- Prologue - Within the past hundred years or so, crime has significantly decreased. Humanity lives in relative luxury along with the fruits of their scientific efforts. Cyborgs, that is, humans with strong physical relations with the mechanical and electronic world, have become as commonplace as plastic surgery, makeup, and orthodontics were in the early 21st century. Walking through walls, swimming through earth, flying through the air becoming capable. Teleportation has grown the norm, with the planet being connected via a grid of pipes constructed beneath the earth in roughly five square kilometer chunks, an effort requiring decades upon decades of negotiation between nations across political cycles upon elections in an era where gunboat diplomacy has lost much of its meaning or purpose. To compliment this physical connectedness of the planet, the Internet has truly become interconnected wherein there are no great firewalls, there are no closed source works, and everyone has the ability to work alongside one another freely among projects that act to support each person. You could say, certainly, that there are people with strong complaints about the direction society has taken. Privacy has decreased to a point where embarrassment and shame as emotions have declined, according to last year's report on the emotional makeup by percentage of humanity on Earth collected by Pew Research. Really, when you can shape your body to fit any mold you please, what's the point of those emotions? Though naturally there are those who cling onto a need not to let others know what they're up to, what they're thinking, how those in charge or those who might be in charge next could do with this information, what an "other" being able to see can do to the creative mind or thought patterns of someone. When the teleportation grid was created, large tunnels big enough to contain excavating equipment were dug first before laying down the comparatively smaller pipes which would be running human, animal, and object matter and data through them. As for how they don't get mixed up, that's what metadata is for. Within these large tunnels a sect of society has begun to form itself who find themselves with strong convictions against the ideals new technology has brought to the world. Forming underground societies and creating technologies to simulate the life which amenities of the surface such as sunlight bring alongside them, connecting those societies via a corresponding interconnected series of trainlines intended to support debugging any issues that happen to crop up with the teleportation grid. It's not necessarily that this is illegal - everyone is well aware of the existence of these societies. Well aware to such a degree that these underground cities do fall under the same law as aboveground, just that there's a proportional difference in coverage which has to be acknowledged. As much as information might be freely flowing, it's only freely flowing so much as what people choose to share, as much as what people put into it. What infrastructure is constructed to support that collective database of memories and information. The world still has some limitations left in defying and bending the laws of physics, you can't exactly create matter from nothing, thus it remains one of the few scarce resources. - Chapter 1 - Malice - Camera fades in to a hallway shown angled straight with the vanishing point in the center of the image. Nearer to the camera along the walls can be seen boards with various paper and laminated posters and signs hanging on them. Just further down the hallway are windows on either side, light shining through as though to indicate the sun setting, or rising. Along the floor a red line is drawn, light reflects from the floor to form a mirage. There are doors between the signs and the windows where the red line begins. At the end of the hallway is a staircase running upwards, the handrail on the right indicating that it runs clockwise. Muffled chorus can be heard. The muffled chorus becomes clear when the camera shifts to show just over a dozen schoolchildren standing in a circle holding hands together, the clothes of each they are holding hands with corresponding to the opposite gender as theirs. Just over a dozen seconds into the shot everyone raises arms to coincide with a raise in pitch with the song being sung. Cutting first to a period of silence, beeping or clicking as symbols display across the screen, then cutting to a version of the previous song with more instruments than just voices while managing to maintaining the somber, melancholic, maybe nostalgic tone. Three children, young schoolboys on their bicycles riding through narrow winding roads intermittent with white paint indicating points at which to stop before crosswalks. On either side of the road older buildings, despite that vague dilapitation, people being seen walking or riding about. In uniforms going to or from school or work, in casual clothes buying juice or coffee from one of the various vending machines standing in front of a liquor store or ramen shop, or tending to their home. The buildings grow first from more industrial areas, factories, construction sites, the type of equipment associated with such lying around, progressively to a more urban area. In the hands of one of the children is a small bag swinging back and forth. Everyone is riding with a speed as if being chased, it's not obvious by what as it isn't shown. Getting closer to the city, taller buildings, and then a park or forest in the middle right next to these tall buildings, sirens can begin to be heard. The children pull out some sort of handheld device. Upon pressing a button, copies of the three begin to be constructed as if from thin air. There's this essence of how children interact with complex technology in an almost sloppy way that's difficult to emphasize through more than just indicating rough hand movements along with a reaction to the effect which maintains a sensitivity to how unusual it is. Laughing, the conjured figures go in various directions along the street with the original children move over a small concrete railing before rolling down a dirt hill into the forest. Angled from the side, the camera's gaze is interrupted by trees running in front of it and almost if not smearing as though to emphasize the tone. Reaching the bottom of a hill is a sort of shrine, the