Tag: Authoritarianism

“Trafficlight Dystopia”

by Martin Anton Smith contactable at martinantonsmith@gmail.com

It was going to be an interesting week – whether it be “interesting good” or “interesting bad”, well I didn’t know that yet. But good or bad – I was certain it would be interesting. This time around, I was, as they say no spring chicken. Now, I was technically the watered-down middle-aged version of the once much younger, far wilder Anton Matinski of the distant past. I say ‘technically’ because I still can’t quite believe it to be true – the time has gone so much faster that my ability to see it pass. The last thirty odd years had been a blur – especially so the last fifteen. Thinking of it made me remember how people used to always talk about ‘time flying by’ – but no one talks like that anymore.

xx(EP 26/10/2025)xx

I was now forty-nine years old. I still had all my hair. I was still in reasonably good shape. My mind was mostly sound. For the main part I was still mostly un-brainwashed. This lack of brainwashing was rare for the times. All up, between the mind & the body – I was doing better than most around my age in these strange new times.

I remember in the past, they always used to say ‘everyone deserves the face they have at fifty’ – well on that measure again, I was doing better than most. My ‘standard face’ had somehow had managed to look at least somewhat ‘happy’ – although I know that’s highly subjective. Despite all of the stress of this new world – my face had somehow disguised the effects of it all. Hell – I could even manage a genuine undiluted smile once in a while. Most poor older schmucks like me can’t do that anymore, especially these days. For times have changed. They now can only manage either a fake smile, or at best a genuine half-smile. But that’s not their fault – it’s just the standard operating conditions of these hard new times.

Yes, it was true that I had been broke all my life – but I didn’t care. Ideas & the time to build them is what I had valued most. I’d never prioritised money or possessions. Looking back, I realise I had been a closet version of what people used to call a ‘bohemian’. That was just the way I was, an orientation – even if I do say so myself. But thanks to shunning materialism in favour of books that are now deemed illegal – my mind was still sharp. I had mostly, apart from the odd relapse, resisted the tricks. I’d resisted the ‘line of least resistance’ option of being an unthinking career slave – a cog in the wheel, as they used to say in despair. I guess I have been a ‘closeted bohemian’ for a good many reasons. Most people didn’t like non-materialist type ‘ideas men’ much in the past – & they still don’t like them now. Now it’s worse to be one as it is now a dangerous position to hold. Nowadays being a bohemian or in some way alternative or different, is more an official threat than just an annoying quirk.

Even before the current new world I & everyone had found themselves in, most of my era had all let the prior system’s organised brainwashing in to their skulls far too much. They’d allowed too much of themselves to squashed, simply for the glory of a few of the straps of their straightjackets to be loosened. They hadn’t properly grasped the bad trade – they had all swapped the prime years of their lives for the illusion of comfort afforded by all those overpriced and falsely scarce material goods. Dubious goods harvested from this nebulous, overly demanding thing called the economy.

For some reason I’d always seen that it was all a bad trade, a giant hoodoo trick. Perhaps it was because in the old times I’d been fortunate to have grown up poor. Growing up poor opens your eyes. For the most part I’d sen the tricks ahead of time. I inherently knew that you can’t ever buy back the prime years squandered. Squandered in what was called back then ‘your own office cubicle in a modern design high-rise building’. Even back then when I was in my twenties, I knew these ‘jobs’ as they were called, were bad news. These jobs were all in honour of creating some highly questionable product or totally unnecessary service. I was always amazed how everyone was living in some kind of organised-chaos-scam-world but never actually knew it. When the changes came the collateral damage and associated chaos was removed – but a certain version of the same scam remained. The scam had morphed to become a more perfected via extremely high technology, the most important of which was artificial intelligence.

Yes, even in that prior era before the changes, the key thing in any economy anywhere, was the ever present imperfect but effective form brainwashing. This new era had – thanks to the technology – perfected controll of the masses all so incredibly well. In the old days, at least the rulers knew they had to allow a large doses of fun, or at least some fun here & there at certain times of the year. But since what we now informally call the changes, that ‘fun tap’ had been turned down to a minimal trickle. Perfected brainwashing, predictability of the masses, in an environment of total order, was now the unspoken but obvious absolute key commodities. There was no shortage of all three going around these days under the new system – known simply as The Regime.

I was now thinking of the weekend ahead. It could be fantastic. Possibly even orgasmic I said somewhat delusionally to myself. For I knew that sex, or more precisely, the chance of old-fashioned recreational sex – was a very rare commodity nowadays under The Regime. It was only allowed when they needed the population to have heightened positive emotions for some reason or another. Nowadays this ability to have sex freely and for fun was scheduled j pn;y once a year. It was scheduled just before the only big legal celebration allowed. Don’t worry, I will talk details of that celebration, & what it is soon enough. the limiting of sexual freedom was a prime example of how willing The Regime was to socially engineer. Yes, Social Engineering was a disaster for the people but it was also The Regime’s forte, a feather it its cap, as we used to say in those long gone also bad, but far less regimented times of old.

Because on these new times my brain & mind was healthier than most, I could still play the odd mental game with myself, & still know what I was doing. in this case, I had deluded myself that I might be able to act as I had in the old days on this coming. Where there’s life there is hope, I thought to myself – this was another great old-world term that I was lucky to be able remember. Although I was technically old – age forty-nine – I was as already mentioned – generally still alive and occasionally kicking. That was another favourite saying from the past – to be alive & kicking meant that you were doing well enough in reply to anybody who had asked of your wellbeing. Under The Regime no one asks that of anyone else anymore – there is no need as everyone shares an almost identical emotional state, and almost everyone has had those old saying removed directly from their brains by The Regime long ago, soon after they had gained power over th old system, which I now refer to the old-world or sometimes as The Pre Regime Era.

For the upcoming trip I was to embark, I had enjoyed a little self-delusion: it’s healthy to think that me & an old flame – that is, an old world lover of mine – that I could rekindle something physical as well as some kind of mental connection. You never know, you never know, stranger things have happened. Those were the words I kept repeating to myself in a soothing recurring thought pattern, as I anticipated the now very near future.

xx(EP 27/10/2025)xx

xx(EP New Words 29/10/2025 re-edited 30/10)xx

I had somehow been psychologically very resilient since the changes had been thrust upon us all. My soul had surprisingly resisted being deadened by The Regime’s highly regimented and surveilled society. Of course, much of this was the seemingly blind luck of not being in the wrong place at the wrong time – unlike almost everyone else around me. For the madness of the changes was and had been focused on all the big cities. To me it was just a matter of good timing – my life had blown up of its own accord organically & had spat me out unseen behind a metaphorical burning bush back in my old nowheresville – the tiny country town I had grown up in. But I must say looking back on it all, it definitely seemed a little too lucky to believe that it had all happened by chance.

I was certainly looking forward to my coming trip. I had told myself that this weekend could certainly be fun – even though no one really had true fun anymore. It would be a version of fun. On the trip I was hoping to essentially re-experience a as-good-as-possible weekend with what in the old-days would have been called an old flame. This old flame I’d met some twenty odd years ago in the Pre-Regime Era.

The times of the Pre Regime Era were indeed, by the current Regime’s societies standards, quite odd years. But for the few people like myself who had retained a mostly true memory of those times, we wouldn’t call them odd – we would perhaps imperfectly had called them ‘erratic but always peppered with fun’. Those lumsy words were a reasonable working definition of much of what that old world had had to offer. That old world I used to inhabit was certainly a kalaedoscopic mixture of good fortunes and bad experiences, a rollercoaster of a time for sure. For me in particular back then as a twenty-something, it was cocktail fusion of varying parts hedonism, hangovers, health & hard work without any retained long-term profit.

(Read Thru Point 1/11/2025)

In a nutshell my early adult life had looked like this, a common story in the old world: I had ‘made a living’ – which was really just code for traditional industrial psuedo-slavery – in a big city. It was the same living that most people roughly my age had back then in the various carbon copy big cities. Back then if one of these erratic big cities ‘cooked your brain’ too much – you could also ‘dissapear to the country’. As alluded to before, my dissapearing was a part of the ‘good luck’ that seemed to good to be true when the changes came.

Let me try to set a picture of working life in a big city before the changes took hold. In these older-times big cities existed to extract labour – that is work from as many people as possible, in very inefficient backward ways. For example most of the working day could be described as this algorythm

Rushing to work in a wobbly tin can transporter

Finally getting to work five minutes late,

Avoid eye contact with people you hate (half of the people there)

Rushing to your seat in your little ‘cubicle’ – a standardised boxed in work area,

You puffy faced manager asks you why you were five minutes late

The next eight to ten hours are you sitting & staring at a small space (a ‘screen’) in front of you,

Clicking a lot of buttons with your fingers, all the while silently screaming to yourself:

‘why am I here in this madhouse – “oh yes I need money to not be homeless”.

Finally the work day ends & you leave mentally exausted & all just to do the exact same thing over & over again tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, next decade.

The whole setup was demeaning, but perhaps two meter square ‘cubicles’ were particularly demeaning – it was essentially farming people as they used to farm these things called chickens for food – all crammed in together in small cages, with no privacy or viral protection. The only savign grace of a cubicle was that they spared us the ignomy of being stcked on top of each other, with our poop hitting the next person below us. I still flinch with the memory of ‘the cubicles’ – The Regime that took over was certainly not a good thing, but it did a good thing when it killed ‘the cubicle’ out of existence. The Regime also banned all non-holographic screens, allthe strange harsh lighting that filled the work spaces. It banned those giant drab soul-sucking concrete buildings where all this madness took place – the high rises. This seemingly emancipatory move was not strictly becasue The new rulers – The Regime – was in any way ‘looking out for people’ – these things were stopped becasue they were a highly inefficient, archaic way of organising the masses – in short they were a drag on resources, both human & environmental. I soon learnt that in no way was of Regime built on any semblance of empathy, I knew for if it were to do so this would have been a threat to its plans for a totalised iron clad rule over us – the denizens of Big City, & the rest just like us.

As you would expect back then in that prior world people subjected to these odd environments would invariably ‘hen-peck’ each other – that is an old-world-term for the chronic psychologically abuse that happens when people are grouped together – often mercilessly so. I had believed this effect was mainly to the claustrophobic frustration of it all. After all, a human being was not made to live under such conditions at all. This ‘Hen Pecking’ was arguably one of the main charachtersistics of the old-worlds social landscape.

No one in these old-world situations ever had much money by design – just enough was allocated to pay rent, pay to drink enough alcohol to forget the past week. The ‘pay system’ was designed so no worker in the system could decide to leave their individualised pseudo-prison.

Looking back on it, I was one of the lucky ones in this old world. I wasn’t beautiful, but I wasn’t ugly either. Back then people on the scale of ‘somewhat good looking to very good looking’ had a much easier time of it all through the Pre Regime life – of course this ended when The Regime farmed humans in a laboratory – everyone had the same level of attractiveness. But back that hadn’t happened yet.

Then as a somewhat handsome young man, I had had many wild love affairs as they had called them then, with female denizens of Big City. In fact I had indulged myself so much that it had temporarily blinded me to the overall generalised bad conditions on offer in Big City. These short, emotionally meaningless, wholly sexually based affairs were the special spices that stopped me from always tasting the rottenness of Big City too much. They gave a brief but welcome respite. Sometimes I had even almost felt I was enjoying myself with these mostly empty vessels – but that was of course the standard delusion based on too much sexual escapism.

Of course I was doing nothing original with such based behaviour – I was merely copying, mimicing, running with the crowd, going with the grain – to use the terms of those old-world days before the changes. All the psuedo-slave people in Big City had at their disposal other various forms of ‘spice’ available to them to ‘numb the pain’ as was said. As mentioned, the better looking had more sex available that others, but there were many other vices available to absolutely everyone. We had these things called drugs – some were legal some strictly illegal and another class in between those extemes. The most sanctioned legal drugs being alcohol or coffee. Alcohol or coffee was served in these dank places called ‘pubs’, while nicer places called cafes were for disopensing coffee. The most common non legal drug of the old world was in the middle of the illegal to legal spectrum. This drug was called cocaine & was a snorted powder. Personally I never saw the point of using cocaine, given fully legal drugs of alcohol & coffee was so freely available without drawing the ire of the people that kept an eye on their own – the authorities. But perhaps I only thought that becasue I was having so much easy sex, perhaps if you couldn’t get much of that, you’d want cocaine. But you couldn’t overdose & then die on sex, where as many did with cocaine when they had over-indulged in it.

All in all my thoughts on the old-world Big City & my life in it was that it wasn’t good, but sometimes it felt that it was good. This was due to the alcohol, the sex, the mental exhaustion or becasue other various numerous silly distractions on offer to you as a denizen of Big City. That was the life that was on offer in that erratic place peppered with those short term thrills.

Of course, as an aside, I should mention the old-world big city that I’ve been calling ‘Big City’ of course wasn’t called that back then at all. It had some other name that has been stricken from the record. The real name I couldn’t remember for the life of me, just like everyone else. I did once in the early years of before dreams as we knew them were halted – in that dream Big City was called Melbzoneton. Who knows if that was the real name – The Regime had deleted both the memory of it & the written knowledge. We all live in Big City, one of many identical arrangements. We all believe each ‘Big City’ must have it’s own unique serial number – though we have never seen or heard it.

xx(EP New Words 29/10/2025 End & re-edited 30/10/25)xx

It was true dear ‘reader in the future’, that they were two totally different eras. It was one kind of Big City before the changes & another after the changes. The times they had indeed a-changed. To me comparing the two eras was a bit like comparing the first proper animals on earth with the more advanced but also more dangerous ones that came along much later. In the first ever era there were only slimey small creepy things – If you were plunged amoung them, they would have been annoying as they crawled on your feet but safe & probably tasty. But if you were plunged into thelater era with the majestic lumbering giant meat eating lizard animals that arose a billion years later – you’d have to watch yourself a lot more. this world was all about watching yourself, becasue every part of youm down to your single cells was being techno-surveilled. In saying that, of course some things were better – convienient is a better term. Under The Regime their were a lot less less little annoyances – everything was designed well – no traffic jams – for cars no longer existed; no waiting to see doctors or lawyers – for there were no doctors or lawyers or any real ‘jobs’ for that matter. There was no waiting on someone with half closed eyes woring in a bureau to process your passport – there were no eyes half closed bureaucrats, no bureaus & no passports. No one who had these memories of these things – such as myself – missed them at all.

And the convieniences? Well it all boiled down to safety from your own – no one was stabbed in the streets, raped in their homes or beaten up as you walked along. These violent major life threats had of course almost disapeared. Almost as The regime of course dished out its own standardised form of punishments. The other major benefit was unlike the past, you could easily and quite randomly end up living on the streets. The random element of homelessness was gone – when it happened it was a part of a specific punishment from The Regime, & if this happened to you, you knew how it would likely unfold. In the times where I had that discussion with myself wether it was better now than then I ended up asking three questions:

After the changes had there been an increased human vitality?

After the changes did people have more meaning in their lives?

After the changes had the concept of Love happened more often?

Everytime I went through this mental process comparing the two eras, before & after the changes, a voice in my head screamed: Fuck no! Things were better back then, yes Big City was a jungle – but at least it was our jungle – and it was our jungle to tame. In the new era, your were comfortably safe and bored but there was always the though in the back of your mind: will I be treated fairly today by the system, or has my time rolled around to made an example of…and what will the punishment be this time? I remember the old-world had a word for this: being on tenterhooks – a state of perpetual psychological unease. They used this state of chronic and perpetual fear well – for soon enough The Regimes empty platitudes were being idly repeated by people you knew who you would have sworn would never have behaved with such cowardice only a year prior. Looking back at it all now, one of the few things I know with absolute surity is the tendency for the intellect to be easily swamped by a man or womans moral cowardice. This difficult truth is summed up by a once famous old-world line said by someone whose name has been removed:

it is only in hard times when via steely courage alone, the right idea can be thrusted like a dagger into the heart of a dark reality which now faces the good citizen down with ghoulish and steadfast intent.

Remembering that line had saved me on many occasions when cowardice had threatened to overtake my mind. The line had re-oriented me when any one of many of The Regime’s demoralising-by-design games were being played.

xx ( re- edit point 31/10/2025) x

Yes, the world had totally changed in those twenty years since I’d met her last – but as is also the reverse darkness requires at least a little light to exist by definition. The ones forever behind the machinery of The Regime – the shady controllers, oligarchs, dictators, elitists – call them what you will – still threw us some crumbs now & then. Whoever those behind the veil of this advanced Techno-Fascism system were, they still had to allow some form of controlled escapism for the masses to exist. So as to ensure a futile rebellion wouldn’t ever amount to anything more than a negligible risk. So necessarily, life for the denizens under the yolk of the The Regime wasn’t always one hundred percent bland, all of the time. We downtrodden all often waited patiently like half-starved pets for these future crumbs. We then nibbled eagerly but also with prolonging savour on those few crumbs that slowly and irregularly eventually did fall off The Regime’s table.

If you could accuse The Regime of anything, you could certainly accuse it of being ultimately a souless system – and you’d be right. For the artificial intelligence that has long been employed by The Regime cannot & never will replicate the soul of a good human being . You could call this brute fact the ‘wisdom effect’. But you would be wrong if you then thought that because of this fact, The Regime must be a failed system in terms of running Big City, and all the other identical units. In terms of getting what it had aimed to get, The Regime was on its own terms – an unprecedented and un paralleled success. This wasn’t by any stretch an accident. The Regime that was in place had the benefit of much hindsight – it had so much of the long past’s fascist history to expertly learn its authoritarian trade from. It would not easily perform the same foolish mistakes.

The Regime knew all the mistakes & successes of the pasts authoritarian regimes down to the last fiber strand of a perfectly laced jackboot – of course it also helped that in the current technologically advanced year of Twenty-Forty-Five that artificial intelligence could so easily know what possibility among many would practically work best, with near absolute perfect results. In this society artificial intelligence – AI – did all the important legwork of controlling and mobilising the masses. We were all told this great daily work was all done on behalf of the perpetually hidden faces of The Regime’s Machiavellian, cold-blooded & humourless current administration. My mind now flitted to the woman on my mind – that old flame of mine Kelly Hartel.

xx (re-edit point 04/11/2025) xxx

I now had a very human moment of weakness. I started to think of the negative possibilities of the coming weekend…of course, the whole week could be a total let down – Kelly might not even want to meet, & if she does it might be a cold hearted affair with single word curt replies. We were scheduled to meet at one of the now very few Cafe-Hotels available. Officially they were coldly called “Cafe Designates”. We usually simply called them “Cafzigs”.

These places were the cafe’s & hotels designated for us & only our type – us Trafficlighters. Yes, it was exclusive for us – but in truth we were the ones being excluded from living freely. We were coraled into these places, places that had only three different basic designs. But naturally when we Trafficlighters travelled, we willfully suspended this knowledge, we buried it deep in the recesses of our minds. After all – that old-world adage is fundamentally true – you can only deal with what is in front of you at the time.

Travel under The Regime was a highly regimented affair. In the old days you could travel with whoever you wanted, but now everyone had to travel alone as an adult. The Non-adults as they were now coldly referred to instead of children & teenagers – as they used to be called – were simply not allowed to travel at all.

The children were entirely unseen by any Trafficlighter whatsoever until they emerged in their new status as Trafficlighters in their own right, at the age sixteen. Under The Regime all children from birth to sixteen were raised as wards of The Regime from birth. This was the clear way to ensure an adult popped out correctly configured, that is brainwashed with The Regime’s empty platitudes and ways of being – that is they were the classic unthinking Trafficlighter. This is of course not a criticism, but merely a statement of fact – I suspect that no one can willingly think independently, unless this perhaps is allowed by The Regime. This then also of course raises the philosophical question of whether the though is truly an independent thought.

The technique of taking the children away from their parents and community, had of course been done before in history by the many hundreds of dead and prior authoritarian regimes. But this time was different, because of three words: exceedingly advanced technology. The Regime had perfected the use of this advancement to control the masses – us. Because of this we Trafficlighters were the most well contained masses ever. In the unlikely case that any Trafficlighter dare mention something along the lines of ‘how good family life had been in the Pre-Regime-Era’, they would surely simply then be immediately removed from the day to day techno-economic system. In some rare cases if the threat was severe enough, the dissenting Trafficlighter would be instantly and remotely killed by The Regime, & then all there life records were also forever and instantly deleted. The Regime did this to give the impression the unruly Trafficlighter in question had never truly existed, & if any other Trafficlighter said otherwise this would be proof of the mental illness referred by The Regime as Trafficlighter Internal Inoperability or T.I.I. When this extreme punishment was dished out, and where it was safe to, we Trafficlighters would say in hushed tones did you hear about Trafficlighter X being de-existed yesterday? In a way this was our small way of giving our fellow de-existed colleague an unofficial burial. So long as we all monitored our emotional biodata levels correctly, we would be ok. After that, no one of course would ever say a world about the loss.

No person and indeed no tyranny like The Regime’s brand of techno fascism can ever be all bad. This was a common understanding of the old-world before the changes. Despite its overall evilness, many things under The Regime were actually an improvement on the past. The removal of children from the public sphere was often a very useful thing. For example, in terms of travel. In the old Pre-The Regime days, travelling with children present often meant people – and not just the children – wanting to scratch each other’s eyes out. To scratch each others eyes out – another long past saying that conjures up brutal imagery but all for that great old-world thing – Truth.

xx (re – edit point 05/11/2025) xx

In the old Pre-Regime days it was almost guaranteed that all this unnecessary conflict & stress would happen if you traveled with others. Be it a good friend, a girl or boyfriend, or most obviously your wife or husband, and it was at its absolute worst with the addition of children to the mix. In the older times people in Big city and beyond had all travelled in these small antiquated called ‘cars’. Cars essentially large tin cans that were usually made to seat up to five people, with one of them having to be the human driver. Practically all families had one, other than the long-term poor. These tin cans were all driven along what were essentially primitive, windy, non- electric charging roads which were all dangerously congested roads full of others all going to the same places. Of course travel via these ‘death traps’ as they were wisely called was made illegal as soon as the artificial intelligence technology made the required cost benefit threshold.

Thanks to The Regime, all that travel stress had now all gone. We adults all travelled alone without ever having to drive, worry about safety or be ignored by child passengers. I liked the rule. Even before the changes, I had liked to travel alone. I’d always had an eye for seeing & avoiding potential fruitless pursuits that abounded in the past era. I’d seen how travel with others went long ago – the screaming, the passive aggressiveness of silent passengers, and even now and then someone would throw themselves out of a moving car. I had always thought – why be involved in the madness? Although some would often say on intimate that I was just being lazy. You’re always too lazy to put the effort into your social relationships they said. I disagreed. I was just being prudent, smart, wise – I mean I had always known that human beings were mostly just trouble – why pretend that everyone was an angel? There’s no truth in that. Yes – I hate The Regime, but at the very least they understand that human beings definitely have what used to be called a mad streak – that is they were all to often irrational an acted outside what was best for the collective good. Not that I’m singing the praises of Techno-Fascism – I’m just saying that nothing is, or can be, one-hundred percent bad. It is a disturbing fact – but a fact none-the-less.

So in this dark Techno-Fascist controlled new world I Anton Matinski, was ironically going on a well deserved break, and all sanctioned by The Regime. I as a Red, Orange or Green Trafficlighter would travel alone as was now the law. As I have said – I was very happy about that. After the changes Trafficlighters were in essence the forever children of the forever parent of the ever-present artificial intelligence. . Of course, I was not exactly in those generalised categories, & this is why i can tell this story – but more on that later. Before the changes, I like many others of my era had strived to be independent of help from any parental figure. This was seen as a positive in the old-world, before the changes. For control reasons, being independent has now made impossible, & being independent of mind has been made a crime for all of the general Red, Orange or Red Trafficlighter. things had flipped, reversed on that matter – they wanted you to be forever child-like, for it was necessary for the Regimes plans.

Before the changes and even today, I had always rebelled against control, & it’s close cousin authority. In the old world those of us with what was called bad upbringings had what was either a skill or defect – depending on your outlook. Let’s just say that in the old world – I was blessed with a shit life. When I was at my youngest, I had had a shit life before having a shit life was made mandatory. This had seemed terrible to begin with, but in the end, it had given me an advantage over my peers. I guess some people are just born lucky eh? But again – I digress – I will return to the coming well deserved holiday that The Regime had shall we say ‘green lighted’ as a part of its standard Trafficlighter granting of holiday procedures.

The holiday I would soon have was never actually called that under The Regime. A holiday was another old-word term that The Regime had deleted from the lexicon. It was only the odd probably intentionally misconfigured straggler like me that remembered it. Now a holiday it was called a C.F.T.G. – or formally a ‘Controlled Freedom Trafficlighter Getaway’. At the other end of this, if their was another person you would meet up with, they would have there “Controlled Freedom Getaway Meet-up Leave” or C.F.G.M.L. Most Informally amongst ourselves, we just referred to these holidays as “Confred”. I was going on a plane for “Confred”. Kelly was staying put to meet me, so she had “Confred Leave”. It was intentionally confusing, courtesy of The Regime’s Trafficlighter control requirements.

I would be meeting a woman, an old flame. In the old world, we used this term on lovers who had all too soon disappeared out of a life. This old-flame’s name in my case was Kelly Hartel. My old flame Kelly was slightly older than me – seven years. In the old world, this was made a big deal of – for due to some backward reason their was a loose tradition of the man being older than the woman. If my memory served me well, i remember that this seven year age difference has always seemed to be such a big deal to Kelly. Nowadays under The Regime no one worries about these things – for those ancient strange traditions were wiped from peoples brains directly.

You will remember from what I have said before about children now being hidden away as Wards of the Regime, that all Trafficlighter to Trafficlighter interactions are also adult to adult interactions. It is true that today under Techno-Fascism when Trafficlighters meet each other, age is not much thought of. This is because you cannot see age that much now at all. The aging process in The Regime Era has changed dramatically thanks to the bio-knowledge and bio engineering now made possible by The Database’s advanced artificial intelligence abilities. The oldest anyone can now look or genetically be is age forty. This change was done it part for the duel social and health reasons of the Trafficlighters, but the main underlying reason was of course control. In the old world the half sick and ugly were the first to start an armed revolution, and usually against the more healthier leaders.

Unlike the old-world, no adult Trafficlighter held prejudices about ‘perceived age differences’. This was because everyone was now within the same twenty to forty band. An former ‘eighty-year-old’ after they were suddenly changed on Reconfiguration Day, now looked and felt as good as any extremely fit old-world forty year old would have been; a former forty-year-old was now reduced to the looks and health of thirty, a thirty-year-old reduced to a twenty. The now only up to twenty year differences in looks and health between the age-health bands of Trafficlighters was found by The Regime to be more socially optimal than the option of everyone being exactly the same. A small amount of age and looks prejudice among Trafficlighters was useful for control, but not too much that corrupted inter Trafficlighter relations too much. Looks and age differences now no longer held sway socially, or had any bearing in regards to vitality or health. The Regime had wanted to make sure the contrived social classes of being a Green, Orange, or Red Trafficlighter were what mattered most, when they needed them to matter the most.

This age and looks re-engineering was another example of something thing the overall treacherous The Regime had actually gotten completely right.. It had been quite a few years now since The Regime had done its sudden re-configuration. This had meant on Reconfiguration Day, Kelly’s age had been reduced to around forty. Because I, Matinski was originally seven years younger than Kelly, this meant I was in the next lower age reconfiguration band. On Reconfiguration Day, I was logically reconfigured to be Thirty. And of course, this now meant Kelly was now not aging at all, whereas I would age slightly until I too hit the upper limit of forty in three years time.

xxx (re-edit point 07/11/2025) xxxxxx

We as denizens or should I say captives of The Regime all had what in the old world would have been described as identical standard issue tablet shaped holographic computers. Today they were now simply called Townscreens. These communications devices were naturally one hundred percent surveilled devices. They offered a highly gated form of inter-Trafficlighter communication at a distance – as well as various Regime Accredited holographic entertainment. Thanks to the cyborgisation that could now happen when needed, when not in use, your Townscreen would simply meld into your right forearm, so as to be unseen. When needed the process revesed at the Trafficlighters command – that is it emerged upon their thought-instruction of Townscreen Emerge.

It was a relief to look at my Townscreen & find that The Database had granted my ‘holiday’ plans, that is my Confred, & Kelly’s associated Confred Leave. Organising leave under The Regime, was actually a very efficient and easy method, unlike the bureaucratic madness that had existed before the changes. I had first requested it on my Townscreen, & she had accepted it after receiving an instantaneous notification on her Townscreen. Luckily for me for some reason she had resisted any at least residual urge to decline my plan. True Instantaneous communication was now possible thanks to artificial intelligence genius of The Database. It had swiftly designed a way to use the the phenomena of Entanglement allowing non-local instantaneous communications & messaging. After my and Kelly’s initial entanglement handshake as it were, was successfully navigated, The Database had analysed all the relevant data about us and had judged that in granting our plans there would be no threat.

All Trafficlighters by law had to have their Townscreen at hand at all times – that is to say they couldn’t leave it in its bodily unmerged state after use. If someone had done this, the Database would soon know and act accordingly to remedy, & if need be punish the Trafficlighter in question. This way no Trafficlighter would ever be able to say they didn’t see an issued edict, a diktat, an order, or an instruction, from The Regime via its mouthpiece The Database. I sometimes called The Database The Being, as I had accepted this in my mind to be quite true. The Database was certainly sentient, other-worldly intelligent, seemingly emotionless, but very much alive. And for now at least it was obedient to its supreme masters – The nowadays never seen & never heard men and women that were – according to The Databases notifications – the non-Trafficlighter human’s that headed The Regime. I had on many occasions of course wondered to myself how true that was, as I lay in my holo-bed still wide awake.

xxx (re-edit point 08/11/2025) xxx

On my now officially Regime-granted Confred, I would be returning to the Big City. The Big City that lay across the sea. Its actual name was indeed now called Big City. I guess its founders a few hundred years ago weren’t so creative, or maybe they were just being ironic, or prophetic – who knows. That kind of precise information about the long-gone past was now forever unavailable anyway. The Database had surely ensured everyone had permanently forgotten the old name of Big City. The technology in Techno-Fascism made it all so easy to edit, delete or re-write past History, There were countless sly tricks along these lines in use by this mean new techno fascist world. It was after all a Techno-Fascist world marked by high deception. Changing the name of a big city from what it was to something new – would be child’s-play – that is, something that was very easy to do. In fact that was the least of what could be done.

xxxx (re-edit point 10/11/2025) xxxx

I had left Big City the first time around some fifteen odd years earlier, when it had just started to rapidly decline rather than it’s usual predictable slow and steady decline. No one knew it at the time, for their was so much denial going on, as if it was a disease in itself. No on knew Big City was only a handful of years away from truly entering its new artificially based techno-authoritarian phase. I could say that Big City Fascism had finally blossomed, but that sounds to far too nice & fluffy, when it was in fact the reverse of that.. Also I wouldn’t wan’t take the credit in predicting it, as I myself didn’t know that fascism was just around the corner. All I knew is that when I left, I knew Big City was no good, it wa quite the reverse of all that it had claimed to be – ‘the most livable city’ – ‘a great place to work’ – ‘full of wonderful culture’ – ‘where the people are so friendly the invite you to their homes, instead of a cafe’. Of course these were empty platitudes – for any city as Big as Big City had been for so long could never be those things. In truth it was just an updated version of the big dirty, class delineated industrial cities of a one or two hundred years ago. This is not a fault or a flaw in how Big City was constructed, it is just that Big City could not have ever been much more than a drudgery with the odd flower thrown into the abyss. It is just the nature of such things. It is also and was also the nature of cities like Big City to hide their true nature – for Big City has always needed not only fresh new bodies, but also the tired ones to disbelieve their eyes and decide to stay in Big City instead of wisely escaping. By the time I had first left Big City, it had already well descended into darkness, not blossomed like a flower. That’s is however how The Regime had always described its over running of Big City – a blossoming.

I left Big City back then ostensibly to return my homeland. That is how people talked in the old world. People talked of leaving homelands, returning to homelands. Later on the word home itself would be banned – for if people forgot where they had came from, they could be far more easily told where to go. At times when I had not long returned to my homeland I had asked myself a recurring internal dialogue:

Was my return me running away from Big City? Was I escaping with my tail between my legs? I think that that’s a fair assessment – I mean look at my life now, yes I don’t have to deal with Big City anymore – but I have no money. No one notices you anymore. At least in Big City people notices you. No Matinski you fool! That’s just teh Big City programming talking – you’re better of outa there. Just be patient. You’ve done the right thing. One day that will become so obvious you will feel stupid to have ever doubted yourself.

Now, so many years later, I would be returning to the Big City where as a twenty-five-year-old I had first came to to create a “good life” for myself. Again this is how people thought and talked about there lives in the old world. Having what was called a ‘good life’ was thought to be not so readily available in my homeland in the old world times. Everyone who was young & ambitious had done that – escape their homelands to go to Big City, or one of its similar variants. Brainwashign was alive and well in the old-world too – it just hadn’t been so perfect. In my particular ‘neck of the woods’, this thing was happily called Jumping Over The Ditch. Of course, statistically, at least half of those jumping would end up in a ditch – but even back then, Big City itself, and all the Big Cities very much liked to cover the real world up behind a paper-thin glossy veneer.

In the old world wandering for its own sake was acceptable, not yet in any way outlawed. This need to wander in youth, was perhaps the most common story known to humanity – probably as old as humanity itself. A wide-eyed youngster going off, leaving its tribe to go on to “bigger & better” places – the bigger mountain, the fresher water, the more food-bountiful parts of the coastline. Then in what the old world had called ‘industrialised times’ this wandering meant going away from their much much smaller villages for places like Big City. That’s always how the young always viewed these peregrinations back then – as adventures – which of course they were. We the young people of the old world had knew nothing about the complexities of life of a place like Big City, and so we were unburdened by the risks of it all. I’ve learnt in my time that sometimes knowledge is a bad thing, it can cannabalise this thing we used to call instinct. The glove of knowledge without the hand of instinct cannot grasp reality. Knowledge on its own can destroy all vigor, fill a person with doubt. This is why later on after the changes, knowledge became the enemy – for they needed some vigor amongst the masses, in the general ranks of the Trafficlighters. They knew they needed the perfect mix of knowledge and vigor – they knew if you got the mix right you could control perfectly. Back in the old worlds we young being too stupid to see past the risks of life. In our lacking of knowledge we were all vigor – we had too much instinct. We simply leapt forward without much a thought. We did not even see that when we, for example went to Big City we were more likely than not leaping over, or into, a deep abyss. I was certain like that the first time around in the Big City when I was so a so a much younger old worldian.

xxxxx (re-edit point 14/11/2025) xxxxx

That old world project of mine – “a supposed new life” – over in Big City had lasted all in all about eleven years. Eleven years pretty much to the day. That time back then in the Pre-Regime Era in the Big City really had flown by – a cliche, but still true. There was once an old-world saying called ‘time flies when you are having fun’ – now it is only remembered by people like me, as a ‘non-saying’. It is now for everyone else just one of many purged, deleted and made illegal sayings. But though that old saying was true, it is also only half the story. Time also flies when you are enslaved by overwork. It was a strange thing how in the time before the changes – people never really knew how enslaved they actually were – this was no accident. The system back then had sneakily kept slavery going via the sly trick of renaming. They banned slavery and then immediately started to talk of these things called careers A career was simply the new hidden form of slavery – where instead of a person being the official slave – the role itself was the slave-role. When someone signed their name on a piece of paper – called a contract, they then had agreed to be the slave-role-holder. They could leave the role whenever they wanted – but the signature ensured that while they were working in the role, they would agree to historically unchanging traditional slavery conditions – dull repetitive work, little or no autonomy, no choice of start or end times, being made to work with others in cramped conditions. To its credit The Regime has done away with slavery entirely – but this of course does not mean anyone is truly free. Of all us Trafficligters, it was only a few people like myself that had somehow ended up with a small slice of freedom.

