"The Surreal Boom of the Budokan Stadium"

The sun had fought a fierce struggle that day but now lay deceased and conquered.
There were madmen everywhere. This was a time of celebration. "Rejoice! The sun lies dead!" the madmen sang and shouted. Underneath their feet, the grass shimmered with tears of dew. One of the madmen approached and said to me "You know how they say that you can't truly be mad if you know yourself to be mad? That is not true. That is NOT true. Madness... Madness is knowing you're mad and not wanting to have it any other way." Mulling his words, I could help but point out: "But that's circular..." Alas, the madman was mad, and had already wandered off, suddenly preoccupied with devising way to shoot fire into the sky. "Rejoice! The sun lies dead! And what better blasphemy than to make our own sun?"

Onstage, the madmen's priests preached their gospel. The guitarist painted the sky with bright blues and reds, the bassist denied the existence of contradictions, and the singer spoke of blindmen in the new dark. Those who before we had thought crippled would now become shepherds. The blindmen who had long navigated the seas of dark had been busy making maps. Making maps for those of us who would later come. For those of us who still played in the sun's playpen. Those of us who had not yet seen that the playpen was a prison.

The Game

Biggs: Don't any of you get it? The Game isn't about politics or money. The Game is about the subversion of our senses. Rational thought is only as good as the data it feeds on. Control our experiences, our language, and our assumptions and you've got us by the balls. The Game is about who gets to decide what you can see and not see. The Game is about who gets to define what words mean. Its about being imprisoned behind bars you cannot see. Unknown unknowns, motherfuckers!

Sonny: Alright asshole, if that's The Game then who the hell is running it? Some omniscient wacko in an underground lair with the power over words? What kind of bullshit is that?

Biggs: Aliens, motherfucker. Aliens.

Sonny: See this is the kind of shit that pisses me off about assholes like you. You got the world being ruled by flesh and blood motherfuckers right in front of your eyes and all you think to do is talk about fucking aliens. That's what makes everybody roll their eyes at us when we talk about The Game in public. Assholes like this one right here.

Let me give you a lesson about the fucking Game. The Game is about ordinary human beings controlling other ordinary human beings. The Game is about a small number of corporations controlling all the major players in the world media. The Game is about money and power and propaganda and all the other bullshit that people in power have been using to stay in power since the fucking pharaohs. Society is being played like a puppet by the assholes in five thousand dollar suits. They control the governments, the major corporations, and the media. Public opinion dances to the strings of these assholes and war is just another tool in their kit.

Less: Oh come off it. There is no fucking Game. The world is too complicated a place for your horseshit conspiracy theories. Sure there’s pricks out there with more power than most and I bet there are dudes out there that really do think they’re running ‘The Game’, but at the end of the day they’re just dumbfucks like -

[Loud banging noises. Authoritative voice is heard, demanding entry]

Less: What the hell?

Biggs: Meeting's over boys; everybody out!

The Machine

Dio glanced at the faces around him, wondering what world these people were leading him into. "So you're telling me that they're perfectly aware of our activities?" "Of course. They're not bullheaded. They've understood for a while now that the stronger you hold sand in a fist, the more grains slip through your fingers." he heard the transient say, his synthetic voice perfectly adjusted to appear to be coming from the location of his equally illusory body. "Call it confidence in their control. Actively squashing any and all subversion only breeds more subversion. Instead they’re comfortable laying back and letting us run amok; confident that we don’t pose a threat.”

Overlayed onto Dio’s vision as a part of the local consensus reality, Prom’teo’s figure seemed to look straight at him. Still, Dio understood that if Prom’teo was looking at him at all it would be through one of surveillance bugs that were pervasive throughout the Ark.

“Do you know why they’re confident of that, Dio?”

Dio frowned, understanding full well that the question was a test meant to ascertain whether he was worth the transient's attention. It bothered Dio. Language was such a fickle thing. That idea that you could size up an individual’s mind through mere conversation seemed oddly backward, coming from a transient. Maybe the sad truth was that there really was no better way to communicate with a hunk of flesh and blood... To size up a hunk of flesh and blood. But attention was currency to transients. Swimming through seas of fiber, a limited attention span was all that prevented them from becoming veritable gods. Talking to a human being meant slowing down their consciousness to a crawl. While a purely synthetic consciousness would have no problem keeping one stream of thought operating at nanosecond speeds and another at the comparatively sluggish pace of a human conversation, the transients' blend of biology and tech was not quite so dexterous with its multitasking. Still, networks were human artifacts. The Ark's synthetic cyber-police did not even begin to threaten the transients' parasitic infestation of their net.

Dio looked up, reflexively looking into the image of the transient’s eyes, “They’re confident that we pose no threat because we don’t pose a threat.” Prom’theo smiled. Bingo. “That’s right kid. The machine is strong. Make no mistake, the glass ceiling of this world is merely to unfuck your head.”