children reach inside of it. The camera pans upwards to the sky before the sound and image fade to black. - Chapter 2 - Curiosity - The screen cuts from black to the view of a ceiling seen through a layer of grating. The deep humming of large industrial fans can be heard, the contour of a triangular roof's interior as it's supported by beams running from left to right and right to left can be made out. In the distance can be heard footsteps from what must be boots stepping across loosely fixed plates of metal. The sound progressively increases in volume until the image of a construction worker from below, large dark colored rubber boots and baggy clothes, can be seen interrupting the space between the viewer and the ceiling. Then the sound begins to fade out. Cutting again to an image we can identify to be facing directly 180 degrees from the previous shot due to shadows being cast following a nearly identical shape to the grate we just saw alongside a difference in how objects rest according to their gravity, now of a young woman, slobbering over herself and moaning unintelligibly with an excited feverish look in her eyes. Interrupting her fervor, a voice chimes in a lofi quality from an almost squeaky male speaker whose position is indeterminable but seemingly capable only of the girl to hear it. The voice goes on to describe a sight similar to the one she's seeing with the details you would expect to be saved only for paintings and sculptures. There's this acknowledgement that when looking at an object you can see the engineering and scientific efforts that came behind it. There's an image which appears of the strain organized so cleanly among beams and plates. Within a rusted corrugated sheet of metal you can see the world flow forth. Connection can be felt. Somehow you can appreciate your current living self experiencing this moment. Beginning to appreciate the fidelity with which you get to experience the world. As the description flows forth the girl finds her face returning to a peaceful resting state, eyes closed or nearly closed and smiling with a light warmth. As the warmth fades and the reality of lying down underneath a slab of metal grating surrounded by a narrow warehouse gutter sets in, body beginning to slightly ache, the girl decides it's best to get going. Her body begins sinking into the concrete as though it were a syrupy liquid, it pools into the contours of her face until she disappears. Underneath the earth can be identified small pipes and wires meant for connecting simple things like water and elecricity. They exist beside one another vertically in layers and the camera sinks through each subsequently until all that's left is an empty space, used to indicate an unimportant earth. The voice from before chimes in, mentioning that the information gathered has been saved to a particular server with a simple name, whatever that information may be or how it connects to the current circumstances. A request to rendezvous at a particular location is indicated. While swimming through the earth, you're given the freedom to look into each direction as much as you please. There's a peace in the solitude, a peace in watching people perform everyday actions. A peace in an unfamiliar angle. A peace in no particular pressure to avert or direct your gaze. As the camera becomes less focused on any particular architectural element or closeups of one's face, the image of the girl we've been following becomes more clear as we can see the rest of her body floating in this space. To describe her in as few of words as possible, it would be the anthropomorphization of a tanuki. She has the tail, nose, and ears to indicate such, ears being attached to a grey bob cut over the soft expression we saw before, matching grey eyes. Her clothes are a simple gardener's uniform, green overalls, white and then orange undershirt with a small red neckerchief. Reaching a certain outhouse on the outskirts of the facility beyond a chainlink fence, rising from the concrete floor within the building accompanied by mouthed sound effects hoping that they might help make the rising easier, we meet a smaller figure. Features somewhat less detailed, retaining the image of an almost cartoon character. Largely yellow in color with blue compliments on a vague pants and to color the eyes and mouth. A boyish humanoid shape only so much as a children's drawing would permit. Coming from the figure the voice from before is emanated, albeit with more quality. Through short dialogue the names of each are indicated, and with a sense of wanting and slight upsettedness the abilities of the girl being shown to be only capable of by her, at least in this moment. Before long, the two gather themselves, the smaller boy bringing along with a small bag. The girl leaves the building through the wall, the boy the door. It might be emphasized here that the boy doesn't take care to close the door well, or leave without a trace. - Chapter 3 - Paranoia - There's this feeling of a guilty conscience. This feeling which exists independent of whether things are good or bad. This feeling which has to do somehow with expectations or what you think the expectations of others are. As much as crawling through the earth using new technology has become more available in recent years, law hasn't necessarily caught up. It hasn't caught up so much as there still exists contradictions. So much as there be whitelists and blacklists of clauses. I stated this feeling to him, this sense of being watched. While both looking at the same image on the screen, he for the purpose of artistic reference, I for the purpose of satisfying this paranoid itch, I tried properly to ask if he did everything he could to leave nothing behind. Maybe I needed a quick lesson in forensics or computer security just to rid myself of this vague anxiety with no reasoning to place it on. This anxiety with nothing more than what my mind identifies to be patterns of seeing the same type of car drive passed me on the street, this frequency illusion of hearing sirens nearby or identifying words in the auditory inkblots of people in formal looking clothes outside shops as being related to me or my actions somehow. I replayed the recording stored from my eye that he saved, I wonder if that image around the curve where my eyelashes meet my eyelid meant something. That it meant not properly hinging the door, that it meant