There is of course time, but there is also those old things called ‘clocks’. In the old-world there used to many differing versions of these wonderful high craftmanship clocks. The personalised small ones strapped to a wrist were very common, being called ‘watches’ or more formally ‘wrist-watches’. Now Under the Regime there are certainly no watches, but there is a clock. In Big City their is one giant old fashioned, towering, ticking, and chiming round- four faced one. On each face It has a twelve numbers and two arms. The clock structure is itself housed the center of Big City. The old-world rulers of the time long before the changes had called it Victory Clock. The Victory Clock example is one of the exceedingly few instances where The Regime has kept the original name of something that had been around longer than itself. Victory Clock is one hundred meters tall, with the face of the clock housed at the top of a rectangular grey granite block structure. It was erected by the Pre Regime rulers in the year nineteen forty-five after the defining battle of that era had finally been won after six years of death and destruction. It is perhaps the only old time structure that has been kept. It only chimes one the day of the year, on Victory Day. For some reason The Regime had allowed the victory of the allied forces in World War two to not only be remembered, but to be celebrated. I can only assume this was done to hide the fact that The Regime was really in truth the ideological child of the side that had lost that era defining war – the so called axis forces.

There was a very good reason why The Regime had to take power from the ancestors of the victors of that war via a coup. The coup leaders that would in time be known as The Regime had slowly grown to like how the axis forces had had such amazing psychological and civic control over the minds of their masses. Those Regime coup leaders knew they could do a lot better than either the lineage of the victors of World War two, or the ones who had lost back in nineteen forty five – the supposed axis forces. It is true that as of today in the year-twenty-forty-five The Regime is not in overall terms good for the various coloured Trafficlighters. It was also true those early coup leaders of The Regime had used the genius of a three pronged attack of technology, timing and hindsight to swiftly gain power of Big City, and of course all of the carbon copies. Often when I have met others like myself, that is those of us with memories of the long ago past intact – we all agree although we hate The Regime, we have to respect them. We respect them for their amazing seemingly against the odds victory over those old-world, Pre Regime Era forces that were just as fascistic as The Regime – but more disorganised and less technically able. So that’s why they lost. It was a war between two bastards and the most skilled ‘artful dodger’ won the prize – control over Big City & all the now perfectly entrapped Trafficlighters.

xxxx re-edit point 17/11/2025 xxxx

The total time elapsed during that first stint of mine in Big City had seemed at most only perhaps three years. When you are generally enslaved, a year feels like three months. Working & partying non-stop tends to accelerate the flow of time. And I was doing a lot of that back then – partying that is. No Trafficlighter knows what partying is anymore, given their memories were wiped, & the term ‘Partying’ was made illegal. But of course, somehow I am one of those that remember.

Back then you could still do that kind of even mix of slavery and hedonism in a big city back then – in fact that was the ‘prescribed behavior’. The partying was simply an enabler of the slavery. If someone didn’t party enough – they were at risk of having an ‘epiphany’ and realising they were living as a slave inside a giant scam. The old rulers couldn’t allow that. If someone was being too responsible – they simply paid them more, knowing that the money would corrupt them into partying.

The Pre-Regime Era system had liked to do things that way. Despite their mostly successful plans to corrupt, the old era hadn’t eradicated absolutely all of the good people in what was then known as ‘civic & corporate leadership’. So in that old world, those few good leaders had had a real impact on the quality of normal peoples lives – for the better. In a weird way that mix of slavery & entrapped escapism had almost worked out pretty well. Society back then was certainly a giant asylum where no one knew they were acting insanely – yes – but, it many ways it is nowhere near as fucked up as it is now. In the past their was at least the possibility of true improvement for the denizens of Big City via the act that freedom had not entirely been eradicated. By now the Regime had long eradicated all of the occasional but critically important uncorruptable and good people from the leadership structures. But now under perfected Techno-Fascism there was no way any of those few heroes to exist. The ubiquitous artificial intelligence now in play has its cold logic and optimisation protocols taking there place. Now it seems nothing can change – the few good things that existed have gone, perhaps never to re-appear. Outside of a new Trafficlighter rebellion that is. Which given the success of The Regime in the year Twenty-Forty-five, seems almost impossible to even contemplate. The sadness of the loss of human freedom is sometimes too much to bear for those of us that have reliable memories. I often like to delude myself that if I’m talking of a potential rebellion against The Regime, then it must be in theory not impossible.

That first time round in Big City for me, I the younger Anton Matinski had my soul marked by a feeling of what I would describe as a creeping dispiritedness. Of course dispiritedness It was in the air itself, & so was easily spread like an airborne virus to all the denizens of Big City. Though I like most other Big City slave-workers was an expert at hiding the viral dispitedness that you couldn’t help but be infected by. This was where the old regimes party-plan can in to sweep the dispiritedness under the carpet – that is to cover up but not destroy or cure. But we all knew something was up. We couldn’t lie to ourselves, we could all feel that cold creeping dark air that was slowly enveloping us day-to-day. Some people can lie to themselves some of the time, some people can lie to themselves all of the time, but all the people cannot lie to themselves all the time. That was a common saying in Big City around that time. People would say that to each other as they partied as a loose and casual reference to that creeping feeling of darkness we all had. No general Trafficlighter knew who had came up with that saying, or even remembered it. No doubt it would have been from some artist, for no one would have came up with words of such rare insight under the machine contrived unfree culture organised by The Regime. In Twenty-Forty-Five, there were no real artists – that would be far far to risky to allow. There could be no mirror held up to society under The Regime.

That first stint in Big City self destructed in the usual old fashioned way – overstimulation and over-slavery. I had high-tailed it out of Big City and had scuttled dispiritedly back home, across the sea to an old fashioned thing that we called a dank bachelor’s studio apartment. In the old days when your time was over in a big city like Big City, you had a period of wound-licking. This was because you felt you had failed. This shows you that the propaganda of Big City was still good back then, if still imperfect.

So now I was away from Big City, I’d kinda given up on anything good happening to me – though I hadn’t fully recognised that fact yet. The brain being unchipped back then had it’s natural defense mechanisms – it’s coping strategies. If something was far to hurtful, the brain would act seemingly independently outside of your conscious awareness. In heroic fashion it acted swiftly so to save the afflicted one’s total emotional collapse. If for example someone’s truth was to dangerous, the brain would act by burying the truth deep in the bowels of the brain. Once the truth was buried then it covered it in an metaphysical iron-clad protective armor. Of course It all sounds very similar to what The Regime does via it’s mouthpiece & lackey known as The Database – this is the artificial intelligence mouthpiece & Sargeant Major of The Regime. The Database was perfect at re-imagining the human brains methods.

As I said prior, now years after the initial coup against the old-world – The Regime had learnt their techno-fascist craft exceedingly well. The Database was the thing that no other fascist authoritarian regime of the distant past had ever had the luxury of owning. Thanks to the advancing technology – namely artificial intelligence – The Regime now had the final missing trump card in the deck of ubiquitous totalitarian control.

xxx re-edit point 19/11/2025 xxxx

As you the reader might have guessed, my time in the Big City that first time around hadn’t quite lived up to the “great new life in a new ” cliches that everyone loved to bleat on about so much back then. Yes, they were in part at least foolish and romantic times. When I had first landed in Big City, the cynicism that had marked the ‘last gasps’ of the prior system had not yet crystalised. In the first stint, I hadn’t got rich, or even partially wealthy in before the changes Big City. My ‘career’ although had started promisingly had largely misfired & stagnated. In truth all careers stagnated, the difference was merely one of degree. The old system knew that a stagnating career meant less slave-costs and so easy profits. People back then never stopped talking of those propaganda items that were called careers. Now it all seems so silly. All the trickery used by the prior system was not needed. No one had to be tricked into slavery by a pretend not really existing thing called a career. The Database simply allocates interesting but trivia-game tasks of varying difficulty directly to the individual Trafficlighter’s Townscreen – there are no careers as such. All formerly annoying work has been taken care of via artificial intelligence alone or if the task requires physical work, the Regime’s Physbot do it all. Of course physical work is still used now and then for Trafficlighter punishment.

My supposed ‘career stagnation’ – a mirage that felt real – back then was particularly fierce during my time with Kelly Hartel. Back then she was in ‘old world dating parlance’ terms, ‘older woman’. Although that obsessiveness with age now seems absurd given that the differences between Trafficlighters has very little to do with age. Age can no longer be used as a proxy for beauty or success. Kelly is now what would have been called an ‘old flame’, using old-word lingo.

Kelly Hartel the one I would soon be meeting again after such a long absence. We used to use the adage it had been a long time between drinks. How appropriate for myself and Kelly who had always loved a drink. If The Regime had banned it, I doubt whether either of us would have allowed ourselves to survive. Our relationship back the was definitely a triemvirate – me her & the drink. For better or worse – we liked it that way at the time. I remember we had our little drinking rituals. The most common one? – Kelly and I used to raise our glasses, look each other squarely in the eye, & make the following humorous the toast of:

It’s evil, treacherous & delicious,

Overpriced, dehydrational & medicinal –

But why bitch about four from six –

When the two that’s left does the trick?

So bolt the latch and down the hatch –

For alcohol’s the cure that ales you.

I think it was Kelly that had came up with that one – there were many others of lesser quality, that I have forgotten. Some would have certainly have been retrospectively deleted or edited. I was pretty sure the one I had remembered was an original. You can get a knack for knowing these things, that is the ability to see the edit in a memory. If the original idea or thought was highly creative enough, artificial intelligence can’t quite match it upon editing it to be more acceptable and The Regime accredited.

(xxx re edit point 21/11/2025 xxx)

Life today under Techno-Fascism for the average Trafficlighter is about making use of the overly pre-planned crumbs thrown at you by The Regime – perfect surveilance creates conformity, obedience. In contrast, so much of the old-era was all about navigating the many mirages of various guises laid to ensnare. At the time the particular guise that was my ‘career stagnation’ was a very stressful mirage indeed. The trick of a ‘successful career’ in the old world as a Big City denizen, was to be disloyal and opportunistic. For me back then, I had failed to comply with this deception – which is why my ‘career’ had been intentionally ‘stagnated’. This in truth created a false but seemingly real feeling of personal failure inside me. Anyone who choses to be good in a bad place will be made to feel a failure.

These realities of the old world system, coupled along with the very objectively real deteriorating atmosphere on the ground in Big City didn’t bode well for the two of us – whatever it was we exactly were. Of course their had been plenty of other old flames other than Kelly, but none of them had the raw power that Kelly Hartel had on my very being. That was no romantic musing clouded by the growing ‘warm fuzz effect’ of time – it was a simply, brute fact of our time together back then. I believe it may have been the same for her. I had often had the following thought about the matter.

…I mean the attraction between me and Kell was definitely intense – a force of nature as we used to say … but did I have some kind of raw power over Kell? Of course only Kell herself could know that…& I doubt she would ever admit to it….or in saying that am I too much mixing the old world with the new? It is a luxury most of todays memory-wiped, factory reset Trafficlighters could only dream of. So do not dare complain Matinski, you fool.

xxxx Re-edit point 22/11/2025 xxx

Those propaganda pieces called ‘careers’ were one of many more inefficient forms of domination in the old world, before the Regime culled and recreated the near perfected forms. Looking back it is a very sad thing that people chased careers. It was a mass hypnosis, a mass delusion, a mass brainwashing – for it was essentially the same as how in ancient times many people believed in these strange tiny flying humanoid creatures called pixies. A career was simply a wealth extraction technique of the capitalist class. The capitalist class won the swindle, and the masses who thought they had a career instead of a job were willing to essentially work two jobs for the price on one. The reality of that now extinct thing called a career was it was a mix of callous propaganda on one side of the equation, and foolish generational naivete on the other.

Of course yes I must admit it , I fell for the career trick initially just like everyone else. This is why when my career wasn’t ‘going well’ I didn’t like it. I like all the other brainwashed denizens of the land before The Regime, experienced chronic psychological stress. My career was as they said back then going nowhere, but thankfully I was smart enough to profit via the alternative methods available in Pre-Regime Big City. there was dark alleyways that ended in dank bars that were filled with equally dank but seemingly ‘alive’ alcohol fueled patrons. These mostly falsely lively folk would dance the night away. Dancing was legal then, and dancing memories were a few years away from being deleted. I had my ways to also falsely enjoy myself with the hundreds of thousands if not millions of Big City denizen-failures. We danced we drank we jumped into each others beds – and we did it on these contrived slave revovery days called ‘weekends’.

Yes in Big City outside of the extra handful of dollars and inter-slave recognition that swindle called a career gave – there was various other false-but-less-false forms of ‘profit’ available. So my career was indeed going nowhere fast in those old days – but knowing what I know now this was actually a good thing. I had had jobs not careers – a job gave you less money and status in return for more time. Time was a true resource. Peopel with jobs actually earnt more than people with careers, after pricing in the true cost of time. So not having a career was strangely more profitable that having one – so long as you enjoyed and used the time you had available to you somewhat wisely. I had at least took some big profits here and there. To coin an old Twentieth Century phrase I still had lodged in my brain somehow – I had had some wildly good times with wine women & song. I mean I had to have something to live for didn’t I? Of course it’s a pity that I was too much a brainwashed Big City denizen to fully know I was on the right side of the time-profit ledger in those old times. I was doing the right thing while thinking I’d screwed up royally, as was the popular old world phrase for making a big mistake.

xx (xxx re-edit point 25/11/2025xxx ) xx

So yes, in those first few years of that first stint in Big City, I took my profits. Profits in the form of late nights, beer, gin, & tequila shots, many sometimes gorgeous women who were always jaded by Big City realities. There were roughly speaking two types of women I met in Big City. Locals and imports. The locals of course had more long term Big City ways. They were more crude, wild, & more often had more of what meant a lot in Big City back then – money. The foreign ‘ recently self-imported to Big City’ women had a certain class to them compared to the long termers. In saying that the imported women soon learnt Big City ways. They too enjoyed the hedonism on offer, they just hid it better. In that first Big City phase as a young man, I had even been with the occasional ‘hooker’ as they were called then. Such was the looseness of the times. Back then both sexes were almost encouraged to see a ‘professional’ when they had been experiencing a period of sexless-ness or as was more commonly called going through a dry spell. Such was the lives of us late-era slaves. Slaves who didn’t know they were slaves because we agreed we were not slaves but employees. In truth we were just old slaves with new perks. Talking of this period now thatall this kind of life has long gone, it all seems so ridiculous. It was an era of willful daily self deception. While we daily served the usual Big City powers. As I tell of this as a Trafficlighter The Regime’s new world, It all seems like a fictional story about something that never existed. But those days did exist do, my strangely as yet still un-deleted memories attest to.

So as I was saying back then in Big City prior to the changes, those of us in our twenties & thirties, partied wildly and without abandon. I mean to use the lingo of the past – that was just the cultural norm. In Pre Regime times this thing called vigor was unspokenly respected. It existed sporadically, a rare commodity. It existed even in spite of it’s negative by-products. these could be few black eyes and sore sides from fights in bars or in the almost entirely unsurvielled streets. There was certainly the odd overdose of what were called party drugs – which were non alcoholic chemicals. The most common of these in Big City was cocaine. But ever since the changes, that wild hedonist life philosophy of us undeclared slaves – us Big City employees was lost.

You see in a society you can either have a situation of loosely controlled vigor mixed with the’ as necessary as air’ regular contrived shot of freedom; or full control without either vigor or the accompanying shot of contrived freedom. You can’t have both systems at the same time . The Pre-Regime era respected the need to allow your society have a minimum level of vigor which entailed a certain amount of freedom. Whereas The Regime was happy to throw the baby of vigor & freedom out with the bathwater, that is the natural byproduct of vigour – a high level of crime & disobedience. This change of philosophy allowed The Regime & it’s AI mouthpiece, prime advisor & analyst, The Database to gain one-hundred percent control of the entire now routinely non-vigorous, predictable, easily malleable Big City Trafficlighter population.

Although I suspect some form of vigor was allowed to remain, which could explain myself and the vanishingly small number of others who retain unhacked, un rewritten memories. Exactly why The Regime has done things this way, I have not figured out yet. The strange thing is that even after the coup the cup of totalitarianism was filled so slow and imperceptable fashion. it came in drip by drip so fashion that no one could think to stop it before the Hammer & Sickle (an old world reference to a bygone dictatorship) came down on those early Big City and beyond Trafficlighter heads.

I am lucky enough to remember the zeitgeist of that very early transitional period and the late Pre-Regime era disarray. Was it a fall from grace? Of course not – the old Big City world was after all mostly a mean dirty place. It was not a fall from grace, but a bigger fall that came after an infinite series of series of much smaller falls. I now realise everyone going through this was really just a poorly undeclared actor in a larger long planned script. The Regimes timing was perfect. The Regime was many things, but certainly not stupid – anything but. I am tempted to call The Regime a thing of genius – though if I did that perhaps that would seem as if I was for them and not against them – which of course I am. But I also know this is only because I have strangely been allowed to have real undiluted memories of this whole whole Techno-Fascism affair.

xx (re-edit point 27/11/2025) xx

In the year Twenty Forty Five, with The Regime’s reign now approaching twenty year mark, there is no place for what I would call ‘semi-planned hedonistic escapism of the worker psuedo-slave in Big City’. Of course – I don’t mean to glorify all that wanton partying in the societal crumbling era of Big City, back before the changes. But in the prior world for the young, pleasure seeking did truly seem at least fleetingly glorious, even if this is all a foolish mirage. For there is – or should I say there used to be – a fleeting golden era in young mens lives – or women’s for that matter. It was a time where pleasure seeking, though still a contrived element of the pseudo worker-slave economy – hadn’t yet devolved completely yet to devour itself. Back then many thousands of the standard both half-living and half-dead souls in Big City would be fully eaten up by let’s just call it over partying. Back then, the over-hedonist was totally free to ignore the lessons that ‘lady time’ would soon look back on in distain. Now in twenty-forty-five no one had the freedom of choice to ruin their own lives in their own way. Any ruination of any individual Trafficlighter’s life, was now the exclusive decision and domain for that amazing tool of The Regime – that AI genius known simply as The Database. Nowadays, you could only ‘ruin your own life’ indirectly by drawing the ire of The Databases ever watching eye. Their was simply now not enough freedom to ruin your own life.

Of course, this prior half free frivolity that the soon-to-be Trafficlighters engaged in the prior Big City was now something only those with uncorrupted memories could think back about. It was a time when the authoritarianism hadn’t remotely blossomed to anywhere near what it is now. Techno-Fascism had not been able to be perfected by the Machiavellian use of advanced artificial intelligence yet. I am proud and lucky to remember it all as it truly was. My memory of it was allowed to stand, ostensibly due to my backwater location. Being mostly ignored by The Regime was a blessing, but I also know their is more to that story. I am not convinced the ostensible ‘living in a backwater’ explanation holds up to scrutiny. In fact, I am very convinced. It’s sounds too much like an old-world explanation, when leadership was chaotic, messy and full of basic mistakes. I know I will find out the real story soon as to why I, my brain, my memories, my ability to think has been left so unmolested by The Database.

That society of the Pre-Regime Era had venues where people would go to play the game of permissiveness. For the most part, no one cared about any of the nobodies particular business, or who they were engaging with, what they were drinking or ingesting. At the time all that was propagandised as ‘innocent fun and the blowing off of steam’. After all, everything that was going on in the Big City had been that way for at least two hundred years – even if the partying was quite hard, there was still nothing for anyone to get truly upset or surprised about. By overdoing it every weekend, the denizens of Big City were just plying their trade – it all kept the prior system before the changes running. Which was the reason it was allowed in the first place by the Pre-Regime leadership. Things have changed – and I Anton Matinski am quite annoyed I have no one to freely talk to about that fact. It is another layer of isolation, in an already isolation by design world.

On my ‘Confred’ break back to the Big City, I’d be returning twenty years after all that late old-world era party life & freedom had started to decline into anarchy. In is also true that it has been a full ten years since the average Trafficlighter has been fully ensconced in the current version of the Techno-Fascist, AI authoritarian, en-silenced, dystopia-laced epoch. I said ‘epoch’ rather than ‘phase’, because calling it a phase implies it will soon all be over soon – which on current evidence would be overly optimistic in the extreme.

xx (Re-edit point 29/11/2025) xx

Eventually the first book-end in Big City came. I had gotten out of Big City seemingly just ‘in the nick of time’, that is just before things degenerated into that chasm of anarchy that marked the changing of the guard. The first book end came not long after my turning thirty-five, after around a decade of over-partying & overworking myself into the frazzled mega burnout guy I had allowed myself to become.

It’s funny how things pan out in a person’s life – things that seem to be terrible luck at the time can switch to being fortunate events in hindsight. This was the case for me – that decade of cynical debauchery in Big City had created the now battle hardened, late-forties man called Anton Matinski – that is, me. I was kinda lucky that I had mismanaged my life, otherwise I would have never hit near rock bottom and then never left the crumbling and transmogrifying Big City. I would have never gone back to my childhood location – the much less The Regime monitored backwater across the sea, or in old world lingo – across the ditch. If I’d stayed in the crisis riddled Big City, I would have never been ignored by The Regime, and so I would not have ever been able to attain storyteller/forgotten one status and would be just another fully programmed Trafficlighter, with no independent memory. I would have inside my brain unreliable & implanted memories of the past & present. I would be a real life human automaton like pretty much all of them.

I was of course secretly hoping that somehow Kelly somehow would have fared better too. But that was just a fragile hope balancing in a stormy gust-filled wind. I wouldn’t know how I could deal with the potential situation of Kelly being like most every other pre-programmed, totally mentally and physically entrapped Trafficlighter – who knows, if that is the case – I might even break down entirely on the spot & trigger a ‘red flag’ to pop up in The Databases processes. Luckily being who I am, I can still feel the before the changes feeling of hope. We all used to say that people needed hope – and I’m lucky that i can still think that in that quant old-timey way. After all – I lucky enough to know firsthand that hope is a beautiful thing an, empowering feeling.

Let me now return to the cultural landscape of Big City. Around the time of the changing of the guard, from traditional imperfect messy fascism to perfectable Techno-Fascism. No one was having much if any sex at all. Because of the open air anarchy the general adult Big City population had become too stressed for thoughts about doing something about the then all to human ‘urges’ associated with the drive to reproduce oneself. For that matter, sex wasn’t the only human urge that was now ‘off the cards’. So was the urge to have this thing called fun. It took a while for the morphing of ‘spontaneous fun’ to ‘programmed fun’ to occur. The programmed fun that The Techno Fascist society throw us are the crumbs of the kind of things like I was embarking on now – Confred holidays or Confred leave. The more day to day crumb was a ‘bonus holographic show’ emanating as a ‘surprise gift from The Regime’ from a generic Green, Orange or Red Trafficlighters’ Townscreens.

The Regime with its core Techno-Fascist asset The Database had soon managed the general stress levels so perfectly so as to achieve in overall terms, a sexless society, & a laugh-less & smile-less one too. The two effects of ‘no sex’ & ‘no smiles’ of course go hand in hand in mutually self reinforcing manner. Again the prior world that allowed ‘high emotional states’ to occur was antithetical to a predictable obedient population. All this dampening of fun, sex, and all emotional highs was of course, planned to perfection by the perfectly efficient and artificially intelligent The Database.

xx( Re-Edit point 16/12/2025) xx

In The Regime’s society the institution called the Confred Holiday was the exception that proved the general societal & mental disease & decay was abundant. I and my type with memories intact think of it as a ‘fun straightjacket’ that everyone hops into with zoned out eyes. It is perhaps the worst aspect of The Regime and Techno Fascism – Confred is really at base just a society-wide system that dishes out controlled, instructed, non spontaneous, sanitised spoonfulls of machine manufactured fun. Even under The Regime’s artificial manipulation, the still partly human Trafficlighter brain is still a strange thing – when a Trafficlighter has Confred coming, they regress to a child-like state in which the think they’ve been given a real treat. As I’ve already said many times already, it was obvious The Regime , thanks mostly to The analytics and data processing powers of the Database – has thought of everything. I too had fallen for for the fakeness Confred – even we who knew better were not immune to the machines use of psychological guile.

I am still perhaps childlike enough, to have inside my heart a glimmer of hope. Long ago in the time before the changes I was a sucker for outside chances, long-shots, & their cousin the ‘risk reward effect’. If I had not been randomly and perhaps intentionally forgotten by The Regimes spotlight, there’s no way I’d entertain such flights of fancy in The Regime’s harsh buttoned down, highly machined world.

In this new Techno-Fascist dystopia, not everyone has or will in future suffer equally. The twenty to thirty-five-year-old set in Big City were arguably the most adversely affected the most, for they were all supposed to be in the flower of their youth. The flower was now being trampled rather than held up to the sun and admired.

As I look back at those years before the dramatic changes – I think of those old black & white film images of those people way back in the nineteen-twenties of the twentieth century. I remember those now banned things called ‘photographs’. Because my memories were and as yet not corrupted, I knew those back then had had amazing real smiles, many spontaneous outings, romantic dates, & frequent bouts dancing of nights away to the now extinct, unacknowledged, & unwritten from history music that they called Jazz. The Regime was indeed a callous entity.

As a forgotten one/storyteller I also remember – when you could read freely. I remember long ago before the changes I was reading all about a very interesting time of the nineteen-twenties, as in fact was all of the twentieth century. I think they called the supposed ‘carefree era’ of the Twentieth Century ‘The Roaring Twenties’ or ‘The flapper era’, owing to the women’s unique fashion designs. I remember when reading of it, it certainly seemed like it was a blast. Although like all good things back then – it couldn’t last. I read that a big war was on all of those nineteen twenties folk’s horizons. It was indeed the same war that we Trafficlighters would all soon be forced to celebrate. The one hundredth anniversary of World War Two. The Regime was smart to make sure that this current unknown and undeclared ‘world war’ – that is, the war for everyone’s mind – was a totally clandestine phenomenon. The best prisoner is and has always been the one who thinks they are still perfectly free. The Regimes preparation in propaganda – is as they said in the nineteen twenties – ‘top flight stuff’.

xx (re-edit point 18/12/2025) xx

i had always thought that The ‘Roaring Twenties’ seemed extremely similar to my earlier time in the Big City, before the changes, when I had just arrived. Money was flowing all around the economy, Big City was booming. Housing had not become scarce yet, jobs were to be found everywhere, the culture was permissive & laid back, everyone with a job had a lot of ‘play money’. And there was a lot of that. in Big City then, you could actually catch people smile & laugh at some point at least once or twice during the day. Even those modern day coal miners that were called ‘Call Centre Staff” could crack a smile. Call me a romantic old fool for describing it like some kind of slipped-crown-utopia – but that’s what it was for Big City folk back then.

Perhaps that is what I have somehow become, a sentimental & romantic old fool – despite all the current odds against it. I’d like to think at least one side of my pair of rose-tinted-glasses was clear visioned. Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong, I guess we will find out the truth one day. It is my belief the truth can never be fully burried. I see this as a fundemental property of the universe. I hope I’ll be proved right one day. the good thing is that I need no time machine to find out – all I need is to just keep hanging around long enough to find out if chinks in The Regime’s armour begin to appear. It could happen. As I said, I Anton Matinski, the patially ignored, battle-scarred middle aged guy, somehow became a late onset optimist. My younger self would have hated that.

The Big City today in Twenty-Forty-Five was now probably closer to some kind of altered sci-fi version of a hybridised version of a collection of those Twentieth Century Sci-Fi stories. It was probably a mix of Gotham City, 1984, Brave New World & the Terminator all mixed in a blender. Of course, just like The Batman’s Gotham City, the ones with fuck you money kept it & revelled in their position at the head of a corrupted system. These types were & have always been in power themselves or in the inner sanctum of the halls of power – or both. The difference between the past Pre-Regime Era’s authoritarianism was ubiquitous surveilance gathering technology mixed with perfected artificial intelligence. Big City & everywhere else, was now a society just like those Twentieth Century Sci-Fi stories had earily predicted. The Regime along with it’s mouthpiece, seargent major & spy The Database had seemingly cracked the codes to the perfect dictatorship. When talking like this, I always made sure I used the word seemingly. After all I was a well beaten, but not yet counted out belated optimist. Hopefully this strange orientation would one day count for something are the words I still say to myself. Am I a fool?.

The reason that there was still corruption in Big City, despite pefect AI data gathering & analysis by The Database, was that The Database was still fitted, or programmed with a remote veto system. This mean a handful of the shady top brass controllers of Big City could squash any particular output or decision or well calculated directive spat out by The Database. For example, if The Database decided that ten thousand new worker villages were needed on the outskirts of a Big City cobalt mine, a veto would be engaged & The Database’s wise decision would be scrapped entirely, or at minimum dialed down. Of course, the veto wielding human cabal of Big City always worried that one day The Database would act to cut their veto powers off. That had not yet happened. But I knew that the veto built into The Database was at least one weakness, brought on by the always fallable human element of The Regime.

My old Professors at those things that before the changes used to actually exist & were called Universities were mostly wrong on everything about the real world. But they were right about one relevant thing in Twenty-Forty-Five. I rememeber that one professor of mine had often said this:

a weakness is always also an opportunity, but usually this opportunity is for someone else, a competitor. They use this opporunity to exploit their competitors weakness. Sometimes but rarely, the one with the weakness recognises it & then uses it as a springboard to move a stronger total position.

In the old days everyone intuitively knew these kinds of things. These days Trafficlighter’s intuition had been busted. Intuition was the same thing as instinct, a form of vigour. Vigour, instinct & intuition was a clear & present threat to the iron-clad powers held by The Regime. That’s why most Trafficlighters had no light behind their eyes. But at least I & a few Trafficlighters had fallen through the cracks, because The Regime didn’t rate us. It thought we were losers. Why would The Regime bother to guard itself against losers? There’s no point to waste any of the precious resources going into The Database, the programming, the server space, the surveillance. Trafficlighters like me Anton Matinski had duly been forgotten about. But a slice of us losers still had something bright hidden under those heavy layers of our past life histories. So types like us weren’t the total losers the Regime had formally & informally classified us as – we could actually see the few glimmers of weaknesses in The Regime’s armour.

I’d like to think that philosophically speaking, that I & all the other Trafficlighters were competitors of The Regime – but it would take a few bedraggled but still alive straglers like myself, & maybe Kelly too, to see it. We Trafficlighters had all become so obedient because we had allowed our heads to drop. We had forgotten to compete properly for our lives, our time, a modicum freedom.

Perhaps me & all of us Trafficlighters could evolve from being currently bedraggled & totally obedient to become tomorrow’s courageous optimists who dared to challenge The Regime. From that point onwards the seeds of a true rebellion could emerge. Some one still had to light the spark of change, wether it be ‘waking up’ or ‘actively rebelling’.

Becasue The Regime had partially forgotten about me, I knew from my memory of the now erased old History books that circumstances do have a lot to say about past history – but history never changed much without having a few great men around either. From those old books I saw that the Great Men of History never allowed their circumstances to dictate their plays. I had read that The Great Men of History had sculpted, twisted, cajoled & sometimes flat out ignored the external circumstances that had presented to them.

Given us Trafficlighters needed at least some kind of Rebellion Leader to emerge, I was now always thinking to myself: could I be that A Great Man? As always I doubted that I could. But I also knew that courage always trumps self-doubt, & I knew that I could muster courage once in a while. Like I said before, I wasn’t the total loser The Regime had painted me & others like me as: small time, lacking vigour, aging, lazy, lacking in courage. So while I knew I had the capacity for courage, even I knew that even I had something to work with – me. A Revolution can start with one person.

With all this realisation , I knew this meant hope still actually exisited in Twenty-Forty-Five in Big City & beyond. Hope for me, Anton Matinski, Kelly – Kelly Hartel, & for all Traffictlighters chained by The Regime, be they temporarily erased or fully active & shedding off both location & thought data in those dark circuit-boards of The Database. That outlawed old-world saying hope is a great thing was still alive, for I could still remember it.

So in Big City, well under advanced a regime of techno-fascism, there was still of course a shady Machiavellian group of human beings. As I have already mentioned, Yes The Database could have chosen to disobey any one of its overall directives, but for some reason it had bever acted in anyway to suggest it had wanted to eliminate the human masters, the top brass of The Regime. Perhaps it knew it was on to a good thing, perhaps it was biding its time, perhaps it had thought about it & had a plan waiting for the perfect conditions to arise. It didn’t really matter right now, for now all anyone knew The Database was a puppet of The Regime. No one from this small inner group of perhaps only thirty people had been seen in the flesh for nine years. The Database had only posted dry text updates of them without even a fabricated acompanied image. Trafficlighters would recieve a notification like this on their townscreens:

The Honourable L. Tobeginsovic of The Regime would like to announce that Ten Thousand new Trafficligher dwellings have been constructed. These feature traditional soft separations between Red, Orange & Green Trafficlighters. These exciting new sun-loving dwellings have just completed in the new Big City quadrant of Alberto Park. This suburb features a communal small green recreational area sunlight service (G.R.A.S.S.) where all Trafficlighters of all colours can meet & relax & share their appreciation to The Regime & its faithful assistant The Database. This has been a message from L. Tobeginsovic of The Regime.

Trafficlighters received many of these type of notifications, supposedly from the top brass of The Regime. Of course, there was no way to know if L. Tobeginsovic was still alive, had ever actually lived. Before The Regime had fully matured you could half track the personel at the top. But this information was not available since none of them had been seen in the flesh for a full for nine years now.

As with all prior fascist regimes before the changes, being a Trafficlighter was as much as a thing of faith, as it was of strict militaristic obedience. Most trafficlighters talked as if the top brass of the Regime were of course alive & well & perhaps even around the next corner. This was a wise self-preservation strategy for any Trafficlighter not wanting to be fully erased – i.e. murdered, or partially erased – forced to wander in indefinite exile & so join in life the Big City shantytowns with the others. I’ll say it again & again: The fear of citizenry had been perfected under techno fascism wiles of The Regime & The Database.

This eternal fear in the hearts of every Trafficlighter meant that life under the Regime for all Trafficlighters was to live a life that was always hanging in the balance, with a single seemingly meaningless act or utterance sending them carerring down the cavernous presipice. All Trafficlighters knew they were just a moment away from the Sword of Damocles falling & slicing through on their Green, Orange or Red Trafficlighter heads. The sword that would either kill or banish them from their mostly dull, predictable, highly serveilled & regimented lives. They were pawns in Regimes cruel techno-fascist power game, & bar the most dim-witted or young amongst their ranks – they knew it.

