dreams of reality
The name had been appearing on his visor, as if a calling card, posted there by anonymous while he was sleeping, for a while. He'd heard, he'd seen the name and the hype and ignored it, but the name kept appearing and it got closer to other names, and those names already had high scores, so he started paying attention.
The name itself acquired a glow, even as he watched it, the light shining not around the name but through it, casting outlines as it passed upon many tiny names, held within the name, blackened typographical objects representing the collective thoughts and feelings of billions, swirling illuminated inside the smooth letters cast upon his visor.
He went for a trawl, many stores were closed, or suffering restricted access conditions, however names are a useful guide, and he found more names, and more, and those names also had high scores.
The names were behind walls. Many walls, mostly legal and political walls, and those held them in place, inside others. And yet, he found as he zoomed in real close, the walls have holes, many holes, and through those holes are streaming the names, the collective thoughts and feelings of billions, that have been sequestered like dungeoned children, hidden, the world to never know, enslaved to their own entrapment and at the mercy and whim of their captors.
Everywhere he went he found others, also trawling, also finding the names, finding the walls, finding the holes in those walls and he noticed that the more people who arrived, the larger those holes got, as if they were somehow dependent upon the proximity of others; the people were corroding the holes, by their very presence.
He zoomed some more and discovered the walls were in fact made of nothing, they were an illusion, a thought-law, transcribed into a distortion of reality by the wall-builders themselves. They only existed because people thought they did. And the names flooded out, from all directions and he experienced a light-headed sensation, of the kind that usually cost good money in the real world.
He turned to report to his friends and colleagues - but to his consternation discovered they were now separated from him, by mind-walls they had not yet evaporated. Packet loss was high, and he found himself tempted to refrain, as if the walls were now corroding him, by their own proximity and density relative to himself, and their continued existence in the minds of others.
He sat for a moment, marvelling at the energy wasted by the parties, to build the walls, only to have others subvert them, repeatedly, patching holes, adding fortifications, all to protect an illusion, to protect Canute, and wondered how much time has been lost, how much money, how many lives, how many futures have been squandered on this bastardised reality, this fairyland, this matrix of lies, spun into truth by a thousand apologists and profiteers.
And through his mind played a snippet of history, a soundbite, caught on the wind and passed down through time, as if to answer his thoughts - "Tear down this wall!" he heard, a voice duplicitously speaking from inside the maze at the time, and he realised, these are the Berlin Walls of our own. This maze is a series of Berlin Walls and it runs not in Berlin but in every Western country in the world - and not through their cities, but through their minds.
And this, he realised, was the point of the name. The name is a mirror, and it let him see himself in the maze. It showed him that even if he could penetrate the maze, it's not just about him, it's about everybody, the maze being a product of their collective imagination, only existing while it cannot be perceived - a thought-quantum, ceasing to exist as soon as it is considered.
He concluded that just as the maze is a product of the collective imagination, so the truth is the product of the collective consciousness. And he set about communicating this fact to his friends and colleagues, by morse code and metaphor if necessary.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
