscious was slowly taking form inside her brain.
When their lips met, their daughter, Ruth, was giving birth to their granddaughter, Esther. Then Esther was walking, parading before the adults with her tablet, working on a secret code to be used as she grew to be a young child and then an adult. The code was formulated perfectly, and it was a virus that would soon be inside every digital network in the world, releasing the masses from the prisons of perfection they had created, and leaving on their screens a message that had bound her grandparents, John and Rose, together inside the world of sensual imagination:
‘There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe.’
Their lips met, the virus became live, and the colors rushed in. All the world’s youth, one by one, broke free from their self-imposed chains to live once more, openly, in chaotic joy and sensuous wonder. They ran to the elderly and the infirm to release them and to listen quietly for the stories to begin once more, in the darkness of evening, before sleep overtook them again.
The Guru of the Present Moment spoke again to his students, “Hallucinations are usually, but not always, visual and often are more pronounced when the person is most confused. They are not necessarily frightening to the person. Other modalities of hallucinations include sound, taste, smell, and touch. We try to make them as physically comfortable as possible while they are going through this mental agony.”
William stopped writing because his hand was cramping, but his story was completed. He tore his father’s writing into small pieces and shoved them inside his mouth. As he chewed, he could feel the time ticking down, and he knew he must get to work. He swallowed, with some effort, and tucked his black diary back inside his coat pocket. The buzzer ending his hour sounded, and he left the room.
Chapter Three
William arrived on the fifteenth floor of the Ministry of Mindfulness at eleven hundred. He worked in the Department of Visual Reality Recordings, and all of his colleagues were dragging metal chairs outside in the hall to face the wide digital screen on the wall at the end of it. They were preparing for the Mindfulness Meditation. William took his place in one of the center rows. As he adjusted the back of his injured knee on the metal seat, he saw two people he knew by sight but had never met personally. One was a young, fierce-looking girl in her late twenties, who worked in the Erotica and Romance Department. He believed she was a computer technician, as he had seen her with USB drives on several occasions. He knew that these trashy video stories were created by computer, as all the plots were the same, and the programmed details were inserted into the visuals as one would assemble a Big Bro hotdog. The youth gobbled these stories up like hotdogs, however, and they kept them entertained because they were also infused with accompanying music and audio soundtracks. She wore the red skirt of the Youthful Sensual Bliss Alliance, so she was most likely one of the staunch adherents to the Party of Big Bro. Her black hair was naturally frizzy, and the freckles on her chocolate cocoa butter face made her look like a country girl from William’s birth state of Illinois. However, she had once given him such a cold and piercingly dreadful stare in the hallway that he had thought she might be one of the latest Mindfulness Droid Protectors sent to spy on them by the Ministry of Freedom.
The other person was a man called Thornton, a member of the Founding Youth Party, who held a post that was so important that William had only a vague idea of what it might be. He looked about twenty-five, and his face held the quiet confidence of one of the ones who had first formulated the philosophical underpinnings that ruled daily life all over the world. He had the muscular physique of one who did daily workouts in the Big Bro Workout Studio, filled with all kinds of computerized exercise equipment. His face had the blond, look-alike beard of Big Bro that many men in the inner party fashioned for themselves. Thornton also had the habit of whistling the latest popular tunes so well that others would stop in the hall to listen to him. In fact, over the years that William had seen him at work, Thornton seemed somehow more accessible than most inner party members. Perhaps it was his smile and casual manner. Maybe it was the way he intelligently laughed at the stupid ads that come over the news channel. At any rate, Thornton decided to wait with the brothers and sisters in William’s department until the Mindfulness Meditation was completed because he sat in the chair next to William and smiled over at him. The Erotica and Romance girl was sitting right behind them in the same row.
William expected the same ritual procedure in the meditation. It did begin in the usual way, with the figure of Big Bro coming out to sit on his gold yoga mat, center stage. The background was a pale, robin’s egg blue, and their leader seemed his usual tranquil self as he crossed his legs in the full lotus and smiled out at them. The sitar music in the background was playing, and when he spoke, blond beard’s voice had its usual flair for the dramatic. William always thought it sounded more like a voice to sell breakfast cereal than a voice to calm the human mind.
“Brothers and sisters, I want you to breathe deeply and focus upon the infinite moment of the present. Are we not fortunate to have world peace at last, under the guidance of our party, as children are being born into a free society, which gives them opportunities that have never existed before? But before I begin our guided transcendence, I want to warn you all of an underground movement that the Ministry of Freedom has discovered exists in your campus pod of San Diego!
The screen went dark for a moment, and then the face of William’s father, John, appeared, in a full-face close-up. William choked once and began to cough so long and violently that Thornton reached over and patted him on the back several times.