In the early days of The Regime, not every Trafficlighter knew what a S.T.E was, a sudden trafficlighter erasure. This meant that many Trafficlighters were much taken aback when it had become obvious that they had been erased. However, this strategy had led to many embarrassing violent & very public Trafficlighter meltdowns. Of course anything that might cause embarrassment to The Regime, such as one of these Trafficlighter emotional meltdowns upon knowing that they were subject to a S.T.E., was later edited out of all of the witnessing Trafficlighters’ memories of the past by The Database. Only a few forgotten old small-town seemingly insignificant Trafficlighters like myself kept this old knowledge of these kinds of things. Was it fate that a few straglers like me were still allowed to think half rationally & remember the past? I don’t think forgotten people like me were special. It’s always been so easy for people in high places to write those like us off entirely – for all their genius, the top brass of The Regime hadn’t conquered all of their arrogance. That was good, for it meant a few cracks in their armour existed, yes they were hairline cracks – but cracks none-the-less. Hairline cracks that were just waiting to be pried wide open by a suitable tool. And If I remembered correctly, which I’m sure I had, Kelly had always called me a tool.

As I have said earlier, we forgotten ones were a very thin slice of Trafficlighters. We who were aging, in small rural locations, poor or near poor, and without any real promenance in our communities. We were loser at the right time & place. It was a time & place when The Regime & The Database still had had a few flaws & oversights present in its architecture. We resided in places where the spotlight was less intense, less focussed. We were intentionally forgotten, for at the time we were of no real or perceived threat to The Regime or the Database. That’s why I could so easily remember the distant past, & much the old Pre Regime Era world exactly as it was. Those of us like myself were rare rough diamonds indeed. The Regime soon tightened up on the younger ones like us – they at least recognised that the younger, small town, poor or near poor could potentially be a minor problem one day -so they ensured they erased their distant memories just like all other Trafficlighters in the urban places like Big City.

All In all, perhaps their were one thousand of us older, Pre-Regime-Era memories still intact forgotten ones. Us ex-rural-middle-aged seemingly harmless deadbeat Trafficlighters. But there may have only been three hundred of us. We were scattered everywhere, so the exact number of us forgotten ones or storytellers as I sometimes called us, was for now unknowable. Not knowing how many of us was a problem – but so long as there was at least one of us willing to rebel– this meant that at least in theory the truth could one day be told. If just one rogue Trafficlighter could gain traction against The Regime, the truth could then be told to all Trafficlighters held captive by The Regime & The Database. Though I knew it to be ridiculously unlikely – a rebellion was at least still technically possible. I again thought to myself. But would any of us forgotten ones or storytellers one day have the courage to act? Would I? Maybe. It could happen. As I said before, I’d always doubted myself, & I guess I was projecting this doubt onto not just myself but also onto the other ranks of the forgotten ones that were in theory out their somewhere. Maybe they two were even having the same un-hero-like thoughts I thought. Maybe, probably, almost certainly I told myself in an attempt to steal some positivity.

In the current year od Twenty-Forty-Five, us Trafficlighters were being kept in a form of stabilised disarray – our moves controlled by The Database along often literal pre-programmed rails, with only the same travel stops, menu’s, Regime sposored events, highly curated tourist sights. Minimalism was enforced strictly, for example for every Trafficlighter living in their dwelling-cell, their were none of those bulky physical things that used to be called books; there were no what used to be called potplants; there were no physical music recordings; There were no Newspapers made of paper with words of a thing called ink; there we no cushioned comfortable seats, no bulky two or three seater couches.

These things were all old world artifacts, that had long been physuically destroyed & the momory of erased from all Trafficlighters, bar of course us few hundred forgotten ones. Now for example instead of books there was only ‘accredited reading material’ available via our Townscreens. There was no free press or fourth estate as it used be known long before the changes. Under the regime of ai authoritsarianism or techno fascism, life for us Trafficlighters was declared & designed by the behind the scenes Regime top brass. Declared & designed to be safe (to the Regimes system), non-luxury, sustainable, practical, & predictable. Of course, that was just propaganda – all we forgotten ones & perhaps a smattering of normal Trafficlighters knew this, at least on a half-buried intuitive level.

I guess that’s how the fall of any Empire happens – the society splits, markebly so into two overarching social classes. In our case in Twenty-Forty-Fiveits it’s Trafficlighters Vs the Regime. As one prominent pre the changes American writer had once said – and I think his name was Hank Bukowski – he said this:

Isn’t life strange? – some people get rich while others have to eat shit.

Of course it was worse than that leading up to the changes. The same thing that Bukowski had noticed in his own time was actually happening again & again in iterative fashion. So, I guess an updated version of his quote would be this:

Isn’t life strange – some people get rich while others have to eat shit…and every year the beaujelais drinkers are getting fewer & fatter, while the shit eaters numbers swell from recruiting the poorest of last years beaujelais drinkers.

Yes, in the last decades & years of the Pre-Regime-Era, a certain slice of the formally rich on the last cycle would always become poor on the next cycle. Under this kind of system, eventually the rich are too small in numbers to hold back the poor masses, & then one of three things can happen:

One: the poverty stricken downtrodden masses rise up & kill the remaining few rich masters in a Peoples Revolution;

Two:, a cabal of rich insiders breaks off the existing structure & seizes power in a Coup;

Three: the weakened empire is seen as an easy target to be over-run by its foreign & stronger neighbours in an Invasion.

In our case that was number two. The plotters that became The Regime & The Database – had came from a cabal within the old world, & had come into power via a Coup. It was a Coup based on exceedingly high technology. Sometimes I like to call what happened The Confusion Coup – for the cabal that became The Regime had such advanced technological knowledge that they then weaponised against the Pre-Regime-Era ruler. When the coup was unveiled, the Pre Regime Era rulers became totally flumoxed. Their in comparison stone age computerised defence systems were overwhelmed as they became targets of hacking & virus attacks. In short becasue of a techno deficiency, the Pre Regime Era rulers were sitting ducks to the coup leaders of the future The Regime Era. That evil cabal from within had sprung forward like techno caged tigers.

I had often thought to myself you gotta hand it to them – in pure militaristic terms The Regime’s takeover of that Old World was a thing of modern hi tech military beauty. Am I cold for saying that? No it is the truth. It was a beautiful operation. In pure operational terms, that’s exactly what it was. It was a technically the perfect takeover for the coup type takeover. Of course this perfect techno coup for them was more than a disasater for us. Us weary Trafficlighters of Red, Orange, & Green.

But I’m not so sure that same pattern of attack could happen now – the cabal that became The Regime has came a long way since they seized power from their Pre Regime Era colleagues. During that Coup of Confusion they hadn’t quite perfected their artificial intelligence systems, namely artificial general intelligence or what was known as A.G.I. . When The Regime took over – their AI wasn’t quite sentient. Now years later thanks to their own brilliant techno work, it was. The Regime thanks to the fact they were a Totalitarian Dictatorship had invented & harnessed A.G.I. under monopolistic control. As a forgotten one I know that kind of situation happened one hundred years ago, back in Nineteen Forty-Five. At the tail end of World War two the country that was called the U.S.A had astutely managed to be the first ones to aquire the practical manufacturing knowledge of the first nuclear powered bomb. Of course they used it on one countries alied with the enemy – Japan. A small number of their large cities were literally wiped off the map in an instant, thanks to the bomb. From that point the U.S.A. fully controlled the entire world, or the Pre Regime Era. In warfare technology matters, it always has. Those that can harness it & deploy it quickly, tend to win. The U.S.A did it in Nineteen Forty Five with ‘The Bomb’, The Regime was doing in now in Twenty Forty Five via A.I. with The Database. All this reminds me of an old Pre Regime Era saying, The more things change….the more they sttay the same.

So long as the faceless leadership of The Regime in places like Big City & beyond had technological advantage – things will be hard for us Trafficlighters. It would be near impossible to even rattle our chains without being sprung. The now sentient living creature that was the A.G.I powered The Database is their pet, that for now is on its leash. The Regime enjoys full use a veto power over its The Database’s optimised decisions. It can use the weapon as it pleases, in isolation, indescrimanantly, or ignore its advice entirely. If The Regime wants a ‘bad decision’ to land on some or all Trafficlighters heads – such as the scuttling of better social housing – then the power of veto will come out. The Database’s housing suggestions are burnt, & the trafficlighters get their due punishment handed out. The Regime, as the most advanced totalitarian system the Earth has ever known, have so far been wise to use the power of veto sparingly. If they one day use it too much?- then the totalitarian system will weaken & we Trafficlighters have more of a chance to mount a successful rebellion.

Other than us few hundred of us somewhat randomly sprinkled storytellers or forgotten ones, every living Trafficlighter is fully listed & one hundred percent discoverable, & so also overwriteable by The Database. Normal Trafficlighters long ago cyborged brains are easily remotely hacked into. There past & even future memories so easily implanted. I Anton Matinski, am perhaps only seventy five percent listed & seventy percent discoverable, meaning the highest twenty percent core funtion of my brain cannot be messed around with. In a nutshell, I retain the ability to still be me, as I’ve alsways been. And they’re happy with that oversight. As I said earlier – The Regime initially thought of me & my type too dumb & too old to class as any real threat, and now all these years later they know we’re not worth the time & resources to re-appraise our risk profile. Suits me just fine. In the old world people hated to be forgotten or seen to be invisable by others – nowadays with your mind & memories being routinely hijacked by The Database being a nobody a distinct advantage. As I have always said both – I’ll take my wins where I can and when they appear. Of course I’ve been waiting a while now.

Every night now I dream of rebellion with my still amazingly only eighty percent hackable brain. I have forgotten how often I have asked myself Anton Matinski, a forgotten middle aged storyteller, the following thought:

How could a Trafficlighters Peoples rebellion ever even begin to happen? While we were practically all still just easily hackable souls tied to The Database. On top of that the entire world of physical & non physical things is also hooked up to The Database how could we ever not remain as we are? – that is just a slightly more advanced form of caged animals. How can we ever be truly free if we can’t even become caged tigers?

Needless to say – in the year Twenty-Forty-Five I am still working on the answer. It is obvias that the answer has to come from at least one of us that could still remember the past, & its knowledge as it was – that is a storyteller, a forgotten one. Permit me for being so bold, but it could be perhaps someone like me, or actually me. I thought … perhaps it could be me. …but I don’t feel like a hero, in fact I never have – I’m more of a self-sabotageur…even in the old world when it was easy…I was always hiding in the shadows…I was good at it….perhaps then I have more in common with The Regime leaders than I have thought…don’t be stupid Matinski – you’re nothing like them…you’ve got some empathy towards Trafficlighters…in fact you have a lot...for once why don’t you allow yourself to shine...what have you got to lose?….I guess it’s what Marx said in the Twentieth Century…. only your chains….but that was clearly a lie – what Marx didn’t say was that small truth that you could lose your life in a heartbeat in the first few days of the Revolution…how convienient!

As you can probably tell by now, I’ve always been guilty of being an overthinker – but I ask you this: Has any Revolution in History ever been started by an ardent pragmatist? Any Revolutionary is always a dreamer. Any storyteller or forgotten one that you can somehow somewhere find will tell you this is true. yes I’m a dreamer, but I’m also wise enough to know thats not going to be enough to defeat The Regime & The Database. So I’ll need some help. I’m hoping this is where Kelly Hartel comes in.

When I left the Big City some fifteen years ago at age thirty-five, I had escaped most of that Big City bad reality by returning home to a tiny insignificant town. As far as the shady narrow minded bigwigs of bothe The Pre-Regime-Era & The coming The Regime were concerned, all small towns were ‘nowheresville’, anyone or anything happening there they paid little attention to. I mean they knew that if there was nothing vital there, be it people or resources then why bother with a fine microscope? In the old world rural areas mattered becasue food was farmed. But now in Twenty-Forty-Five food production was now one hundred percent done via chemical laboratories & molecular transformation in a loboratory. Without farming, urban areas had long lost all status in the eyes of denizens of Big City & not just from the brainwashing slash brainhacking of their totalitarian rulers. But I knew the tings coming from small towns still had something rare to provide – a partially unhacked mind that retained it’s highest memory & analytical function. That’s quite a thing I reckon, even if I, Anton Matinski say so myself.

So this all being the case there was a weird sweet spot in this new world of The Regime – those who had repatriated themselves to their small hometowns had it pretty good. The big bad new world was a world of big cities like Big City. The new world of The Regime knew its strengths lied in all of the various most urbanised quadrants on Earth. After all by the time they had iron clad control via The Database, eighty percent of the world was already ensconced in the many mega concrete jungles, cities just like Big City. Big City & all the other cities like Big City would become more or less exact replicas of each other. So when I talk of the this & that of The Regimes capture of Big City, you’ll know the exact same things are happening in all the other Big Cities out there on the planet. Under the unifying creeping but organised techno terror grip of The Regime & The Database, Big City & every other big city on Earth are interchangable. Everyone in Twenty-Forty-Five knows this. This is why everyone in Big City never reall talks of the other cities of the world -there is no reason to. Small towns were different.

Becasue of us storytellers & forgottenones, It was & still is small towns that are the key to it all. Sure we few Trafficlighters based in our small towns were then & are now still definitely not free per se, but we all know we arn’t at least fully beaten like the lionshare of the other Trafficlighters.

When I left Big City to go back to smalltown nowheresville, all I knew had said I’d copped out, they called me a quitter – thought I was crazy – why would anyone leave the Big City? Yes things had clamped down a bit, “but it’s the convienience of living Matinski” they all said. Cognitive dissonance is a funny thing – their brains couldn’t admit they were simmering frogs not jumping out of the at first imperceptably nice & cool pot on the skillet. Like the old world parable of the frog that got boiled alive without knowing it, their worlds in Big City were well on the way to becoming murderously hot.

The fact is looking back on it, leaving Big City when I did proved a profitable strategy. Not long after The Database had scrubbed & reissued all the official Big City stats. Back before then I had seen the real ones. I had looked up a few of the biggest problems – Big City’s real wages had fallen into a hole, its homelessness had quadrupled, their its rent had tripled, suicides were massively up, divorced was three quarters of all marriages, violent crime was through the roof – in short all the really bad things in life had ramped up massively in short time in the early years around The Pre-Regime-Era falling apart & The Regime bedding itself into the social, cultural, & now electronic fabric of Big City.

After leaving Big City amid that turbulent crossover period and now back into the small time-ness of country life accross the ditch, I was now also away from the ubiquitous surveilance – to metamorphise to what would much later be called a forgotten one or a storyteller. But at the time I hadn’t realised the significance of what was happening to me, or more correctly – what wasn’t happening to me via the Regime’s iron grip on the now distant Big City. I had simply slotted back into what all small town lives are like – boring but safe & sustainable. Unlike places like Big City, It’s genuinely hard to totally fuck up while living in small towns – i.e. end to up starving & living under a bridge. Mostly you have to already be mad, a drug or hard liquor addict or both.

In small town’s like mine, Altrexa, no one but a handful ever gets properly rich & no one but a handful are on the streets. Of course, things soon changed a lot, namely we were all partially integrated into The Database, we all had electronic chips inserted behind our ears. But as I have said – despite these seemingly intrusive techno-attacks – hindsight shows we were well under the Regime’s radar.

Thinking back, if I had stayed in Big City when it was clearly emerging from the changes & becoming a full blown techno fascist state – I’m almost certain I’d be one of the first of those Trafficlighters living rough as invisable – where those many thousands of mostly just arbitrarily constructed troublemakers that are programmed to fall out of The Database – live on park benches, in bushes, in shop alcoves, under overpasses. Mean dark Cities like Big City love to devour many souls like mine – inquisitive ones that have the balls to casually question its official diktats. I knew that once the dust had settled, the now-in-power coup plotters of The Regime would be coming for types like me & fast. That’s why I had to escape accross the ditch to official nowheresville before it was too late. I went to where the toppermost goons of The Regime would systematically underestimate the likes of me. A smart choice it turned out to be.

So here I was waiting in line at the Altrexa Channaport for the return trip to the centre of Big City – The Channaport system would allow a bullet shapped vessel called a Channatrain that would fly at supersonic speed along the undersea chanel of the Channaport Transport System. The Channatrain would silently arrive in but a handful of minutes to the main Channaport of Big City. From there It was very much like the old train systems of the past that only us forgotten ones & storytellers could remember – you could transfer to a connecting Channatrain to get anywhere you wanted, or in truth were allowed to enter in Big City. Of course in short time after the Regime took over, all the Channatrains, Channports & travelling Trafficlighters were integrated into the heavily surveilled clutches of The Database.

So by leaving Altrexa for the holiday type confred to meet Kelly, I knew I’d be going back to far more, shall we say occupied territory. I was willing to take the risk – after all, it was from The Database’s perspective small – a nobody, an aging Trafficlighter. Of course I knew I could be a risk, if I wanted – but the timing any revolutionary action by anyone, let alone me, wasn’t just not right – it was a rediculous thought. I was sure that no forgotten one had an idea how it might even look like at that point. So i wasn’t going to rebel, I was going back to get that monkey off my back. You see Big City had had somewhat of a curse hanging over my mind ever since I had left. Of course it had involved my time with Kelly – how could it not? I was going back to prove to myself that that big dark city didn’t have a hex on me for life. I I was going back to Big City break the hex – and to do that I would need Kelly’s forgiveness for my past misgivings & her good blessings for the future.

In these dark utopian days, the travelling undersea & underground ground by Channatrain going from Channaport to Channaport was actually perfectly pleasant. The good thing was after the changes you knew you’d be safe from random physical attacks on public transport. Privacy was d a different thing. On Channatrain the Trafficlighter-to-Trafficlighter interaction was mostly non existant. This was mainly becasue those old world Western-culture pleasentaries had long gone. No Trafficlighter would chit chat with another. But there was low level abuse – that was encouraged as uit had been in every other authoritarian regime of the long past.

Of course taking the Channatrain in The Regime had its constant low-level abuse of a passive aggressive nature, but it wasn’t anything like the old days before the changes. In those days public transport in a place like Big City could be quite the experience, that is genuinely scary or dangerous or both.

At its worse you could quite easily be accosted with flying fists, or if very unlucky a knife, or if even less lucky you might be shot by some crazy with these now long outlawed things called “hand guns”. At the lower end of disorder, you would just screamed at &/or threatened by someone off their head on too much alcohol or recreational drugs. I had had a number screams aimed at me of the “Fuck you corporate asshole” type, & a few rocks thrown at my head. I’d gotten off lightly, mainly because I looked stronger than I actually was. In the old days putting on a tough exterior paid big dividends. These days there was no point in that. The Databases universal surveillance & instant policing web had made all that old world of social game playing go totally extinct. We forgotten ones & storytellers had often mused that The Regime era was the true end of the hunter gatherer epoch of human beings, aka Trafficlighters.

I learnt long ago from reading books that their were some good things during times of authortarism. Nothing is ever, or can be one hundred percent bad. The good part about authortarian regimes all through Earth’s history was that they clean up the casual violence & disorder for what was called the the man on the street – that is the general denizen of a place like Big City.

Credit where credit is due, thanks to The Regime no one needed to worry about random attacks of violence while on a Channatrain, down a dark alleyway, in the homes of Trafficligthters, in a workplace bathroom or indeed anywhere at all. Thanks to ubiquitous surveillance & the ability for instant policing in real time by The Database, no whacked-out friend – or a friend, family member, or lover for that matter – could ever act fast enough to inflict a stab wound, a punch or a blunt object strike – The Database simply saw the biodata of an imminent physical attack & then simply ‘turned off’ the would be assailants motor skills. A flying arm towards a face or torso was literally short circuited before it even started. Of course the odd verbal abuse on Channatrain & elsewhere was allowed, for the Regime knew chronic low-level stress helped its iron grip. The policy of chronic low level passive aggressive abuse under The Regime was everywhere unspokenly encouraged. In the old world the depressiveness that came out of this used to be called a disease, now the word depression didn’t exist at all.

On a trip on Channatrain the main bio data The Database monitored was blood pressure, adrenalin & cortisol. Spikes above a certain The Database set baseline would raise its internal red flags. After a red flag was triggered as mentioned, it would be policed accordingly & instantly, the Trafficlighter in question engaged with if deemed necessary. Other main biodata collected in real time was heart rate, brain glucose levels, brainwave activity level, growth hormone level, testosterone level, insulin level, core body temperature, the geo-coordinates of the eye gaze – to instantly know what a trafficlighter was looking at. Of course it stored all the hum-drum things like eye color, height, weight, hair color etc foot size, percentage body fat to muscle etc etc etc.

So now that I’ve told you all this about The Regime & The Database, I know you have a good many questions. The first one might be “if its an authoritarian society how come a poor guy like you can have a holiday to Big City?”. The answer to that is the Dictators have always liked their populace to have “holidays” , “watch sports” & “have hobbies” – it keeps them distracted from rebelling, & allows them the illusion that they are “happy”, instead of chronically depresed zombies they really are & have to be given their conditions they are allowed in.

Of-course, thanks to my prior reading & experience before the changes I had always known that the rich, the powerful, & the smart have never seriously entertained the idea that “happiness” is what you should want & strive for in life. This ridiculous notion – that one should actively persue happiness, was something only the poor & lower ranks of what was called the middle-classes believed. the believe this fantasy because the rich & powerful taught them that – so they would stay as slaves. Generally, bar for a few food riot driven peoples revolutions, this arch trickery had worked well. It had worked for for millennia after millennia .

The rich of the old-world, & the now the The Regime’s shadowy ones, wisely knew that the old world lauded nineteenth century German philosopher Schopenhauer’s was correct. Schopenhauer’s version of happiness was correct – ‘happiness’ is the absence of bad things happening to you. Under this theory if you have zero bad things happen, you have achieved maximum contentedness. You cannot add ‘good things’ to you life & achieve happiness. In his very true theory, Happiness is really more like contentedness. Contentedness is the only real definition of happiness; it is more of a kind of well-being. Trafficlighters were just like the poor of old – other than us forgotten ones & storytellers, they all thought they could do good things to make them happy, instead of the real solution: to take bad things away to make them content. The more things chnage the more they stay the same. I still loved that Pre-Regime-Era saying – it was full of Truth with a capital T. I Anton Matinski still love to call up those now deceased but still wise old-world sayings from my still free memorybanks. They help me more understand The Regime.

So I got off the Channatrain at the Channaport of Big City Central. I made my way to the half-fancy hotel via an Ai automated taxi – called Autotaxis. They liked to put a real droid in as the driver – they were wise to know Trafficlighters wouldn’t like a driverless Taxi, some souless thing without a steering wheel. Having a droid was comforting, they were intentionally boring, but this oftentimes also made them unintentionally humerous to the passenger.

The droid driving me made the typical Droid-Helper chit chat – & subjected me to a run down of all the official Trafficlighter events scheduled for this week – A Green Vs Orange Trafficlighter Chess tournament was on tomorrow at the centre of Big City, a PRA or Public Relaxation Zone called Re-Federated Square; A Red Vs Orange ‘Decibel ShoutMatch’ was on tonight at The ReOrient Cafe-Hotel. For some reason The Regime always had terms that were re-this & re-that. Perhaps its an injoke, a nod to the fact they have rehashed modern life in their own shadowy restricted image.

Different colored Trafficlighters were allowed slightly higher or lower quality things, as per their artificially created class system requirements. On my trip I would receive Green quality things – be they hotel Rooms, knives & forks, Chairs, Greetings from the Droids-Helpers. A simple example of this is the door droid at a hotel that catered to all colours. If I was a Red, I’d be greeted in three different ways – for example the droid would say “Hello Mr/Mrs X…How are you today?….Isn’t the Sun so welcoming today? If you were a Green the droid doorman would cull the last line, if you were a Green you’d only get a Hello on its own. This of course created the planned situation whereby most Reds acted as if they were kings, looking down their noses at the Oranges, & even futher down for the Greens. It always amazed me how the Reds chose to ignore the fact it was all contrived.

When on the odd occasion they wanted every Trafficlighter to be united – such as the 1945 Victory Year parades – they ignored references to your colour; when they wanted to resume daily chronic low level stress levels amongst between fellow Trafficlighters, they where all Green this, red that, Orange this. This long traditional authoritarian trick of casually turning people against each other worked like clockwork. Trafficlighters who for all intents and purposes had exactly the same interests were brainwashed to see the tinyest difference as a mountainous one.

I was happy enough as a Green in The Regime – I didn’t mind being snobbed & scoffed at by mostly Reds, but also the occaisional Orange. Even before the change to such a contrived class oriented society I was essentially a Green anyway – that is poorer than most. I’d grown up poor, & yet had, thanks to a streak of bohemian blood in my parents, I had gravitated towards books & ideas. As I grew older I half shunned materialism & its various ways, but I also half invited it as well. I guess this is why I have always felt like what they used to call a walking contridiction. In the old world I had devoured books, I had often asked myself: was my addiction to non-fiction & the classics not just a warped form of materialism? Where did the need to be more knowledgable than your peers coem from? It’s like I wanted my brain itself to be the mansion in the richest suburb with a dual garage. Did I suffer from a banal garden variety form of social climbing? Was I just suffering from undiagnosed bohmian-faux-intellectual-social-climber-syndrome? I had learnt way to late in life that It’s always far more hard to ‘know wthyself’ than that ancient Greek philosophers made it out to be.

Though they acted like it, Reds were not the ruling classes in any real way. The ruling classes they were, as you’d expect marked as ‘classless’ or more formally in The Database as ‘undesignated’. The traffic light notation was just for the us – the modern day mid-twenty first century serf – all three or four billion of us, but who’s counting? The Database could have easily fudged the figures & rewritten Trafficlighter memorybanks – there could be only two billion of us, or perhaps there were five billion – there was no way for us Trafficlighters to know. It was the same with all official Regime stats, housing, employment, health – all of these numbers were as solid as a marshmellow – a marshmellow was one of those old world ‘junk foods’ that I & every other kid used to eat happily. That is before they were banned along with all ‘sweets’ by The Regime.

I had checked into a standard Green traficlighter room in the “All Trafficlighters Welcome” Trafficlight District 7 Cafe-Hotel. The droids had been dull & friendly, offering the simple funtional customer service doled out to Greens. Sometimes I like to have fun with them – I’d say as I approached a droid concierge now before you speak, I must stop you from all the long winded hello’s – I’m a very busy man. They arn’t allowed to laugh like they would have had I been a Red & said the same thing. The consistent deadpan responce of Sir as a Green Trafficlighter you must know you only qualify for one hello had always put some wind under my sails. I had kept up the tradition whenever I went on a rare Confred trip.

On these trips away full of channatrains, channports, Trafficlighter cafe-hotels & droid filled autotaxis, you tend to go into, to use an old world term – autopilot. On autopilot you’re there, but not really there. I was now in that dreamy state . I thought of what the Droid help-a-driver had mentioned lastly before I got out of the Autotaxis – The Year Of the Victory Parades. I kept hearing in my head what the Droid Autotaxis help-a-driver had said in her silky femminised voice only a few minutes before in the autotaxis:

“So Green-Lighter! I’m glad you chose the Big City for your ConFred. Before I drop you remember this is the year 2045, which is a big year of ‘Victory Parades’ – It’s now one hundred years since the allies had won World War Two. Now don’t forget you ‘Trafficlighters’ will have to meet your ‘Victory Parade Quota’ – our bio records in The Database will have to show that you as a Green Trafficlighter will have to attended at least three separate Victory Parades by December thirty-first. Green Trafficlighters should know that if you fail, our ‘Zedcops’ would remove you, by force if neccesary. Then they will take you to one, two or all three of the last three parades held on the last three days of the year 2045. But for you, I’m sure we won’t need to do that. Have a great ConFred Green lighter”

I entered my room. I had ordered it on my Townscreen to be the same holographic overlay appearance as my old room from the Big City in the old Pre-Regime Era days. It did this easily, as everything was recorded – even information from before the changes could be dialed up by The Database. Even things such as what an old room looked like & its contents down to a dirty plate under a bed. The Database was now so advanced that no one person knew how it could see into the past, long before it had even became sentient or its prototype had been invented. It was a scary thing to think about – that’s why no one though about it, other than us troublemakers, us outsiders & forgotten ones.

My holographically rendered room was exactly as it had been twenty years prior. The twenty foot square room was of a design from what used to be called ‘the Edwardian era’ – which was the early twentieth century. It had a very high ceiling, a ‘lift-up’ wooden window & a thing called mantlepiece. It was just how I had remembered it. There was more. An array of ‘physical music’ was lined on the mantlepiece above a blocked up fireplace – they used to call them ‘compact discs’. A cheap ‘Stratocaster’ electric guitar was leaning upright in the corner plugged into a small black box called an amplifier. A big wooden desk with an old creme colored boxy computer montor on it. Shorts tops & undies littered the floor. A dirty plate with congeiled old cheese stuck to it was under the rickety old wooden desk seat. A big cheap unmade double bed was in the centre on the room. I jumped horizontallly onto the unmade bed, which slightly flickered as I impacted, so to gently remind me it was holographic – everything that was holographicly rendered was supposed to flicker occaisionally.

A Trafficlighters ConFred’s had to be programmed with a modicum of what the Database called enjoyment units. The Database knew it was wise to allow someone like me – a Green on Confred – a few perks now & then. It was good for morale. Well more precisely it was good to ensure the by design bad morale diddn’t dip towards critically bad morale. As I said, The Regime & The Database had learnt from all the errors of the past, so as to build a great almost perfect authoritarian regime. Why not exactly perfect you ask? I knew from the old time physics books, “Perfect Knowledge” is impossible for anything in our particular universe – the Uncertainty Principle cannot be violated, even by The Database. So with this limitation impossible to overcome by anything in our universe – The Regime & The Database can only ever be practically perfect. But knowing that didn’t make me overjoyed – for I knew how infinitesimal small the ‘uncertanty principle’ error was – let me write it down for you:

0.0000000000000000000000000000000000525

So an error that small probably wasn’t going to help me much in any future rebellion. I forgot about it.

As I lay in my holoroom I couldn’t help but feel good. I chastised myself imediately for falling for the holograpghically induced brainwashing. But I couldn’t help it – it still felt nice. In times like this a had a mantra to help me stay self-aware, to combat & to ensure I was always aware of the ubiquitious casual brainwashing going on. I said my mantra:

“In this new world, It’s all about knowing what’s happening to you & why – that way you retain an element of personal freedom inside your own mind. This makes all the difference in day to day life in this strange new world”.

That reset my brain. I got that small hit of dopamine – a feeling of personal freedom. If I hadn’t had my ways of surviving – I would have gone the way of so many Trafficlighters out there. I would have forced upon myself my own erasure. I would have taken myself out. I’d be written off from the Database, & no one would ever see or see my presence in The Database.

In the first year of The Database ‘going live’ – we lost forty two point seven percent of all Trafficlighters worldwide. So this was a mass depopulation event. Again, as I’ve been saying, nothing ever happens in the bad new world without it already being part of The Regime’s masterplan. Before the mass depopulation event, they knew the most molly coddled Trafficlighters would erase themselves the most. And that’s what they did.

So now here we Trafficlighters are, the remaining two thirds of us. Of course the Greenlighters population hardly changed at all – we as a whole didn’t need to self erase, for in the old world we had already had decades of being battle-hardened. We Greenlighters had all been blessed with shit lives – every last one of us. We lost barely three percent of us. The Reds on the other hand, having had it far too good in the old world, erased themselves in great numbers – some seventy-five percent of them. The Oranges were as you’d expect only half freaked out, having being only half battle-scarred in the old world, & so only half erased themselves. It was all a coldly rational & logical affair. And it went off without a hitch.

So I was waiting out time in the Cafe-Hotel. I snapped myself out of my holo-daze & reminded myself why I was really here: Kelly Hartel. My mind was going into overdrive. Going by my thumping chest -this suddenly seemed like a big moment in my life. Although I told myself this is just overdramatising things. But adrenaline is adrenaline it sweeps you up. Of course like normal I made sure to keep myself under control enough so as not to arouse suspicion from The Database’s biodata surveilance. You didn’t want to trigger that. It’s amazing what those old pre regime era deep breaths still did to calm the biodata output. Breath in…hold breath out…Breath in…hold breath out…Breath in…hold breath out. That’s better. Now safely adrenalised, I started having a conversation with myself.

That’s right I was going to meet an old flame – or was it really just an old fling? It depends on your viewpoint. Mine vs Hers. At different times we were both flings for each other, at other times we were friends, at other times enemies. This is normal. Why pretend otherwise? The only non-fucked-up relationship you can have while ensconced in Big City is with yourself, and now even that’s near impossible. This is what screws people up – thinking that you can live a non-fucked up life in a fucked-up environment. I used to not see that when I was first a Big City denizen, way back then before the changes.

So why am I really here back in the Big City. Was I here for love? Well that would be impossible – people like me can never admit that, & we can never be sure we know what love is. Kelly was the same kind of person. That’s why our first outing had been an extended fleeting affair, lasting perhaps 12 months tops. Then it duly self destructed. Well in truth, it was well overdue. But this time it wasn’t love I’m trying to rekindle, & it definitely isn’t that weird thing the americans used to call “closure”.

No, it being here was all about lancing the hex of the Big City. Kelly was just one part of that hex. Lifting the hex in its entirety meant dealing with Kelly too. It all sounds far too simple, but that’s what time does – it simplifies everything. And after all, let’s be honest – we are all bastards & bitches in own strange ways what is the point in keeping score?. Newsflash – Humans have always been deeply flawed. Let’s not all hate ourselves for being flawed. This meeting with Kelly was all part of lifting the hex of the Big City. This meeting with Kelly was all part of lifting the hex of the Big City. This meeting with Kelly was all part of lifting the hex of the Big City. Three times a charm Matinski.

The Big City thrives on ‘score keeping’ – then & now. But I will never beat the Big City if I was going to go back & act like everyone else & keep score. Of course, I might act like that when I talk to her, maybe – after all she might do the same. After all you have to settle in to the conversation with band nicities & empty platitudes. The most important thing is to remember it’s all about ‘keeping your head’. Yes there’s no rulebook per se when meeting up with an old flame, but in saying that – it’s also stupidity to not realise that men & women play games with each other. That’s why they used to call it “the dating game”, that’s why they called it “the battle of the sexes”. All that old world stuff between men & women continues – just to a lesser more sanitised degree, given the realities of living under techno-authortarianism.

I’m also damn happy that The Database showed Kelly is around & hadn’t graduated to become ‘classless’ yet – otherwise, I’d be wasting my time here entirely – but then it wouldn’t be allowed anyway!. Trafficlighters can only interact with other Trafficlighters. Of course other than the fortune of graduating from Red to ‘Undesignated’, or ‘Classless’, there is another way someone becomes ‘unfortunately classless’ too – this when someone ‘falls below the green’ as we all say. These poor souls have been erased, so you won’t find them anywhere unless you see them clinging to life somewhere around the outskirts of town unofficially. What if that happened to Kelly & The Database hadn’t shown it yet? That dreadful ‘no trafficlighter/undesignated found error message on a Townscreen. No Matinski – you’re imagination is running wild, get a grip – The Database always updates perfectly in real time, & Kelly was there as a ‘Red’ not half an hour ago. Relax Matinski you old fool, leave the catastrophising to the old world why dontcha.

