Today, I realize that my -very optimistic - presentation to the world is false.
Well, I didn't actually figure it out today. You (whether you know me well enough or not) probably already question the perpetual happy-go-lucky smile on my face. That's not to say I am not content. However, it is indeed a barrier I learned to perfect. Regardless... we will not get into that... instead, get distracted by today's addition to Manny's OST:
Yes, it's true.
So, in today's installment of "Why the F am I reading this?" I present you a snippet of my mind in the form of an alternative, and dare I say, more advanced universe?
Please enjoy a descriptive bunch of texts that combined, enlighten us with detailed social, physical, biohybrid characteristics of the people living in the Regen Era, more specifically in the city of Eutobaria. This is a context piece for my yet to be published novel. Just like the phrase "Be the person you admire? or want to be?" I once read "write the book you would love to read" and that book lingers in my dreams. Let's get right into it and don't forget to smash that subscribe button. Just kidding.
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Humans in the regen era became more cyborg-like than ever before, with regenerative technology installed under their skin. This gave humans the ability to live much longer, change the colour of their skin, hair, eyes, teeth and nails, they were able to produce their own food within their body.
The new thing to do, what they would call “Taking vacations”
Like in a dream I had, This takes place in old commercial office buildings, abandoned, empty for 100s of years. A "new" ritual is to go in groups, purchase tickets to this event where many strangers go to take some “time off” of life. They go to repose and sleep in peace. Somehow in this overcrowded office building, which has been untouched by looters, furniture almost in place, people find comfort in the barely lit abandoned building. People of the regen era seem to replay a scene from historical video clips showing office buildings being used as temporary refuge from war (I know, it didn't make sense when I wrote this, this was based on a dream). You could see dusty furniture slightly over the marks where missing furniture used to sit, swinging blinking overhead lights, emergency lights half on, half off, scattered cardboard and sleeping bags for the guests of the evening. This reenactment has become socially acceptable as unplugging from the system.
They actually go to socialise, and talk and ask each other questions (somehow this was not possible in everyday life) no one knew how to do that in the outside world without sounding or seeming weird. So they would create these ritual-like vacation events to do just that. As soon as the "guard" (in uniform and all) yelled “lights off” every one was supposed to sleep. However, they would start chattering in the dark… some people could not take it. There was a custom to find old almost molten jars......
SIDE NOTE: There is a myth that states " glass is a liquid, and moves very slowly, acquiring a melted look over time, over a long time." This is just not true:
"When somebody asked why the stained glass windows had ripples in them, the tour guide said that it was because glass is a liquid, and these windows were so old that the glass flowed over time and created the ripples. That’s just not true. The windows were made that way.” Found in an article written by Lori Baker from MIT school of engineering
... and bring them just in case they needed to break them and use them to commit suicide…(don't ask, it was a dream) This was a normalised way of going if life became too difficult. Everyone would smile at their hysteria and erratic behaviour as if knowing one day they might do the same thing. Reminiscent of that feeling you get when you stare at Joan Cornella's artwork =)
Dark beings
Dark figures with light skin with black upside down chevrons from their noses down to their necks, long straight black hair, and high shoulder/neck vestments… bad guys
Ribs with memories
If we are to live forever we will have the ability to robotize parts of our bodies. In the case of our ribs, and our memory, we will be able to compress memories into tiny memory banks on our ribs, where there will be a ton of space per slot on each rib, we’re talking a few YBs per square centimeter.
Switchable “clothes” (on /off) to edit
People can be as large or as small as they want, and look however they want, no one will ever collide with one another thanks to non-collision. With a press of a button, you can take off the “clothing” suit, which is basically a polymorphic visual illusion that people can change as they please.
Non Collision
“It is so difficult to step outside of the lines these days. Non collision customs have been passed down by generations. Since all pedestrian areas disappeared, we have become reliant on the pathways programmed for us. I want to go home and turn off my clothes.”
WHY? No one seems to care and ask why.
In Eutobarian time, people could walk around all day without paying attention to their route. The path was automatically chosen when one thought of their destination. Which meant people were connected to a database. As soon as they thought of a location they wanted or needed to be, their internal computing mechanism (or the one they wore, or both) created a unique path programmed to never collide with another person or thing.
Regeneration Rituals
A future where society does not give any importance to family. People reproduce by act of nature through regeneration rituals (from insemination or some form of fertilization through the gestation period) performed at special regeneration institutions. This is where people hand off their offspring to an organization that dedicates itself to the sole purpose of raising [children] and teaching them the way of the homosapien without preconceptions of birth family and concepts of the like. So they could grow up and live their life and not conform to the limits of birth family systems etc.
main character
Sarcasm
- Bullying made me search for weapons and the only weapon i had was sarcasm
- Vladimir Yankelevich “the irony: the seriousness of the intention”
- Metaphoric story-line of a poc living their life within the "safe" institutions of white folks. Examples below. And, since people could be any color they desired, the main character was purple. Light purple to be precise.
- To blend in and attract less attention for being poc. (Whitewashed) Would it be too literal to say the main character had pale purple skin while others chose colors that were a bit bolder. main character only wanting to blend into more places without standing out…
- Traveling only to western / white countries. For fear of traveling to other countries may be more dangerous or prone to "attacks" (but this is a thing in our current day society… a lot of POC believe this to be true… for many, varying reasons)
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If and when I find other characteristics in my saved documents I'll add edits to this text and re-post. Hopefully this all makes sense, it probably doesn't. Dreams come to me in weird scenes from a post something world. It's always the same feeling. I dream of a world after a major event happens sometimes in the near future. However, the dreams are usually extreme and sometimes make no sense, but if they were part of a novel, they would make complete sense lol.
Last night I dreamt of a similar situation where I was being moved from an apartment with Guilhem to separate apartments that we would share with other people. These apartments were in GIANT ships, floating on water. These ships, according to what Dream Manny knew, were former Navy ships which were transformed into housing for people. I was sharing an apartment with a family of 5. It was a tiny apartment with walls of bookcases, beds that rolled out of the wall to form cots... where three kids were sleeping. This was a horribly scary normcore white family y'all. I was petrified, by the whole idea but HAD to do it?
image created with dreamstudioai
Luckily my room was separate from theirs in this tiny apartment, the room was also tiny, had a normal bed and a ton of bookshelves lining the walls, no windows I think. Although, I clearly remember seeing another ship next to this one and thinking that was an old housing complex no longer in use. . .
I woke up mid dream int he middle of the night and eventually fell back asleep only to continue dreaming. I explored my room to find a sliding wall, semi hidden, but obviously there. It lead to a winding white concrete hallway which led to another sliding door, this one slid upward, reminded me of the roll up doors to those old food or garbage elevators. The door lead to a huge slide which spiraled from the top floors down to the very bottom of the ship as an emergency exit for the former navy. i imagined the Navy people being attacked, ambushed and their ship being boarded in their sleep, an alarm sounding and them using this exit to gain access to their outside armory or just to escape.
Anyway, the INSIDE of this ship reminds me of the inside of many large buildings I dream of. So, while this ship housing complex might not make it to my Novel, some aspects of it might.
Toodles!