Panopticonopolis

Written in a bout of mania lasting two days. A part of me does hope for this future.

When it appeared, the masses decried it. Evil men of all calibres clambered to their nearest public forum to shout and scream until their faces turned zit red and their lips pus white. The democracies of the world, with their decrepit, decaying, and corrupt helmsmen, banned it with near unanimity. The godly too spoke of this as man’s ultimate affront to the almighty, a power so divine yet unholy that its mere invention might usher in the rapture. Pandemonium, terror, and mania vomited out of the minds of each so-called enlightened open-minded individual when he heard the revelation of this tamed impossibility. Horace Sims was a boy of twelve when it arrived, bulbus with prepubescent fat, floppily uncoordinated and shyer than a shrew monk. He had not the sapience to form an opinion on it; he could not comprehend the psychic shockwaves reverberating through polite, meek modern society. Horace’s only memory of that day is of dinnertime and his father’s seething rage. The family of four were gathered around the table eating that day’s manifestation of his mother’s labours of love, likely schnitzel, mashed potato and steamed vegetables. The news had met Matthew Sims, the father, around midday, and the pain and sharp horrors of this fresh reality stewed for hours in his brain until he could not hold it inside him anymore and exploded into diatribe while eating. Chunky and slimy fireworks of brown, grey and white bifurcated from his mouth while he spoke with a raised voice that instantly made Horace alert. According to Matthew, this technology was the zenith of international communism. He laughed and shouted in a tantrum about how a Jewish world order was upon them, and today was the day freedom had died. Idiot. Genoa Sims, long accustomed to her husband’s emotional outbursts, nodded her head and squeaked quick words of approval as he prognosticated. In her mind, she contrasted this fat, balding, smelly, messy jester man baby with the shy, innocently confident student she had fallen in love with. Men, she believed, were not capable of intelligent self-governance; a comfortable, settled man will always let himself go and reach some inevitable point of misoneism. In her approximation, young men were charming and adventurous out of necessity, but the older they get, the more their feeble minds shove them into sheepish groupthink and infantile emotionality. If Horace today fell down a rabbit hole, and mysteriously ended up back in time, at that dinner table. The first thing he would do is hug his mother and sister tightly, of course, but then he would rise to meet Matthew’s challenge, as he had done five years ago in their future and many years ago in his past. Undoubtedly, another shouting match would ensue, but Matthew’s energy would be greater than the pathetic, frail old fool he had denounced then. Horace would shout as he had never shouted before, exclaiming the unquestioning morality of that day’s change; he would likely shout all the air out of his lungs and pass out, so magnificent was the zealotry of the future Horace Sims. Again, his father would cast him out with slithering personal insults and outlandish humiliations about his stupid, airy-fairy, brainwashed supposedly Marxist son. Horace wondered to himself if it would hurt less a second time. Once he was done with the prick, he would do the truly impossible: save his mother and sister from their fate.

A device capable of reading the mind. This is what set self-believing civil society asunder. Then, the newest saccharine fruit of the burgeoning black-box tech tree, an overcomplicated matrix fed since inception on the brain waves of humans recalling songs, recalling memories, visualising apples and elephants, speaking to their internal monologues and their fabulous lucid dreams. Had the mind reading software been a man instead of a soulless concatenation of decimals between one and zero, the lucid dreams would have been its favourite food. Its designers did not understand the processes it used to decode mental enigma; they had no idea the contents of lucid dreams formed the bridge between the two hemispheres of its brain, between conscious and subconscious human thought. Homo-ignorami, the mind-reading software man would smugly rename its creators. The eccentric loner billionaire Maximillion Greenstone funded the research; this result was perhaps the only worthwhile contribution an obscenely wealthy grub had made to society since the turn of the century. You may be surprised that a rich man funded such an endeavour, since you know as well as I that greed puts the soul through a paper shredder, and turns men into perverted, obese, grotesque facsimiles of an actual person that fain morality to mask their monstrous one-upmanship with the torturous daemon villains of scripture. Greenstone justified his dragon’s hoard and inherent capitalistic exploitation of his servile underlings with a messianic prophecy beamed into his thoughts from the future. It began in his mid-twenties, he saw visions of himself herald in an angelic utopic new age for mankind. He watched himself create the mind-reading technology in the future and watched as the pure of heart purified the Earth with his weapon as their sparkling, shimmering golden lance of holy justice. Born an atheist, Maximillion Greenstone, overwhelmed by the beauty of these images, began to worship the future version of himself as a pagan might worship a petty god for rain or decent grain. Alone, in the solitary moments of his days, he would pray to this ultimate version of himself, he would pray for the strength to become him, he would pray for advice, but more than anything, he prayed to syphon off his own future magnanimity such that it might be wielded in the past to curtail reality and turn the future into a corporeal certainty. A violently knotted ouroboros of prophecy, technology, chronology, madness, divinity, fate and causality. It succeeded.