Big Bro spoke over John Drury’s image. “This man, John Alfred Drury, has been used by certain individuals as the focus of rebellion. It seems he wrote a certain printed text called The Insane Call Us Free, which has been circulating throughout our campus for over a week. We want to confiscate any copies that may be in your possession, so there will be a full court press to discover those brothers and sisters who have read this book and who might be aware of its circulation and the copies that are out there. As you know, ever since we came to power to suppress those elderly warmongers who always sent the young out to die for their politically and industrially complex causes, there have been groups that arose to rebel against us. They want to return us to the days when wartime fever gave meaning to them and gave them the anger and fear they needed to send our young into battle! Thanks to our victory in 2028, we no longer have a wartime society. However, this cancerous book must be found and destroyed! Its author was once a collegiate educator who taught our young, and now his secret book is being used to attack us and perhaps raise enough support to mount some kind of counter-revolution. Can we allow this?”
“No! To hell with Dr. Drury and his book!” our unit of brothers and sisters shouted back at the screen.
“We never want to return to this!” said Big Bro, and the screen then filled with videos from the past before 2028. Drone strikes sent Peacekeeper missiles into the homes of villages. Villagers screamed over the bloody bodies lined up by the hundreds and raised their fists to the sky. Kneeing citizens in orange smocks were beheaded out in the town squares, places of religious worship, over television, and inside soccer stadiums. Millions of refugees fled the wars all over the world, dying in rat-infested boats and perishing inside other dangerous vehicles of transport. The insane killings of lone wolf terrorists also filled the screen with horror.
Then, just as quickly, the sounds of waterfalls and sitar music returned, and the calm smile of Big Bro broke wide across the screen. “How can this one man accuse us of being the insane killers? We, who bring peace and brotherhood to the Planet Earth! Let us meditate on the face of this Dr. Drury. Focus on his features and memorize this book and its title. If any brother should mention his name or discuss the contents of this book to you, you must report him or her to the nearest Minifree official.
The rest of the meditation was the constipated sound of “auuuummm” coming from Big Bro and the haggard face of William’s father, Dr. John Drury, staring back at all of them, like some kind of crazy black heretic. As the face returned to Big Bro, the Party slogans once more appeared in bold capitals:
WAR IS IN THE PAST
FREEDOM IS ALWAYS TODAY
IGNORANCE IS IN WRITTEN HISTORY
William stood up at his seat as the lights came back on in the hallway. In three days’ time, he would become William Drury, as his very own Department of Visual Reality Recordings would present the video of his birth, along with the names of his mother and father, to be officially entered into the Ministry of Freedom’s records for the rest of his natural life. And, at that same moment, he would also become one of the most dangerous members of society. As his mind filled with hatred for Big Bro, the Party, and for those secret spies around him, William also began to visualize a new hatred, and he turned around to stare directly into the brown eyes of the frizzy-headed black girl from the Department of Erotica and Romance. He wanted to grab her by the hair and drag her screaming out into the night, out into the tourist traps of Old Town, forcing her to fellate him in public, as he shouted obscenities about how blacks were still being subjected to forced labor and demeaning jobs. He heard his voice inside his mind as he stared hard at those young brown eyes of the enemy: See this young and healthy black woman? She creates the visual pornography that greases the coffers of the Ministry of Living Bliss. Her face is black, and my face is black. Together, with our parents behind us, we serve as the scapegoats to your Big Bro and his lying peaceful coexistence. You thought we brought rape and gang violence to your cities? Well, now you’re going to see what we can do for this peaceful land of the guru pods and frat boy parties! Here comes the rebel forces, and the black history of true freedom shall lead us!
The black woman from Erotica and Romance left the room. However, as he turned back around, he caught the eye of Thornton standing next to him. The big man had been watching him as William had been going through his hate passion. Of course, it had only been in his mind, but still, there must have been some anger showing on his face as he thought his traitorous thoughts and indicted the Party and Big Bro with his venomous accusations. Thornton was smiling at him with recognition, as if to say, “I’m with you!” It was only a transient moment’s glance, and then Thornton turned away from William and began his slow trek back to the upper offices of the inner party.
Later, back inside his hostel room, William was thinking about the day’s events while holding his pen in his right hand. He was using the rest of his privacy spy camera deactivation chips. Party members who worked at the Ministry of Mindfulness were given six chips for the year as a way to claim that they were special people to the inner Party. William’s eyes returned to the page in his diary, and he discovered he had been doing some automatic printing in all caps:
FUCK BIG BRO
FUCK BIG BRO
FUCK BIG BRO
FUCK BIG BRO
FUCK BIG BRO
These words covered almost an entire page, and his mind immediately filled him with fear. It was crazy, as those words were not any more dangerous than when he had first taken the pages from his father inside the gerontology unit. Just for a few seconds, William thought he should tear-up the diary and try to escape San Diego forever before his name became recorded. He realized that this kind of escape was even more insane than his father’s book being written.
