Ordinary World-- Daily Life Suited For Someone Else - Fictionarium Meets Reality
With a loud clatter from the floorboard of the car, Arlo let off the gas and hit the brakes.
Ordinary World- Fictionarium Chapter 1.
(author's photographic rendition @therealpaul )
It was looking like it would be another tedious week of mundane repetition and grinding boredom for Arlo. He was bored with the town, he was sick of the next cursed traffic light coming up, and was already sick of driving back through this same damned intersection later. Arlo was tired of his pointless job. He was fed up with his meaningless existence in this fictional little town, and had decided that his immediate plan for this Monday morning was that he would drive freely into the wind and then leap from the vehicle after carefully parking, then sit quietly in a diner to stare at a wall.
The diner would have decent walls, while the walls in his lifeless apartment weren't good enough for this caliber of staring, since they were the same dull walls that had been reflecting the boredom from his boring job for the past year. Arlo was in such a foul mood this morning that he had just jumped into the car without thinking about any of it. His Monday morning plan was nothingness and fruitlessness, and that was fine because he was well accustomed to nothing, and he was plenty sick of stupid fruit.
The light up ahead was green, but it was a stale green. Arlo knew that the cruel traffic device was waiting for him to get a little closer before it switched to yellow, so that he would have to slam on the brakes and then wait the usual eternity for the red light to finish torturing him.
Stupid town. Arlo looked with a sour frown on all of the cars driving around him, going to their big jobs and meetings to give each other their business cards and talk about money and how there's not enough of it, acting like this makes them respectable citizens and actually believing that they are being productive in their daily flights of fancy.
Arlo feigned a bit of envy as he watched them go- but they had conveniently forgotten everything of value, no longer taking any responsibility for their world- and he laughed sardonically at how they had trained themselves to always blame someone else for the brutal system of scarcity and any other obvious problems they saw in their little town. Bored with such repetitive silliness, he yawned at the irony of how these lazy busybodies could simply vote away all responsibility for their world's flaws, and then feel safe to assert that their elected leaders were actually the ones who were "irresponsible".
Grey clouds had moved into Hill Valley and had quickly covered the morning sun, and with the green light still taunting him up ahead, Arlo pushed the gas, raising the front of the vehicle with a frantic roar as if he actually thought for a second that he could make the light without stopping. The alert traffic light knew just how to toy with Arlo after a year of these games, and it switched to yellow at that same instant. With a loud clatter from the floorboard of the car, Arlo let off the gas and hit the brakes.
The frustrating thing for Arlo in particular was that he was a Science Board paid (barely) Observer stationed in Hill Valley, so he knew that the whole town was really just an ongoing illusion, and that the people around him were destined to snap out of it at any moment.
Yet here they drove, every day selling the hours of their lives for just enough money to last the week, or to the next paycheck. Here they slaved, and here was the place that these subjects called their home, dying but never living, comforted in the belief that it is normal to dodge all responsibility since it was all built, owned and protected by The City. They had become accustomed to the idea of the fatherly city watching over them as they slept, comforted and secure in their belief in a benevolent grown-up figure, always watching, always knowing what's best for it's children.
The people of Hill Valley could be happy pretending that there was this deity called The City that could be both worshiped and scorned in the same breath, they could vote for the lords of their choice and then go right back to sleep in their ordinary positions. The Science Board had long ago quit building churches in their societies, since obviously people could be persuaded to worship any external force that represented authority as long as it was invisible, omnipotent and terrifying in some way.
It was clear that the churches had previously worked well as mind-control devices, but the Science Board had eventually begun to take credit for all of creation, and it's members rather enjoyed the total worship of the people.
From Arlo's point of view, there seemed to be little difference between a Fictionarium town and a real town: In a Fictionarium the subjects train themselves to mindlessly worship a franchise lord called The City, while back in real life the people are trained to simply worship the Science Board directly. Arlo could hardly understand why the Board would even keep a Fictionarium program going anymore, it all seemed so pointless. His whole job seemed pointless, to sit around observing ordinary life for a living.
Observers are expected to maintain a low-class status within a Fictionarium, and are typically endowed with the facility to communicate directly with the Science Board. They are expected to take advantage of their earthy perspective and use this low position to better share their community's secrets and confessions on a weekly basis with the higher lords of Science.
For Arlo, it was a fancy SB job in the department of Perception Management, and he'd been trained to have a good understanding of how a human culture would naturally reclaim itself in stunning displays of mass realization if left alone, and that it would happen quickly if Perception Management didn't keep a few good pairs of boots on the ground in the population's fertile mind.
Arlo was taught the craft of mass mental maintenance under the rigorous guidance of the Universal Science Board, and had excelled in his classes. For Arlo, his success at getting even a lowly Observer position in a Fictionarium was something of a privilege, and yet he couldn't tell a soul in Hill Valley what his secretive job was: Science made up all of the TV news, parody and cartoons, and Arlo's job was to watch it, record it, and snicker at it.
He had acquired this coveted job that demanded that he live as a pauper in the worst part of town, a secretive job that allowed no friends or relationships, a special job that offered a low standard of living as it's curious pay for helping to keep the accepted standard of living low.
Arlo glared at the flowers in the median approaching the intersection. He professionally watched ordinary life, waiting for the extraordinary to happen so that he could report it, so that the extraordinary could be properly marginalized and subdued.
Arlo stopped the car at the light. A particularly monstrous thicket of power lines and wooden poles with ordinary high voltage transformers arrogantly ravaged the sky at the corner of 3rd and Maple, and Arlo stared at it. A storm was darkening the neighborhoods as the light stayed red. Arlo didn't know it yet, but making up news wasn't going to work anymore. Parody would soon become futile when reality itself was considered to be ridiculous.
And it might soon be discovered that Science's finest animations and cartoon productions on the ubiquitous TV's would be no match for Hill Valley's soon-to-be hero. She was called Beulah.
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Chapter 2. coming soon, @therealpaul follow follow!
[EDIT] Can Steemit handle this story? Fictionariums are always peaceful and comfortable, this upcoming Chapter 2. is going to challenge that illusion. Should I even post it? Then there's Chapter 5; 'The Screwtape Emails' ... will we even make it that far?
Stay tuned
Fictionarium INTRODUCTION on Steemit
CHAPTERS (Coming soon on Steemit)
2. Beulah's DMV Rant
3. The Lights
4. The News Is On The News
5. The Screwtape Emails
6. Lakeland
7. Monday, Day of Rest