If you were to walk through the city with your old habits—though avoiding the new ones was not advised—or if, for some reason, the change simply didn’t concern you, the place would likely feel deserted.
No people, no cars, no advertisements or billboards. No shops or restaurants. Perhaps some animals, but we can't say for sure. You’d probably hear noise. And you’d see countless buildings, no longer pretending to be anything but what they were. And you'd likely feel warmer than you used to.
What the sky might look like, we do not know, and sadly, we cannot even imagine it. We never experienced it that way. Today, it's beautiful, of course—full of stars and galaxies you can actually visit.
Such disgrace!
It’s hard these days to be free of obligation, but we try. It was a blessing that the visual art databases were launched early on. Otherwise, we would probably be hopelessly lost in it all now. Naturally, the richest were the first to take control. Luckily, only for as long as they held power.
Only the strongest and wealthiest religions survived—those that managed to cling to their ideals and quickly sell off their old assets. Now we know: it paid off.
Reality turned out softer, somehow more fluid, than expected. It edged closer to the original idea of a dream—and in some clever marketing strategies, it even surpassed it. But the dream went in a different direction. It wasn’t so easy to change. At first, we didn’t know where the boundaries were, but in time, we learned to recognize them.
Still, today, rest is not something people really get—at least, not the way you once could. Things are always running, full throttle—and there’s plenty of it! The number of entities trading on the dominant platform keeps rising.
You’d probably call our condition the end of days, and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
Time has vanished.
It brought plenty of problems, but as it turns out, we were prepared—well, many of us were. The others mostly went mad. They refused to accept the new rules. They denied the final death. And now they live, die, and are born again forever, in the wasteland.
by &
2011