Everyone knew how these things went down. Whether he wrote down FUCK BIG BRO, or whether he did not, it made no difference. Whether he continued writing inside his diary or mounted a revolt against the Party, it made no difference. The secret police unit of Mindfulness Droid Protectors, the MDP, would arrest him. He had committed a crime just by being born. His father had told him about the days in the past, when there were the wars, that his people had been condemned by society even if they served to fight the enemy, or did not serve to fight the enemy. More black young men were arrested than any other races, and white citizens ran to other sides of the streets when you were walking down them, and they shot you before you could surrender, and they kept you down until you gave up trying to improve your life. Father had been secluded inside the halls of academia, and yet he still understood the wall of fear and resentment built up around his black community. That same fear had finally returned to the “eternally peaceful now,” as Big Bro phrased it, and Drury was chosen to be the scapegoat for an entire generation of leaders. William now wondered how many in the inner founding party were black. Thornton was certainly not. Perhaps he could find out before it was over and they shot him in the back of the head, just like they did to all the other traitors.
The arrests always come at night—just the way his father told him the white Klansmen had come during the olden days. You were jerked from a sound sleep, the calloused hand grabbed your shirt and yanked you to your feet. They shook you, and their LEDs lit your eyes, the ring of frowning faces circling your bed like vultures around their carrion. His father told him that there was once a law called a “patriot act,” and people of color had also been rounded up to be kept in prison with no trial, just the way the Party did things today. Men were often singled out as world terrorists and shot from drones that hovered above them in the clear skies of many foreign lands. Again, no trials, no arguments, no fuss, and no muss. It seemed, said John Drury that the Party had learned its lessons well from the past and had actually not forgotten these methods of maintaining “freedom” around the world. In today’s system of peacekeeping justice, there was also never any trial for the accused. If you were labeled a terrorist to the State, you instantly became a hunted creature, just like a rogue elephant terrorizing a peaceful village, or a man-eating lion sneaking into a hut by the full moon. In fact, today, there was no report of the arrest. Since you spent most of your life with no surname, it was that much easier to erase you from all records. Your name was removed, every record disappeared, always during the night. For, in the morning, there appeared the great sun of new beginnings in the Eternal Now, beaming out at his family and guiding them in the peaceful morning’s meditations. The State religion was Mindfulness, and William worked for it, and he was now going to be arrested, without a trial, and then become vaporized, abolished or annihilated, although “vaporized” was the most popular term used. William imagined it was because of how efficient the system worked to move its citizens toward death and complete disappearance forever—like the misty vapor of the marine layer over San Diego disappearing with the sun.
William was most afraid of the fact that he knew of no book written by his father entitled The Insane Call Us Free. The only books he knew written by his parents were articles on the great works of literature and the methodology of teaching the youth in the Party. His parents never discussed politics at home, and the only way William had discovered what his father knew about the past was when he turned 65 and was put into the gerontology units. Something had snapped inside, and John Drury began writing down his thoughts and memories on sheets of paper that William had smuggled into him from Minimind. Paper was used on a very limited basis. Only Big Bro approved posters and edicts were written on paper, and William was able to steal some of those sheets for his father to use. Today, with his 40th birthday just three days away, William had decided that he would also begin to write down his observations in a diary.
Perhaps the Party spies had found something William was not aware existed. If his father had indeed written such a book that slandered the Party and its practices, then there must be somebody else assisting him. William’s mind again saw the face of Thornton, and he imagined if there were some inner party official who would do such a thing, he would be the type. The idea itself made William shiver and look back at the news screen on his wall. On the other hand, it was probably more likely the Party had decided to make a scapegoat of his father because of the website he had published for artists. Artistic expression was controlled expressly by the Ministry of Mindfulness, William’s employer, and he had warned his father on several occasions to stop the communications on his blog. His father believed his writings were no threat to the government, and he also believed his favorite status among the young college students would protect him from scrutiny. He was obviously wrong, and now William was to be the next rebel placed on the roster of insurrectionists, unless he could do something to prevent the inevitable arrest.
His door began to vibrate from the pounding fist on its surface. Are they arresting me now? William thought, shoving his opened diary under the mattress on his cot.
This is an excerpt from Life in 2050 (2015).
Edited by Marie Ginga
James Musgrave has been in a Bram Stoker Finalist anthology, and he’s won the First Place Blue Ribbon for Best Historical Mystery, Forevermore, at the Chanticleer International Book Awards. His most recent publication, “Voices,” is in Madame Gray’s Poe-Pourri of Terror, third edition, Hellbound Books. “Bug Motel,” is the first story in the Toilet Zone 3 Horror Anthology, Hellbound Books. "Jasmine," is in the anthology Draw Down the Moon published by Propertius Press. His adult short fiction anthology Valley of the Dogs, Dark Stories, won the Silver Medal at the 2021 Reader's Favorite international contest. Two of his historical mystery series are published through and curated by the American Library Association's Biblioboard.com. He has an MFA from San Diego State. See more at EMRE Publishing