Simon Says: Put the little object to your ear!

What's he saying?

Pause. Silence. Smiles all around.

The downtrodden man with the cell phone to his ear, having just passed the modern day equivalent of random drug testing, spent the pause somewhere between amused and pissed at how the interface to his "occupation" was really, like human interaction itself, just some lame ancient infants' game. Then he repeated what he'd heard through the earpiece when Simon said repeat what you've just heard through the earpiece.

"Suspected carrier now crossing 4th and heading down F."

No one could say for sure if the physical and medical tracking of everyone on earth had prevented the next major world virus outbreak because no known carriers had ever been stopped by this method, but, likewise, no one could say that it hadn't -- because no outbreak had occurred since the law mandating all this useless crap was passed, a year ago.

So people at the front lines of tracking all possible carriers (everyone was a possible carrier) were like the nuclear button pushers of old (and currently): they never really DID anything, but they made a lot of noise (in world fear-space) NOT doing it.

The only real advantage of the job was the impoverished person you got free to handle all your cell phone calls for you so you didn't have to drop dead of brain cancer after the 1000th call like all the other poor slobs of the world who couldn't afford to or weren't smart enough to hire someone desperate enough to potentially die in their place with the cell phone of death to their ear.

Even news writers were smart enough these days to hire somebody in India to write their cliché-ridden stories for them, because excessive attention to news and culture "ideas" had been shown to cause advanced forms of the disease known as being a fucking moron -- where people would frequently flush themselves down the toilet because there wasn't a car chase, nuclear explosion, boxer from the sticks with a dream, or band of bomb-toting anarcho-terrorists to stop them.

So going from failed news writer to apprentice carrier detector, as I'd done 6 months ago, cost very little basic change, as both were just a matter of outsourcing all the deathly parts of the job to someone who couldn't afford NOT to do them despite the risk, while you yourself just kick back and don't do a fucking thing except write this story about kicking back and not doing a fucking thing except write this story.

In this climate, the difference between the vast success of the very few and the abject failure of the vast majority was always either nepotism or a single occasion where the right person gives or says the right something to the right someone at just the right time, and the rest is history.

So why bother?

Well, for everyone else, their lives are controlled by forces above man -- so they have an excuse for exercising bogus tyrannical illogical power at whatever local level they can become benign dictator of, then quickly or eventually drop the benign.

But I hadn't gotten there yet. So like all those who hadn't, I relied on a belief in the existence of an abstract force made flesh who uses superior strength or cunning or special gifts and modern hi-tech to laugh at all forces that would control him or her. Emotion, religion, stupidity, and the halting problem are, of course, never mentioned.

But now we are engaged in a great civil war. We don't have time for fucking stories anymore. We just need the information, the concepts, we just need the graphic semantic representation, just the Char names connected by directed arrows to actions and objects and causes.

We need just pure graphic elements and word fragments -- predicate calculus clauses, cutups of algorithms left to genetically re-evolve to prove they were right the first time.

But, whatever happens, use of the word "freedom" should be curtailed in everyday discussion until someone can show us -- in real life -- someone or something who actually IS free.

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