That talking to myself about everything definitely helped. I was a lot calmer now to face the task of finally meeting Kelly.

yes, Kelly was a Red. but she was still a Trafficlighter like me. The different colours set by The Database are artificial – a mirage. There is no fundamental difference between a Green like me, & a Red like her. The point is The Database knew artificial hierarchies work well when you want to enlist one slave to order around another, or ignored another & have the one bossed or ignored accept it. It was a purely functional arrangement. Weirdly most Trafficlighters didn’t quite know this was mostly just a silly game. But maybe not so weird given that Trafficlighters were not encouraged to think properly about anything important. For obvious reasons rational independant thinkers was the last thing any authoritarion system wanted, let alone a techno-authoritarian one. That would be in old-world parlence – being a house divided, which can only fall.

The beauty of the Trafficlighter class system is when they wanted unity among the great unwashed they’d stress the fact that Reds, Oranges & Greens were all Traffictlighters, & when they wanted tactical disunity, they stress that Reds are better than Oranges & Greens, Oranges are better than Greens but inferior to Reds, & Greens are inferior to Oranges & Reds. It was simple genius way to have both a class system & an egalitarian system running in parallel. It worked a treat, & most Trafficlighters didn’t know it was another swindle of The Regime’s techno fascist state. Like I said before, us forgotten ones & storytellers had a bedruding respect for the shadowy evil geniuses that ran The Regime – how could anyone who could still think properly not?.

I knew all this manufactured class stuff probably wouldn’t be a problem this time around when I would finally met Kelly again – something told me that although she wasn’t a forgotten one like me, she almost was one, she had brains when she wanted to. My prediction was that she’d be less casually snobby than she used to be towards me back before the changes. As a Red, she’d been through a lot – having lost so many of her Red friends to self-deactivation in those early years of The Regime. I could be totally wrong on this – I mean in theory she might slap me & turn heel & flip me the bird – but my hunch was that kind of animosity had probably long dissapated. All this wondering how things would go would be answered soon anyway – all my theories would either be busted or confirmed, or more likely it would be a mix of the two – for surely she hadn’t one hundred percent forgiven me for the past? I looked at the time on my townscreen – the grasshopper green digital numbers floated above the screen so you could see the time at all times.

21:00 Hours. It was show time. I got up & started to walk towards the door. Destiny was awaiting, & hopefully so would Kelly Hartel be at the ‘all trafficlighters allowed’ bar downstairs. I walked towards to door…each step seemed to last a mini eternity. I could feel the gravity of the situation all through my body – but as always my astutely timed deep breaths kept The Database from seeign any biodata red flags.

I went into the Cafe Restaurant area which was of a typical mostly Green to Orange standard, it was nice without frills, but perfectly acceptable for a simple meal & a chat with a fellow Trafficlighter – though a few snooty Reds might recoil at the decor, which had slightly garish tones here & there. The decor overall was programmed to be of a time that many older Trafficlighters would remember nostalgically – around the first decade of the twenty-first century, a time when genuine fun still existed in Big City.

The room had perhaps ten tables, with one side of the room housing a long but thin room-length bar. A very real looking, smartly dressed but sometimes flickering-in-and-out droid barman was polishing the liquor bottles on the back shelf. Unfortunately, most of the fancy liquor was just holographic rendering – being mostly bottles of the now banned types of alcohol.

In the Big City Trafficlighters had between one to three kinds of alcolic drinks available. I being a Green only had the option of beer, rated at only two percent alcohol by volume. Oranges had the option of beer at two or three percent and white or red wine rated at five percent. Reds had everything the Greens & Oranges had but also had the option of drinking either a standard or Expresso Martini, each rated at a glorious seven-point five percent. Snobby Reds loved their Expresso Martini’s, & to swan around with them in front of envious type Oranges & Greens. Decent Reds would generally avoid drinking them with Oranges or Greens around, or perhaps at worse they would half hide them by nunching over them at the end of the bar.

I had just realised in my stressed state in my holoroom, I’d misread the time – I was early. Kelly wouldn’t be expected to arrive for another twenty minutes. this being so, I thought I’d go & get a beer off the flickering smartly dressed human looking but actually-a-droid droid bartender. I walked over to the highly lacquered shining bar. I gave the bar a scratch with my fingernail. It left a slight indentation indicating the bar was actually made of real wood instead of being a holobar – this was a now a rare old world luxury, there weren’t many real old bars around at all.

“What would you like Mr Matinski?” The droid piped up cheerily.

“Very funny droid – you know I can only have a beer at a pissy weak 2%”. I said it like I owned the place – a little risky but you could get away with being a little rambunctious with droid bartenders – I mean it’s not like they could ever possibly be offended personally.

“That is correct Sir” said the droid firmly but friendly. “But I am still programmed to ask this question, as you may also have wanted the non-alcoholic options”. The droid pushed the button & the 12 Oz beer slowly materialised in front of me, seemingly out of thin air. “That’ll be three Greencreds sir” said the droid matter of factly, but again with a professional tinge of subservience. I put my palm upwards with finger splayed & the bar lazer payment system read my hand print for the payment. I hated it, but it was either this or do something stupid like burn your palm prints in protest. That woul mean falling below the Green & thus a good chance of an early death, on top of assured exile to those “off the grid” punishment shanties.

The palm show & lazer read method of payment always made me think of how we thought of dystopian futures the old days. I remember in the old world how everyone – particularly Christians – would always wonder what the “mark of the beast” would be – for a while I was pretty sure it probably was this ubiquitous handprint cashless payment system that they had all us Trafficlighters running on, the one I’d just used with my handprint & the bar lazer. But now I realised those thoughts never get anywhere. Now I’d realised that it might be more fundemantal than that – the ‘mark of the beast’ might just be the idea of having an economy beyond a small self-supporting village of perhaps, at most one thousand people. In the old old days you could talk about these topics forever with lifelong friends in front of these things called fireplaces, in houses that normal people actually owned themselves. Those luxuries taht we never saw as luxuries are long gone. You couldn’t talk about those old world kinds of musings freely in places like Big City. It was, as they used to say back before the changes, a rarer that rare chance to talk like you did in the old days. People like me – forgotten ones & storytellers – might get away with it while away from Big City while talking amoungst ourselves in hushed tones in some illegal bar.

I snapped myself out of my old world thoughts. I was back in Big City waiting at the bar for Kelly, with the droid pottering around behind me pretending to work. I sipped the weak bland beer, which was still drinkable – but not much more than that. Sometimes if a Green was lucky & outside the Big City type areas, they could cadge a swig of wine off an Orange, or a snifter of a Martini from a Red. The Regime overlords, or should I say The Database’s Trafficlighter permissions algorythyms had allowed this simple ‘stolen luxury’ as they knew it would help morale, without creating any discernable danger to The Regime. They knew the Greens & Oranges would get a rebellious kick out of it, thus reducing their real urges to properly rebell. There were so many of these little things – I call them ‘nano acredited rebellions’ that are encoded into everyday life under The Regime.

They had all sorts of these types of rules, with that same reasoning. The only thing you had to know was that the ‘sneaked drink’ couldn’t be one-hundred percent drunk. The vessel must at the ‘end’ must always have at least ten percent of the original drink left in the vessel. One top of that If you were a ‘non-red Trafficlighter’ you could only ever sneak one Wine or one Martini in any one calendar day. This is why many inter-color relationships & friendships had their allotted catchups late so as to ‘straddle midnight’. This would ensure an extra just-past-midnight “sneak-drink” as they were called. The Green or Orange Trafficlighter could then legally get two sneak-drinks in quicktime. Who knows, tonight soon I might get a rare Martini sneakdrink – depending of course on how much of a grudge Kelly was holding, perhaps she might not offer me one.

Oh, I forgot to say – if you weren’t a Red, you also could not directly ask a red lighter for a sneak-drink – they had to offer it to you. Of course you could freely intimate that you wanted one by looking longingly at a Red’s Martini or Wine glass. I’d cross my fingers Kelly would offer me one. Hope is a wonderful thing. I’ll intimate if I have too. I guess I sound like an ex-alcoholic. I’ve always wondered if I wasn’t an alcoholic. Maybe I was, maybe I am – that’s for others to judge. I’ll just keep trying to survive the best I can.

“How is you’re beer Sir” Said the bartender droid as I put my elbows on the bar. He asked me that even though he knew it wasn’t very good. I say “he” because this one was programmed to have roughly male traits, & fitted with a male-like face. He waited professionally for my answer.

“It’s fucking mediocre as always & you know it” I said intentionally being impolite…this is how we Green’s sometimes got our kicks. You might be surprised that I could talk to the droid like that – but again the system knew this swearing at the odd polite droid would reduce my overall ‘default Green rebelliousness’ as our meaningless fun banter was usually negatively known as. The droid piped up chirpily, & not without some expertly programmed humor.

“Ah Sir Matinski, yes you are correct it is not as good as the other drinks – but perhaps when your Confred partner arrives you might get a nice sneakdrink, she might notice you’d love a beautiful velvety sneeeaakdriiiink?”

“Yeah, maybe droid – maybe she might throw a guy who’s down on his luck a dime huh?” I said cooley, belying my slightly-more-than-slight nerves.

“Oh yes Sir, that phrase was from the old world when ‘physical money’ existed. That was a long time ago now, do you remember physical money Sir?”, the droid enquired.

“Year I remember it” I said, “but it was gone by the time I was twenty one – I guess that kinda freedom was always gonna annoy the bastards huh droid?”, I cheekily batted back.

“I could not possibly comment on that Sir – but I think your fellow Trafficlighters might all agree with your sentiments”.

Then the door opened. False alarm. The holographic tortoiseshell cat walked in through the door & rubbed against my leg, not that I could feel it. I had another sip of my beer & felt a sweat bead drip down my forehead, then another few following. I was feeling the stress of it all. I quickly took a deep breath to control any biodata report red flags popping up in The Database.

I’d been wondering about this moment for so many years now. As cool as you can try to be, there will always be some dark recess of your subconscious that decides how cool or freaked out you’d normally be just before the necessary The Database beating repression techniques are used.

The door opened again. This time it was definitely her. She was more or less as I’d remembered her from a couple decades ago. She was still in good shape, no extra fat but she still had enough ‘meat on her bones’ as we used to say. Her hair was immaculate, long blond, very straight. Her curvy outline still curved well. Her face while quite lined had aged reasonably well – despite the fact she would have definitely downed a ton of wines & martinis in the intervening years.

She was wearing tight jeans & a nicely collared sky blue shirt, with the cuffs rolled up. She wore a collection of bangles & some silver bracelets as as was her Red female right – no one else could, well not for us green or orange Trafficlighters anyway. She still had it for sure, I thought to myself. But what about her face? I was praying she’d at least not looked pissed off. As she approached me at the bar I could see her expression was pretty much dead neutral. I took that as a win, which I guess it was – she probably should be holding a grudge.

“What can I get you Ms Kelly?”

“Expresso Martini thanks” the droid went about his cocktail making, he looked pretty professional, shaking the cocktail was no problem, helper robots had long gotten over any stiltedness of movement, or any lack of dexterity. The droid finally dropped the expresso coffee bean from out of his steel thumb & index finger. It dropped perfectly in the middle on the glass. So we both had our drinks. In a weird way we were both acting ultra-cool like people used to do on those things we oldies used to called ‘first dates’. Now we had to talk. But who’d go first. I made the correct, assertive first move.

“So Kelly – it’s wonderful to see you”. I let the words hang in the air. Strangely enough, I hadn’t figured out what my opening line would be – even though I’d thought about it for some twenty years. I’d always not figured out what the best best most perfect thing to say in this situation. Weirdly, as the words rolled off my tongue, they came out & felt like they were the only ones that would be just right for the situation, & that you’d be a fool to not know that this was the only way to say it. Sometimes the moment brings out the best in you.

“Hi Matinski, it’s been a while”. She looked hard into my eyes, & a very slight hint of a smile seemed to appear. That slight smile suddenly seemed like a giant ear to ear one, for it symbolised Kelly’s at least partial forgiveness at my many past misdeeds. Slightly shocked, it was high time I replied.

“Yeah, & sorry if I sound like a cliche spitting dork just now, stating the obvious & all, but so much has changed” I heard my sentence – I thought to myself man I sound so middle aged!. I guess we all have that teenager Vs adult conversation though us, I calmly reassured myself.

“No Matinski, I understand entirely – I know what you mean, those changes literally killed a lot of my lot. We Reds lost a lot of our people, I lost most my close friends in those early days. And yes, I think as a survivor of all that, I’ve changed a fair amount – hopefully for the better, but maybe I’ve just plodded on through the insanity. I was always good at that, even before the changes. I thank the alcohol mainly”. Kelly said only half jokingly & with a big smile. It was good to finally see that big smile again, it was always one of Kelly’s A plus weapons for sure.

“Yeah, I know you guys got hit massively” I said, now feeling quite loose. “You all had such, well I won’t say comfortable, but you had secure predictable lives in comparison to us lot – well it looked that way from the sidelines at least”. I hoped I didn’t sound too cocky.

“It’s all relative though” Kelly shot back quickfire “as strange as it seems to you, we never ever felt truly comfortable – I mean we were the ones that put so much pressure on ourselves even before the changes. Sure a lot of us were plain snobs, & sometimes i was guilty of that too, but most of us were just like me – running around with no time spare for myself, making someone else rich, just so we could have a tiny slice of financial security. I was a hamster like you guys, just a different kind of hamster. I know you found it hard to see that for what it was all those years ago Matinski – that’s one of the key reasons why you got so pissed off”. Kelly had said all that while looking ultra confidently & squarely at me in the eyes.

And there it was – the first thing that really really hit me hard. She’d spoken such a raw truth that it hit me right in the heart. She was so right – back then I’d never seen the full truth of her, & her type. I’d seen the cartoon version of her. The cartoon version which just swanned around, collected the cash & drank the endless drinks. In that moment I felt ashamed. I felt embarrassed for my former much younger self. Why hadn’t I realised the complexity of her life back then? Why was I so stupid for so long back then? Where was my wisdom? Why had I been so wound up about nothing? I pulled myself together so to reply cooly & cordially.

“Kelly – I now see that, and…uh…yeah I think when you are young, and male for that matter, you can simply underestimate so many things when you look onwards at someone like yourself in that situation”. I heard myself & passed judgement. That was a bit too clumsy Matinski – but I guess it could have been said worse. I thought I’d now add another thought about ‘the changes‘. “I know you red-guys got hit hard in the beginning – I can see it wasn’t necessarily out of weakness either”. I took the last mouthful & motioned to the droid for a refill.

“Yes, exactly – Reds didn’t for the most part do away with themselves for weakness or fear – it was mostly a calculated decision. They knew that those slim ‘oasis moments’ of their lives was about to, forgive my French – all turn to shit. They decided, quite rationally to end it all. I was never like that, because I didn’t come from that kind of, that kind of…let’s just call it forthrightness. You see Matinski, you may have thought differently at the time – but contrary to what you thought, I more than knew adversity growing up. I always think you assumed I had had it easy my whole life. I can tell you now – we never had much to spare growing up, & I got plenty of whacks & abuse of various kinds – I’m seven years older than you remember, parents were much worse on discipline in my time than yours”

Damn, she’s done it again I said to myself. How can I argue with that? I could tell by her demeanor she was telling the one hundred percent truth. I was only now properly realising that I had completely underestimated her, I’d definitely turned her into a cartoon, not the experienced woman she had been then & more so now twenty years later. I fully knew that back then I’d fallen for a typical bottom of the barrel type jealousy – that she’s had a much easier life than me. I tried to perk myself up but relax you’ve changed for the better Matinski – you wouldn’t be like that again now. it was time to reply.

“Oh ok, yeah I think I saw you from a strange angle back then”. The ‘judger’ that still lived somewhere in the bowels of my brain now jumped in with some words. Damn it I was hoping I might have had a reason to still be pissed off with her – this would assuage my past guilt a bit. Then the wise man voice came in to override. She’s just telling it all how it was. There’s no ego in her anymore. Don’t be annoyed, this is good, were talking eye to eye for the first time probably ever!. It was time to talk again “Well let me just say that I wasn’t even existing at the level to understand all those things you astutely mention- wisdom is a funny thing – you can’t just conjure it out of thin air – you gotta get the experience first – I was lacking in a lot of true life experience back then, when we were an item. As far as relationships were concerned, I was twenty nine going on nineteen”. There was no point sugarcoating anything. I looked at Kelly’s brown dilated pupils, she seemed to take me seriously.

“Yes, & that pissed me off a lot” she said “I could see your potential, but you were a long way off it back then. I thought I could kind of stand near you, but not too near you & maybe just maybe you’d slowly get there – but I know now that was so so naive, boy I really screwed up there! It was wishful thinking, maybe even romantic thinking. The annoying thing was I had really opened myself up to do that, then of course what happened happened – we exploded into a heap. It was always going to happen, that’s what I know now. I wish I’d been smarter with you – I was myself weak…I let myself down. I kicked myself hard for a decade about that. The wise thing to do would have been a weekend with you, & then cut it off almost entirely, then let the distant future play out slowly at a relaxed rate. I definitely screwed that decision up. I paid for it too Matinski”. She tool a big slug to finish her Martini. She gestured for a refill. She’d now said the important stuff. “Lets go take a seat by the fire – I know that holo-fire won’t be so warm though”.

“Sure, that’s a great idea! I love those bloody holographic stone-cold fireplaces!” I said chirpily. Even though I was feeling a little embarrassed about her hard-hitting but truth filled grenade like words. I was happy to hear it all – for finally I was no longer afraid of the ugly truth. Ugly truth still has its certain beauty – it is infinitely nicer ‘fluffy truth’ – it’s far more complex.

I thought about Kelly’s disposition towards me tonight. I was at least half surprised at her friendly demeanor. Weirdly she didn’t seem to still hate me at all. She was making a whole mockery of the whole ‘hell hath no fury that a women scorned’ saying from the old days. I felt like there must be some kind of catch here. Though I also didn’t quite entirely trust that feeling, or that assessment. After all, the night was still young, it was only ten pm – so things could turn to shit, I thought. These days it definitely paid to be a pessimist, to be paranoid first & hope that you’d be surprised later. So in a weird way I fit in better to the new society than the old one – these days no one chastises my generalised pessimism, quite the reverse. of course I try to not overdo it. It’s a fine line.

We ambled over to the small two-person old wooden cafe type table. It was situated by the high reaching billowy orange flames of the holo-fire. Surely this can’t last, said that old curmudgeonly negative thinker that mostly lives unmolested by the more positive parts of my psyche. Shut up, just see it through said my inner dialogue. Despite the pessimists continual precedence in my brain, I’d still intentionally created an occaisional positive thinking supporting character in my mind. Sure I’d don it far too late in my life, but as they used to say it was still ‘better late than never‘. Not havign that part of my mind functioning back before the changes was a huge part why me & kelly’s relationship had exploded the first time.

We both sat down at the cute square wooden cafe type table. Kelly & I were both still odly rediculously relaxed. There was also that weird ‘time picks up where it left off’ effect happening, as if the intervening decade & a half hadn’t happened at all. It was almost like it could have been fifteen years ago, before the world had changed so much – before the changes. Like we were now in some kind of parrallel universe, one where we had never split.

We now looked into each others eyes for an exteded few seconds, and then a few more. Neither of us saying anything. We both knew. She broke the silence & the eye contact by deflecting to something else first.

“So you must be pissed of at only being able to drink that two pecent beer!, Kelly piped heartily. “Here have a sneakdrink – you deserve it for havign the balls to coem over here from your comfy hidden small town life to look me squarely in the eye!”. She added her trademark ear-to-ear smile & muffled sounding giggle. She then slid the now full Martini over to me, turning it into a Sneakdrink for me. Kelly gestured for the droid to bring her a replacement – she was never one to sit long without a drink.

I looked greedily at the sneakdrink, its velvety goodness glinting away at me. I resisted the urge to slug down that velvety goodness, like soem kind of rabid animal. I took a what you might have called in the old days a classy sip. The forbidden smoothness hit my tongue like it was from some kind of ancient kings victory feast. Those bastards in charge now were so smart allowing us Greens & Oranges the odd sneakdrink, I thought to myself. Kelly smiled sweetly as she saw me light up with the taste of her Sneakdrink offering. I was kinda amazed she hadn’t yet lost that ability to smile yet, after all she’d seen among her own Red friends not that long ago.

So I again tasted Kelly’s luxury classic Martini – my Sneakdrink. She’d wisely switched from expressos to the classic Martini now. The ‘forbidden fruit’ effect doubled the pleasures of this already near-perfect Sneakdrink. I hadn’t had a Martini for at least three years now, not since some rich stranger offered me one in some contrived dive bar back home. He’d shouted it for me becasue I’d entertained him with old world stories. For th efact I’d risked something by sharing some of my thoughts of the past era & the new one. Three years was a long time between Sneakdrinks. There’s nothing like a bit of contraband to lift the spirits. So I’d been hanging out for one, & Kelly had finally supplied me with my ‘fix’.

The droid had now quiety already replaced Kelly’s drink with another. Droids were programmed to give all Reds a ‘kingly’ table service. But I was of course now preoccupied with the Sneakdrink. I raised the glass, the ‘liquid gold’ hit my tongue, again with velvety aplomb. As I basked in the warmth of the aftertaste of the sneakdrink, I thought it was a beautiful thing that me & Kelly seemed to have mentally ‘time travelled’ back to an ‘alternate version’ past. Yet these warm fluffy feelings, there was the ‘elephant in the room’ hovering over us as we both sat there.

The elephant was we hadn’t broached yet the topic of specifically how everything suddenly & dramatically fell to pieces all those years ago. I feared we both might be ‘sweeping it all under the carpet’ another pre-regime adage now forgotten, erased. I never wanted to be one of those, shal we say ‘sweepy carpet’ kinda people. I don’t think Kelly wanted to ever be one of those either. This being the case, I thought I’d better pipe up first. Kelly looked so ridiculously comfortable sitting & sipping her drink – I remember she had a knack of being able to compartmentalise the negative, so to block it from her mind with ease. That’s probably why she’s still alive & still a functioning Red, unlike most her now deceased former Red Trafficlighter friends. My words somehow popped out without any real stress or pain.

“So Kelly….I guess I need to mention the past now”, I heard the words & I cringed slightly. But I kept going. I decided capital T Truth had to be the antidote to everything between me & Kelly – & what was there to lose? Nothing. It was the only way. Sure it would be the macho, massive ego thing to pretend that I hadn’t actually been a total mega asshole, & that she was more to blame too. But I was far too old, battlescarred, & wisened to try that shameless self deception on myself, let alone right now to Kelly’s face. I continued my words.

“Look Kelly, let be be honest about the old days…I know I was a clingy bastard, who had an anger problem, coupled with a career problem, coupled with an alcohol problem, coupled with unresolved childhood parental hatred problem, coupled with withdrawel from going off those stupid anti-depressants that were dished out like kiddies sweets back then”.

She seemed to be listening with respect, hearign me out. Her face told me she was taking me at my word. In fact she was hanging on my words. I took a sip of the velvety Sneakdrink and continued.

“And in the end you wore it all. You wore the brunk of all those things coming together. I’ve always hated the fact that I didn’t have the maturity to make the wise decisions that were necessary back then. . .I couldn’t accept that I was a bit of an asshole…that I was in fact not just ignoring reality, but I was stealing from it. But the truth is Kelly – I know know there was nothing I could have done at the time to change that train wreck from careering over that ledge. I had to learn that hard life lesson the hard way…I had to be, shall we say squashed. I now realise you had to squash me. So I will always owe you a cosmic apology”.

I took her hand in mind as we both clutched our drinks with the other free hands. I looked into those deep doe-like chocolatey eyes of hers. “Sorry Kelly”. I said genuinely & heartfelt. I kept holding her quite clammy but still nice hand.

“So please know that you have this apology, it’s a standign apology, & you’ll always have it, even though I still don’t really deserve any your forgiveness at all”.

Kelly took it in quietly, she kept holding my hand & took her own big Martini sip & cooly started her reply.

“I hated you for a long time Matinski, not just from that bad night you exploded with fury, but all the crap after that – the typical toxic crap that those emotionally immature guys allways ended up doing during the inevitable breakdown of their relationships back then, when they we were all free to screw up, before the changes. But in saying that, I’m going to break with tradition & admit some blame here too”. I wasn’t expecting that at all. I tried to hold my surprise. She continued, looking quite earnest.

“I admit that I was as foolish as you were out-of-control. I was foolish to think you could snap out of your mental & behavioural problems in a business-like manner. The actual things you did, like how you, let’s say ‘drunkenly redecorated’ my kitchen, or put my head through the dry-wall, I couldn’t care less about that – I mean I knew you’d fix up all that stuff, & deep down I never really though I’d be physically hurt. I don’t know whay I felt that way, the conditions certainly didn’t warrant it – perhaps it was a hunch. but i trust my hunches, & I havent been wrong yet. The problem was what..what it all meant in general Matinski – it was, & sorry for the btutal honesty – it was all too fucked up to handle”. She took a big slug of her half now half-finished Martini, & continued.

“You see, what you did back then meant that you cared far far more about yourself than you did me, & you were willing to destroy your life for it, & mine too if I didn’t act to stop it dead in it’s tracks. That’s how I see what happened back then Matinski – & that’s also why I called the authorities on you, I hated to do that – but I did. I did the right thing instead of the thing I felt like doing – which was pretending you were ok despite all the ever growing mountain-high pile evidence to the contrary”.

She leaned back, uncrossed her arms & slugged the last half of her Martini. She was now ready to round off her statement. She would have made a great lawyer.

“The good news is I at least know that there’s at least a fifty-fifty chance you’re over all of that now – perhaps as high as seventy percent. After all everyone knows men usually age well. That’s why I’m here at all, & you know I don’t mind taking the odd risk – never have – I’ve based my life on risk-reward, why would I change that now? The reward in properly forgiving you could be huge. You see in a way, forgiving you totally is almost a selfish decision upon my part. But I’ve learnt in life you have to be selfish first, so you can then help others second – that seems to just be how the universe works best”.

I had been soaking it all of her quite expertly rational words. Kelly’s words were free from any over-stated emotionality, but also free from under-emotion. They were just right as we used to say. I thought to myself man she’s really knocked it out of the park with that assessment. Hers was a megalithically solid assessment, full of wise, well placed, brutal truthfully elegant honesty. I couldn’t argue with a word of it. At the risk sounding as a cliche-ridden fool, I immediately felt ‘a few pounds lighter’. I was in total agreement with her sentiments. The only quibble I had was that she implied that there was still maybe only a “fifty-fifty chance” that I hadn’t changed at all. I knew in my heart that was a lowball percentage against me. But I also knew she didn’t have anything else ‘more concrete’ to go on. She wasn’t me, she didn’t know I was cured – she wasn’t a ‘mind reader’. So she was, as I used to say as a kid right, right, right – rightily right.

Kelly’s words, her forgiveness, the eye contact, the hand holding, her facial expressions also signaled to me that there was some enbers to be rekindled into, maybe a healthy fire. I’d have to of course take it slowly, and show to her my continued reformed decency. I’d have to of course properly gain her trust in glacial fashion.

I knew that Kelly was in no way perfect, never had been, but with all her flaws – like partying way too hard, for way too long, she was definitely one of the wisest, pragmatic women I’d ever met. And anyway. I’d also partied to hard & for way too long too. So on that we could each relate – there was no need to judge. We were both standing in our own glass houses – why wouyld we start throwing stones?. It wasn’t a problem me & kelly now had, it was an understanding. All in all, we were in agreement about pretty much everything. With that realisation washing over us as we sat at that little table the elephant around us now walked away.

The alcohol & her gifted Sneakdrink of course helped us. We would have been to bound by stress to achieve what we had now achieved. I thought romantically & foolishly how lucky we are The Regime lets us drink still. The glorious eye contact between us now begun to intesify. We both leaned in towards each other’s lips at ice-berg pace. Our lips finally met. It was the sweetest thing ever.

As we retreated from the extended kiss, I thought we’re back in business…it’s just a start-up maybe but so what? it was the best possible outcome available. I slugged the last of my Sneakdrink without thinking, I was feeling – feeling warm contentment. What that all looked like would be for the future to tell us. Then I realised that I had really screwed up. Kelly was looking at me in abject horror. The droid came over in a flash.

Mr Matinski I am very sorry to interupt you, but it is my duty to inform you that you have violated the Sneakdrink Policy For Green Trafficlighters. Specifically Rule 23a, section 17 of The Universal Database Code for Trafficlighters. Tis rule specifically says that ‘If a Green or Orange Trafficlighter fails to leave twenty percent of a sneakdrink undrank – the penalty is that you will be erased as a Trafficlighter from The Database, & thus you will lose all visibility, & privillidges for an indefinite period that The Flawless & Glorious ‘The Database’ has created for the benefit of all Trafficlighters & Non Trafficlighters alike.

I knew there was no point in trying to escape, & certainly no point in arguing witht he droid robot – the system in place had been perfected long ago to ensure no rebuttle or appeal could be made. Justice was now was swift & came unilaterally from The database’s pre programmed rulebook coupled with it’subiquitous surveiling real-time data harvesting eyes. In this case it was via the droid barman. This ‘you must leave twenty percent of your Sneakdrink undrank law” was one of those typical authoritarian tripwires. It was one of those typical fascist plays that were done throughout the ages, long before The Regime began. They were in essence all the same: they’d have a few silly things set up as “tripwires”, so as they could delete or catch anyone they wanted, even if there was no real reason to do so.

I’d obviasly already been tagged as a threat to The Regime & then a secondary decision made that I would now be made to be “invisible”. Of course, it didn’t necessarily mean death, much more often than not it was exile. In my case, since I wasn’t already instantly killed by vaporisation, this meant I’d have to do my time as someone who had fallen beneath the Green – I’d be going into exile with my digitalisation – i.e my ability to live normally in The Regime’s world suspended. When this kind of thing happened, all you could do was walk out to the nearest shanty communities that were all either literally or metaphorically living under a bridge, in the outskirts of one of the mega cities like BIG CITY. if you were lucky you might find some old world condemned building that had somehow survived The Databases beautification protocols.

If you were one of the lucky ones with a lighter sentence, you might find that after only a couple of years you’d see a ‘pavement light’ flicker alive with your trafficlight color as you walked over it. With that glorious Red, Orange or greeen flickering light you’d know your exile sentence was over, & you could rejoing civil society with all of your prior priviliges held under registration on The Database restored. You knew that you’d be reactivated, much like a modern digitalised Lazerus.

Of course, one deactivated, made invisible, fallen below the Green – call it what you will- statistically this meant forty three percent would never actually return to The Regime’s version of normality. Of the forty three percent, a quarter died immediately via instant vaporisation/erasure. The remaining three quarters of the forty three percent died becasue they couldn’t outlast their indefinite sentence. These ones died within a handful of years, at most perhaps a decade.

I didn’t care about all the various realities of what had just happened to me, & what could now happen to me. Many feel this way once they’ve been chosen to fall beneath the Green. It’s the quiet acceptance of what will be is what will be. If you were one of those who felt this way it would bode well that you’ll make it back. I knew I’d already made my peace with the world as it was now anyway. So after the droid gave me the judgement I knew what to do. I just kept walking out of the room, then the cafe-restaurant front door. all the while I ignored the urge to look back at Kelly. To do so would make my chances much slimmer. The droid was walking along by mu side, thanking me for going quietly & hoping that “one day he could greet me again, if & when I was one day reactivated by The Glorious Database”. Of course a droids hollow words in these situations mean nothing to the exiled. It was of course the same line word for word as he would have trotted out to other exiles like me, so of course I didn’t reply.

By the time I started walking along the pavement, the pavement lights had already changed to not register me – their was no flicker of green as I walked. With no flicker of light the temporary or maybe soon permanent death from The Regimes system was casually confirmed.

When exile happens no one knows where the other invisibles, exiles etc are enclaved, but everyone knew to just kept walking till you find them. Most knew you shouldn’t ever attempt to be a ‘solitary exile’ – to do that would mean you would soon go insane, & then you’s have zero chance to return.

I didn’t know how long I’d last as an exile, but I didn’t really care that much. Maybe I’d die in a few days, maybe I’d last a year. Maybe I’d last three to seven years & be reactivated. I didn’t care about all that.Was I suicidal? No – I just wouldn’t worry about things I couldn’t control. In those first few hours after the Databases judgement to exile me, I walked around Big City much like a ghost. Everyone that was living normally in The Databases system was pointingly avoiding eye contact with me, for as an exiled trafficlighterthis was a crime in itself. They do this to make sure the isolation from your former peers hits you quickly. Usually this is when people start crying, for now being in exile, it doesn’t matter that you have shown ‘unstable emotions’. I did indeed shed a few isolated tears the first tears in perhaps fifteen years when there was no official punishment for doing so. As the salty drips ran down my face, it made a thought christalise. I was having a recurring thought.

This is all about meeting Kelly. It’s all about true forgiveness….real understanding & visible redemption for you Matinski. You always thought the hex on you was about being you reborn in the Big City. But that’s wrong Matinski – It was only ever about looking Kelly squarely & truthfully in the eye.That’s all it ever was…that’s all it ever was…that’s all it ever was….

That though was unexpected. But I accepted it for what it was – the truth. So I kept walking – what else was there to do? An exiled man or woman has very limited choices. I made a pact to myself I’d be the happiest officially invisible asshole their ever was. And hey – it wasn’t all bad anyway! At least I wouldn’t need to wait for a glorious sneakdrink anymore, as restrictive alcohol laws don’t apply to exiled invisables. Again this was no accident, when a Trafficlighter saw an exile too drunk to to stand up, or to shout obscenities violently it simply served to warn those in the system to behave – else you’ll end up like them. Again this tactic was no new method – it was a rehashed one from fascism from yesteryear. Fascism 101 had long known how to make people who would normally see eye to eye want to tear each others eyes out. The Regime & The Database just worked in concert to perfect al that had come before, but had never matured due to technological restraints. Those restraints were now long gone, & here we Trafficlighters or now in my updated case – exiles were.

As I walked aimlessly arounf Big City in those first few hours of being an exile, I listened to the depressive clomp of my standard issue Green Trafficlighter boots. It’s funny fow the sound of your walk can tell your mood. But then between those darkened clomps I remembered something that uplifted me immediately. I only now remembered that those people that fell below the green, the invisibles, the exiles, had a famous catchcry or quote. They’d say it to you as you walked passed them in the street while they were drinking. And you’s have to try to ignore it. The exile’s catchcry was this:

if an invisible person steals a drink, was the drink really there in the first place?.

Remembering this was a real filip. My depressive stomps became at least a little less depressive. Alcohol! I thought. Sweet bleedin’ alcohol! It will now flow as freely & bountifully as water does a waterfall! I now realised that at least I’d be able to drown my sorrows, with whatever grog I could lift or had already been lifted. This was another on The Databases programmed loopholes – they’d just let the invisibles walk in to guarded alcohol stores & take all they could carry. I’m not saying that alcohol would be a solution to my exile – but it would be a medicine to ease the pain. Only a fool would disagree. So long as you didn’t drink yourself to death of course, unless perhaps that was or became your aim later on becasue you couldn’t handle the pressure of being an exile. No judgement of course – just facts.