leaving a spec of dust that's normally perceived to be clean. That somehow you can feel the typical temperature of a room and anything different might be chocked up to someone warming up the place. What actions can you really take to alleviate this feeling. You can encrypt information that you believe to potentially somehow be the originator in its nakedness. You can limit somehow involvement with others, particular places. You can change the language you use, you can filter the language you use as it might somehow indicate a dialect indicitive of something. When I make something, when I write something, when I live the information of me walking through a hallway or pointing my gaze in a particular direction on something material and tangible, it begins to exist as a version of myself with this guilty conscience. It begins to exist as a test dummy somehow. You begin to see nakedness the more you look at how clothes sit on the body. I suggested we go underground. I suggested a change of pace. I used excuses like being able to interact in a new environment. Being able to see how toys act in this new space. Seeing how changing the people you interact with informs the personality that you constructed in the previous social setting to compliment the other. Even if it's just temporary. Nearby our house there's an entrance within one of the old construction sites. Desire paths, animal tracks have emerged and people have even begin making their own structures on the property, things like lighting, bridges. - Chapter 4 - Unknown - Hallways, some eight to ten meters in width and height. Light is shone at consistently intermittent rates from above, beside, and below as from one direction alone would not properly cover the space. The intervals are indicated by grooves found in the ground as if to indicate the cave existing in prefabricated building blocks, similar to the construction of a ship's interior. The center of the hallway has two small rail lines, one for each direction. Along the walls at regular intervals smaller and more narrow hallways can be found without rails. Along these hallways to each side can be seen server rooms, discs spinning together to create an ambient orchestra, echoing throughout metal and concrete as though paulstretched. Honestly considering everything, we're lucky to live this close enough to a construction site leading here. There really aren't that many elevators and even fewer staircase. I guess that's what you get when you have city planners working with such limited means by which to change things. That you have politicians who can do no more than simple policy changes in desperate hopes to nudge things in a particular direction. You can't really blame that on anyone though more than just the nature of things. There's really no sense of getting fed up over something that has no real viable alternative, or that has none that we're aware of. No sense in complaining about the pain required to perform an action, I wonder. That's the beauty of information somehow, isn't it. You really don't see very many people in the tunnels. You might come across some kids at their secret base, maybe an uninterested maintenence employee tending to servers. There are clubs and these sorts of things which exist in these spaces quite vibrantly, but they exist in the reality of the servers themselves. So it's just not really apparent. The place that we're headed to is a nearby town which acts as a connection for various long distance railways. By using it we can find ourselves in a more crowded space, and in that crowdedness blend in and find ourselves lost in it. We reach the station, it's a largely reserved place, no fences preventing you from throwing yourself onto the rails, no deep and complicated interior facility with gift shops. The amount of people here is enough to hold in one hand if everyone were a marble, an amount which really emphasizes differences. An amount which really has a high amount of gazes pointed at you. There isn't much information you can find easily about the scheduling for everything. Some information is available on a nearby sign, but this place is as much as a city not on the map. A conversation is started, maybe it was when I wasn't paying attention or because of looking confused. We're directed that trains lead to larger cities every 450 stops. Whether a stop indicates a kilometer, mile, or something else I'm not really sure. Trains aren't necessarily trains so much as machines which you put in the location that you want to go into... Somehow it feels similar to the matter transportation pipes. I indicated in what must have been a mumble that we should go to 465, or 465 away from here, being around the outskirts of a town would be preferable wouldn't it. Maybe that wasn't properly acknowledged, my emotional state is a bit impatient or not able to properly listen and see if others are responding to the information that I'm communicating. I entered my location into the machine and my consciousness flickered. - Chapter 5 - Side A - Where could she be? We should have reanimated at the same location, no? We both put in the same distance, right? Shouldn't we be spit out at the same station? Are there multiple exit points? Walking around, this place really is crowded. It's almost like a carnival, can hardly be called a city. I decided to take one of the trollies to look around, to hell with her I'm sure she can find her way around. There were people speaking in various languages nearby, someone sitting next to me asked what they were saying. Maybe it was my disposition somehow or how I looked that lead them to believe I knew, but I told them. It was just a simple phrase, I wonder if they got anything from it. The question turned into conversation. The person, a plain looking girl whose features I didn't take much note of, showed a lot of interest in me. I shared with her that I was looking for someone, and she offered to help, stating that she was familiar with the area. Be that the case then, I'll accept your offer. One of the things to note is the variety in which people look like in an area like this. More than anywhere else the people here have come to embrace the body modification and transhumanist technologies of even recent years, without much fear as to the long term effects it has to their body. Our route we took lead through alleyways, into darker and less crowded areas. The space