The implant's biggest drawbacks were the headaches. The gear-man had assured her that would abate in time, but meanwhile she was dying for an injection, or even a good, old-fashioned aspirin. Too bad the chemicals would interfere with the implant's bonding process.
Text passed before her eyes, the latest news, the day's top story, ads for sexual aids and fast food joints. She blinked, but the visuals refused to recede into the background of her consciousness. Could she really take another day of non-stop sensory stimulation before she could control her access?
Resigned to stay plugged in, she laid back...
Maurice looked at the empty mailbox and sighed.
His pension was supposed to be delivered today; first of the month, just like always, but instead the inside of the cold metal tube held only a few bills and a postcard advertising the latest whatever that he didn't need. What he needed was his damn pension.
He took a deep breath and took several careful steps back up his driveway to his front door. He checked around the bushes, painfully walked the outer perimeter of the house, even checked the cat flap, but no pension.
Son of a bitch, those damn...
It was difficult getting to people to understand that actually you wanted to be in the cage. That the cage was the safest place at the moment.
The rest of the world had gone mad - or at least, it seemed that way. Maybe the world had always been like this, maybe there had always been something in a stranger's eye, maybe there was always something in the rain that made it taste funny.
Maybe the drugs were wearing off, maybe he was finally waking up to the reality. Or the drugs were taking effect, maybe he was devolving (he'd...
It was not a world in which it was advisable to take risks.
It could be argued - had been, by a few scholars, in the deep and distant past, a more romantic age - that risks were always inadvisable, that this was what made them risks in the first place.
But those scholars didn't live here, they didn't live now, they were from a world of chivalry and knights and heroism.
They were not in a world where you were burned if you were caught.
There were marks all over her arms - his, too, they sat beside one...
100 feet away, all hell was breaking loose. Everything was going to change, forever - but for now, I was willfully ignorant. I chose not to look through the windows, not to know, to keep the door closed, locked.
Real life was not going to invade my sanctury.
It had been my prison, up until the moment when I had heard that damned siren, the one that we had all prayed would never go off. The one that promised that it was all too late, that everything had gone wrong, that it was too much.
That sacrifices must be made,...
The dystopia is a genre of fiction designed to teach a lesson about society by imaging a future society warped in some terrible way. The interesting thing about dystopian novels is their reliance on a single, antagonistic character to provide a terrible monologue of exposition to the horrified protagonist, explaining just how and why society went bad, and why the system must persist.
George Orwell's 1984 has O'brien, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World has Mustafa Mond, and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 has Captain Beatty, the remarkably well-read "fireman" who has turned his back on all that literature had to offer...