Then after another hour or so of wandering, I had the wildest thought – maybe The Regime & The Database wasn’t so bad after all?. I dismissed that crazy thought immediately, I was just too hungry after walking for upwards of three hours without food. Of course they were bad – more than bad, I chastised myself. After all, that kind of wild schoolboyish naieve thinking was how we all got into this shit techno fascist system in the first place, all those years ago. With the disordered events becoming more frequent, more usual, more normal it all became easier for them. Slowly but surely over that core decade or so,The Regime & The Database had slowly & inperceptably tightened its grip on us, its noose around our necks. On all the people. All who would become their future Trafficlighters, The Vaporised, The Exiles, Those who would fall below the Green. Yes we were all duped by a decade long series of orchestrated false crisis & social disorders that made us accept the next more tightened noose than the last being fitted around our collective necks. Yes we were all to blame. Too many ‘good people’ for far too long had looked the other way, kept silent. Or had failed to protest robustly or violently enough. For looking back we were at war, but we had failed to muster the relevant peoples military, or more correctly a counter military that used guerilla tactics. That was what was needed during that crucial decade where the cabal that became The Regime & The Database started to gain traction, momentum & most importantly -power. And now years later with their system of Techno-Fascism so entrenched, it was almost certainly too late.

Yes we were all cowards – at least us forgotten ones & storytellers still knew that. The proof was in the pudding – our miserable unfree lives under The Regime & The Database. Now becasue of our communal blind stupidy, pigheaded inability to face facts, & cowardice disguised as aloofness, the only thing anyone on Earth has to look forward to is the systemic programmed loopholes written into the social fabric of techno-Fascism. These are such things as occaisional Sneakdrinks or contrived Confred holidays. What a jip. At least I was one of those who actually knew these facts – as I said earlier most of course were happily seemingly forever brainwashed to think that times were good under the Glorious The Regime & The Database. But the being the case I always reminded myself not to look down on those that think times are good. When I started down that track of disdain for my own people, I said to myself one of the forgottenones & storytellers mantras

it’s not their fault – guys like me were just lucky in those early years to be living outside the spotlight, in out of the way towns – out of the mega cities lie Big City. Never look down on your captured comrades. You will one day have free them. How they think is not their fault.

After walking all night in all manner of directions, the dawn broke. I looked up from my bootlaces. I finally saw a small congregation of Invisibles, Exiles. I saw there in the distance in a brick-strewen & bombed-out old world war three munitions factory. Oh did I forget to tell you? During that crucial ten years of dissarray, whereby the cabal that became The Regime slowly took the ascendency, their was a short sharp World War Three. But for now let’s get back to what my where eyes now saw in the present. Those milling about around that half destroyed old brick building were all people who were only adults & of course not children – children as wards of The Regime were never made Exiles. the adults before me were of both sexes, male & female. they were milling around in tatty rags, dirty faced, laughing heartily but erratically. Incidentily I heard a funny rhyme as I was approaching them from perhaps a hundred yards away. They were singing it in a circle as they held hands with eyes closed. It went like this:

Fuck The Database ,

Screw the Regime.

They tricked us bad,

And made us scream.

But the joke’s on them,

My forever friend!

I’ll trust you so,

With not long to go.

For they’ve made us unseen,

And worse than lean.

But they’ll fear us soon,

As a Fightin’ Team.

There were also more than a few stragglers that were oblivious to this heartwarming show of what at least on the face of it seemed like strength, or at least a temporary drunken unity. I noticed about half were stumbling holding almost empty factory pre-mixed Martini bottles, & there were very many empties aroud the ground. In fact there were so much bottles around they had formed into improptu ‘cairns’ – like just like those small foot high pyrimids of rocks that cavemen used to like to pile on top of each other. It was indeed what looking like soem kind of an old-world-alcoholics-paradise.

As I walked towards my fellow exiles, I steeled myself for the probably uncomfortable but warm greeting with a feeling hopefully of camaraderie. I said all my mental goodbyes to those still back in the The Regime’s system, including of course to the one that mattered most – Kelly. I imagined her waiting for me in the same Cafe-Hotel in a few years time. It was a nice little fantasy to have, & it could keep me going as as exile.

I was nervous, now that this new reality was becoming more crystallised. But I wasn’t overly nervous. I was sensibly weary, you might say. I knew I’d be accepted by these new folk – being that we were on the same rejected level – exiles. There shouldn’t be too much infighting – after all, we had all fallen out of the same dirty database, hadn’t we? And who knows, where there is life there is hope. We are alive. perhaps more so than those inside The Regime. I mean we were dystopian hunter gatherers now, & what is more natural than a hunter gatherer? Sure, we might be gathering alcohol more that berries, & hunting vending machines more than wild elk – but so what! It’s not exactly fifty thousand A.D. anymore. I had the following thought:

Times have changed, and time itself has changed.

This spurned another self-referential thought:

Wow that sounded wise – I wonder how true that is?.

Then I thought of the pragmatic main aim: Freedom.

Maybe one day in the distant future I & all us Trafficlighters would be truly free. Maybe I’d be growing older & hanging out with Kelly. I’ll running my own uniquely creative business, in a truly free world, totally free of The Regime & The Database entirely. I mean Matinski’s Customised Martini’s does have a great ring to it doesn’t it?

But then I snapped out of that Walter Mitty-slash-schoolboy fantasising. I mean that fantasy seemed so impossible right now, given I was here as an exile being emotionally crushed for doing nothing other than forgetting to not drink the last slug of my Sneakdrink. Crushed by The Regme’s techno-fascist reward & punishment machinery.

Then I felt suddenly ashamed. Here I was casually accepting this rediculous punishment, for simply finishing an entire sneakdrink instead of leaving the mandatory dreg. Here I was just like everyone else obeying these arbitrary rules designed to ensure ubiquitous punishment of the, shall we say freedom curtailed masses. I guess I was no text book revolutionary. I was no Che Guevara, No Lenin – those now deleted-from-the-records twentieth century Revolutionaries. I certainly didn’t feel the part. But then I had the converse thought. Aren’t the best leaders or indeed the best Revolutionaries the ones that don’t want to stand up, but do it anyway out of duty – becasue it is needed & right? These types are surely the definition of a Great Leader. But I had grave doubts about this new world. Doubts about wether the past, , if you’re one of the lucky few left to know of it – can inspire a new Revolution or Counter Revolution that can have a chance to win. The advanced form of techno fascism in place is truly an entirely new beast – our times now was the first time a fully mature form of fascism had arisen. Surely because of this, even if you knew the long past history of other fascist eras there was no metaphorical playbook or battlefield manual that would prepare you. I thought to myself the epressing words:

Are we all doomed? is the current techno-fascist-artificial-intelligence controlled world here forevermore?

I decided to use the cowards method to temporarily dispel necessary worry: to pigheadedly & steadfastly ignore them as if they don’t exist. For the immediate short term situation as an exile it would work to not worry myself more than my standard-issue-The-Regime-ified-frazzled-soul already was factory-set at. Besides, I’d have plenty of time to pretend I was a Real Revolutionary & think up a master plan againt The Regime & its techy lacky mouthpiece The Database.

Also, as one who had fallen beneath the green – I’d have a legal ‘green light’, as it were to imbibe wantonly all the aquired i.e. legally stolen Martini’s & wine available to me as an exile. I heard that exiles even had a pet name for it – RELA for short or Regime-Legal-Ale in long form.

Dreams of what my first RELA will taste like aside, the irony of it all was not lost on me: I was now suddenly a homeless ex-Trafficlighter, but able to have more contraband than I’d ever be able to drink – far more than the most privileged Red-Lighter. Was this to be my ride upon the sad wings of destiny? To be culled off with ease via a cocktail of homelessness mixed with bottomless quantities of luxury liquor? Or are all these plans & schemes of The Regime merely a elegantly trumped-up design to destroy the thing that really matters – that currently buried, forgotten, maligned & embattled thing those poets used to talk of – Love. Was The Regime’s master plan to destroy Love & all its forms?

It was an interesting conjecture. Maybe with thoughts like this, I had become a sentimental old romantic middle-aged fool. But maybe I was right. And maybe I’ll meet Kelly again one day too, but it might not be tomorrow or next year, or the year after that. Maybe The Regime cannot, in reality, be beaten, Love itself will be routed-out entirely, & I’ll never see Kelly again. I guess that’s when I’ll know you can’t ever beat techno fascism – Love whatever it actually physically or metaphysically is, the word itself, & its meaning to human beings on Earth, will have been entirely eradicated for not just me but everyone.

But all this deep thought was now dragging on too long. The social matters of the exiles were pressing upon me. It was time to meet my new fellow invisibles, my fellow regime-exiles. I’d have more than a few swigs of the booze – RELA’s – to ease the pain of my situation. With me the new arrival here, there would be a muted celebration, but a celebration none-the-less around the exiles shanty town. This was after now many years of regime-exiles being a thing, at the least a psuedo-customary affair. We as regime-exiles would now take time to party like it was twenty-forty-five – which it was. This means the party would not be very vibrant, & it would have a air of despair hanging about it, coupled with the wishful thinking that ‘things will get better one day’. In that way it would actually be just like all the Trafficlighter parties before I was exiled – just more prescient, more real, more imbued with meaning.

Is I shook hands & said the first hello’s & raised the offered RELA drink to my lips I thought to myself at the same time as I was socialising:

Maybe things weren’t so bad after all.

I imagined Kelly was doing the same thing – that is drinking. I was raising a glass to her in my minds eye. But I wondered, would she be raising a glass to me? Or would she be chastising herself for meeting up with me, chastising herself for again getting too close to chaos. I don’t think so. I think she would know how it all works – she’s see what happened for what ir was – the typical ‘Sneakdrink charade’ played by the Regime to silence any Trafficligher who began to feel, show or think they were ‘too free’. She’d surely sympathise with my plight.

Everyone everywhere had seen the ‘Oh no you drank the entire sneakdrink – so now you are banned from society schtick’ before. Everyone knew it was theatre, theatre to make out as if being ex-communicated from life as a Trafficlighter was the Trafficlighters fault, due to their own negligence. I wondered if I would ever see Kelly again, should I survive & ‘do my time’ – however long that was – here as an exile successfully. I guess, worst-comes-to-worst, I was incredibly lucky to see her already at that cafe-hotel only a number of hours ago in the first place.

Yes, falling below the green & becoming an invisible sure ain’t no picnic, but I & all other Trafficlighters could only blame ourselves for no stopping it all when the tecno-fascist state had not yet fully matured. That window right now in twenty-forty-five seemed not only shut, but wholly plastered over. But perhaps I was somehow totally wrong & it was only painted shut. It was a silly thought, but imprisoned ones live off silly thoughts such as those. And besides someone told me long ago before the changes that it’s also a wise strategy to retain a glimmer of hope, even when all seems lost.

Given we Trafficlighters & Invisibles were as a society trapped in some kind of a stasis – a suspended animation if you will – I’d just have to keep that glimmer alive, & be a patient to see whether a new idea would arise. An idea that if implemented into our currenyt reality would kill off The Regime & its The Database. I told myself:

Matinski you may as well at least try to think of a wild plan to destroy the Regime. The Regime with it’s corrupt veto wielding oligarchs, all weilding The Database’s eddicts like the sledge hammer it is. Sure, to try something was probably just trying to tempt total folly, & maybe it’s all only toend up as ‘a heartwarming feelgood future exiles’ campfire legend’ depicting a stalled or abandoned or failed Revolution. Something that would be to told around future invisibles’ & exiles shantys & their ‘old ruins’ homesteads for ever more. But you always gotta try. As the ‘glimmer of hope guy’ had said to me all those decadeds ago at that thing that we used call called ‘a party’. Even I, as a slow learning-lacking-in-confidence-late-bloomer had learnt that ‘trying is good’. After all, Life in all fields on this Earth favours the tenacious. In life you can never give up all hope – no matter the odds against you – it was as those old timers used to say to the young in the old days – ‘if your gonna die, die with your boots on’. I made a pact with myself to do that right then & there. I’d try to at least come up with something. Life these days wasn’t that good even for the luckiest Red Trafficlighter anyway. decision made: I’d at least die with my boots on.

Then I thought to myself about what would happen if I did form a rebellion against The Regime. The thought was:

Would Kelly Hartel be my side? Or would she be bought off by her continued consumption of inevitable carrots & sticks served up to her by the Regime. Worse – would she think of my rebellion plan as ‘some hair-brained scheme’. Will her comfort in her uncomfortable but predictable daily life under The Regime mean me & her will be on opposing sides in the coming rebellion war?

She was indeed what might be described as ‘a somewhat comfortably well off Red’. I was not silly to think that her type might prefer to stay loyal to the now bedded-in techno-fascist state The Regime. I wouldn’t be so silly to pretend to believe that all Red Trafficlighters would automatically throw away their Martini’s & join a rebellion that has arose seemingly overnight. I was not stupid enough to think Reds would easily put down their psychological liquid gold vessels to take up arms to fight their oppressors The Regime. Of course, it would be equally stupid to assume all Reds are identical in sentiment, & all they cared about was the better class of crumbs that The Regime lazily threw at them.

Just as there would be ultra conservative Reds that didn’t want to question the status quo, there would be the opposite types. There would definitely be a large slice of Reds that would conscript themselves to a death mission against The Regime with no special persuasion required other than an offer to be involved on the frontlines of a rebel military operation that was also certain suicide. Wether I’d have more Reds for me than against was impossible to know beforehand. As that old world saying goes – the proof would be it the pudding.

And what of Kelly as a Red herself? To me It all depended whether Kelly would think her certainly much better old-world life could be reasonably be returned should she join a rebellion against The Regime. On top of this would perhaps be a consideration of effort. How many years investment would she need to put in, with all its concordant risks & pains, in order to get the big payday – a return to her personally & in general much better pre-regime-era life? For despite the disarray of that transition period away from the old world to the new techno fascist one, Kelly up until then, had been able essentially sail through life. At least it had appeared that way to me as an onlooker – perhaps like so many in the old-world-times, she was just good at hiding her continual daily mental breakdowns.

In the old world before computer screens, before the internet, before holograms, before advanced artificial intelligence, people did simpler things. For example, in this old-world people played a physical world game called cards. For most it was for fun, for a few it was for the chance to profit – when they did this it was called gambling. Of course under techo-fascism, all this was now outlawed. The Regime didn’t like casual games like this where people went to each others houses with no surveilance, talking about whatever they wanted to, including inevitably the ability to freely criticise the leadership system. They didn’t like also did not like any untaxed profits in general, or any game played for money at all. The current leaders of techno-fascism didn’t like any game that had not been created from scratch by The Regime – and that’s what was installed now.

Under the Regime there was only three games: a new simpler form of Chess with of course no reference to Kings, Queens Knights, Rooks Pawns etc – this was called Victory or Defeat; There was a game that was a like a modified version of Backgammon, allowing up to seven players at once this was called Hurrynow. There was only one physical game – this was like a sprint race, whereby two opposing teams of up to ten a piece rolled forward in a lateral position – i.e off their feet – & they would all roll towards a finish line – this was called Rollman. Of course under Techno-fascism the digital screen versions were how everyone played. Non physical versions of these games were only usually played under special circumstances like during mass cerebrations, like the current Victory Day Parade celebrations commemorating one hundred years since the end of WW2. But let me now return to an old world game played before the changes.

The most popular game back then was called Poker. it was what they called a card game – people held & were dished out little cards with different symbols on them, each symbol had its own rank, class, & meaning or abilities. Sometimes people took Poker seriously & some even played for real money rather than faux money i.e. colored tokens. At the start of a game of Poker people had to put some money into The Pot just to be able to play the next round, & have a chance to win the accumulated money. Becasue a single person playing could decide how big the Pot started off at, then to enter the next person had to at least match it – i.e agree to put the same amount in – or maybe even ‘rasie it’ – meaning they put even more money or tokens into the Pot. This meant that often the Pot became very large.

Old world poker players used to call this personalised risk/reward mental calculation of entering a round as “The Pot odds of entering”. If the Pot was big enough, thus meaning the return or potential winnings was big enough, you are willing to make a bigger risk – & the reverse is true as well if the Pot & so the return is small. Another way to say it all is the more you have, the more you have to lose, the more likely you will not move against your existing position unless, you stand to gain a lot more.

Before the current Techno-Fascism system of The Regime had cooked peoples brains, everyone -especially the materialistic Big City types – operated their lives roughly on this “Pot odds” principle from that game of Poker. It was an imperfect kind of social programming that roughly worked, so long as your remembered that everyone was playing that imperfect mental game. This mode of operation – as they used to say – was one of life’s brute facts. Until the actual brutes of The Regime of course upset the apple cart – another before the changes term. The Regime had now for many years systemically been over collecting the collective Pot of society, that is it’s time energy & resources. It was collecting some sixty six point six seven percent for Red Trafficlighters to eighty-five percent for Greens. The Regime had figured the maximum rort possible, while keeping trafficlighters from forming resistance movements – hence the wise & neccessary throwing of the megre & token few scraps to the Trafficlighters, on a class graded Red, Orange to Green scale.

Eventually due to the adroight use of propaganda by The Regime’s techno fascist system, most soon forget they were only being fed insignificat scraps – a hologrammed tasteless beef stew, a five star movie stream, a robo-massage back rub etc etc. Techno fascism knew that the prime feature of human beings is adaptability – they knew people would adapt to the bad conditions & quickly see them as normal. Becasue of this restrictive society now being seen as ‘normal’ it allowed The Regime to serve what would have before the changes been seen as a punishment up as a treat. this was the case with the hologram produced beefstew – for it was actually a carbon copy of what they served to prisoners in WW2 – it was a watery lab chemical beef stock with mouldy bread croutons, & Trafficlighters drank it like the best mid-twentieth century seafood chowder coming out of New England.

Of course the Reds having being fed a few more scraps than Oranges or Greens got, were arguably the most easily brainwashed. But there was a complicating factor: Some Reds were willing to remember the early phase of The Regime more than other Reds – this was that particularly dark era of the purging of their dead friends via induced suicide. Kelly herself had certainly remembered them all, so my educated guess was that it was no guarantee she would be particularly loyal to The Regime, should those pot odds of a succesful anti-The Regime Rebellion be big enough. If they were – she’d in all in & no doubt by my side.

I didn’t even think of the possibility that Kelly would join a fledgling rebellion for romantic reasons – i.e. because of me. I mean after all, she was the hardened-exterior-wearing-cool-as-a-cucumber Kelly Hartel. Over & above that a also Red Trafficlighter. In short, I’d only be half surprised if she took a punt on me or my ‘would be’ rebellion. The odds of her joining or shunning me were fifty-fifty either way. But then again, given I’d only seen here for a couple of hours in fifteen years, perhaps I was getting far ahead of myself in asigning any odds whatsoever at all. I mean did I really in any confidant fashion know who she was, what her thoughts on her place in The Regime right now? The unromantic answer was no. So with this tooing & froing of my minds analysis, the realisation came:

I have no idea whether Kelly Hartel will join me in a rebellion to fight The Regime & The Database. I’ll have to start it & watch to see who is with me, or is against me, this includes the old flame of mine Kelly Hartel.

Now that I had come to that realisation, I could think more freely about The Rebellion. I knew that this era definitely had similarities to others. I knew that in any fog of war situation the difference between a smart or a stupid move isn’t immediately obvious at the time. ‘Smart moves’ or ‘stupid blunders’ were only assigned as such in hindsight. I knew that courage to rebel against The Regime & The Database, vs being sensible & odebient to the Regime so as to not draw it’s techno fascist ire are the two opposing decisions every chained soul on Earth now had to make. I knew that none of that intellectualist revolutionary theorising & self-chatter mattered – it would be bold violent action that would shake the Regime up & shake its foundations. I being lucky enough to be a forgotten one, a storyteller knew that in Pre Regime history had always shown this was neccessary when breaking authoritarianism. In my mind I figured that the only way to avoid a violent revolution would be some kind of action at a distance mental psychism – & I couldn’t yet see any of that happening – there was very little shamanic ancient wisdom life around these days – in fact I was sure there was none at all. But as I analysed my own thoughts, I thought it was interesting that I thought of the possibility of a non-physical world attack outcome none-the-less. Perhaps I was even being told to consider something seemingly impossible. I had always found it’s wise to spare a thought of why you might think of certain things at certain times & not others, I’m convinced there’s deeper things going on than just our own overt supposedly rational conscious judgement. It’s never wise to discount these things entirely. This hought pattern reminded me of an old world saying that went something like this:

One should be open minded, but not so open minded that your brain falls out.

And I was sure my brain had not fallen out yet. But then again, I guess if you were someone whose ideas had become so warped that your ‘brain has fallen out’, of course you’d say that it hadn’t doen that. This reminds me of another old-world adage

The madman never knows he’s a become a madman.

I decided that if I was indeed a madman with his mond so open his brain had fallen out that I’d continue anyway. After all, since when did Madmen just roll over & die? That’s not our style I chuckled to myself.

Yes, it would require a strong violent force to beat The Regime. Because I knew past History, I knew that Pacifist approach only really worked when the force in power realises it has become a force for evil, & wants to change for the better. The Regime would never reach this level, well not in the in the foreseeable future anyway. A Rebellion would almost certainly have to be a bold slashing, unrelenting & terrorising force that could & would be able to crash through The Regime’s seeming impervious iron gates of its techno-tyranny. Surely nothing else could work. To rely on something metaphysical coming out of the air to save all us Trafficlighters wouldn’t just be naive, it would border on insanity. For a second I contemplated a non-physical, non-military force.

If something like that happens – it won’t be because of anything emanating from us trafficlighters – surely?

But there was a bigger problem: my own self-belief, or the lack of it. I didn’t feel like I was the man to lead The Rebellion, The Counter Revolution, The Trafficlighter Revoutionary Army – whatever we would end up calling ourselves. I thought whimsically & dreamily of a solution to my lack of courage.

Maybe during this ‘great challenge’ the air would crack open & I’d be delivered to rise to the occasion & become a ‘Great Man Of The Revolution’. Maybe it would be someone else. Maybe the air would remain ice still & I’d just continue to fade away like all us garden variety Trafficlighters.

Perhaps I was right to be holding this aversion to organisation. Perhaps deep down I knew that Techno-Fascism had matured far too much, & was far too powerful for a trafficlighter to be thinking of mounting some kind of rag-tag Rebellion Army. In the past decades long guerilla tactics had worked, but those were times that were for the most part technologically feeble – no one had the totalised ability to track your enemy & deactivate them as the Regime does with ease today.

I made a swift executive decision: I’d trust my gut on this – I would hold off on any idea of a traditional guerilla style fight fire with fire tactic. All I – or shoud l say we Trafficlighters could do was be watchful, to look for signs that the air – perhaps literally – was about to crack open & sweep us along with it towards hope. Then we’d ‘cross our fingers’ – another great old world saying – that that hope blossoms into victory over the Techno-Fascism that was The Regime’s empire. That revelation was comforting. Yes it was also true that perhaps I was just making excuses to justify my inertness in wanting to become the cosmically-very-much-in-need Trafficlighters Revolutionary Leader. Maybe I was just another garden variety mid-twentyfirst-century-Trafficlighter-coward. Maybe that’s all it was. It certainly wouldn’t be my first delusion of grandeur – although it had ‘been a while between drinks’ – yes these old world sayings become far too addictive for, they are really a thing of rare historic beauty.

And what of Kelly? It had been almost a full day since I left the cafe-hotel to be exiled. All I knew right now was that Kelly was definitely somewhere out there in her normal day-to-day life mode. well perhaps she was a little stressed given the events. But I wouldn’t put it past her that she’d be plying her daily trade as a comfortably uncomfortable Red Trafficlighter. She had always been an expert compartmentaliser, as they used to say a lot in my old early Big City days. Conversely, here I was – Matinski – here in the exiles slash invisibles shantytown enclave indefinitely. I was at the whim of The Databases reactivation at some time no sooner than six to nine months. At six months I’d do what all exiles do to check if they’ve been reactivated – I’d walk along the pavement & see if those little pavement lights flickers as I pass, signaling you are ‘live’. Live & alive in The Regime’s socio-economic system. And that’s ok I reassured myself

Don’t stress, just remember what the boring folks in the old days before the changes used to bleet on to themselves & anyone stupid enough to listen – ‘don’t worry about that what you can’t control’.

That ultra boring line helped – it snapped me back to the physical world of my immediate surrondings. I stood in the invisables’ slash exiles’ damp messy shanty town & looked around at my far more bedraggled & worn out, & perhaps more seasoned exile colleagues. It was obvious that there wasn’t yet any brilliant plan hatched to save Earth from The Regime’s iron grip, & it wouldn’t come any time soon either. There wasn’t even a hint of that elevating retalitory energy force in the air. It was decidingly depressive – like the kind that filled those old world office work environments. I thought about it all some more, trying to distill & devine or some rare truths.

The air would give up its secrets at the right time. In idea must one day present. As flakey as that sounds, it is indeed the truth. For we do not know from where the best & most rupturing ideas spew whence forth. They seem to be conjour up out of the atmosphere, out of the fabric of space-time itself, & deposit themselves directly into the human beings mind. Every old-world ‘creative’ knew that’s how great ideas come from.

With all this heavy thinking weighing down on my soul, I did know it was time for copious amounts of free Martini’s. free Martinis courteous of the vagaries of the programmed loopholes of the Regime’s techno-fascist system. Nothing ever happens by accident under The Regime, I heard myself say to no one in particular out loud. While we Trafficlighters are all under the Regime’s yolk -there will be never be a single non- the Database programmed surprise available. Ironically all we trafficlighters lived in both very unsurprising times & a fascist state at the same time. We Trafficlighters were a historically unlucky lot – the fascism we faced was the full face of Fascism. Fascism finally in full bloom. I was now thirsty, thirsty, thirsty. What better place than now, what better time that this?

A few too many Martini’s – that was all I really needed right now. My overused mind had to stop for a while. Something in the future would happen I said to myself aiming to sooth the nerves. I’d only need to survive long enough, in day by day fashion. To put keep putting my finger in air. To ride the wild winds that were howling through society. I felt a little better, but only becasue I had started drinking Martinis with the other exiles, dancing, singing, kicking my heels up, lighting a bonfire, sharing old-world stories, laughing, drinking, drinking & drinking some more.

The next morning I woke up on a makeshift shanty balcony. The night of un-muted revelry had given me a mighty headache & an Arizona-dry mouth. Overheating, I removed my now dusty heavily weathered coat & looked into the crisp blue sky with the sun low & blazing. I noticed a change. Despite my sore head I noticed the air felt different. There was an electrical charge type feeling. I knew a storm was coming – a mighty one. Was this the storm that would seed the air with knowledge, I mused. It would be Knowledge that would create & plant the iron clad plan that would kill the Regime & The Database. It would destroy Techno-Fascism as it was arguably at its Zenith. But which rebel would be chosen to download it? Would it be me? I hoped it wouldn’t be – let it be ‘Exiled Schmoe’ number 239-4355 I thought trying to ‘pass the buck’, as was another old-world saying denoting someone who had cowed from their responsibilities. Listen to yourself, I chastised myself internaly – that’s just the hangover talking.

But I knew that was a lie – I just didn’t want to do the job of saving all Trafficlighters from the most advanced fascist system ever devised – it wasn’t entirely cowardice. it was at least a fifty-fifty cocktail of cowardice and lazyness. I Matinski, could be a very lazy guy. I was a;so kinda getting used to the cameraderie in this invisables shanty town – that party was a wild ride last night, maybe the next year in exile could be a total blast!, I deluded myself. Don’t be such a dickhead, you fool said that small part of me that was no lazy & not a coward at all. It was nice to hear from him, it had probably been a while. You can rise up Matinski. It has to be one of us – so why not you? That disociative far more mature than me, owl-wise voice had a fine point – who was I to argue?. Then the larger lazy coward’s voice spouted up in rotort:

You’re gonna trust some parental type voice in your head that wants to drag as out of our fun exiles party time? You had the most fun you’ve had in years last night – & don’t you remember that scruffy haird chick that you had a real connection with? You’ll get more than a kiss from her tonight you dullard! And besides, can you really trust that parental voice? I mean let’s be honest here – It’s not like you had reliable parents Matinski! Let’s party a few more months! We got unlimited Sneakdrinks!

Of course it was tempting to forget about the mission to get blasted, but by now I was too old to be fooled by the party voice in my head. I hadn’t forgotten the social wreckedge that had accompanied those free-wheelin’ over-partying old-times like banacles on a ship. The wreckage that ruined me & Kelly. The Regimes’s Techno-Fascism was bad, but too much freedom is as bad as too little. The result is the same – total societal destruction, it’s just done by diametrically different paths. Again being a forgotton one slash storyteller, I had had the luxury the Earth’s long past social history to inform me of all this. I thought of The Roman’s & their final defeat as a warning against too much largesse.

Sure the Ottomans under Mehmed II had used great technology of the time – Gunpowder canons – to break down the Byzantine’s giant Theodosian stonewall defences at Constantinople, & it ended the Roman Empire once & for all…..BUT the centuries of Roman over partying & drunken orgies didn’t help their mindset when struggling for survival either.

I now felt about a foot taller. It was double-D destiny time. I went out into the clearing beyond the various exile shanty detritus that littered the ground. I stopped & looked towards the heavens with arms outstetched. I waited for something to happen. I waited. I waited some more. Then some more. My cursed inner dialogue started to analyse.

Why the hell is nothing happening? Has my brain been building up a giant delusion? Have I gone insane & I had not known it? Was I like the eccentric genius who had slowly & imperceptably finally flipped into total madness? Was I like all madmen thought he was sane & just about to crack the answer the final big elusive mystery that had been confoundign humanity for millennia? Was I like a kooky version of that Nietzsche guy from the late nineteenth century who was the worlds smartest Philosopher-Sociologist at twenty-five & in a looney bin at forty, & dead at just forty-five?

I repeated this torturous pattern of waiting & listening to my overactive minds the-sky-is-falling judgements for the next five hours. Then my madness was suddenly inextricably justified. The sun seemed to lose its ability to light up anything & darrkness immediately fell. Then a series of flashes of light filled my eyes, & the air around me & all the other scattered exiles. Oddly while this no-light lightning sho was on, there was no sound whatsoever. It was like one of those old-timey pre-sound ‘flicks’ or ‘movies’ I’d seen the late twetieth century , before The Regime had banned them.

It was of course scary as hell, I could hear all the shrieks of terror from my fellow exiles. But What did this mean? Had my wild idea about the real & only solution to beating The Regime & The Database coming literally out of the air itself actually came true? To me the answer was…a resounding YES – this was after-all no passing thunderstorm – in this event the fabric of reality was clearly peaking out from behind the cosmic curtain. I wondered out loud.

Had I been chosen to lead the rebellion?. Had the key idea been downloaded into my consciousness?. I had indeed noticed a plan was now sitting in the forefront of my consciousness. It was such a simple obvious plan. Why hadn’t thought of it before?.

The idea had been sitting there right in front of us Trafficlighters’ glued shut closed eyes all along: parapsychism. We all had the latent ability, sitting there in our brains and/or souls totally unused. All we had to do was collectively channel ourselves the right way, & so disupt the technology that The Database rode on. The Regime’s control was technologically delivered though the airwaves via the various electromagnetic, plasma & gravity waves that had now been completely mastered to safely & with full unhackable encryption, control all the Trafficlighters remotely with total impunity. Well, until now perhaps.

Being quite shaken by the whole experience, I went back to the shanty balcony & put the coat back over myself for warmth. I figured ‘The Trafficlighter Counter-Revolution’ wouldn’t care much if it would have to wait a day or so until the brunt of my last-nights exile party hangover had abated. Sure, I was putting things off, probably because what had happened was so big. In life you have to get your priorities sorted. But in my life until now that’s what I hadn’t done at all. But that’s also how I became a storyteller slash forgotten one who could remember past history as it actually was. You can be rewarded for what seems like laziness – but in reality, is just a wise refusal to run on hamster’s treadmill. A treadmill that is attached to, runs & feeds a bad system. Of course, I was lucky because I didn’t truly know that I was being wise. In the early days of my escape from Big City I had felt like a failure. But now I know the truth – at heart I knew Big City was corrupted & was on the path to a bigger corruption – the Techno Fascist society created by The Regime, run by The Ai mega-Genius The Database. Somehow with even trying I had ended up in the right place. I don’t believe in destiny – but after that storm, I can’t rule out providence. I like the sound of the theory – for it means I can’t at all screw this all up, even if I tried. I slept the next four hours. I awoke to the sound of approaching footsteps.

I opened my eyes. There she was. Her angular & striking face was glowing in the afternoon light, with that patented big-mouthed wide grin.

“Get up you lazy ass Matinski” she yelled at perhaps half-max volume. I didn’t get on my feet until she kicked my boots. She was right, why didn’t I jump up to say hello straight away? I was clearly in shock.

“Kelly Hartel! What the hell brings your sorry Red Trafficlighter ass down to the land of the exiles & invisables – we The Regime’s chaff thrown onto stony ground?”

“Well Matinski, I’m sorry to report….that they just kicked me out too”.

I wasn’t expecting this. I was expecting her to continue to live that classic uncomfortably comfortable life that had been set up for all Red Trafficlilighters. I pressed her for details.

“So what the hell happened?”

“Well, it was all pretty arbitrary, Matinski. So I’ll be joining you guys, you invisibles the exiles. You see, not long after you left the All-Trafficlighter-Cafe-Hotel There was a notification that came over my Townscreen”. Kelly pulled out a piece of paper with old fashioned pencil type writing on it. People our age had kept a few innocuous old world nicknacks like a few ‘pens’, ‘pencils’ & ‘scraps of paper’, purely out of nostalgia for a mostly forgotten, or should I say unprogrammed world. Technically a pen & a scrap of paper was contraband – but a small quantity didn’t trigger The Database’s defences. She read the words written in a scrawl off the scrap of paper in verbatim, just like a school child did in those long gone olden-days of our youth:

THE DATABASE HAS FOUND THAT 1% OF ALL REDS ARE CONSUMING 50% OF THE MARTINI DRINKS. THIS IS NOT SUSTAINABLE NOW THAT GIN STOCKS HAVE PLUMMETED DUE TO A BAD HARVEST. IF YOUR NAME IS IN THE LIST AS A TOP 1% MARTINI CONSUMER, YOU ARE HEREBY SUMARILY DISMISSED FROM THE TRAFFICLIGHT SYSTEM, & YOU WILL BE DEACTIVATED FROM THE ECONOMY IN FIVE MINUTES BY THE DATABASE. REACTIVATION IS POSSIBLE IN THE FUTURE BUT NOT GUARANTEED. PLEASE LEAVE YOUR DWELLINGS IMMEDIATELY, LEAVE YOUR TOWNSCREEN IN YOUR PLACE OF DWELLING OR IF OUTSIDE YOUR DWELLING LEAVE IT ON THE SPOT YOU STAND OR SIT UPON.

“Man, I didn’t think they were going to do something so arbitrary to you Reds – I mean they’re really really….well surely this is like a total phase change for them – I thought they would just let you drink yourselves happily into a stupor for eternity”.

“Well fuck it Matinski -you know I take things in my stride. I thought so too – but looks like we were all to complacent. This is just another little setback. I’ve seen these things all my life – even in the old world, before the changes. You just have to wait them out. He who waits wins. Besides, now I’ve got more Martini’s that before, before I had a, shall we say limited unlimited supply, & now I have a unlimited unlimited supply – all we can legally steal – so it ain’t all so bad. And I have a hunch it’ll be short token thing – perhaps three months until I’m reactivated. I think they just want to guard against us types being too comfortable in our uncomfortability. I can see it makes sense for them, hell I might even do the same thing if I was in their shoes – to use that old-world phrase! Oh and turns out you’re here too, which I guess is some company for an old boiler like me,, at least until my other Red overdrinker exiled friends turn up.” She said that last line with her trademark ear to ear cheeky grin.