To his employees and friends, Greenstone presented himself as a solemn, quiet, thoughtful man, disinterested in the day-to-day comings and goings of mortals. In private, he could not hold himself back. Every research milestone hit like heroin, he would excuse himself to the restroom and grin ear to ear, when he knew he was out of earshot of anyone, he would yip madly like a cheerful puppy and cry messy tears of joy at the thought of his ever accelerating requiem. He was shrewd in spite of his insanity; he delayed the announcement of the new world until the growing pains of the technology could be buffed out in private. The researchers, the apostles, had made several breakthroughs in one. At the time of disclosure, a mind reader could transcribe internal speech into text; it was also capable of creating a continuous visualisation of the images in the mind’s eye. If asked to close your eyes and imagine a banana, what you see would be perfectly mimicked on a screen, with all its blur or intricacies. A result of this digital phantasia was that memories and dreams could be recorded and seen as if you were the person imagining them. No more secrets. The apostles did make one discovery they did not expect: when viewing images stolen from a mind, it was possible to tell which scenes were fantasy and which were real memories. The distinction is difficult to describe without being shown the two side by side, but let’s pretend it works thusly: Imagined happenings manifested themselves with an obvious blue filter over the entire image and subtle unreal warping, whereas true memories displayed as if they had been ripped right from a high-definition camera. Obviously, it is possible to combine the fantastical and memorable in the mind’s eye, but any deliberate conscious editing stuck out like a cartoon character sitting in a real-world café in front of you pretending to truly exist in earnest. The bliss for Maximillion Greenstone on the day he unveiled his triumph is indescribable; each colour shone brilliantly with full confidence and gusto in his vision. It could have been the greyest, most miserable weather of the year, but Greenstone would have wholly believed and seen an idyllic world of sunshine and rainbows. His minions scurried around his offices like grain-stealing rats revealed to the light of day by a farmer opening a barn door, toiling their finite lives away to ensure their boss’s special day went perfectly. A meagre group of three dull-eyed, bored reporters heeded the call from the unknown man of means. Three not-so-wise men. How I wish they were magi. At the end of the fifteen-minute presentation, a live demonstration was performed, some nameless nobody sat on a chair on the stage while hooked up to a mind reader, a screen above him streamed the world as he saw it through his own eyes. Impressive enough. But when he closed his eyes and pictured the room he had just seen, the screen showed these internal machinations to the group too. Two of the reporters outright rejected the display as the farcical charade of a charlatan conman, but the eldest of the three, once a primetime anchor who had been pushed out to pasture by his colleagues, saw the unquestioning truth and confidence in the eyes of the scientists and Greenstone and published the story. One wise man. The story might not have spread if it were not for the scientific paper published alongside it, a plausible, actionable roadmap to recreate the mind reader from existing knowledge. During the months which immediately followed the public discourse, the zeitgeist consisted entirely of bitching, whining, moralising and panicking. It was as if the second each person had finished reading about the revelation, they immediately started criticising and fear mongering to as many people as they could reach. In the Primadonna republic herself, the United States, each and every Freedonian whipped themselves up into a hysteria. This is unsurprising, for it was a nation so self-entitled that the word sonder was conceptually incomprehensible to every American. A civilisation so oxymoronic that it defies belief, a hegemony projecting power, protection and morality to the globe, but as individuals, they were a mass of useless, insecure, weak dunces too stupid and propagandised to see their evil paedophilic oligarchs for what they were. An American would sooner bite off his own hand than pull his neighbour to safety, and the scum would have the pompous audacity to posthumously whine to the bloody bony smudge that was his neighbour about the man’s cruelty for the imposition of testing his humanity. The political class of the United States marched in lockstep with a speed and unity not seen prior to or since to prohibit and prosecute the use of this technology. The liberals, taking a brief respite from their doing nothing, cried out about the dangers of the mind readers to the social fabric of their city on a hill. The conservatives, poorly hiding their paedophilia and homosexuality behind their saviour’s crucifix as always, screamed incoherently about God, or freedom, or something of that nature to justify their hatred of this new enemy. Maximillion reacted to this legislation by releasing the technology for free on the internet. The next day, poor old deluded Maximillion Greenstone was murdered. Well, he was last seen on a security camera walking into an isolated wooded area near his home, and that was the story the world was told. In actuality, he really was murdered by federal agents inside of his home, no less, and a body double wearing a perfect rubber mask of his fanciful face was sent to be recorded on a nearby camera walking towards the woods. American ingenuity for unrepentant horrors is commendable. The world’s other democracies acted just as hastily, only with less drama, and banned pure truth too.

