Sector 3, for those unacquainted with astrography, was most directly related to Sirius A and Sirius B in terms both real and metaphorical, the Dog-Stars. It is, and was as far as you can get from civilization without losing the Anglican tongue. Not long ago, I remember we were boarded onto a vessel – like a boat or a ship – we traveled through a shot of light, which like the crashing of lightning left us momentarily blind and deaf. I seemed by the time I’d recovered my senses, I’d been on the planet for years. I had a roll of padding and a makeshift table, assembled from broken pieces of furniture – a couple of lumps of wood tacked together with nail. The light which hung above the bedding did not flicker, but provided a steady bath of incandescent light, unlike several of those of neighboring inmates. A man had died in the adjacent room. I have learned in some parts of the universe that speech is forbidden, as so when we gathered around our evening meals, a thin-rope like string produced by the workers at the Plasticade in their off-time, or cubes of some form of soft and edible goop, we did not talk aloud or reveal our fears or beliefs. I, for my part, had developed a theory, and most often in my spare moments,I berated myself for timidity,for the shallowness of character that was revealed in my inability to decide my own fate. The world which we inhabited was not unique,I supposed, but rather a common variant of large inter-dependent system,a galactic empire, the core of which was a multi-polar center, visually like a multi-nucleic atom… We had many tasks assigned to us: the planet’s gravity was weak, weaker than my home – at night, lying awake I sometimes listened to own heartbeat, and felt the strange likeness that the faintness of its murmur, was also like the slow amble of this satellite’s axis: here was a globe impoverished for a lack of positive momentum, weighed by generations of weakness and lassitude. When sent to our work, we had begun to build the lower foundation of some structure, placing small blocks no more than a pound in weight but larger in mass. At times I wondered how large would be the structure we constructed? But most often, this was not our central task. The people of the Sirius-cluster are amongst the most despicable in the Universe – exiles from the mainstream of human civilization, cast-offs from the Isle of Man, banished for a reason or another: contributing to natural catastrophe, mass murder, treason, some crime against humanity. Though negligence, ignorance, or through some blunder they have been tried and sentenced for a capital crime: some were guilty of being less than purely human. Over the course of many hundreds of millions of years in the many thousands of outposts of humanoid civilization there was sufficient room for an almost inconceivable number of errors, but of the slight and gross variety. Along the walls of the Federal Auxiliary Prison #1392, I was told the story of “Dr. Julian Boyd”, who was a successful practitioner of a wide range of medical procedures and was admired for his ability to resolve the thorny existential issues relating medical problems. He was wealthy in a way that few people could afford to be. Though he had contributed to society, he was not universally beloved -- a group of radicals referred to as [ ], blamed him for his complicity to a range of genetic birth defects they considered to be preventable. These birth defects were themselves not merely superficial, and could prove dangerous over the long term potentially posing risks to the genetic pool of the general population, [ ] decided it could not stand idly by… Dr. Boyd was married to a woman, Mary Jane Rudolphs,and over the course of several years --oblivious to her unspoken qualifications to their relationship, it was discovered that he had agreed, unwittingly to a wide range of propositions. **One day Boyd found himself pinned on an operating gurney -- tailed from his office, he’d reasonably panicked and gotten run-down by a pair of thugs in an alley, tasered and rendered unconscious -- when he awakened he was naked and attached to a cool table of stainless steel. The group, these do-gooders, they took some time explaining the procedure, in a manner that was largely non-verbal, quiet implication non-violent innuendo, and with his hands tied to the gurney, a skilled artiste duplicated his signatures, confirming his complicity to this elective procedure, absolving the medical group of liability… Boyd returned to his life, weakened by the operation, and tried to assimilate himself to the passing days, but found a world that seemed to have tired of his presence, a contagious apathy that’d gripped people familiar to him, even passersby who demonstrated a cold disinterest. Often times he found himself ignored -- shouting senselessly into the face of some unconcerned person, or at best, given courteous and peremptory refusals. All the doors had closed. His cash allowance and insurance was significantly lower than what he was accustomed to. His misfortunes multiplied -- upon his death, he would be shipped to BD-Internment, to fulfill the contractual stipulations appended to the manufacturer’s warranty on this ‘essential component’, he was unsure about the ‘lucky sod’ that’d received his own wetware... o0o0o0o0o Most often we were placed along the trenches, we marched long distances, slogged through sodden grasses, up and down through the hillsides. Our task was a collection: we gathered thin pulp like a spider’s silk, that clung to the threes and in the grass. The work was dangerous -- grown men collapsed from exhaustion. When not along the trenches, we occupied the quarries, and used a tool made from the a plank of wood to which was fixed a long, slender metallic blade, like a novelty sized tooth pick. We collected essential materials that were used in the construction of the Strao-sphator, a mind-control device used by the upper classes like a mood-stabilizing drug. It was placed in the wards, allowed to radiate. Alone at night it is impossible to decide for oneself the purpose or direction of existence, there are no certainties, nothing is clear. o0o0o0o0o0o0o0 We were awakened before dawn and shuttled to our sites - as we traveled, we were made to listen to WorkStation programming: we were the censors, we listened to programs culled from the minds of our neighbors, from our own minds, subjecting the streams of consciousness to scrutiny, textual analysis - everything could reveal some moral flaw or ideological defect, some indication of a lapse in political righteousness or some other form of gnostical turpitude. Some days we were dropped into the fields, to comb the streets and forests, methodical searches like I had seen on televised programs of war parties in search of their adversaries: our adversaries were small concealable improvised explosives and other similar devices - contaminants and explosives packed with carcinogenic agents. It was our work, our responsibility,to identify them, though it meant the risk of our health, and render them harmless. o0o0o0 Liberal measures had been enacted - new human beings when they were created were granted a world of their own - a new person was the center of a small solar system, the beneficiary of rules which had been encoded into the galactic computers, machines constructed in a way from the gravitational relations between solar bodies. Systems functional at the highest levels of compliance to a broad and liberal standard of realism - that may accept the occasional homicide, but insisted on the fulfillment of futures propositions, global catastrophes, even world-ending events the result of the introduction or reintroduction of certain persons. What, with such powerful computers, with such limitless super-abundance were people fighting over? Arguments in the vernacular regarding ‘realness’ was rarely limited to suppositions regarding emotional honesty or socioeconomic position -- most people prefer being ‘real’ to the alternative. Everything was possible, but for most people, allowing a person to re-enter the world who is guilty of some sin, some breach of ethics that could allow a class 1 disaster was too great a risk, these persons spent their time in the cemetery -- only truly remarkable circumstances would bring them back. Most people realized survival as it was possible the “extinction of consciousness” which is death, is contingent on satisfying the criteria of the upper-echelon litigators, a species apart from ordinary human beings, who possessed the duty of manipulation of the world’s possibilities, could extend a person’s life - if not as a human being, then as some other form of mammal. For many, the lines of acceptable behavior are not rooted in political ideology, or some trifling values such as money or security, but rather on the lines drawn between what is and what is not fundamentally human, of human superiority. It was a fine and easy thing to do, as some do in the naivete of their youth, to look upon animals with regard, and design to give them a place in the world. It is another thing to realize that the competition between species is without end. {{The ethics of reality do not allow one to become the accomplice of a system which is tolerant of such radical inequalities -- to find oneself the ward of a state that tolerated the difference between a frog and a cow, a dog a man, is a form of guilt - worse than murder…}}
Posted on: Wed, 09 Oct 2013 19:09:47 +0000
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