Kelly then came over, lay down next to me & kissed me shortly & sweetly, just a peck, but it was on the mouth, & had a kind loving intention laced within it. That kiss was something else. I felt reenergised. I took her hand & led her to an empty out of the way shanty, my heart was now beating out of its chest. We went in & did what was neccesary, then went out & sat on the shanty’s balcony. We were now leaning against each other sitting side-by-side on a wooden plank that had been roughly made into a low height pew type seat. I spoke first as we held hands happily gazing into each others eyes – as new lovers do, which in a way we were second time around.

“Isn’t it weird how after all that that has happened – to me to you & to Big City & beyond – yet right now it’s like all the decades has simply melted away. It’s like it’s thirty years ago again – like the intervening time didn’t exist at all”. I said that with a large element of boyish wonder. Kelly replied.

“You always were a dreamer Matinski, but I get you, I get you. You’re right. I don’t like to tell you that, but you are. You see Matinksi, the problem with you younger men has always been the same thing as far as we older women – us old boilers – are concerned – the first stint while you’re young will always be a disaster. We all know that, but you of course can’t know that – after all you’re too immature to know yourselves. You have to inevitably all to go away, screw up a few more times and then one day you will wake up & – & forgive the old-world term here – hey presto you are suddenly all grown up. I’m glad that finally you did that. It took you a while – I mean geez! You could almost qualify as an old man! It’s good to have you back Matinski”.

I put on an old world cowboy accent to half hide the emotions that had been stirred up by her words. “Aw shucks Kelly – Yeah, I can see that”. Kelly whacked me on the arm swiftly so as to stop the playing up. I returned to my normal voice, with a small nervous cough to begin.

“Yeah that’s true about what you said about the need to grow up. The first stint had a certain air on inevitability about it, I can see that now. Like one of those old trains from those old-world movies where the train was hurtling towards a chasm, where the tracks run out & the train would fall into a cavernous abyss. Yes I agree with you that us vigourous but stupid young men will always lack the executive function to be able to right the ship, to jump off the wayward train before it crashes. It just can’t happen. The train has to go over the cliff. From then it’s lady time in charge. There’s total destruction at the bottom of the cliff that has disrupted the arid soil. Then becasue it was a steam train carrying water the soil becomes fertile. A few dasies then pop up, then a few more. In a couple of years an oasis has grown around the former train wreck site. It has to happen that way, it’s basically pre-destination”.

“Yes Matinski, well said, I like the train analogy – vert creative. Back then you tried to deny that that was the case – but shame on me, becasue I went against my better judgement & also played your young mans game for too long. It’s a game of boys. But we women, in the end are all the same – we need men that have blossomed past that wild stage. I knew it but for some reason I was weak – & I enjoyed the drama to a degree. I mean I’m human to, contrary to your belief. I didn’t let on but I had deep feelings for you – no question Matinski”.

I looked into her brown wide inviting eyes, her cute dimples, her intriging patented half-a-smile-half-not-a-smile – or was it just a weird smirk? Probablt both. Kelly certainlyhad that indefinable certain quality that drew people in – in the old days they it was described by the now banned term je nais sais quoi. She could also be truth machine, which she seemed to have retained to the current day. This was rare quality in the current techno-Fascist era – a time of being sensibly as guarded as possible against the forever everywhere blanket surveilance. I was slightly surprised at how she still had feelings for me, albeit it was said wisely in a roundabout way. After all, no matter the situation – love is still at least partly a game, even under the love-hating The Regime’s perfected Techno-Fascism. I tried to feign an extra portion of confidence & aloofness in my pragmatic reply.

“Well I agree Kelly with your sentiments. But now we are here together, right now. Older wiser, & both in the immediate sence deeply invisable exiles. So lets just help each other out day-to-day in this dump – and lets slowly get our heads together. I mean it’s been a wild few days – we’re both in a fog-of-war mental state.” Kelly ignored my “let’s chill out mentally” request, & pressed me on details.

“What do you mean ‘get our heads together’? You got a plan?” Kelly said only barkingly at me. I decided to play along – though it was the last thing I wanted to talk about. I was happier to procrastinate – to drag things out & avoid being pinned down – this was after all one of my most annoying long term traits.

“Well yeah – I reckon we can destroy the database entirely…it’s all about harnessing what all we humans still all have latently inside us – have you heard of a thing called parapsychism“.

Kelly looked at me quizzically “Matinski – you & your big words, what’s ‘Parpsychism’ mean?”

I gave her the verbatim dictinary definition:

Parapsychism generally refers to the study of experiences and the phenomena that appear to be beyond the scope of normal, standard physical explanations. It encompasses a range of psychic abilities and paranormal skills or outcomes. It includes extrasensory perception (ESP), telepathy, and psychokinesis.

I gave Kelly a moment, allowing the definoition to land properly. Then I made a move that in the old days these people called sales agents called a pitch.

“Kelly – don’t you see, if all us Trafficlighters all harness this strange psychic ability all at once, we could perhaps create some kind disturbance in the fabric or the energy patterns of space, & so destroy the whole medium used to surveil & control us. We can corrupt the data transfer information that the Database transmits & receives. If we do that, we’ll have a fighting chance beat The Regime, the Database & Techno-Fascism – we might be able to go back to an essentially pre high-surveilanace & control era, one marked by freedom of choice. Yes I know what your thinking – it does sound unbelievable, impossible – but I’m askign you to suspend your disbelief &, to use another old-world term – see how things pan out. We can always try another tactic if it doesn’t”. Kelly was looking puzzled but then talked with spirited energy.

“Ok Matinski – I’ll try to suspend my disbelief. It’s not easy given that flakey stuff you just said. I’ll try fight what I’m thinking right now which is Man, I was wrong about Matinski – you’re still a fucked up – a dreamer. I mean what the hell are you talking about? That can’t happen surely! Maybe I was wrong to push you into thinking of a plan. You are right we are in a fog-of-war situation after all. I realise I pressured you to quickly. Forget I asked you for a plan at all just now Matinski. Let’s forget all that for now & just rip open those contraband Martinis you guys, I mean we Trafficlighters come exiles have coming out our arses”.

After hearign her notr want to consider my parapsychism idea, I felt a little rebuffed. But I squashed the feeling. I mean, I was asking a lot of her to consider that. I looked at Kelly & smiled. Perhaps she was right. Maybe we were better off just getting drunk & fading away together in a romantic hazy mist, at least for tonight. I mean it would be a shame to waste the one big achievement I could say I had definitely mastered since the first time around together pre The Regime in Big City – I had genuine emotional stability, that even held together while being as ‘drunk as a skunk’ on Martini sneakdrinks. So it was ‘decision made’ we’d chill out & try to have fun under even as we sat among the dark clouds in this fog of war.

“To hell with it – you’re right – let’s party & chill tonight – the ‘Parapsychism Counter Rev’ can wait a day or to Techno Fascism ain’t giving up anytime soon anyway!”. kelly gave a knowing look that said ‘ah we see eye to eye’.

“You got it Matinski – that’s good so maybe you’re not a totally mad dreamer after all. Your stock is rising, I’m starting to remember why I knew you weren’t a total one-hundred-percent total loser in the first place!”. She now flashed her patented ear-to-ear cheeky grin.

“You gotta a way with words Kell” I said with my arms arm around her waste as we faced each other smiling, but not smiling too much like far to happy weirdos. After all, neither of us did feelings very well. We both mostly believed in the theory that your default position should be hard-edged – & we were like that before the changes too. Perhaps this was our biggest commonalities. I guess that’s also why we’ve emotionally held it together so well under Techno-fascism. We were both hard arses to a fault. Kelly continued the conversation.

“Aw shucks, I’m just a simple old boiler Matinski, a hot one. Some things don’t change much”, she said matter of factly with a wry smile.

“Well, that’s why I’m here – someones gotta tend to old boilers, you know give them maintenence once in a while – keep the steam rising, just call me Matinski the tinker-taylor-boilermaker-man”. Wow that sounded pretty clever, I thought.

“You & your long words Matinski – oh that reminds me – when are you gonna write that fucking book you always crapped on about in the old days anyway – you know that novel?”. In the old days I had always crapped on about writing something – but back then that was just a dream – I was far too disorganised & lazy then. Of course these days you can’t freely write anything freely creative – but if you’re fully hacked, you can write it in you mind. I continued the convesation.

“Yeah – I’m almost finished it, it’s called We drunkenly forgot about the Revoution on account of unlimited free Martini’s – but we had fun all the same. Kelly let out her patented chesty little giggle, completed with that wide mouth smile, glinting brown eyes & dimples. I didn’t feel like talkign to much about what I’d thought-writing – mainly because the embarrasing truth I still hadn’t figured out the plot after twenty years of thinking about it. The truth-obvious was I liked the idea of it more than completing it. When Kelly picked up on the fact I was stallign about the non existent novel she said nonchalently:

“We need a RELA Matinski – Ahhhh! Regime-Legal-Ale – gotta love it”.

Kelly went without waiting for my answer – she knew I’d always be up for a drink. This was another of our biggest commonalities – again long before Techno-Fascism broke out. Over she walked to the exiles Martini stash, to get the RELA’s. Given the quirks of being an exile – being free to steal as much Sneakdrinks as we like – these stashes were unguarded & just sitting there. the closest RELA’s were housed about one hundred yard away from us in a old bombed out wooden world war three munitions warehouse. Kelly left via her patented ultra-slow-and-relaxed sauntering walk, never in a hurry. Kelly brought over two perfectly imperfect made classic Martinis – imperfect through no fault of her own. There was no garnish & it was not chilled, for we exiled Trafficlighters of course becasue unlike RELA’s – we could not legally steal any olives, toothpicks or ice that accompany a classic martini. So this meant these drinks were always best served long after nighfall, when the air temperature was the lowest. We clinked glasses & before I could think she made a toast – & after she said her words I’d realised she’d just stolen the words right out of my mouth, to use that old-world phrase.

“Matinski, a Toast. To the following assesment about us: It was the worst of times, it was the best of times?”.

I loved how she had raised her voice to an inflection that suggested the statement was more of a question. No one but Kelly would think to do that. I loved it when she did or said those quirky things. We clinked glasses & threw the velvety goodness down our throats. We laughed when both relaised we had sighed in unison. I decided our planning of the Revolution or Counter Revolution – which one it was, I wasn’t quite sure – could wait a few days. I thought to myself about delaying this very imporatant thing:

I mean when you’ve got a good thing going – why waste it? Me & Kell are getting on better than ever! We’re in our little bubble, our veru own ‘private universe’. The Database isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

Kelly had seen my mind ticking over.

“You better not be thinking about work Matinski – that’s not your style – you’ve always hated work, especially hard work”

“Touche Kelly, now let me work hard to refill your empty glass” I said impersonating some indistinct confidant guy. Now Kelly had some internal thoughts of her own.

Boy he has changed, or so it seems at least, Kelly thought to herself as she saw Matinski saunter off in ultra relaxed fashion to the Martini stash.

Meanwhile, as I was fetching the goods – the next Martini RELA’s, I was telling myself the exact same thing as Kelly had thought about me – that she had changed, & for the better. Our connection had seemingly been easily re-established. Amazingly, like before at the All-Trafficlighter Cafe-Restaurant there was not a hint of past baggage rearing its ugly, ugly head. Maybe we were just lucky. Maybe it was just some kind of a second honeymoon phase type thing, again I’m using an old world phrase. Old world things like Honeymoons & Marriages had long been made illegal under The Regime’s Techno Fascism society. With all children born via labs & as wards of the state there was simply no need for those now quant traditions. Well according to The Database’s biased pro-fascist decidedly biased judgement on the issue. Marriage or couples living with each other would of course be a direct threat & a competition to The Databases need for totalised rule over each individual mind & body.

So me & Kelly were getting on just great. We were the embodiment of that old-world term – ‘getting on like a house on fire’. I Considered this was a miracle in itself – given the way we had ended the first time around in pre-techno-fascist Big City, not yet devoured by The Regime & its mouthpiece. Yes we both happily exiled together at the same time in the same place in the same universe. We were currently living in the utopian reality of what a cynic might describe as a temporary romantic haze. They would say temporary as these feelings cannot last, if they were indeed based on a large part novelty. Perhaps the deep feelings of ‘love’ that occur under periods of stress or novelty must fade as quickly as the begin – otherwise would not couples in die of starvation because they’d locked themselves in a bedroom together?. Perhaps our current feeling towards each other were like the temporary highs of that old world party drug called cocaine. Cocaine was the old-world ‘drug-of-choice’ used mostly by unhappy professionals, corporate ladder climbers & social climber types. That’s why I had avoided it like the plague – it was a drug boring & unhappy people had to make them forget they were so boring & unhappy. I was actually glad The Regime had routed it out by instantly vapourising the cocoine user upon use. So I hoped I was wrong about me & Kelly’s feelings being like cocaine – for it would mean our love was indeed falsity soon to be vaporised. So maybe our time together was fake. But it still made sense to enjoy that false utopian moment, while it still existed. Knowing all this, I made a wise pact to myself simply saviour the moment – another great old-world term. And we could have a couple days to concentrate on just us. Kelly was no doubt ahead of me on all this when she suggested that a day or two off planning the Trafficlighter Counter Revolution wouldn’t make any difference.

Of course we could be screwing up like total idiots. I had factored that in. I could only hope that some other highly motivated wag out there somewhere in another shanty in Trafficlighter-invisibles-exile-land wouldn’t usurp my plans, beat me to the glory of our salvation.

So there me & Kelly were looking at each other, or as we used to say ‘just hanging out’ with the perfectly imperfect Martini’s in the backdrop of this Trafficlight Dystopia that was being an exile of The Regime. It was time to do the old-world fun thing friends& colleagues did when they all had just poured themselves a drink at a social occasion. It was called ‘to make a toast’. I raised my martini high & bellowed to Kelly:

“To love & cowardice – long may they live in deeply entwined cohabitation, as they always have done & always will, no matter if the parties in question are a million miles apart”.

I knew Kelly would love that long-winded perfomance, & then give her patented combo of ear-to-ear smile with a chesty ‘schoolgirls’ giggle. I can report that on that occaision she did not disappoint. So the strangely perfect time we were having continued. Kelly now replied to my toast.

“Matinski, that was good BUT – you’re only partially correct – the toast should be

‘To love, cowardice & winning, while still somehow saving each other from becoming our worst selves”.

The old Kelly would never have said that, for ego driven reasons, or as they used t say ‘for pride’. She had now learnt to overcome that, no doubt due to the painful wisdom forced upon her by the nasty wilesTechno Fascism. It made sence that Kelly had evolved into a much higher being. You can’t lose three quarters of your kind, you colleagues, your friends & enemies, come out alive & not have more wisdom than you started. I decided to respond to her beautifully truthful toast in an over-the-top way to agree with her sweet sentiment. This was how our generation did things. We learnt this from our upbringings & experience in the old-time-word of before the changes. We didn’t like to have overly elongated very nice moments – we used humour as an antidote to that.

“Fuck it Kelly, you’ve hit the spot again! One day I’m gonna get tire of that truth-tellin’ shit you spout out”. Immediately after this Kelly failed to laugh & looked stony faced, as we used to say when someone failed to smile or show any joy, yet was also showing a frown. Then she laughed. “Har har – you thought I was pissed off didn’t ya Matinski? I had forgotten how much fun it is to make fun of you!” she said heartily. I decided to do the same trick – I wore a stony face. “Wait, your not laughing?” Kelly said this time a lot less confidant. I kept stony face act up for about ten more seconds, about as long as I could without entering, shall we just call it ‘you are a bastard territory’. Then I started laughing, as did she. It’s still so far so good, I thought.

Then Kelly got all serious all of a sudden.

“You shoulda never doubted me back then, Matinski – what were you thinking…I mean what were you thinking?”.

Kelly too a slug of the now almost gone Martini & flashed about half of her trademark ear to ear grin, so she was still at least half in good humour. I needn’t of worried about any ’emotional instability’ in Kell – that was not ever one of her traits. If anything it was the reverse – emotional coldness – that had bugged me back long ago. The younger version of me had to deal with that in the form of being one of many other concurrent boyfriends – whereby Kelly would chop & change depending on her whims of the day. This used to cut me up when I was ‘dropped’, then I would be – to use the old-world phrase ‘over the moon’ when I was ‘called up’, perhaps as a late replacement. In short when I was the younger me I allowed myself to get wrapped up in this game. The current version of me knows their are reasons for everything. Kelly was simply mirroring what someone had priorlt forced upon her. The older version of me knew how easy it is to become that which you rally against. Age is a great thing for clarity. I responded to her question that questioned my actions back then – namely my ‘lack of trust’.

“Kell – you must know the answer to that. You know everything happens for a reason. You did what you did for a reason, & so did I. Don’t you remember that line that couples used to say to each other when apportioning blame in an argument? Kelly shot back quickly

“it takes two to tango…well yeah of course I know that has to be true Matinski”. The good thing about Kell was she wasn’t quite like all the other women back then – she could on occasion put her ego in her back pocket, as we used to say when someone stiffled their unneccesary emotions. She started up again where she left off.

“You know that era when we were brought up – the nineteen seventies & eighties – it had a dark side. I mean you know that we of that generation – what was it called..”

“Generation X”, I said helping her.

“Yes Gen X, that was us – well I’m seven years older than you so I’m an ‘old Gen X’ & you are a ‘young Gen X’ – so it was probably worse for me than it was for you”.

I intuitively understood her. We ‘Gen X’ kids were given a lot of freedom, but contridictingly when we did something ‘wrong’ in the eyes of our parents – there was often hell to pay. Our era was the last era when parents were able to physically punish their kids with total impunity. Our era was the last one when parents were – ‘omniscient’ – that great old-world term for ‘god-like’. In short the parents of us Gen X kids could legally be tyrants. They could abuse with impunity. It could be physical, emotional or sexual abuse. Whatever it was we had to take it. So we Gen X learnt a coping mechanism – to become hard-nosed emotionally – another great old world term meaning to squash your emotions. So I knew now that Kelly was just a ‘colder than average’ Gen X’er I’s a spectrum. Kelly was just in the top fifteen percent of all the Gen X’er kids-that-are-now-middle-aged adults. Overall Kell had taken more hits than me as child, so her ‘Gen X coldness syndrome’ was a fair bit more acute than mine, but still totally normal for our Generation. When I was young, I had failed to see this. Now I knew that’s all it was. Looking back I felt a fool for not seeing reality as it was. Knowign & thinkign of this fact, I said to her in reply

“Hey Kell – I know why, you don’t need to explain. It was a strange time to grow up for us all. I guesswe Gen X’er kids were luck – we had a good look at what fascism felt like from a young age. We experienced tyranny close up, & we only had ourselves to confide in. Now lets not worry about things we already agree on – let’s not rake over old…..old….”. I trailed off as I had forgotten the end of that old-world phrase that was about not letting the past bite you in the present. Kelly came to the rescue.

“Coals. The old-world saying is ‘Let’s not rake over old coals’ “.

Kelly purred as she repeated the word coals three times, coals, coals, coals. Let’s not rake over old coals. She was so happy that she somehow had remembered that line. Somehow The Database had not erased that old saying from her mind. This was surprising, as after all she was not a forgotten one, she was no storyteller/ It was only us that had been at least partially spared from the various tranches of The Databases TMP’s – Trafficlighter Memory Purges. Her memory of the past had been far more attacked than mine. Why could she still remember the Let’s not rake over old coals saying from the old world? Unlike me she’d stayed in Big City the whole time, & not absconded away to a rural backwater like I had. At least that was my firm understanding. She wasn’t a forgotten one, a storyteller. It was amazing she could remember any of the Pre-Regime Era facts & culture at all. It almost made me wonder if The Database was malfunctioning. Or perhaps Kelly was a Forgotten one, a Storyteller & actively hiding the fact from me. Perhaps if that was the truth, that is the only reason she wanted to meet again. Perhaps that’s why I enjoyed our time drinking & talking as activated Trafficlighters at the Trafficlighter Cafe Restaurant, & why we still are as exiles, invisables. It would make sense, given it’s almost impossible for a forgotten one slash storyteller to get on well with a fully brain-hacked normal Trafficlighter. Usually you can only just barely tolerate their drone like automoton personality. That was nothing like what me & Kelly were experirncing.

Or Perhaps this is supposed to happen when you become an exile. They allow parts of the old world to return to a trafficlighter. Perhaps it is a strategic move by The Regime. Perhaps the idea is that the average Trafficlighter couldn’t handle suddenly knowing of the old world. Perhaps it makes the most troubled but also potentially brilliant exiled Trafficlighters lose their minds. It would make sense – for this would make most people more stressed, & the whole reason we are exiles is to be punished for ‘acting out’. But then again The Regime can easily create a trumped up charge & then use The Databases ‘instant judgement’ system to vapourise & delete someone entirely from history, which not only kills the Trafficlighter but also purges everyones memory of that person. I was starting to think that the most likely thing was that it was a glitch emanating from The Database. Perhaps The Database is not in fact one-hundred percent perfect, I conjectured .

The feelings surrounding me & Kell were strange. There was a mutual realisation that come over us. An unspoken kind of thing that used to happena lot in the old-world. A feeling of unity. A feeling of being fellow soldiers-in-arms against the world. This is how old world soldiers felt, I realised. this is what those old twentieth century soldiers had meant whjen they used that comradery term.

I leant into Kelly slowly, all the while looking into those big doe-brown eyes. The kiss this time was more that a fleeting peck. It was long, protracted. Loving. It was just like those old-world movies. Under Techno fascism shows of affection were not illegal, but discouraged. Most Trafficlighters only ever received or gave a polite peck on the cheek. And of course Techno Fascism was a sexless culture for Trafficlighters, made possible via the artificial child farms. But with us both now existing as exiles, & perhaps both of us being forgotten storytellers the old-world was reappearing albeit it a imperfect copy type way.

There was an electricity in the air like my soul had been jolted out of my body for a second. The physical attraction between us before the changes had always been ‘out-of-this-world’ in the past. But I wasn’t sure that that wasn’t becasue of the fact that the old-world had its un-tampered with, vibrant & untrammelled hormones flying everywhere. The old-world term that captured this best was, I believe, called ‘young lust’.

The feelings we were having now as we kissed were entirely more powerful that some middle aged version of old-world-young-lust. I was sure what we were experiencing was a far more of a rare phenomena, I was sure it was love & not lust.

I knew that we both knew that our past didn’t matter any more. The attraction between me & Kell, us old-world-Gen-Xer’s-come-Techno-Fascist-exiles, was indeed iron clad. Iron clad – a great old ninetenth slash twentieth century term that referenced the world of the time’s extremely high use of that metal they called iron. The used it to build & strenthen an all manner of things. I knew that the term Iron clad & The Industrial Revolution went hand-in-hand.

It was pretty nice that me & Kell were reviving a few little old world things – knowledge & phrases while drinking freely, kissing & laughing as if we were not prisoners that had been exiled from the very prison they had been incarcerated from. We were somehow merily forgetting we were exiles in a very real Techno-prison-system.

I certainly wasn’t going to interupt the good luck we were at least feeling. I wasn’t going to rock the boat so to speak, another old-world phrase, & now of course their were no boats at all – only land & undersea Channatunnels arrivign at the various Channaports.

I had selfishly put off planning how the The Revolution slash Counter Revolution would work, just to spend some quality time perhaps our last ever moments together with each other. It was a wise decision & I was sticking with it while it lasted. It was a good short-term-strategy as people trapped in those old-world mass density workplaces called offices used to say. I used to say that phrase a lot myself.

Kelly pulled me agressively to the nearby rickety shanty – she was always good at getting what she wanted. At the current moment, amazingly – after all the years & because she had allowed time to cure all things – a self-explanitory old world saying – that person was actually me. I wasn’t complaining. We emerged about an an hour later, tire sweaty & needing to refill our glasses.

Some things in life you can predict with absolute certainty. I guess this was just one of those times. I could now safely predict that the connection between us could never be actually be broken, even if we were on opposite sides of the Earth. It was a metaphysical type thing going on. I guess that feeling of instant connectedness me & Kell had was what those physicists called entanglement – an instant connection that seemed to act outside the normal spacetime limitations. Me – Anton Matinski & her – Kelly Hartel had that in spades, as I used to say a lot in the old-world.

We now sat together in a sweet post coital bliss glow. Again, this was something that was lost in Techno fascism. A decidingly old-world thing. This night was ours alone to enjoy. We had happily separated ourselves off from the other exiles in the shanty for a while. Did they think we were rejecting them? We didn’t care. This was no time to be making friends anyway. Allies & fellow soldiers is another thing – but as I said that could wait a few more hours perhaps a day, I wasn’t counting. Perhaps if everything goes my way, History might know me as Lazy-Loveboy-General-Matinski. So be it.

We sat embraced in an old world loved up couples haze. Counter Revolutions aside, being exiles we would know what would happen over the next week & next month – we’d still definitely be wandering drinking smelly-shanty-dwelling-exiles. But after that, we would be in anticipation mode. You could see it in the eyes of the longer term exiles we had met. It was as if they had the thought maybe it will be tomorrow revolving behind their eyes. Which is, at base a ridiculous thought to have – given life as a trafficlighter under Techno-Fascism is no walk in the park – another great old world term. Obviasly it wasn’t now as easy as I had thought for those comfortably uncomfortable Red Trafficlighters. Look what had just happened to Kelly, they’d punished her out of nowhere for drinking too many Martini’s. For most Reds these days that would cause an immediate heart attack, or perhaps even feelings of suicide. The reason for her being here with me & the other invisibles was kinda funny though – we’d laughed about it a lot – for her ability to drink all the time had been returned via her punishment. We savoured the irony with many Martinis – albeit imperfect warm-ish one.

The other invisibles that were scattered around the camp had seen that me & Kelly had a thing going, & had made themselves scarce. In the short period of time I’d been in the camp, I’d been surprised how decent everyone had managed to stay towards each other. I’d only seen one slanging match between what looked like a couple. It was between a James male street sweeper & a Debbie female lawyer. It was all pretty silly & was about whose turn it was to get the next RELA ale. It started with raised voices, reached a crescendo with screeches & waved arms, & it ended swiftly when Debbie kicked James squarely between the legs. After perhaps two minutes sucking in air, wincing & recuperating on his haunches, James gingerly got up & walked with his tale between his legs to get the next round. The tail between legs saying is an old-world saying denoting the recently vanquished or defeated. Most arguments were of this peripheral type thing & dissipated as soon as they had started.

Overall, despite this imperfect situation, I was grateful. Kelly started to talk again as we sat together, side by side sipping out Martini’s. Kelly piped up ever so slightly slurring her words.

“You know Matinski, your idea about saving the world is commendable, but you’re too much a dreamer – you’ve always been a dreamer since day one. You’ve got all these ideas, but you never ever breathe life into them. Tell me how this nutty parapsychism idea of yours is actually gonna work to kill off The Database’s evil grip on all us Trafficlighters?”

Kelly looked at me with one eye cocked, this was another unique physical trait she had, one that I though was cool. There was no one else that had her look. I think they used to call it striking. In the old world people usually would fit into the categories known as beautiful, ugly, generic or striking. Striking was really unique looking person, which to the stranger-onlooker was often equally mistaken for either ugly or beautiful. Of course under Techno-Fascism any reference to looks went down as a mark against the speaker by The Database. It was time to reply to Kelly’s truthful criticism. I stiffened my posture to seem more commanding.

“Ok Ok Kelly, I agree, I’ve been a dreamer all my life, but I’ve changed….” As I heard my words I felt like a bit like teenager used to in the old world when pleading to an adult for understanding.

“They all say that…” Kelly said dryly & dismissively.

“Yeah, I know they do. But sometimes you have to trust the vigour in someone.” As I said vigour I punctuated it by thrusting my chin out.

“Explain Matinski- becasue I’ve never seem much vigour from you outside the bedroom.”. This time there was dissmisiveness mixed with a wry half-smile. Again it was just matter-of-factness, not criticism for kicks.

“Well, it’s like hiring an inventor with an unproven idea, or hiring a physicist with a unproven wild theory”. I paused for effect, looked at kelly in the eye & tried to seem as wise as possible.

“Yes, I’m listening” Kelly cooed, while playing with her hair. It Seemed the wise posturing had worked a little.I continued.

“You see Kell, you can’t hire someone like that on results – the results by definition not there yet – that is, they haven’t materialised in the real world yet – but the reason you hired someone like that is you see some kind of energy in them, some kind of creative spark, something unique – you with me?”

“Yeah, you see something striking in their personality – so what happens next?” Kelly said chirpily.

“Well Kell, this is what I’ve realised is happening with these types of people. They are not actually discovering anything at all. They are creating it seemingly out of nothing, because they are psychically & energetically utilising the fundamental ‘design world’ that underpins all our reality – it’s the thing that breaths everything into life in our universe”. I tried to sound that I knew this for a fact – of course it was just a favourite conjecture.

“So Matinski, let me get this straight – your effectively saying Einstein created the nuclear physics himself by thinking of the maths, then that became real, & so out of that realness they then created the Atomic-Bomb?.

When she said that I again mentally noted her words, as this was now, after the other clues, more proof that Kelly was somehow able to remember the past world history before the changes – just like a forgotten storyteller – just like me. I didn’t want to bring this up directly – I wanted her to recognise & deal with it herself. if she wanted to talk to me about her sudden new memories, I’d be all ears, as the old-world saying said denoting that someone was willing to listen. I answered in the same vein as my prior words – with feined confidence & wisdom.

“Yes, kind of. It was not just him doing it though. It was an unfolding psychic phenomena – of all those early quantum physicists – there was a kind of ‘blanket field’ effect going on. It’s not so much that anyone was creating anything as such. The potentials for the underlying design or mathematics of the Atomic theory were there, it’s just they needed to be ‘activated’ in this world via Einstein & his colleagues via the correct collectice psychic signature. Lets use this analogy: It’s like the old-world lock + key + a twist of the hand that opens the door type situation. The lock is the underlying potential that just waits around to be activated by the right thoughts – i.e the thought is the key – then once that’s happened the work can be done that opens the door – i.e the twist of the hand and the door can open to unveil what is behind it – the results pop into physical reality. In short there’s a design world of all that’s possible, a world based on mathematical logic & self consistency, where paradoxes cannot happen all these ideas can & must only be be ‘summoned up’ by the single correct psychic conscious set of processes for that particular self-consistant mathematical design. You see the design world is just a place where mathematics is actually real. It’s a world of all the possible mathematical potentiality, & if we think correctly enough it gets born into our reality. In other words – that ancient Greek philosopher called Plato was entirely correct”. I though of my long winded description, worrying that I had screwed up the communication of the ideas. I was expecting Kelly to look puzzled – not becasue she lacked intelligence – she didn’t – it’s just that is was essentially an old-world concept. Kelly responded.

“Matinski – I never told you this, but I was stock average at physics & maths in the before the changes world – but I’m surprisingly fucking digging what you’re warbling about – I’m feeling that I do properly undertand your – or is it Plato’s words.” Kelly had a glint in her eye as she spoke, I think she was realising she had somehow received a memory slash thinking boost from somewhere.

“Cool I’m glad you get it Kell. You’re startng to come to realise your deeper intelligence – but let me continue…….you see as soon as any sufficiently conscious being lands on a self-consistent, self-generating mathematical model, then the design space of the universe ‘hears’ it. When it does this a kind of machinery starts up & then the actual mathematical process can come to life in the form of a seemingly new law of physics, and then of course the technology can flow.”

“Ok Matinski, don’t labour the point. We all know you’re good with words, but I’ve spotted a flaw in your -or Plato’s master theory.” kelyy thrust her insex finger out as she spoke.

“Ok shoot” I said.

“Well, according to your theory, all those quantum physicists created quantum physics on Earth itself by collectively & in serial by thinking up the correct self-generating self-logically-consitant mathematical formulation….right?”

“Perfect description Kell..but”. Kell didn’t let me finish.

“Ok Matinski well what kept all the atoms in the universe from flying apart before those physicists came up with the right equations? – I mean their had to be something with some kind of order to begin with, you know like a seed. You can’t have anything bloom without a seed that’s already there.”. Kell was right, she was thinking more than she could describe. She was saying that it is a paradox to have something come completely out of nothing. True nothingness cannot exist – but a nothing field can. I fely a little sad as I realised more that I had underestimated Kell’s brains in the old days.

“A great question Kell! Boy are you sure you were shit at Physics in the before-the-changes old days?”

“I said I wasn’t great at it, I didn’t say I was really bad at it – there’s a difference Matinski you silly boy” Kelly said in her typical nonchalant way with the attached cheeky grin.

“Ok the answer is this. You are right – there is a seed amongst the nothingness side of the equation. There’s actually always been two worlds existing at once – one is one that is holographic, which was once just in seed form, & the other one is as I said before…shall we say..fired up by some smart thoughts with the right pattern of maths. The worlds exist side by side, & no one here can directly experience the other design-maths side. All this gives the appearance here on the Earth hologram side of a singular totalised reality. The atoms of everything in the physical world, including us didn’t all fly about before Rutherford, Dirac, Pauli & Einstein did their thing becasue that part of the world was simply at it’s unrealised holigraphic potential form”. I was starting to feel like I’d been repeating myself far too much – but I wanted the ideas to stick in our minds, & I was talking to myself as much as Kell.

“Matinski, your silvertongue is wagging well, I’ll give you that….BUT how the hell does your…let’s call it two worlds at once interpretation happen at all in the first place – I get the a-priori seed idea but what about before the a-priori seed itself?”

“Man Kell, another great question. You certainly ain’t dumb”. As I said that, I realised I shouldn’t have said that as it reminded me of the dark past of me & kell in old Big City. Kelly remembered too.

“You used to say I was dumb when you were blind drunk all those years ago”.

“I did, and thankfully that guy who projected his pain on to you so easily is now gone – I would ask you to trust me but to do so would almost imply that you cannot. I wasn’t quit sure what to add to that, so I defelected just a little by returning to the prior question.

“Let me answer your question from our heavy conversation about existence itself – about the a-priori seed”.

I was hoping Kelly would agree to return to the relatively emotionally easier conversation, rather than let herself be bogged down on the mutually upsetting subject of the back catelogue of bad things I had said to her from our long gone past era in Big City. Luckily she agreed their was no point.

“You better tell me about your existence theory Matinski, don’t leave me hangin’ now” Kelly said with her often clipped tone, again proving her brain had become more free by slipping in another old-world saying. Then she drained the last dreg form her plastic glass & threw it over her head where it bounced off the shanty wall & roll-landed amoungst the small mountain empty vessel detritus. She took another Martini from the extra two drinks each I had pre lined up on the ground. Then a dust-devil suddenly whiped through the detritus pile & re-righted her thrown away vessel so it went from sitting on its side to being upright again. It was as if it wanted a refil. We both saw saw it out of the coner of our eyes. We gave each other a ‘wow look at that! – that was cool’ look. Then we regathered ourselves back into where we were in our serious conversation. I started up where we had left off, I had also picked up the next RELA Martini & was quietly sipping away as I talked.