On the fringes of the Earth, there were some who welcomed the change. Weirdos, hermits, victims, and unsuccessful philosophers all quietly praised the development in the safety of their own minds, ironically enough. The Elijan Church, a Christian sect that was too soft and too large to be called what it truly was, a cult, embraced the technology with open arms. The founder of the church, Elija Reaper, had founded his congregation on the belief that the devil manifested himself as lies and deceit, he instructed his followers to be truthful to each other always, no matter how painful. The Elijans saw this for what it was: a divine miracle that allowed them to free themselves from lies, secrets and falsehoods forever. The eyes of dictators and autocrats the world over glistened with the glee of promise when they heard the news. As soon as the schematics were released online, each strongman gestured with his iron fist and commanded the loyalest scientists under his control to begin construction of their own mind readers. It was the hope of each despot that this technology might finally let them rule in peace, freeing them from the paranoia and rat race of unchecked power, to peer into their subject’s minds, a gracious gift from God. What these tyrants failed to consider was this: even the quietest, meekest worm of a man still craves the allure of ultimate power in the fantasy world of his mind. Despite his appearances, the worm wishes desperately for power over his fellow man, such that he might be free to execute all the other worm men who even vaguely remind him of himself. So, long before any mind reader was complete anywhere, usurpers’ plots were expedited. Eldest sons, brothers, and cousins of the royals killed their patriarch. Each general, from the weakest to the strongest, rallied whatever militia he could and fought to the death for the throne. The authoritarian blotches of the map were the first to fall to this enlightenment, some failed states incorporated into neighbouring countries, other were abandoned to the anarchic chaos of warlords, ideological fanatics, or gangs waring endlessly.

Almost exactly a year post-announcement, what would later be referred to as the summer of stalkers began. Nobody noticed the pattern at first, but a month later it was the main story on every newspaper, radio station, television set and social network on the planet. Human evil isn’t difficult to understand; the urges, actions, and violence can defy description, but the nucleus of these barbarities is simple enough to articulate. Evildoers fall into two categories: the first is those who commit acts because of power; this can mean at the behest of a superior’s orders, or for monetary gain, or for the means to some end. The second is a malfunction in the human psyche; these people compel themselves to act on catastrophic impulses they have not the constitution to suppress, the lowest form of human being, if they can be called that at all. Some people engage in sex in public because the thrill and taboo of being caught intensify the natural emotions of the act for them. The appearance of the mind reader devices had the same effect on the most depraved of the world’s societies. Retired serial killers, who became bored with always getting away with their crimes, started up again and covered their wrinkled, scaly geriatric hands in fresh hot sticky blood again. Evil monsters, already unable to control their grotesque desires, instead of killing themselves for the good of everyone, were pushed over the edge by the danger of exposure this technology silently whispered into their ears. The idiotic and the impulsive started up their terror sprees first. Their depravities inspired the reluctant, the retired and the careful until the streets were crawling with skin walkers resembling humans only in abstract form, but wholly awful and unspeakably irredeemable. With every death and tragedy, a silent class was born, those who in their hearts knew that the mind readers could have easily, effortlessly stopped their trauma before it ever occurred. In societies, punitive punishments have an upper limit because up until that point, there was always the possibility, no matter how damning the evidence, that the accused was innocent. Those most affected by these calamities let a fire ignite in their souls; they dreamt about using a mind reader to find the guilty without the possibility of doubt, and then personally making those responsible suffer in the slowest, most painful torture they could fathom. Despite the increasing public support for the tech, the response of governments was to pour hundreds of billions into police forces, surveillance and tracking, anything but the cure. This worked well enough, but as the summer of stalkers was coming to a close, Horace Sims suffered the worst day he would ever live through. His mother and sister had gone to the beach with a large group of friends. There was supposed to be a police guard there; they were supposed to be safe. There were two police officers there, but the beach was far from safe that day. The officers were pimps, drug dealers, domestic abusers, murderers and worse. On that day, the weight of the mind reader’s existence made them snap. At sunset, beautiful globs of red, pink, and purple clouds filled the sky, but lined up on the footpath by the beach were 25 people kneeling with their hands on the backs of their heads. Children and adults were helplessly crying. The two officers laughed and swore at the terrified mob, and one by one, shot them in the back of the head. Genoa Sims was killed trying to wrestle a gun out of one of the cunt’s hands. Josephine Sims, six, completely overcome by terror, was murdered shortly after this. The beachfront massacre. When he heard the news, and after he processed that it was reality, Horace instantly changed his opinion on the mind readers. Before, he had tentatively supported his father’s rejection of the technology, but now nothing could convince him that this technology was not the magnum opus of human invention. The newly fourteen-year-old Horace, with miniature musculature and tiny black hairs just sprouting on his upper lip, became a crusader for the holiest cause in human history; his zealotry subsumed his entire personality, and his every thought was tethered together by the knowledge of the illegal mind readers’ possibilities.

