Click here to read the Introduction!
This is the Flag of the City of this Short Story: giving instructions about its language and how to communicate with the people living in it, organic construct of its citizens, and its coordinates in the Universe. As it's stated by Universal Law, each city must place its flag for display, mostly for security reasons, and to give an insight on how the city functions. The organic structure of it's citizens it's due to the fact that some living organism in the Universe and Multiverses can be deadly toxic to other ones, so as a measure of preserving life, this must be placed in the flag as well.
"The Fall, and The Spiral"
Everyone wanted one. They were all in display. We standed in lines. Government lines. 20 minutes long. The sound the cadence made when it advanced. Like a stomp from an animal carrying rocks to a waterfall.
My mother picks up the phone. The conversation she is having starts like this:
“Every morning, he goes to school! Say what? The latest game? You want a game to kill some hours in the day of the schedule of the child? Say What?! Well, the most boring game at the moment, that we have, is “Pick up the bottle, the Right One”
After hours of playing the game, which was an immersive nerve system attached game, which sent electrical impulses to your brain cells, activating parts of your brain, left you in a semi comatose state. The parents loved this, this way, there was no noise in the house, there was no need for a nanny, no need to take care of the child. A semi comatose kid, in the living room, laying in the floor, playing in his mind an immersive virtual reality game that the final purpose was to count bottles as they fell down a hole at a pace so slow it seemed like it was broken. How many bottles fell in a hole? Three? Two? In a span of 3 hours about 6 bottles fell in a hole. That’s what one life lasted. 3 hours. And you could buy easily more than lifes per day per game. If you had the cash, you could do anything you wanted in these games.
There were no games filled with characters that had an underbelly quality to them.
It seemed that the most popular, and over sold games, gave you a comatose state thanks to the boring effect and the direct brain cell connection. It drove kids to a reality not unlike their own, but with a uniqueness of dullness that astonished them. Then the boringness began.
The houses in this town where mostly built in spiral shapes, the area that it covered in a cylindrical space were around 18 feet, and had about 6 stores. With high and low ceilings, depending on your Social Status. Family with High Social Status, had higher ceilings, thus having higher Houses, from which the sunset could be watched above all of the ceilings of the surrounding houses.
Why the houses were built like this, I can’t tell.
“No! He has to be less exited! - Was one of the catchphrases of one of the Super Conglomerate Company that produced these immersive games.”
“No Fun No Noise!” Was another one. One aiming clearly to the demographic of parents that wanted their kids in a quiet state for 3 or more hours, so they could indulge in their favorite pastimes, or sleep as well, without having to feed a child or worry about a kid coming across the idea of getting a shotgun, buying some bubblegum and start kicking ass in the real world.
They discouraged high end level fun entertainment. Was read that on the Social Newspapers, every week or so, like a dripping faucet, Newspapers where “Didactic” advice on how to raise your child could be read at any time.
Strangely enough going to church wasn’t mandatory or encouraged. They were religious.
The charts of the brain The State kept record when playing the games where uploaded to a main server that monitored for adrenaline surges and the like. “More boring, more boring, more life!” Was another motto from another company. They were all over the place.
What they wanted to really accomplish was out of my mental reach.
A Society that encouraged this behaviors from responsible parents had endured the test of centuries of rain and inclement weather. Though no Revolutions, or Social Up-heaves. Not even secret downstated ones.
I found a square light, shining in my bathroom, like a Square Pixelated entity, that permitted me to travel from time to time to this place, and oddly, to the world in which these kids were playing.
The entity seemed to communicate with me, via color emissions. I had come to the conclusion given our communication efforts, that he was a survivor of something called “Tronned”. A program, or a way of life, I couldn’t go that far.
As I mentioned before, church wasn’t mandatory. Sundays were spent walking the Malls of the city, onlooking day only. Window Shopping was mandatory. Nothing else.
Vanilla was the only ice cream flavor.
Volumes didn’t go past 3 under any circumstance in any establishment or social club.
Phones had no video conference calls.
And 3 companies delivered all the game titles to the masses.
And each company had about 45 games. All variations of 3 games. Mostly original work.
Movies had subtitles in different languages that blocked the view of what was going on screen, thus making it impossible to know what was going on visually.
One day it all happened, it still rings in my mind like a bell submerged in water.
3 musical notes were emitted from a game, in a fun manner, which leaked to the other games via it’s connection to transmit data, it raised the levels of serotonin in the brain of the users, the adrenaline started to rise. To rise slowly but without a break. The computers monitored this, but when the Engineers came into the Monitoring Lab, it was too late. What consequently happened was a chain reaction. The Psychiatrist came afterwards, needles in hand, and had to take nock out 3 to 7 Engineers who had entered in panic. The Scientists were in a state of panic they never witnessed before as well. Some of them went semi crazy and injected themselves, 5 seconds later, they were knocked out in the ground watching colors flash before their, intense glitch effects on the layers of depth of view.
Half of the eyes horizontal view was shut off while the other half was on, and changing colors rapidly, at a very intense speed rate. Then the heavy visual glitch effects started. Then the bottom half became blue while the upper half was normal, with a clear division in the middle. Then the vision became like a mix between a broken radio, a very bad VHS, and modern day glitch effects, non stop, hours on end, until they fell asleep due to exaustion.
The Scientist who endured this for 3 days never injected themselves due to having panic attacks, but in this case, did so, several other times with no regards for the state of the real situation. This which I’m talknig about they called him a “Pentatholite”, because after 17 hours he injected himself he yelled for 12 hours without shutting up “No more Pentathol, No more Pentathol, it can be fun!!!” - If he wasn’t mad before the injections, after several doses, he surely went bad in the head -
Obviously his colleagues had a low opinion of him. Other Scientist who injected themselves to keep from the back ally ways of life, screamed for 12 to 14 hours for 3 or 4 days. They placed them in a big hotel room with a pool, and an assistant. There was no way this keepers of the Social Order were going to have a stressful life. Or a bump on the road.
The first kid to stand up from the floor was Tommy. He got up, went to the roof terrace of his house, stared at the sun down, and plunged himself with his arms wide open into the nothingness of his 17 store apartment complex.
What seemed to follow, it was a nefarious event. As with all video games, when the adrenaline kicks in, one of the instincts, is the so called “Lemming Effect”, here lies the key to this all:
Every kid who was connected seemed to follow other kids behavior, due to the transition the games used in the nervous system, that was in chained parallel mode. Every kid connected could feel and transmit thoughts to the Monitor System, when it was overpowered, all the adrenaline kicked in, and it multiplied.
“The Lemming Effect Day” they called it. Every kid in the city, exactly at 5:45pm, when their parents were on “Nap Time” they took to their roofs. And jumped off. “The Lemming Effect Day”
I was the son of a tobacco street seller and the son of a starving artist mother. But I was connected as well to the network. The fall, even so not from a great height, knocked my head in the outside pinnacle receivers of my brain and permitted my body to produce adrenaline and serotonin and the types of chemicals that kick in in certain circumstances. I began to learn stuff my normal brain couldn’t grasp and was out of reach out of limits of comprehension. All of that due to a slight wind that blew as I was falling.
Not many survived the fall. Some say people lost one or two lives, as they still think this is a game. And they think it was all simulated by a Shadow Government.
It is knows as “The Lemming Effect Day” in the City, and in my Pixelated friend, it can be reproduced as “A Chapter” inside a command console, using the command line:/home/exec/The Fall, and The Spiral - I have no other knowledge about that day apart from this.
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