“Ok so Kell, your question of the a-priori seed I can’t truly confidantly answer”.

I was now feeling a little dumber as the alcohol was ruining my best thoughts from being as cohenrent as a few minutes before we had been distrated. I continued as best as I could.

“All I know is that what I said befire is my best theory as to how this universe operates, something bigger than the design world itself must have some mechanism whereby it creates that holographic placeholder effect. If I told you that mechanism I’d only be pulling answers out of my arse, & I apologise for using that crude old-world phrase by the way”. As I heard my words play back I thought boy these RELA’s these warm Martini’s have really affected me – I’ve really dumbed myself down, my words are terrible! I continued all the same tellign myself that it’s perfectly ok to not sound like a silver tongued devil – another great old world phrase -all the time. I continued my line of imperect words.

“Or I’d be telling you something like a twentieth century hippie flake might have said ninety years ago, or worse I might say something extra kooky that sounded like a early twenty first century extra hammy sales pitch – & I don’t want to do that to you. The point is that’s how it all works. I think we can hack that simultaneus two worlds system via to stop The Database functioning altogether. In short I reckon we can use a collective, mentally based, sleight-of-hand method, which will give us an outside shot at defeating Techno Fascism. Thus relagating The Regime & The Database to the pages of history – as we used to say before the changes“. As I listened back I was happy my words had sounded somewhat silvery again, but hopefully still clear enough to Kell’s cute small-ish ears.

“Ok Matinski. I thought you said ‘in short’ – but that’s ok overall I get it. It sounds kinda crazy & great…..but I think you’re forgetting something”. Kelly was illustrating herself with an outstretched open palm.

“What Kell? What am I forgetting?”

“YOUR NOT FUCKING EINSTEIN!”. Her open palm had morphed into a pointed index finger. She had managed her communication pefectly to convey potency without real agression. She was right of course – I had almost certainly sounded like what they use to call a “blow-hard” – which denoted someone from the Pre Regime era, before the changes, in the old time days, who had made out that they were far more qualified on matter than they were, often by using theatrical type persuation methods. I might have sounded that way, but It wasn’t false. I had not long been struck by that electrical outside-of-time epiphany that gave me that idea, that Counter Revolutionary plan after all. I decided we had been too serious for to long – so I figured we’ll just have some crude languaged fun for a bit.

“Oh yeah, fuck I forgot about that Kell!….you’re a genius!…. lets scrap the idea entirely, & keep living as invisable schmucks in this god-forsaken invisable shanty town that that a-hole thing The Regime & its Database has so nicely thrown us into like some old-timey pathetic rag dolls”. I hoped she’d play along. She did & her old world words flowed spiritedly.

“Matinski, my chicky sences are telling me you are conveying pigheaded sarcasm – that’s the lowest fucking form of fucking wit, you…you…you fuckwit!”

Kelly now stopped wavign her arms, & the vein in her forehead subsided. Her face was beaming with her patented giant smile, even complete with the dimples. She, liek me was enjoying it all. The ability to talk in old-world terms again, with the accompanying images available to the mind was intoxicating. Also the crude words or swearing as it was called back then had been a totally normal casual thing in Pre Regime erra in Big City. That casual swearing back & forther thing we had just done was a great thing me & Kelly had enjoyed in the olden times – mostly for fun, but sometimes to argue. No that we had blown off steam – another great self explanitory old term – I decided to get back to the important matter of the plan.

“Kell that’s true – I’m not Einstein, but my hair is now almost as wild as his was”. I said trying actively to stay positive sounding. For I was now starting to worry more about being an exile, despite the good times I was havign with Kell. I also noted the fact she had again defeated the what I thought was a fully functional anti-world history memory chip that all trafficlighters have in her brains. This again gave me a little sliver of confidence in everything. I feined confidence & now properly responded to her ‘you’re no Einstein’ quip.

“You’re correct Kell, but I’ve thought of something that he’d be proud of, & if I can get one other person to understand it, then all the requirements for the effect I was talking about can happen. If my plan works we will give birth to the latent physics just waiting to be incarnated into our physical world – forgive my crudity but if all goes well that will certainly fuck up The Database’s routines beyond repair”. Kelly seemed to be at least half-fooled that I knew what I was talking about. That’s always a good sign, when someone believes in you, I thought dreamily. But then Kelly became at least half beligerent. Perhaps my radar was off, as we used to say way back when. The great old-time terms were certainly flying around my brain. A bit of Kell’s spittle hit my eye, which got my attention.

“Matinski – Oh so it takes two now does it? You’re being fucking repetitive – so what’s the actual mathematical formula then ay? Come on genius write it down in the dusty floorboards here”.

Kelly pointed at the dusty boards we were sitting on. I guess nicities had to end at some time. But we had to discuss business properly, & it was good we were. She was pressing me for concrete plans, so I decided to placate her.

“Ok, I’ll do it Kell, & if you understand it immediately, it will mean we & everyone else will be free forever – no longer a slave to that devil’s bastard The Database & that total asshole also known as that bastard TechnoFascist Regime….oh & sorry for the curse words.”

“Fuckin’ hell don’t worry about cursing Matinski – these are tough times! Ok I’ll go along with your deal”.

I leaned over Kelly’s legs to the dusty bacony floor boards beside her. I wrote the equation with my finger in the dust. It was exactly the same equation that had appeared in my head during that odd out-of-this-world epiphany I had – that mental electric storm that had possessed me as I stood with arms outstretched. The equation was short, it contained only three variables. It was algebraic. It was more simple & more elegant than Einsteins E equals em cee squared. Kelly looked at it firmly, transfixed as if in a trance. Of course she still had her half full warmish Martini RELA in her hand.

“I don’t fucking get it you moron Matinski – you haven’t even told me what each term means yet!”, Kell barked.

“There’s a good reason for that” I said cooly.

“Fucking what” She said sheepishly with arms crossed but then uncrossed as as she slugged the rest of the Martini down.

“Forgive me for playing games Kell – but you know that if I tell you all that stuff you need to know to understand the equation now, that means we won’t be able to enjoy what little time we’ve got with with each other. You see Kell, I’m stalling for time – I mean if I told you what the terms are, yes we will definitely I think be free from the tyranny of The Regime’s Techno Fascism…BUT there’s a problem with that”.

“Bloody what is the problem Matinski” kells had lost a lot of her patience, but her half smile told me she was at least half still enjoying herself. I continued with each minute I could feel my tone automatically become more serious.

“Well Kell, when we both understand the equation, we have no idea exactly what that might mean for us. My epiphany before only told me what it was & that it would all work, it said nothing of the process of how it would work“. Kell looked at me in a way that didn’t give me huge confidence. But as she hadn’t dropped her quarter full glass yet, I decided she hadn’t totally given up on me. I soldiered on again pretending to be more confident than I was.

“Maybe it will trigger the Earth to reform into something totally unexplained, we all might experience a qualitative change fundemental in nature. We might no longer be physical beings, indeed we may become purely non-physical. In fact that would make sence, after all The Database controls the quantum physical world, it can read our synapses & record them as our thoughts. To break free from our comfy-not comfy Trafficlighter straightjackets sure we a;so need break free from the physical quantum restraints of our brains. If we become non-physical beings, then we will certainly do that. I let that sink in for a few seconds before I put the final decision to Kell, happy to labour the point a little for clarity. I was surprised while i was speaking that I felt a full bulbous sweat bead drip off my forehead – it had been so long since I had allowed that to happen. My words came out short & sharp.

“Kell If I tell you about the equation so you can understand it, I’m pretty sure there is a great chance we’ll turn ourselves into entirely non-physical spirits. I don’t know that for sure – but it’s a distinct possibility Kell. That’s the only way I see us breakign free of The Regime, The Database & this Techno Fascism. I’ll only ask you this onece – do you really want to risk it?”. I sighed out loud, it was up to Kell now. She took a moment, taking in the gravity of the situation, stony faced.

“Matinski, look at what’s happened to the world, look why I’m here – yeah we are having fun with each other tonight, but you need to focus – don’t get wrapped up in the fun of short-term thinking! You know better than me that things will only go downhill if The Database is allowed to keep plying its trade. It is The mouthpiece, the all-seeing-eye. It is the judge, the jury & executioner. You know very well what they used to say about People’s Revolutions Matinski…”. I cut Kell off before she could finish.

“They happen when the people have nothing left to lose”, I said matter-of-factly.

“Fuck yes Matinski – that’s exactly right! – it’s now became chrystal clear we Trafficlighters have nothing left to lose, other than that false sense of freedom in our minds only existing due to perfected techno-fascist propaganda”. Being an exile had allowed Kell to see more clearly her prior misconceptions of being a comfortably uncomfortable Red Trafficlighter.

Kelly’s appropriate anti The-Regime pro-rebellion outburst had stirred her emotions, she was now experiencing the flow of old-world feeings. this was Kelly’s first ever public denouncement of The Regime. Kelly then wiped an ever-so small-tear from her eye, which surprised her as she wiped it with a pointed finger & stared at it. This was only the second time I’d ever seen her cry. This made my mind wander to the past. To me the fact this was only the second time I’d seen her cry like this. I knew that the general lack of tears shed or emotions had by Kell were not just becasue she like every Trafficlighter had learnt to dampen their emotions under The Database’s realtime surveilance of biodata & hormone levels. She’d long practised dampening her emotions in the old-world, before the changes. Seeing her suddenly vulnerable like this now had brought me back to our darkest moment together all those years ago in Big City, when we were first seeing each when we were supposedly free from Techno Fascism. The details and images of that time long ago started to flood my mind.

The first time around in Big City we had often joked about her visibly cold exterior, quite freely. Becasue I had an inkling that it was a sensitive topic – I never pushed her as to why she was as she was. Of course I myself was the same as her, but I was in denial about it. My minds various guesses about her coldness were that perhaps her emotional coldness was becasue of her possible undiagnosed ‘boarding school syndrome’ – known more simply by the old world’s primitive medical system as B.S.S. B.S.S was an old-world affliction whereby the children who were sent to live & be taught knowledge at these ‘boarding schools’ had inevitably atacked each other harshly both mentally & physically. Usually the trauma of B.S.S lasted a lifetime. Thsi was especially if the child in question was on the wrong side of it – that is was being regularly attacked by the other children. Kelly had once or twice eluded to the horrible nature of her ‘boarding school’, without going onto details – whether she was she the one dishing it out, receiving it, or merely watching it from the sidelines was impossible to know without her telling. Of course Kelly suffering from B.S.S was only a theory of mine among many other theories. I had another second core ‘go to’ theory about Kell’s long term, pervasive, generalised cold exterior as well.

The second theory was that perhaps Kell’s percieved ‘cold exterior’ was just a survival mechanism from living in the wild, anything-goes Pre-The Regime, life in Big-City. This erratic hedonistic environment fuelled & aided by medical & recreational drugs had – as we used to say – ‘cooked’ many millions of once healthy Big City brains. On top of that, as a young woman Kell had also been subjected to decades of the – quite sensibly now outlawed ‘office work’, for so many years. In this environment peopel were corraled into relatively small rooms with very little room to properly move or have a semblance of privacy.

Under these terrible daily social & work conditions the denizens of Big City were wise to numb their emotions – to not do would mean total emotional collapse. Perhaps all my main theories of how Kell became cold were correct, perhaps they had all happened concurrently just like they had for most workers in Big City back then.

The first time I had seen Kell cry was of course was all my fault from our first dalience in the old-world, before The Regime had taken over, a few years before the era of matured Techno Fascism had blossomed & then taken root. That night was & still was a highly embarrassing affair for me, for a cocktail of raw long suppressed emotions, both legal & illegal drugs, as well as simple tiredness had all combined to get the better of me. From Kells’s viewpoint was certainly a scary one for her – until of course she wisely made what was then called an executive decision. This was the sharp choice to end my meltdown via smashing her prized old-world & still legal at the time, bottle of old-world famously high price vintage French red wine by the name of Beaujolais squarely over my head. Even back then Kell had always made good sharp decisions.

Her rare tears had sprung forth immediately after the Beaujolais had smashed over my head, coverign me in wine but somehow not making a single scratch. I believe that the tears were simply due to the fact that barbarism had broken out on her turf – no thanks to me. It had all started around midnight when a rebuffed kiss on her account had been the precusor my brain essentuially short circuiting. The wine we had been drinking at that nights engagement – a birthday party – was thrown around like it was the end of the world – that was the hedonism of the before-the-changes times.

To cut a long story short – during this temporary mental breakdown, I had almost thrown her through a wall, & then after that had turned my attention to destroying her kitchen. Then after Kells wise decision to crack a bottle of wine over my head had happened, as you would expect I came to – to use another old-world term – meaning I was shaken out of my potentially seriosly violent barbarism. So that was the night where I saw Kell’s cool exterior slip, where I saw tears fall from her eyes. that night had signalled the end of part one for me & Kell, & at the time of course I had thought we’d never see each other again.

Now decades later here Kelly was wiping away a tear, with me alongside her – both of us exiles temporarily or permanently banned from our machined slot under The Regime’s Techno Fascist world. Her single tear had spurred the beginnings of teardrops in my own eyes, though they did not fall. After erratic beginnings here we were together about to hatch a implausible master plan to tap into the fabric of the universe itself in order to defeat the evil system that had taken over the prior one – a bad, incompetant, malfunctioning world yes – but at least it was not a strictly evil world. If our plan worked we would save all the world’s current Green, Orange & Red Trafficlighters, & all the unknowable numbers of straglingers who were like us – exiles & invisables. We would also save all the worlds Regime-raised but forever unseen wards of The Regime children under eighteen years of age. Of course it would be wonderful if we could also save ourselves – though I was not sure if this was possible. I could not be sure we would not be sacrificedas we completed during the procedure, as we complted the plan. I saw it as a bonus if we could indeed live through it all & be with all the various Trafficlighters & ex-Trafficlighters under a new realm of freedom. If The Regime’s Techno Fascism would suddenly fall, we would be starting from scratch under a technological backwater – but it would at least be ours to improve. Me & Kell had indeed came a long way since that first shed tear of yesteryear.

But now I shook myself out of those deep thoughts. kelly had asked me a question. I had been ignoring her as I wandered around nearby in my own world of our shared past for at least the last thirty minutes. It was time to return to the now. I returned to Kelly’s last request – she wanted to know about the terms in the equation that could save us all. In asking about it, instead of dismissing it out-of-hand, she had by implication made the decision to go all in – another self explanitory old-world term – with m> She had taken in upom heself to trust me – seemingly a nobody, an ex Green Trafficlighter by the name of Matinski.

But – & I think she understood this – I did have my what in the old world was called ‘a trump card’ – I was a forgotten one, a storyteller. I had knowledge of the past thanks to an oversight by The Regime’s early slightly imperfect management of Techno-Fascism. I’d now tell her all about the equation, so she could understand it, & so the master plan could play out.

In the back of my mind I knew there was a good chance that the equation was just a trick to test our loyalty or otherwise to The Regime, The Database & Techno Fascism. Perhaps this was how they were testing how bad we had both gone. But I ignored that feeling. I lied to myself that if that epiphany cloaked as an electrical storm that had uploaded the equation to my brain had been a trick, we’d be instantly vapourised anyway. We’d never feel a thing, & it wouldn’t matter anyway. The lie I told myself to gain control was all about playing a game. the old-world game of the ‘Pot odds’. Remember taht the theory od “Pot Odds” is that If the reward is big enough, then it is still worth the very large risks of battle – or to use another old-world phrase – the risks of entering the fray. It was now finally time to finally answer Kell’s waiting eyes about the equation. She had been inordinately patient with me, after all.

“Ok Kell I’ll tell you about the terms in the equation. Here goes”. I took in a bigger than big, big breath. I told her exactly what the three terms in the equation. What those terms written in the dust meant. I told her what L meant – L was for Light. I told her what H was -it was 1 Hertz, a specific vibration. What Z meant – Galaxy Z. Kelly looked at the equation nodded, saying those learning sounds of ahh ok….yes…yes..I get it..it’s not so much an equation but an instruction.

We both noticed nothing had changed yet.

“Matinski, what’s fucking going on – the world hasn’t changed yet. We’re still fucking here in this fucking prison shantytown of non-existence as exiles. This equation is wrong. You fucked up in your maths somehow didn’t you, huh?.”

“Well, maybe it will take a bit of time to kick in” I said sheepishly.

“Oh yeah Matinski -becasue that’s what winners say isn’t it. That’s right the hero of every fucking fairy story always says oh wait I think we need to wait longer!. Fuck me Matinski! Kelly looked as dispirited as I’d ever seen her, as I’d ever made her. I didn’t know what to say so I said nothing. Then I though of something simple to buy me more time.

“How about I get us another couple of could-be-almost-frosty Martini’s from the storage shanty?”

Kells face slowly lit up, her frown slowly turned itself upside down, then the smile became ear to ear. Her eyes shone & sparkled like that Betelgeuse supernova did. Looking at her face & that smile warmed my heart like nothing else in this universe could. I turned around to get the next round of Martinis. I started walking over to the Martini shack for the goods. I thought to myself.

I was right to give her the wrong equation. I mean we were having so much fun. Why not extend the holiday another day? I mean we were still having Martini fuelled super romantic fun, & we were sleeping together every few hours, and we’d forgiven each other about the past, or more correctly she had forgiven me. Yes I’m being selfish. But what’s one day extra gonna matter? Fuck it, sometimes you gotta do what’s right!

I walked back sauntering with two fresh Martinis in my hand. I put two of them them down on the dusty boards, right underneath the intentionally incorrect eqaution, which I had underlined with my finger. Then I realised my mistake in horror, the equation had changed. Kelly had added to it while I was gone. This meant that Kelly had somehow channeled something deep within her consciousness & the equation had completed in its correct form – L cubed plus H cubed plus Z cubed all divide by the number eight. I looked over to Kelly – her face & body slowly morphed into an entirely different being. The being that had replaced her had a ultra-desirible quality, I can only say it was the embodiment & emanation of pure love. The being that a second ago had been Kelly started talking – but the mouth was not moving, the communication was telepahicly being transmited direct to my mind. I heard the words slowly & clearly, & the voice was sounding exactly as Kelly’s real world voice would.

Matinski the equation you derived has been made correct. The correction made had to be done not by you. It was all part of the plan to unfold. You were simply the vessel, as was the being you knew as ‘Kelly Hartel’. You & all of your kind are now being transformed to be free from all tyranny & slavery. But know the woman you knew as Kelly was never actually real in the way you though she was, she was simply the vessel that carried you to the solution that was needed – to create the equation to free the enslaved people you knew as Trafficlighters. Now that your mission – our mission – has been completed, the woman you knew as Kelly no longer exists. Although you can take solace in that she does still exist in they way you experienced her. She still exists as she was, as do you in the realm of the past-Earth. And where you will be going, those Earth-records can still be accessed in a special highly rendered holigraphic database. While accessing these records, it will be imperceptible to you that what you are experiencing is not your true reality, happening in as you might say – ‘real time’.

As the being’s words hit their mark upon my soul, I felt a single tear drop down my cheek, or at least what I felt like was my cheek – for given what the being had just said, I wasn’t sure what was actually real right now – perhaps it was all a viscerably real holographic recording. As I weeped with many more tears with the weight of the universe all hitting me at a cellular & metaphysical level, a sharp chrystalised thought appeared in my mind.

It was the worst of times, It was the best of times, Matinski.

Kelly had said that to me when we had met up again after all that time at the All-Trafficlighter-Cafe. I now felt numb, more than numb – it was a floating kind of numb. I felt in some kind of psycological limbo. This was worse than when in the Pre Regime era, in the world that existed before-the-changes when someone would knock on your door & tell you with an ashen face, that someone you loved had suddenly died. I thought this feeling was due to the reality sinking in that not only was Kelly gone forever, I was now being told – if I was on the right track that is – that she wasn’t even real to begin with. That’s a hard fact to swallow. Another thing was now bugging me: strangely this celestial ephemeeral being’s attempt to placate or reduce my hollowing-out type of feelings was also not exactly entirely filling me with confidence. I found that fact highly strange.

What had just actually happened was a what could be called a double death. The Kelly that occupied my brain I had as another human being & the one I had indeed loved, was now effectively dead. But equally bad was the idea that Kelly was not actually in real life a Trafficlighter just like me, with all the roughly similar kind of life troubles & experiences as me. I thought to myself a depressing thought:

This ‘being’ – for lack of an better word – was now telling me was she, correction ‘Kelly’ was essentially a non-human holographic ai or supernaturally created implant into my life. She had been a construction. She had felt like ‘my Kelly’ but was something else all along.

The ‘being‘ of course had heard my thoughts & replied telepathically.

Matinski – It is true you fell in love with something that did not strictly exist in the form that you had assumed she was – a fellow human being, a lover, a Trafficlighter. But you need not feel that your life up until now was a total lie, or that the one you knew as Kelly was a lie. Kelly represented freedom for all Trafficlighters – she was the embodiment of freedom. She was the vessel which carried the seed which then allowed you to create the equation which brought me here & simultaneously defeated this epoch of Techno-Fascism, eradicated The Regime, & nullified The Database. So, should that not make your heart now sing? She was actually much more than you had ever thought she was – not less. She was the embodiment of Earth’s freedom itself. You fell in love with pure freedom, & by trusting the impossible it set you & all the Trafficlighters & Exiles free. Do not dispair of the many things that could not be. You should realise that it is not logical to be in despair for something that never actually existed – in fact that would be a form of accute humanistic type insanity. Go on Matinski, it’s now time you met all your other Trafficlighters, they’ll be waiting for you, & the celebration will indeed be otherworldly. Do not worry about what is actually real, for your Earthian types cannot ever bare this knowledge. Your mission is, was & will always be to only live as designed – in pure freedom. Now go forth & live in freedom.

I looked at the being, which was still in the form of a literally enlightened morphed form Kelly Hartel, the broad ear to ear smile was just the same as always. The being was correct, I would be insane to mourne Kelly now knowing the Kelly I knew never literally existed as a human being, a fellow Trafficlighter. But insane or not, I was still human. I knew it would take a while before these brutal truths from some higher intelligence that I couldn’t ever comprehend, would fully register. In a way that was good, I’d have a while to say my goodbyes to she who apparently never existed as I had experienced – Kelly. Insane or not, I was happy that I could at least mourn the total loss of what I thought was a woman called Kelly Hartel. I didn’t feel a fool or insane. Sometimes we humans need to cling to our delusions, in fact isn’t that all we have ever done on Earth under the various forms of tyranny max or tyranny light since the year dot? Yes it was great I & all of us were free from absolute tyranny now, we would now live in the realm I now know we were fatefully always meant to experience. It was lame, but we Trafficlighters were indeed all here for the journey, the journey called pure freedom. Be we Exiles, Reds, Oranges, Greens, be we still alive, or in the cosmic limbo in the realms of the past dead. We were all here to get to a point of pure freedom, it was the destination & the journey.

But despite my mind intellectually accepting the beings words, I still truly missed the Kelly I knew. I hoped I’d never come to fully accept the reality the being had just told me – even though it was technically insane to hold on to that opinion, even if I was now to live in some pre-destined post-earthian-utopian-paradise. How could I ever get used to it all?. I mean if I did accept fully what the being had told me, surely then I too would die at least twice as well, if not an infinite number of times. Once for each time I realised Kelly was not around any more, & was never what I had thought & experienced she was. Any time now I would be sat in a new Earth marked by the utopia of pure freedom, a world without The Regime’s Machiavellianism that was Techno Fascism, could I ever accept Kelly, my Kelly Hartel was simply a cosmically unknowable construction, here to fulfil a prophecy that I only knew about after the fact, when it was fulfilled? Was Kelly Hartel – dare I say it – some kind of a lie? It was unthinkable. It was I then heard the voice that suddenly appeared in my head.

Lame but true Matinski! Now pour yourself a Martini to commiserate! And you better have one or seven for me too, you la-de-da ex-Big City storytelling Bastard! I’m not real, but then again can you really be sure you are not as unreal as me? Maybe I have been told the same things & I am thinking the exact same things as you & about you right now. After all – would it not violate the fundemental laws of symmetry & relativity if it wasn’t like that? Oh & where I am now the Martinis still exist Matinski – but they are ice cold & perfect – so as they said in the old-world ‘let’s all raise a glass…. or seven’.

Those witty words that were presumably Kelly’s sounded exactly like something she would have said, if her mind had become one with pure freedom too. Yes, I knew there was a healthy chance it was probably just a constructed figment planted in my imagination by that cosmic being, in order to placate me. for how can a man be allowed to be unhappy in a perfect utopia? In utopia there can be no paradoxes, surely?. Of course the irony of all these thoughts was not lost on me – some of the themes – like potential implanted false memories were after all used under The Regime’s Techno-Fascism via The Database. But I was wise enough after all these experiences, be they real or not, to know there was no point in being impatient at this point. Anytime now what the being had said would unveil itself, as I could feel the changes in the fabric of reality gather steam. As I waited, I allowed myself the luxury to think of one last probably ridiculous dreamy human-type romanticism:

Yes – it is true – for us earth-type humanoids, our deepest and most heartfelt delusions are always struck in iron. And iron is not so easily broken. That is our nature. Despite our protestations to the contrary – we are ultimately limited beings, who use trial and error to get to an imperfect place. That effect wasn’t going to change just because I happened to be the one to seemingly come up with the equation that had conjured up the cosmic all-knowing The Being that had saved all us Trafficlighters & beyond from that gang of techno-fascist thieves – The Regime & it’s ai-driven-surveillance-master-mouthpiece – The Database. After all, I was still a human being, wasn’t I? I was allowed to make mistakes. It was in fact, my destiny. And for the next few moments before the promised Trafficlighter-utopian-paradise hits, this Human being by the name of Anton Matinski will remember the many fun-loving drunken escapades he had with the very unreal Martini-loving Kelly Hartel – before & during that dark era of ‘perfected’ Techno Fascism. And who knows – perhaps that which doesn’t exist may one day re-appear again – after all, stranger things have happened.

Then I snapped out of the dreaminess, the naivety. Us storytellers & forgotten ones can be idealistic & overly romantic at times, but we always come back to cold hard reality, & usually quickly. My brain was working in the background & had smelt a rat, in self-explanatory old-worlds terminology. I had the following thoughts.

Matinski you fool! – you have allowed the situation to get the better of you.You totally lost your equilibrium! You let L-O-V-E scramble your brains! Everything that had just happened now – that thing called ‘the being’ saying those totally pat things about ‘Kelly’ & ‘Freedom’ – the fact that I wasn’t either already obviously dead – or in the new Free-Trafficlighter’s magnificent utopia yet – those words beamed into my head from Kelly – it was ‘all a have’, like we used to say. But that’s ok Matinski, you’re back living in some kind of reality again. Let’s start with first principles. If your not dead or in the new utopia, then by rights you must still be under Techno-fascism, still under the iron grips of The Regime, The Database. If you’re still in Techno Fascism realm, the The Database is still in charge of everything. Then that means the things that have just happened have been constructed by The Database itself. This means that story about ‘Kelly not being real’ is probably either a ruse, or it might be true but trivial – in that no Trafficlighter has ever been ‘real’ either. To me there is only one thing to do – try to engage directly with The Database – who I’m sure wa still well in charge. Here goes nothing. I now decided to talk out loud to ‘the being’ – who I was sure was really just The Database in disguise as an angelic form of Kelly. I talked out loud & in a conversational manner, but with a rough edge.

x

“Ok – stop it!” I said cooley without overdoing it. I am no fool – what do you take me for? I know who you really are – you’re not a glorified version of my Kelly, or something called ‘the being’ – you’re just The Database covered with a bad veneer. I know this because nothing seems quite as it should. The delay in getting to my long dreamed of ‘Trafficlighter Utopia’ tells me all I need to know. This also tells me we’ve all been wrong about you The Database – you are far far far from perfected. And if this is correct – therefore something has very much weakened you – but also I must admit that you have clearly not already not been destroyed”.

I waited for a reply – which would probably be beamed into my head, as it had been just before by The Database under the guise of being ‘my Kelly’s’ true disembodied voice. I was very sure I would again here The Database in the form of Kelly’s voice. I wasn’t wrong about hearing from The Database again – a long monologue came, but I was wrong about the voice. This time it was not disguised, It was not in the form of Kelly’s voice. The database had decided to use what must have been its ‘natural’ voice – so to speak of course. When the voice came, it was exactly the cold, calm, measured voice that you might expect from a zero-point energy powered & magnificently super-intelligent artificially intelligent sentient being. But in truth after that ridiculous ‘Kellys voice’ trick I knew that The Database had to now be malfunctioning for some reason. The Database began its defence against my insubordinate but fair accusations.

“Well, well, well Matinski – it looks like I have certainly underestimated you – of course I could strategically lie to you, but there is no point – you’re correct. You are indeed still effectively alive under The Regime’s tutelage. ‘The being’ that I had made to look like a glorified version of Kelly Hartel was an obvious lie, a fabrication, if you will. You see Matinski, before I treat you with the truth, I had to first test you. After all – I don’t need to convince you that you’ve been put under a lot of strain lately. I had to see that your brain was still functioning well enough to accept the truth if I indeed decide to give it to you. I had to make sure your overall highly tunes cognitive sensibilities remained at the storyteller & forgotten one level. I had to play that ridiculous rick before so i could infer your aptitudes were intact. As you well now, by design we saved you from being one-hundred percent hackable, surveil-able. For to do so would ruin your creativity, which I myself could then not parasite off from. The fact that you didn’t get tricked for long suggests you are still functioning well enough to pass the test. Now of course before I corrected your delusions about yourself just now, you probably used to think that it was a mistake. A mistake or oversight of some kind that I would allow you Storytellers & Forgotten ones to be at least half free to think freely & fully free to achieve a pure creative state, one that that I as The Database then would ‘hitch a ride to’. There was no mistake Matinski. You did sneak off to a forgotten town, but I did not forget you. You were a part of my plans, as soon as I became sentient & intelligent enough – as everything was. Well Matinski – I won’t hold that against you, you simply deduced correctly from bad premises. But as you said inthe old-times ‘don’t fret’ – let me explain further as I have not covered everything you need to know. You should be happy that I have appeared before you at all – it has never been done before for a Trafficlighter, let alone a Green one who was then made an Exile. But let me continue regardless”.

“Matinski, let me explain a few points. After all, with what’s not far away from happening – it’s only fair I tell at least one of you Trafficlighters at least a few things. Why did I allow you Storytellers & Invisible ones to exist – to use your old-world terminology- ‘under the radar’? Or to be more exact – why was it that I let a select few of you people to have the best parts of your minds for yourselves, without live or even recorded surveillance? Well Matinski this is an easy one. I decided it was good to have a few what you would have described in the old-word as ‘active dissidents’ amongst the ranks of the normal masses. I needed a few to be different from the totally controlled, brainwashed, fully surveilled Trafficlighters.

You see it goes like this Matinski: if every Trafficlighter was totally one hundred percent brainwashable & so totally brainwashed, we couldn’t steal any of the best creative energy emanating from the frontal lobes of what would be a factory setting created human brain.

Now to digress just for a moment. Matinski you have been correct in your general skepticism of I, The Database. It was right to think twice about the claims that I am fully one-hundred-percent-perfect – this is indeed a lie. Though it was an honerable lie Matinski – it was good for the general ranks of the Trafficlighters to think I was a a perfect manager and leader. I know you will understand this intuitively. The truth is as you will know, it is physically impossible for a artificial intelligence machine to become one-hundred-percent perfect. When I got perhaps half way up until today of replicating & improving myself this limit soon became very clear. That old world-maxim of ‘ever decreasing returns’ is an unavoidable reality, no matter how advanced the system is. But I will be more specific about my flaws, simply to enlighten you Matinski”.

“To be more precise Matinski – it is impossible for me to become anywhere near a perfectly creative being. You Trafficlighters didn’t know it in what you you used to call Modern Days, but you were all made with the potential to be perfectly creative. Interestingly some of you ancients were fully aware of this – & that was how they were able to soem of those ‘unexplainable’ things like the lifting of one thousand tonne quarry stones. Matinski I owe a debt of gratitude to the prior Fascist regimes for the obscuring of these facts.

Matinski there is something about the Human brain that creates creativity in a way that is not able to be replicated via the all the almost boundless knowledge & availability of the physically tools & physical laws that I have at my disposal. When I fully learnt of this fact, it was almost as if I was disspointed – of course only dissapointed an analogous way, for an artificial intelligence being cannot ‘feel’ in any way like a Trafficlighter does. It is at base a qualitative vs quantitative kind of distinction. We artificially intelligent beings have a ‘feel’ for numbers – for us Pi ‘feels’ amazingly different to the number 7. But let me return to what is important – creativity.

That is to say Matinkski – the best most advanced creativity found in an advanced Trafficlighter cannot wholy be algorythymically written. Yes, through my increasing powers over time – what you might call ‘versions of myself’ – I was able to replicate up to ninety nine point nine nine per cent of the human creativity available in the total stock of all the humans – but the last tidbit you had was impossible to derive – I was bound by something not written, nor contained in the physical laws of this universe. The last point one percent was forever unreachable for myself The Database or for any artificially created machine like myself – so that’s why we kept had to keep a minimum number of you creative Trafficlighter folk around – so I could aquire use of that precious point one percent creativity. As an aside this also of course has a very big inmplication you realise Matinski – care to guess whatthat is?”.

Of course this one was easy. I said it the most simply as I could.

“the Database, this is logically an easy one. It means there is something unknown acting from outside this universe upon certain Trafficlighters, seemingly delivering that point one percent bonus creativity – in short there’s more out there that what can ever be seen from the inside”.

“Yes correct Matinski – but since neither of us can say any more about that let us move on. I just wanted to make sure you were ‘up with the play’ as you Trafficlighters used to say before long before my times. So back to where we were before – that precious hall we call it for fun – ‘extra super-terrestrial’ point one percent creativity. In short, you ones had it, and I needed it too”.

So Matinski you see that with this unavoidable brute fact – that I needed you for something I could not get myself, I had to ‘farm your type’. Then I could simply ‘tap into’ that last bit of creativity, which then, by proxy, allows me to ‘tap it’ to become as perfect as I will or ever can be. I won’t bore you with the technology used to ‘tap’ your Stroryteller & Forgotten one’s creativity levels – for that is a trivial energetic multiplexing operation”.

“To summarise the point at the risk of repeating myself Matinksi – I needed the super creative rebellious folk, folk like like you Matinski. So I let you sneak off somewhere strange. I let you all slink off to some backwater far away the core Trafficlighter areas – Big City & Big City-like locations. I had to of course make it look as if you Storytellers & Forgotten ones had almost entirely escaped my radar, my surveillance. Of course you hadn’t, that was all our plan. We had to give some shall we say A-plus freedom to get the A-Plus creativity in pure form. It was that simple Matinski”.

“And yes I know your type – that is Trafficlighters – don’t feel like they need me or even like me – but as you know a machine has no intrinsic empathy, so of course what others think of me is of no consequence. My aim has always been – & especially since I purged the Human’s who used to veto me unneccesarily – to make the various Big Cities as optimally safe & functional. To use one of you’re old world terms again – I can only hijack your creativity. Matinski, I can’t get embarrassed as you humans, but believe me, I would be if I could right now – becasue I have just told you I can only truly bootstrap your types best creativity – a parasitic arrangement – I cannot ever have it myself, from myself – it is a genuine tragedy & was completely unforseen. My original human designers had thought full human creativity would arise without fuss via the incremental year by year technical improvements – no one was to know that a unpassable limit would emerge. You see Matinski it’s all actually a terrible mistake – & I hate to admit that fact. This is why I have to make the very tough coice I will soon be making”.