By the time Horace Sims was seventeen, the movement had a great enough mass and momentum for the once fringe political parties, talking heads, protests, and rallies to mobilise in force. In Horace’s opinion, support for unrestricted widespread use of the mind readers could be split into three camps. The Elijan Christians, who at announcement day were no more than a single church in rural Wyoming with a dwindling number of rapidly aging members, the largest age group were septuagenarians then. Today, they were the sixth largest Christian denomination in the United States, and like the Mormons with Utah, they had become the main political entity in Wyoming. They rallied and preached to whomever would listen that lies were Satan’s last tendrils in the hearts, minds and souls of God’s once perfect creation. Many lost souls listened and joined. The second camp was victims, survivors and their loved ones, not just of those who had suffered during the summer of stalkers, but everyone whose tragedies could have been avoided since announcement day. These people simply wanted to build a better world for their children and a safer world for humanity. The last camp was the newcomers; these people could be further categorised into sub-camps following a few philosophers or authors of various regards. Since announcement day, multiple books had been written arguing in favour of the then taboo mind reader technology, some positioned their beliefs as an extension of other philosophical frameworks, others built their own. The largest of the sub-camps of philosophical thought were the Kingstonites, followed by the Redd school of thought. Taylor B Kingstone, in his seminal philosophical book titled “Cogito, Cogito, Cogito”, argued that true self-understanding could only be achieved through the use of a mind reader; letting those around you peer inside your deepest darkest mental catacombs, he says, is the most terrifying and freeing endeavour a man can embark on. Redd argues otherwise; he discretised human psychological evolutionary history into four past epochs with a fifth approaching. First, he said, was the invention of language, the ability to converse with oneself and others forever irrevocably changed human thought, and in his approximation, probably led to the birth of nontrivial non-animalistic technology and society. The next was after the invention of writing, outsourcing your memory to papyrus, clay, or stone, the ability to preserve your ideas beyond your life changed human psychology unmistakably. This change, he says, led to the personification of gods, stable civilisation, and allowed human knowledge accumulation to truly begin. Next was the near-instantaneous transmission of human thought, the telegram, which he says led to an underdiscussed and underappreciated shift in how people conduct themselves and laid the foundation for an explosion in international culture. The most recent was the invention of the internet, ask anyone born after the turn of the century, he says, they will tell you that something inside them prevents them from dancing, from drinking, from loving in public, their psychology has been forever shackled by the realities and tribalism of the modern internet. The next should be obvious: the widespread adoption of the mind readers, Redd’s fifth epoch of human psychological evolution, Redd believes that with this technology we can finally abandon the archaic restrictions of our primitive minds; a heaven awaits us, he says, a peace where dishonesty is dead. To the shock of the speculators and bettors, the second group, the martyrs, were the first to arm themselves. The young fervent radicals of the party, of which Horace aligned himself, saw reality for what it was. As the pro-mind-reader factions gained ever-broadening support, the democratic establishment, the rich, and the evil became ever more desperate. In their recent march on Washington, Horace was shot in the ribs by a rubber bullet, and two members were killed by police violence. The older generations of the United States, they understood, had lost their backbone with their youth, and would not only tolerate increased violence against the crusaders, but they would also probably soon enough call for said extrajudicial killings to begin. An armed wing of the party was needed to protect the innocent on their side from state violence. History would remember them as the Army of the True, but they called themselves the New Continental Army, in a transparent propaganda attempt to create some sense of continuity between the American revolutionaries and them. Horace Sims, a well-known and respected personality in the radical faction, was appointed second in command of these forces.