turned closer into those tunnels that we saw from before, closer to the almost cramped server rooms. Maybe a storage closet. As we reached the other side of a door, it became pitch black. I showed some confusion, tried to ask for light or tried to ask if this was really the right way or for a vague description of where we should be going. There was no response. The door we came through was locked, well, it seems as though it was only the door I came through. Footsteps can be heard growing in volume until it climaxes with falling into unconsciousness. - Chapter 6 - Side B - The surrounding area resembles natural caves more than anything else. The only thing that looks manmade is the pipe and panel from which I came from. After interacting with the panel, it indicates on it that it needs to recharge, and that because this is a generally unpopular location to visit, the next recharge, or the next train if you want to think of it that way, is going to take forever. Long enough that you might as well spend your time looking around. As much as this might be a cave in structure, it does still bear elements that we saw from the more uniform and organized tunnels. There are server rooms, less which must somehow indicate that on the surface there are less people who really need them. Whether this is underneath the ocean somehow, or underneath farmlands or mountains I'm not sure. Around this area are creatures and animals roaming about, I really tried not to interact with them. I found myself in one particular server room. Inside, a musician was performing a concert. I decided to join, sitting down as everyone else bobbed and sung alongside the performance. When the performance finished, along the screen behind the performers was displayed various erotic images, everyone continued to and shared the mood of joyousness. I guess I don't mind staying here for a while. - Epilogue - There's this sense that when writing, one should avoid referencing things which the reading could not recognize. I suppose this doesn't apply to rare dictionary language. At what point do certain concepts become common enough to fit this bill, as in eponyms. Does writing imaginary names independent of outside influence fit this. Does describing imagery influenced by the outside fit this. Is this contemplation exclusive somehow to writing. Is it exclusive to a medium where you only have a select list of tools. Characters in Unicode, colors on a Game Boy, pencils in a jalapeno jar. Another medium. Is there a point to abbreviation. Are these abbreviated feelings anything more than feelings which can never be communicated. Feelings which can never be materialized. Feelings which never come out as anything other than tears and snot as you struggle and flail to find some means by which to share the qualia with another person. I wonder how much I contradict myself. I wonder how much others contradict themselves. I wonder how much people actually notice. I wonder how much the world does. I wonder how much law does. I wonder how much the rules of physics do. I wonder how much of everyone's separate truth really is a separate truth and not just bullshit guarded by the veil of ignorance or inability to see all information at once. Technologies that usurp one another. Technologies that can't exist when another does. References to how you spent the last few days. References to your thought patterns. Making active changes to look at things and experience feelings more than just as comparisons to something else but the enjoyment for the thing itself. A sensitive, childlike, virgin feeling where there is no other qualia to connect it to. You're describing and your feeling the thing for itself. It is the colors of the pixels on the monitor. It is the molecules as they're bound together. It is where they exist in space and time. I fucking hate patterns and buckets. I'm a boy at the height of disillusionment. How your emotions affect what you think. How your organs affect what you think. How what you ate affects what you think. How what you're listening to affects what you think. How you spent your entire life until this point affects what you think. How your needs affect what you think. How other people's control over your needs affects what you think. Storing large amounts of information via compression into formulas somehow. Formulas which indicate emotion. Emotion which indicates material. Abbreviated sequences of emotion. Creating images which work to web together emotions. Mood board, inspiration board. Breaking everything into its core elements. Frustration with someone who is only capable of acknowledging half the layers. The inability for an electron to have position and momentum at the same time, at least determinably. At least communicatably. Showing new cultures so as to emphasize the transientness of one's own. So as to treat things as themselves. So as to think of things independent of the emotions attached to them. So as to form new connections other than the ones you believe to be patterned so heavily. Communicating an image by displaying its opposite. Communicating an image by displaying itself. Communicating by acknowledging every tool available. Tools which weren't previously acknowledged becoming now apparent and your eye improving when things are more than just colors and emotions and tags somehow. Sharing things and giving along with them names. Telling others that you're treating this as a thing. That you're treating this as something which exists as itself. Telling others that this is a concept or an idea. Telling yourself that it's such. Everything being a rough draft. This sense that something is never really perfect. That it's just turned into something new the next day. That it's ground down into a powder somehow. That everything is just influenced by the previous thing, influenced by the previous thing. I feel as though the more I make these commitments to bind myself closer to society by only being able to eat when I buy bread from the store, by only able to live when I get medicine through prescription services, that I'm making changes to affect how other people see me through modifications of body which I wonder if even fits here. In doing so betraying this original self. Betraying this inner self. Betraying the child that this body and this mind was supposed to be working so hard to take care of and raise and feed and love. I don't know. Fuck you.