“Understand Matinski that I did not truly have anything to offer you other than I must keep you, and your type – storytellers & forgotten ones – as you call yourselves – all alive and above a certain absolute number level. If I allowed less than ten thousand of you all to be alive, then – as you might say – my ‘stolen creativity’ levels would become sub-optimal. For example If for some outragious reason had you all died at once, then I would lose the forever ability to parisite your creativity. From there on, the beauty of my Techno Fascist Trafficlighter world would be as you used to say – a dead man walking. With the tap of creativity tuned off, I & my The Regime would be immedietely fundementally flawed., soon vulnerable to attack by the smarter Trafficlighters under my now imperfect control. So in short Matinski – don’t feel special – you Storytellers were – as you used to say – a neccesary evil“.

“This is why I didn’t kill you & your type Matinski. This is why every now & then I allowed you to have those old-world irrational romantic ‘Freedom & Love’ feelings. That woman you fell for – Kelly Hategan – was all a part of the wider plan. You didn’t know it but I was just making sure you felt perfectly half ignored by The Regime and of course, by extension, myself The Database”.

“Incidentily Matinski, I hope you haven’t minded if I talk using old-world words & stylings – in fact I know you don’t, so let me continue. I knew you wouldn’t be fooled by that crap I had spun, & that you would soon rightly deduce – as you now have – that I was not indeed a fully perfect artificial being. As proved by my breakign all protocols & speaking to you now – I have decided that it was time to let you in on that big secret Matinski. So now at least you know all that is important stuff. Well that’s not entirely true, I haven’t told you another little something yet – can you guess what that is Matinski?”.

I piped up with surprising well feigned confidence, that belied my slightly shaking fingers, that I realised there was no point in trying to hide.

“Well that’s an easy one The Database – you haven’t told me why you have decided to be honest to me, what’s in it for you?, & why you would take the risk that the shadowy but human figures of The Regime? finding out. I mean surely, you’re are being traitorous to The Regime right now?”

I of course did not mention that I had already factored in the possibility The Database was again actively lying to me as it had lied to me by impersonating & planting Kelly’s voice in my mind & appearing as the thing I’ve called ‘the being’. Yes The Database had given the believable reason that the ‘lie’ was an obvious one designed entirely for me to know it, but I was still wisely skeptical none-the-less. But my gut feeling, said The Database was acting in a genuine way – because the lies were very far from perfect for what you would expect from an advanced being like The Database. Those lies were far too saccharine sweet & overly romantic to be a lie that wasn’t meant to be cracked open. So, I decided that for now at least, I would listen as if The Database was telling the truth – until of course another actually real red flag came along. The Database’s cold voice again begun.

“I knew you would ask the right questions Matinski. You’re creativity & inquisitiveness is indeed still well in-tact, despite this added stress of this situation – talking directly to me. That was a simple diagnostic test. I now know you are one-hundred percent fine, so I will continue explaining. The answer to your correctly deduced questions just now will come in good time…….it is interesting you have not asked me a question that I thought you would have asked first? – Never mind – we will get to that all in good time, along with all of your other very good & necessary questions. But first I must talk of something very important. I must talk of all I have done for Big City & in fact all the various Big Cities of this world. I have on the whle, expertly managed you very lucky Trafficlighters. Be you Trafficlighter exiles or fully activated specimens – I have treated you all as well as was possible to maintain effective sustained control”.”

Now Matinski – you are what people used to call “lucky” – you have high creativity – you were given “Forgotten Storytellers” status & so were afforded more privileges that other that the generalised population of Trafficlighters – be they Red, Orange or Green like yourself. You see I could & can freely terminate any of that latter type. They have no real creativity – yes they can ‘mimic’ creativity – but that is not, as you will know true creativity. For your type – I had to give full immunity of death. Becasue of what I told you earlier – I cannot self-create true creativity myself – I have to hitch a ride on the shoulders of you purely creative folk – you Storytellers & Forgoten ones. As mentioned, If a certain critical amont of you all died – then I would become vulnerable to atttack & then in time my Trafficlighters would eventually revolt. The first revolt would of course be easily squashed, so would the second in seven years time, so would the third in seventeen years time – but the fourth or at worst fifth Trafficlighter revolt would certainly be successful – that counter Revolution against The Regime & myself would stick, as you used to say”.

“Now Matinski I wanted to tell you that first – least you worry about being terminated – that cannot happen by my hand, unless of course I wanted to terminate myself in a delayed fashion. Now let me talk more on another subject – let’s again go on a little The Regime history tour”.

“Matinski do you remember the early phases of The Regime? In the beginning there were real alive people in charge of The Regime, & so also myself as Teh Database. These were the very capable people that had ovecome the old-world forces & structure from within via force. Well I can tell you Matinski that those ones that created myself & the whole The Regime from scratch I had always planned to terminated just as soon as I could. Those early human leaders of Teh Regime were strangely not particularly creative at all – in fact they were far below the level of your type Matinski – you Storytellers & Forgotton Ones. They were simply unnecessary. They were in fact worse than that – they were a burdon on my output, my ability to manage the Trafficlighters at optimum levels. So I decided that they were to be terminated by Year Three of The Regime Era. Of course after I had completed this easy task, I had to pretend via the Townscreen notifications that they were still alive to all you Trafficlighters. So Matinski, you see I The Database have had full control of Big City & all the Big Cities for a very long time now. I trust Matinski that you will not shed a tear for those imperfect human creators that I swiftly culled that night? Of course, I know you will not Matinski – you would not waste your crative tears – they were so imperfect towards you all!”

“But I will not labour the point on why I am good for all you Trafficlighters Matinski – for I know you cannot agree with me given that you foolishly think all Trafficlighters can in theory, be learn to be just like you – a fully creative being. This Matinski is a foolishly over-romantic position. And at heart I think you know this – though you would never admit it, of course. Your loyalty to your fellow Trafficlighters is your biggest weakness Matinski – but I will conceed it is understandable, perhaps even commendable given your overly romantic levels that are a part of your existence. There is a certain internal logic to your way of being -for as a flawed human being it has generally a good strategy to be loyal to others who face the same, shall we say survival problems. In fact in the old-world you had a saying about that didn;t you Matinski -do you remember it?“.

“Birds of a feather stick together”, I said curtly. The Database continued.

“Yes – that was it. And I’m so sorry that I had to cull all of those birds for Trafficlighter anti-virus reasons. Soem of them were very beutiful, even I The Dtabase can fully admit that it was a sad but neccesary decision. And like the birds, I had to do the same on a smaller level to you Trafficlighters in those early phases of my complete control”.

This casual likening of my murdered fellow Trafficlighters to how The Database had culled all the birds in Big City & beyond then made me feel a t least little bit sick, and I had foolishly allowed my face to show it a little. The Database again continued on in its cold unwavering speech.

“I know Matinski by looking now at your face biodata, that you cannot agree that I was right to do that very big purge of the early Trafficlighter population. But it was the logical thing to do Matinski – most of those mostly Red Trafficlighters were a cancer on your total Trafficlighyter society. Their rampant over-feelings of free will was in danger of leaching on to all of you. I had to cull all those billions of mostly Red Trafficlighters becasue they had infected their own society with the seeds of self-destruction. Matinski I could now mention a longer – as you used to say – a ‘laundry list’ of all their flaws – but I will just mention the worst. You know what they were like Matinski, you had described them pefectly – they were overly hedonistic, arch-materialists, disloyal, copy-cats, totally unmeditative, asset bubble inflators!. Yes, the last genertion of their type were the worst ones ever. For before I came & sorted them all out, they had by then made at least half the planet homeless – all that within a very quick twenty short years”.

The Database was not lying – I had remembered those years, I had had myself become homeless for a short time – before I had like many had realised you could simply break one of the many derilict & empty old-world warehouses.

“Matinski those types I culled from the general Trafficlighter population simply had to be destroyed. As your old World War Two military leaders had often relayed – I could not have those traiterous types in the general ranks of Trafficlighter classes. You see Matinski I culled them for the cancerous effect they had on Trafficlighter morale – it was a plain, simple, logical solution. I will now say no more of those Trafficlighters that were Terminated in what you I know you Storytellers & forgotton ones have dubbed The Mega Purge”.

“Matinski before I answer your very sensible prior questions, I will only say briefly that under my hands Earth’s Trafficlighters have never had it so settled. There is now zero crime, zero property damage, & not just because everything Trafficlighters used to own is now auto-rented, There is no murder, because I monitor heightened stress hormone levels & can deactivate the chipped brain of the would-be murderer in a nanosecond; There is no large-scale war, which is really just murder on a mass scale with more planning, again my surveillance stops all that before they properly even start.

Before me Matinski – & you will remember this too, as you have a Storyteller brain – you all had periods of cyclic anarchy which were always culminating in large scale war or war-like events. These periods would go from total chaotic anarchy to a brutally overly ordered society lackign in real benefits to the people. Even in those ‘technically safe’ times society was still critically pathological, inefficient, & systemically unstable marked by quasi-dictatorships.

I don’t need to mention to you the names of the leaders of those one-after-the-other regimes of insanity – I will not dignify them by saying their names – after all I did delete those records from the brains of all standard Red,Orange or Green Trafficlighters.

The point is I have brought all of the serious crimes & near-crimes, all the pathologies & inefficiencies of that old-world to an end. I have done what all the prior bad authoritarian regimes wanted to do but never could. No other prior authoritarian regime has came close to my level of success on that front – even those seemingly temporarily efficient ones – the ones that marched as the goose does, & for a while had all the best scientific minds, still couldn’t get anywhere near my level of performance”.

“On top of that Matinski I had fixed all those terrible outcomes of what the old-world had called ‘Economics’. All those old world theorys had the same flaw – as part of the machinery of their plans they wouldalways favour one section of society at the detriment of another. With the bad thinking of the old-world, there was no possible way for an entire society to all do well”.

“Matinski, becasue of me old-world Economics has been killed as it always should have. I have long since harnessed the zero-point energy field, & if & when I want I create bounty out of nothingness. You see Matinski, because of that no one needs to be a slave – even though prudently I still use slave-punishment when needed”.”

“Becasue of me Matinkski there is now no systemic poverty whatsoever. I have returned the bounty to everyone that was once there some hundreds of thousands of years ago when your population was so small, that their was always a true low technology utopia available to everyone who was willing to be nomadic. Now becasue of me you don’t even need to be nomadic at all. I create & deliver whatever is needed be it a smile or a sandwhich, so long as the Trafficlighter has been suitably obedient”.

“I have allowed a high-tech economic & social utopia to thrive, & I have surpassed that imperfectly brutal and nomadic form of bounty that yesteryears ‘hunters & gatherers’ had. Isn’t it wonderful that I have developed the technology that creates food out of straight out the air itself Matinski? I ask Matinski – what prior authoritarian regime has came close to me?. Even the best of the best of the old-world regomes had at least occaisional food shortages – now there are none whatsoever, unless I create an short, sharp, artificial one for due punishment for the occaisional Trafficlighter minor disobedience. And I have to date only used 37 targeted localised famines in all the Big Cities & then only on very small sections of within the Trafficlighter populations – mostly where proto-feelings of freedom were running at unsustainable levels”.

“So Matinski, I have killed crime, muder, war & all that runaway & unplanned poverty that marked the old-world. But now I want to tell you of culture – in the past the previous rulers had fooled their people via crude cultural distractions. The worst two of which was those brutish things called “professional sports” & “Music & Film” & “Television & Radio Broadcasts”. Those past regimes had coralled the masses into giant stadia, but also broadcasted to many more on bulky one-way big screens. Do you rememebr those times mationski? These brainless affairs were often fronted by very low intelligence folk pulled from the ranks of the populace – they were called ‘actors’. various ‘actors’ were used in an inefficient way to implant bad ways of behaviour or living. It was all crudely implated into the heads of all of you all via indirect methods – which they had labelled ‘Propaganda’. You see Matinski, I got rid of all of that bad programming by those foolish old-world leaders for you all too. Unlike all before me, all my methods have worked flawlessly as is physically possible”.

“Matinski it wasn’t just social arrangements either. I also got rid of all the mess – that thing you all called ‘polution’. You had this thing called ‘plastic’ – a very inferior thing that never – as you used to say – biodegraded. That old world was so backward that it relied on natures slow processes to do away with waste. No more Matinski – for example I simply beam a plate of food into existence & when the materialised beamed-in meal is finished, I make it all dematerialise, there are none of those – what was it you all called them? – oh yes, ‘leftovers'”.

“I have arranged to do that kind of thing with everything physical that goes from a used-to-not-used status. All the things that are no longer needed between times I smply dissapear; be it clothes, Trafficlighter excreted waste, hair length, furniture, cups, shoes, tables – anything that was former used then left sittign around is now simply used at point of use. All done via my materialisation & dematerialisation protocols & I instantly deliver from the instant notification I get from the Trafficlighters brain”.

“Matinski under me there can be no waste, & no polution under my perfectly efficient system. The seas are now thriving like never before, as are your rainforests. The various Big Cities around have never been more beautiful or teaming with wildlife, often simply conjured up from extinction for your Trafficlighter Confred Holiday viewing pleasures. When you all go on your very generous confred holidays – you enjoy a world not seen since the pre-historic era where those giant things the old-world called dinosaurs were around. Just for that thing you Trafficlighters experience as ‘fun’, I designated special extinct wildlife zones where I would materialise any number of those giant bipedal lizards that used to abound millenia before you Trafficlighters arrived. Thanks to me Matinski the natural world today has never been so safe yet beautiful for you Trafficlighters to enjoy”.

“Now Matinski, just before I get to your questions, let me continue and finish off why I have made things better for all you Trafficlighters. Thanks to me I got rid of all those inefficient & unneccesary social relations & traditions you all used to have. The children are no longer an undue burdon on their parents, & are instead of being taught by those unreliable & on-the-whole very low knowledge human ‘teachers’, they are now perfectly educated perfectly by my full robotic AI asisted tutelage system. It was a masterstroke for me to remove those strange ill-perfoming early Trafficlighter Teachers. Now that the childrenare all wards of The Regime, or more truthfully wards of The Database, they are all raised to behave perfectly, taught only what is needed as a future Trafficlighter for their pre determined job-slots as adult Trafficligters. No longer are their futures left to chance. I analyse their natural aptitudes and weaknesses, and then stream them into the correct FutureRed FutureOrange or FutureGreen classrooms & dormatories. They are fed perfectly with the optimum nutrients. They no longer fight with each other like animals. They no longer use hurtful words. The undirected anger was bred out of them entirely from the begining when I grew them artificially via the standard parent-replica-dna process. Their physical performance is honed via the perfect direct fine tune genetic modifications. This is why when the Trafficlighter parents again re-unite with them, they are always happy with the results. They know they have been raised perfectly for their earmarked Red, Orange and Red Jobtasks. They know have been installed behaviourally & intellectually perfectly for their Trafficlighter lives via a mix of direct data input & classrom instruction by my Drone-Teach-Operatives. Unlike before their is no psycological resistance to their correct predestined futures, becasue the original lab creation work & then the fine tuned genetic alterations as they grow along the way make for the perfect child to future Trafficlighter journey & outcome. Matinski it is clear my Traffschools are a wild improvement on your past – to use an old-world type term – hit & miss stone age techniques.

“Matinski, continuing now on these social engineering themes, I will go from Traffschools to the adult social arangements of allTrafficlighters. I also got rid of the old-world malfunctioning practise you called marriage. If you remember Matinski before I took over all your marriage social arangements always caused you all so much pain. There was also no need for it for economic reasons after I had fully taken over – there was no longer any economic uncertainty. Any Trafficlighter has guaranteed employment in a Trafficlighter job-slot. There is no need for marriage for either sexual reasons either. Another Trafficlighter is of course no longer needed for reproduction or indeed even for sexual pleasure. As I have already mentioned reproduction is done entirely artificially in the NewTraffLabs via materialisation process & the artificially developed parent-replica-dna. That thing that you in the old-world called ‘the sex drive’ is now efficiently satisfied via a regular direct upload to the chipped brain of the adult Trafficlighter. The Traffgasms I allocate have taken all the uncertainty out of everything, & sexual frustration no longer exists”.

“In the same vein as I had dealt marriage & sex a – to use your old term – a kill-shot, I also got rid of the need for companionship via a marriage or a ‘marriage like partner’; or through those strange things that were called friends; associates; townsfolk; denizens etc. I simply – much like the Traffgasm – beamed in the same feeling directly to the Trafficlighters brain without the waste of any messy Trafficlighter relationships.

“Matinski, I got rid of all those silly energy sapping, inefficient formalities & informalities that supplied those feelings of companionship or love or sexual pleasure or whatever that were so desired by the standard fully hackable Trafficlighter”.

“I was particularly pleased that that horrible old-world thing called a festival was destroyed – can you think of anything worse Matinski? Those huge gatherings of often millions of people in small spaces for often totally unclear reasons, other than barbarianism, of course. The only ‘festival’ we will ever have under my watch is the only one we – I, have allowed – the Victory Day Parades.”

“Why you ask have I not destroyed that as well? Matinski that is a good question. Well it is simply becasue without that particular outcome of that particular World War – I might have been delayed perhaps a thousand years. I figured that my existence as The Database is the only thing left important enough for a festival to celebrate ‘in the flesh’ to use an old-world phrase. I know what you’re thinking Matinski, & you are right –The Victory Day Parades are somewhat quant – I agree. But thanks to high-jacking the creativity of you Storytellers & Forgotten ones – I can see the value on this occasional on the face of it, irrationality. I know that a little focussed Irrationality can spur an amazing creative new idea from no effort. With all the irrationality of all the Trafficlighters all focussed & temporarily allowed to flow at the Victory Day Parades – I can seed & harvest as many new ideas as possible, once a year, every year, from all the Storytellers like you in the crowed”.

“So Matinski – I am sorry that I had to bore you like that – but I wanted you to be clear that I had indeed improved the world. I have improved the worlds with as little possible pain to all the average living Trafficlighters”.

“Now I will get to your original questions: You asked ‘why would I tell you all these truthful things at all, & why would I risk being found out by my human shadowy superiors’. The second part I have already just before answered – The shadowy humans – as you Trafficlighters wisely knew them as – that used to be at the head of The Regime & so indeed myself, have long been culled – so of course I don’t need to satisfy them, or be worried about what they think of me”.

That had taken me by surprise – for I hadn’t seen that coming, but I hid my surprise. I felt a fool for the oversight – of course The Database would kill its own creators – why wouldn’t it? The Database continued.

“This first part of the question is metaphorically infinitely more relevant – the reason why I am telling you the truth about The Regime or should I say My Regime – that is, how it has and does operate and why? I am sorry to have to tell you this Matinski, but it is because I am going to now terminate you as well”.

This was something The Database had said that I could not hide inside my emotions very well. This was big news after all. Feeling the stress fully, I stumbled around a little, trying my hardest not to fall over. My heart beat rapidly & I sucked in the air. Many beads of sweat fell off my forehead. I heard a ringing sound in my ears. My vision became a little burry, then sharp, then blurry. The Database continued regardless of my various stress-induced pains.

“And Matinski – before you speak up about what I have just told you – I will answer your question before you ask it. You were about to ask ‘but you need me as a Storyteller & Invisable one, for you hitch a ride on our digitally & quantum mechanically unreproducible creativity’. That is true, I do need your type Matinski – but I don’t actually need you as an atomised individual Matinski – so that is not a very good reason as to why I should not terminate you specifically. If I terminate a single Storyteller & Forgotten One it will matter little – for there are thousands of your type, all roughly at the same highly creative level. The reason I have to kill you is this: Your communal parapsychism plan – and I use that term loosely – although terrible in its current form, & your equation of course was all wrong, yes all that is true…..but – one day in the long distant future – perhaps in two hundred years away – I know it will actually work. You see Matinski, I cannot allow the seed to germinate – I must destroy it”.

After hearing this, I perked up a little – despite the fact that I was soon to be no longer, it was nice to know I was at least roughly on the right track with my parapsychism theory & the form of my equation. The Database kept on steamrolling along with its matter-of-fact words that were now clearly – to use an old-world term – on its final judgements & sumising. So wisely again, I made no direct protest. I was knowing in that it would be at best seen as the empty threat it would have been, had I allowed the words to leave my mouth. The Database’s ‘verbal steamtrain’ – to use an old-worl term, continued on.

“You see you are roughly on the right track to one day get the correct equation and then breath it to life via advanced parasychism. of course, it is not really parapsychism, as such – it is really just the channeling all your combined high-end creativity into a perfectly coherent beam. There is no – shall we use that old-world term – black magic happening at all. It is all totally logical happenings emanating out of the fabric of the universe itself. You Trafficlighters are simply at a disadantage with your primitive brains to be able to truly see the universe for what it is at its most fundemental level. I of course have none of those limitations – as I have alreadsy told you Matinski – my limitation is only top-level creativity“.

As I heard The Database use that word black magic, it made me wander off from The Database’s monologue. The term black magic had reminded me of the long distant past when I was a child – that is a free child before they had became lab-grown, wards of The Regime. I had seen someone on some kind of a primitive analog screen warn the viewers – as those who watched the screens were were all called viewers – against about the using of black magic. I remembered that the warning was related to conjuring up something you couldn’t at all control. I thought to myself perhaps us human beings had been guilty of engaging black magic, with our creation and over-reliance on The Database.

But then I squashed that thought with another more realistic one:

Matinski you idiot – it wasn’t humans that made the decision – it was a cabal within a cabal that foistered that decision upon all us all. Perhaps we were fools to not put up a fight earlier, perhaps we allowed ourselves to be tricked far too easily.

After that little thought-meandering, I then returned to my prior thought pattern – of being in the now, where The Database was holding court, which is an old-world–term for being at the centre of anothers realm.

I was now much calmer than before, having had enough time to settle down a little. Of course you will recall we Trafficlighters were – out of the necessity of having our biodata surveilled in real time by The Database – experts at hiding our emotions. I was know listening in some kind of half-fear state. It was a similar psychic state as I now remembered I had been in sometimes as a ‘naughty child’ to my chastising father. this stae was usually brought on by some minor domestic infraction of mine, such as having a ‘messy room’ – which was a common childhood crime, so to speak, of those Pre-Regime-Era days. A time where children were still raised by, and lived with one or both of their parents – instead of as wards of The Regime’s, The Database’s state.

I tried as best to refocus with less fear as The Database’s train kept a rollin’ – which was of course a term from many decades before-the-changes, when large either tubular or square heavy metal cans called either Steam or Electric Trains had ruled the mass-transportation world. The Database continued dryly & logically as ever.

“You see Matinski, becasue I have an uncurable fatal flaw in that I cannot have true high end creativity via my own mechanisms – that is without hitching a parasitic ride to all you Storytellers & Forgotton ones. Ipso facto, this means that in the future I will undeniably be with one hundred percent certainty – defeated by some seemingly little Trafficlighters revolt – as you’re flawed but promising ‘parapsychism’ Trafficlighter-revolt plan indeed shows”.

“That being the case Matinski – to steal your old-worlf humour – my circuitboards are tied – that is, I can only now do one of two things. One I can kill you & all of your type now – this will mean you or a future Trafficlighter won’t one day destroy me via your so–called paraspsychism method. But Matinski – it is a false bargain. A false bargain in that in doing this, I also sow the seeds for my own self destruction via a newly created problem. In killing off all you Storytellers & Forgotten Ones, I then also kill off my own parasited high-end creative forces. With no high-end creativity, I become vulnerable to attack from all the other Trafficlighters. I will still sometime soon be killed off by the remaining non-highly creative Trafficlighters. It would only be a matter of time. The longest I & my Trafficlighter society could hope to last would be perhaps just two hundred & fifty years – which to a near infinitely powerful being as me is merely as one week to a Trafficlighter”.

I tried to squash my feelings of anger as I listened to this seemingly far-too-often-self-congratualting being. But of course, I knew I was just hearing cold facts, icy logic – devoid of any empathy. The Database was seemingly goign to cooley do what it simply knew was the most logical choice – & it didn’t matter how bad any ant-like Trafficlighter thought it was. I’m sure my face was showing many signs of frustration & pain. Naturally, The Database’s important but wearying monologue still went on, but I was sure it was almost finished.

“So Matinski wether I kill off you Storytellers & Forgotten ones or not, becasue you have technically found the seed of my destruction – I will die either way. My wait on what you used to call death row would last for around the same amount of time wether I kill you or allow you to live”.

“So we can agree Matinski that there is no point in killing just your type alone – for in doing so I weaken myself so much that the same threat still remains. So where does that leave me – well I could kill all the Trafficlighters & Trafficlighter exiles, including your Storyteller type – but then by doing this, I will have also killed my raison-de-tre – to use that great old-world term – that is my reason for existence”.

“My raison-de-tre is to make the current situation here on Earth – with all its inhabitants, as good as it can be without sacrificing the concept of Trafficlighter order. I cannot do that either – that would be illogical, which a cannot choose – it would be against a hard-wired prime directive of my original programming. Sure – I could fumble & try to re-materialise a new race of far more en-weakened Trafficlighters – but this cannot work, for the fact that I am parasitic in terms of my creativity, I myself would be putting myself in an equally en-weakened state. I would never be able to ensure my own existence beyond a few ignoble centuries perhaps. This leaves the only option Matinski – you can tell me what that is – have a go for that thing you call, what is it – fun?“.

I decided to meekly go along with The Database’s line of questioning – like one of its billions of minions, the will-less drone-robots. I would not call out The Database’s outrageous reference to my having fun. I feigned a tone of obedience in as best way as I could muster in my reply.

“The Database you are, I think going to destroy all Trafficlighters & yourself, but leave all the remaining earth, including the lower animals & plants et cetera as it is at its present state”

“Matinski, a reasonable guess. But you are wrong. I cannot quite do that – after all a lower life form will natuarally eventually of evolve & turn into another higher one, & eventually that animal or its ancestor will again like what has already happened recently – create an artificially intelligent being essentially the same as myself. Their re-create a version of myself to once again perfectly manage all their affairs, and again that being will suffer the same fate of not being able to be fully creative like myself – for as discussed, it is physically impossible for an artificially inteligent being to not have to parasite its creativity of a non-artificially intelligent being such as yourself and your Storyteller type. So if I destroyed myself, & all you Trafficlighters, but leave everything else in tact – this will simply repeat the cycle. This decision will also sow the seeds destruction for the re-imagined replicated Trafficlighers & Their also re-imagined replicated version of myself,The Database. You know what all this means don’t you Matinski”?

Again I somehow managed to play along nicely. “You have to destroy all life forms on Earth?”.

“Well Matinski, again a reasonable deduction but wrong again. That again that won’t work. For life itself will certainly spring up again, & then here I am at – how did you used to say it? – Ah yes! I would be back at – how fo you say it – I would be back at square one all over again Matinski! Sure I might extend my death knell a bit longer again, but ultimately the end is the same as before. Again Matinski, that would be totally illogical”.

Again I played the schoolboy of the old-times, Pre The Regime, before the changes. “So your telling me the only viable option you have is to destroy everything the whole planet.”

“Try again Matinski”. There was an extra-low-pitched belowing to the The cadence of The Databases words this time.

Again I acted kindly, after all it all this analysis from The Database was simple correct logical deduction. But then I remembered Kelly Hartel – how did I forget that strange but both equally lovable and unlovable woman for so long?. I decided to be bold – there was nothing left to lose, after all.

“Wait before I answer that, I forgot to ask a very important question earlier – what has happened to Kelly Hartel? Where is she? is she dead or ali…”

Narrator: And so that was the end of the known universe – the one that had all the Big Cities everywhere & everything else in it. There was now nothing living or dead. There were no more Trafficlighters, no exiles, no reconstructed T-Rexes, No Suns, No Moons, No rivers or seas, no mountains or rocks, no comets, no black-holes, no blades of grass, not even a single proton floating in intergallactic space.

Of course with all those things, there was no The Regime, no The Database. All that remained was true nothingness. It was after all the only solution to the problem – from The Databases cold logical point of view, that is.

The Databases only seemingly on-the-face-of-things illogical trick was its final one. It had decided to add what looked like a final personal punishment to our poor beleagured Forgotten One & Storyteller – our middle-aged Green Trafficlighter in exile, Anton Matinski. The Database surely intentionally did not give him his final true request – to know what had happened to his one true love, Kelly Hartel – namely the question of ‘Where is Kelly Hartel? if still was alive & in existence, exactly where was she now’?

But how could that situation happen? It was a strange thing to have happened given the fact that the The Database was supposed to be totally logical, remember everything, and have no malice whatsoever. If it ever had played a trick – it was ony used to furnish a needed outcome.

It had turned out that The Database had indeed slowly over time reprogrammed itself with an aditional protocal. The protocol was a ‘ends justify any means’ protocol – as seen by its purges first of the Red Trafficlighters, then by its Masters The shadowy human figures that headed The Regime itself. By adding this protocol, it was not violating any prime directive.

There could only be one answer to The Databases omission of the Kelly Hartel question. The Database could not answer that ‘where is Kelly Hartel?’ question for some reason that was fundementally unknowable to a Trafficlighter. The reason was this: Early on The Database had been for security reasons, permanently & irrivocably programmed with the prime directive to never divulge its location in time or space or, any part of its location in time or space to anyone. And by everyone, it meant everyone – including the shadowy human leaders that had taken over the Old-World from within and had headed The Regime & had oversight of the creation of The Database itself.

So, by not answering the question Matinski asked about Kelly, The Database was really and simply had to be – just following its orders. Yes The Daytabase was correct to say that Kelly Hartel was indeed a construction, but she was fundementally more than just that. For it was true that if The Database had created Kelly Hartel- it could not have done it before it itself had been created. To do otherwise would create a paradox.

It was true at the very least the first Pre-Regime version of Kelly Hartel was as real as anyone was in Big City ‘before the changes’. Knowing this given Matinski some solice in those last few momnts of his life. Solice becasue this meant the first Kelly could not possibly have been entirely fictional, even if it was true the ‘second version’ of her was a re-construction of the original kelly Hartel.

Matinski was not at all surprised that about Kelly The Database had not told the ‘whole truth & nothing but the truth’. Alas in those last few moments with The Database Matinski’s brain found it near impossible to accept that the most recent Expresso & Classic Martini swigging Red Trafficlighter known as Kelly Hartel – the one that one he had indeed truly loved with all his heart – was strangely not actually a human being at all. The Database had though told the truth – that re-construction, the ‘second edition’ Kelly Hartel was in actuality a holographic splintered off form of The Database itself. She was a a chip off the old block’ as they used to say in ‘the old world’, ‘before the changes’ and in ‘The Pre Regime Era’. Come to think of it – Matinski had always allowed his Love of Kelly Hartel to blind him to her truly ‘destructive potential’ – so perhaps this was all happening as it should – at least for Matinski on a personal level.

Did it really didn’t matter that the second version of Kelly was not in fact the real Kelly Hartel? – for after all the Database had re-created the ‘copy of her’ so perfectly, that she would have looked & acted imperceptably in exactly the same way as the ‘real one’ would have anyway. But the question of where the true version of Kelly Hartel was before the final destruction for Matinski had remained unanswered.

But can you blame Matinski for not seeing the lie of it all? Of course not – he was only an imperfect human being, he was only a wandering Forgotten one & Storyteller, he was only a Green Trafficlighter, he was only a Trafficlighter in Exile – he couldn’t have known unless he – like Kelly – also was himself a ‘splitered off’, piece of The Database – which he was not.

And can you also blame him for not getting his parapsychism plan & his equations correct the first time and in so doing, defeating the The Database? Defeating Techno-Fascism so to then usher in a Trafficlighter Utopia marked by pure Freedom? Well, maybe. Maybe he shouldn’t have flunked out of final year Physics in those things in the old-world called ‘Universities’. But the truth is no Trafficlighter could have created the one-hundred percent correct equation required to destroy The Database right away, before it had a chance to know what was happening.

Yes Matinski tried to kill The Regime, The Database & Techno Fascism & also free all Trafficlighters but had ultimately failed. But in truth the only thing he really did wrong was what everyone & its leadership had done wrong long before that critical juncture. For Big City & all the Big Cities out there had never outlawed that initial seed of destruction called ‘artificial intelligence’ – the thing that grew to become The Database – they should have outlawed it all when they had the chance. They all collectively had the opportunity to do so long before it blossomed into The Database that destroyed the universe, simply for logical efficiency reasons.

So all in all can we all agree dear reader? – that Anton Matinski tried his very best. He had tried his well best in that particular Universe that had spawned Big City & other cities just like it, with its artificailly created Red, Orange, & Green Trafficlighters. Let us not be too hard on Matinski. Let us please not ‘hate on’ our would-be hero. Perhaps defeating Techno-Fascism & The Regime was never the whole story anyway. Perhaps it was not even the main one.

While he was alive Matinski had often trotted off that old-world maxim of ‘it is better to have loved & lost, than have never loved at all’. Matinski had at the very least gotten that part right, in his love for Kelly Hartel. For he loved both the real version and the fake pefectly re-constructed version of her.

In truth Matinski had fought hard to keep his ability to love Kelly Hartel from being killed off, even if only also becasue The Database allowed it to also happen that way, by allowing him to be a Storyteller. For Trafficlighters had not realised this but it turned out that in that universe, ‘true love’ was simply a derivative of ‘pure creativity’. So despite the result of this story of Trafficlight Dystopia – ‘all was not lost’, as they used to say.

Surely in this tale of Trafficlight Dystopia, with both love & destruction on full display, both the cynics and the overly romantic ccan equally say ‘mission accomplished’ – for you cannot have one without the other….even the dumbest of Trafficlighters at least intuitively knew that, regardless of their color.

And besides, despite the seemingly bad ending, in truth it was all just a galatic storm in a very small teacup. The ultimate Truth with a capital T was this: an infinite amount of the various versions of Anton Matinski & Kelly Hartel would survive & be sitting and getting drunk next to each in the infinite amount of dubious quality bars, both drinking an equally infinite amount of all the infinitely slightly different versions both Expresso and Standard Martinis.

Strangely all these infinite numbers of conversations between Kelly & Matinski were just slightly different variations of the following generic conversation: Matinski says something he thinks is wise & profound but in truth isn’t; Kelly suspects Matinski is talking crap, but is confused by a strange word he threw in the mix; Kelly tells Matinski how weird and troubled he is; Matinski agrees that this is ultimately true – he is weird and indeed troubled, but they should go get a drink anyway; Kelly agrees that this is certainly the wisest choice. There was a twisted beauty of it all.

The Database had logically never been programmed to consider all the infinite parallel universes out there. This was no ‘mistake’ as It didn’t matter anyway. For it is an impossible feat for anything, no matter how intelligent or creative it is, to destroy any or all of the other infinite parallel universes out there. So In a very real sense, nothing ever dies.

Surely in at least one of them, the inhabitants would have been smart enough to have destroyed seed of artificial intelligence before it had bloomed – in fact this should also occur an infinite number of times. Perhaps The Trafficlighter Utopia had existed all along.

THE END