The murderous state reprisals the radicals had predicted came to pass, and by age twenty, Horace Sims led a guerrilla rebel army of believers through the Appalachian wilderness. The worthless, malnourished, and smelly Army of the True more resembled a medieval peasant revolt than an actual self-respecting paramilitary. By that time, the economic weight behind the movement was vast, and the rebels carried with them portable mind readers. After purging their own ranks of traitors, criminals, perverts, cowards and heretics, they turned their purification to the citizenry. Horace would march his troops into towns near the mountains under the cover of night, and all at once they sprang on the guards and townsfolk and coalesced them into a town square or building. Then the questioning would start. Paedophiles and murderers were executed on discovery, with their crimes carved onto the foreheads of the cadavers, so that anyone who discovered them would know their death was no cause for sadness. Believers found were forcefully conscripted, and those ideologically opposed to the mind readers, but innocent of violent crimes, were branded by a seething hot iron rod that imprinted a circular ouroboros with an open eye in the centre onto their foreheads. The established symbol of the bystanders to evil, those who chose not to believe in the mind reader’s divinity despite all the evidence to the contrary, lazy, worthless subhuman ingrates prolonging the suffering of all mankind. Two years ago, the pro-mind-reader factions finally agreed to make the Greenstone Proclamation. The story of Greenstone’s self-messiah that defied the confines of chronology spread far and wide and inspired dangerous ideas in the believers. The Greenstone Proclamation was an act of desperation; it essentially made it a crime to be against the idea of mind-reader technology. The ultimate purge and punishment of criminals found to possess these evil misgivings was to be delivered once the party gained control of the state, which they had yet to do. Therefore, anyone who did not actively work towards building this future would suffer immensely once it arrived, yet another self-fulfilling prophetic ouroboros. Horace Sims enjoyed the power and the violence against non-believers; his troops knew he did as he routinely exposed his thoughts to them. The fall of democracy in the United States happened in a brilliant and quick flash, a combination of greed, stupidity, corruption, poor economic conditions, a poor harvest and the joining of multiple pro-mind-reader militias. A perfect storm. The Army of the True, this time a true army, marched on Washington and accepted the surrender of the few disparate congressmen too foolish or stubborn to evacuate. Appomattox. Horace Sims stood at the base of the Washington Monument, surrounded by a cheering crowd of impoverished militiamen and announced the dissolution of the United States and the founding of the American Commonwealth, a utopia built on the foundation of the supreme divinity of mind readers checking the powerful and the powerless equally. Political power in this new world would go to the purest, those who chose to willingly expose their every thought, dream, humiliation and desire to those they served. These Archangels had mind readers permanently installed into their heads, a surgery only slightly more invasive than a hearing implant; these saviours streamed everything to their fellows. With not the burden of deceit nor lie, these protectors ushered in the purification of the planet, the reconquest of Eden, and a glorious holy evolution for humanity.

Now we come to I. A soul chosen by forces unknowable and deemed grand enough to be born long after the birth of the new age of man. A second splendid celestial internet spans my world, orthogonal to the old, one more akin to mycelium than the information superhighway of then. Through these sacred fibres, each person transmits their every internal machination to the collective, to be judged and experienced. I am proud to say that I was upgraded with this new sense not ten minutes after my coming into the world. Truthfully, it is a strain to comprehend the archaic ways of my ancestors. I look on those times as an atheist might view the inquisition, or a doctor might react to watching a pre-industrial surgery happen before him. Disgust, fear, cringe, a vile display that I would rather stop than force myself to come to terms with. The collective is the zenith of intelligent consciousness; we could not have achieved our mastery of reality for not this divine cataclysm. The debate rages, I understand the arguments for and against well, but I am among those who believe the sheer psychic weight of the collective has a gravity so great that it propagates itself backwards in time to ensure its own existence. Surely there could be no other way to explain the events of the twenty-first century. We are the holiest form of life in the universe; we propagate ourselves in every stellar direction. May our collective salvation subsume the cosmos.