This is a draft
I’m currently working on this, and it’s far beyond done. I would appreciate if you would not share this until it is done.
The hollow promise of a system of civil liberties, consumer choice, and economic freedom. A ruling class who does not tolerate dissent. It’s people, with no passion alight, obedient with a will to ignore what could have been. All fervent that remains is a stained acceptance, a means to endure, a veil drawn over the eyes to obscure the stark reality of this systems class divide.
Horrible, branded serfdom. 47 toothpastes. Shelves groaning under the weight of a meaningless, hollow promise of choice. An illusion of diversity. Smile in the face of existential dread - Now with new strawberry flavor. Same price. Same box. Same tube. Less paste.
The air tasted of burnt plastic and resignation. Factories hummed hymns of extraction, their smokestacks bleeding into skies once considered shared. Workers shuffled through algorithmic shifts, their lungs stained with the glitter of cheap electronics—collateral damage for quarterly reports. What was once a false allure of consumer goods is now clinging to their bodies like a grotesque badge of servitude. Aestheticized poison.
A drone flew by. It reads: “YOU OWN NOTHING BUT YOUR RAGE”
In the clinics, there was no difference. A catalogue of Itemized body parts. Liver: ¢583,950. Cornea: “Market value.” Emergency Heart Transplant: Contact us for the best deal. Bloodwork receipts filled the gutters, their ink dissolving into the acid rain. A triage algorithm assigned guilt scores: Did you smoke? How is your diet? Fail to monetize your circadian rhythms?
Entitlement is considered a disease. You’re owed nothing but endless tasks. Now choose: Kidney or credit score. Fresh and healthy clone-vault liver? Premium tier subscription required.
To any person, your own body is the totality of their existence. Instinctually, you need to claim dominion over yourself, your thoughts, your actions, your destiny. Not in this world, but maybe your next.
A drone flew by. It reads: “YOUR BODY IS A DEBT IN PROGRESS”
In a distant nation, it’s last remaining poet carved verses into missile casings. “We were once a chorus. Now we are an echo, searching for its wall.” The roads, once vast networks for the people and their trade, now wound through stacks of rubble and empty casings. They led nowhere, or perhaps the same nowhere they’d always led. Dreams of a people left to fend for themselves had left, replaced by broken spirits.
Few buildings still stood, drenched in the marks of ceaseless bombardment, now skeletal remains of what once was a home of many. Here, they experienced unimaginable agony. Skin bubbles into liquid wax. Eyes cook in their sockets. Air that reeks of scorched hair and smoldering pavement. Inextinguishable phosphorous smoke chewing through their lungs long after the incendiary rain stops. Horrors etching themselves into the living, into the soul, into the very concept of their person. A weapon so vile, its use is a confession — not of war, but of a hunger to unmake creation itself. Evil itself would not dare to whisper its name.
The commodification of ruin is evidenced by each librarian that has outlived ones library. War doesn’t destroy. It liquidates. Demolition permits double as stock options. Refugees, stripped of maps and deeds, are ‘repackaged’ as human capital: limbs for construction sites, voices for call centers, fingers for data entry farms.
A drone flew by. It reads: “THEY WILL MAKE ART OF YOUR SCREAMS.”
This is a work in progress