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I didn’t believe we were all bags of meat propelled by emotion, but I was wrong. The DIs know. They know exactly what we are, and how to play us. That’s how they teach you to kill.
“Nobody can expect handouts,” I said, because that’s what my dad always said.
‘Everyone knows how to love in his own way; the way, it does not matter; the essential thing is to know how to love.’ ”
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most corporate states are fascist, though they would have you believe they’re oligarchies, ruled by tables full of rich old people with humanity’s best interests at heart. The more fearful and out of control we feel, the more we look to some big man on a horse or a tank or a beam of light to save us.
Did you know those who are mildly depressed see the world more accurately? Yet they don’t live as long as optimists. Aren’t as successful. It turns out that being able to perceive actual reality has very little long-term benefit. It’s those who believe in something larger than themselves who thrive. We all seem to need a little bit of delusion to function in the world.
Everything that’s going to happen has already happened. You just haven’t experienced it yet. We are, all of us, caught within a massive loop of time, bouncing around in the spaces between things.
I: You don’t believe in free will. S: People believe what they want to believe. You aren’t here because you want your horizons shattered. You want your worldview reinforced.
see what happened to America, after. It became everything it accused others of being. It tore itself apart, riddled by the rot of unfettered free speech, drowned in a deluge of propaganda foisted upon an uneducated public with no formalized training in critical thinking. Liberal democracies and scheming socialist regimes were doomed from the start. You give a human being freedom and personhood as some innate right, and what do they have to fight for? Personhood is earned.
They won that war, is all I’m saying. They started losing when they forgot how to be decent. People will fight for the idea of decency. They will fight for someone who treats them like people. They fight for beliefs far longer and harder than out of fear.
The corps think like corps—all short-term benefits. No long-term strategy. No greater vision. Just profit. Just winning. You can only win for so long before it all topples out from under you.
They don’t pretend military service is some glorious or noble sacrifice. It’s simply about serving the whims of the corporation. It’s always been the rich pushing us around, making up stories about how we’re fighting for a noble cause when it’s just about, what, some old guy insulting some other old guy’s dick, measuring their relative genius based on how many people live stream their breakdown.
the fact is there is no free society on Earth. Everyone is owned by someone else. The resistance here wants to unshackle you, but that’s too frightening for most people. So what does that leave us? Free people who believe they are already free? They think they have chosen their servitude, and that makes them individuals, powerful. Freedom to work? Ha! Freedom to die on the factory floor, behind a desk, pissing in place because they don’t get bathroom breaks. Freedom to be fired at the whim of a boss bleeding you dry on stagnant wages you can only spend at the company store. But the choice of
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Once you begin to drop, time becomes a luxury, an outdated thing, like the idea of voting or equality or freedom that meant anything but freedom for the rich from the burdens they force the poor to carry for them.”
“Dumb shits.” That explanation probably made Marino feel better. We all wanted civs to die because they were stupid, because they deserved it, not because we were the bad guys.
She said there’s this thing called escalation of commitment. That once people have invested a certain amount of time in a project, they won’t quit, even if it’s no longer a good deal. Even if they’re losing. War is like that. No one wants to admit they’re losing. To end a war, you have to give them some way to save face, to pretend the sacrifice was worth it.
We believe it has something to do with electrical discharges in the brain that cause faults in the way you store memories. It’s not that you’ve really seen what you’re seeing before. It’s that your brain already wrote the memory, but your consciousness doesn’t realize it yet. You feel like it was a long time ago, but it wasn’t. Time is highly subjective. Its interpretation relies on the brain’s ability to interpret and imprint memories correctly. There’s a tremendous amount that can go wrong.”
Deja vu
What makes people believe this shit? I thought as I lay there listening. But it was easy, wasn’t it, when people were isolated. When information was scarce or siloed. People would believe whatever you put in front of them, if it fit their understanding of the world.
A virus is not a war. We have contained and quarantined those affected. We expect a quick resolution.”
Reality is a constructed thing. Imagine us all standing in a circle, trying to describe an object to one another, and as we agree on its characteristics, the thing at the center of our circle begins to take form. That’s how we create reality. We agree on its rules. Its shape. Different cultures have created different realities just by all agreeing about the thing they described.
What I learned, as I looked back on those times, was that the lies are what sustained us. The lies kept us going. Gave us hope. Without lies we have to face the truth long before we are ready for it. Long before we are prepared to fight it.
“You can control what you react to and what you don’t. You can change how you react to pain. Pain is simply a message, a ping on your heads-up. Acknowledge it and move on to the problem. What a lot of people don’t get about these modules is that half the experience relies on you believing in it. The more you believe, the more intense it is. The more real it becomes.
I am the construct. I am creating half of this. I took a deep breath. Focused again on Andria. A single, real thing: her voice.
Isnt andrias voice a construct too? What makes her voice real
Corporations had been chipping away at the authority of governments for a century before the Seed Wars. They experimented with company towns, and then outrageous benefits for employees. As health care became more expensive, one didn’t even have to offer private transport and free meals. Simply helping pay the cost to cure grandma’s cancer was enough to ensure blind obedience. That’s how you keep them loyal. Foster distrust in the democratic governments that are actually accountable to them. Show them that only the corporations can save them from themselves.
When you are under the thumb of a corp, they own you. They say you have freedoms, choices. When your choice is to work or to die, that is not a choice.
War was all about the annihilation of truth. Every good dictator and CEO knows that.
“You aren’t even curious? What really happened?” “What would the truth change? We follow orders.”
there are always people who are more comfortable with what is certain and known than what is just . . . a promise.
People need to feel like they have free will. They want to believe that nobody else is as free or happy as they are. If they aren’t citizens yet, well, shit, that’s their fault. They aren’t working hard enough. People disappear in the night, and you think, of course they must have done something wrong. Good people are rewarded. Bad people are punished.
But it turns out most of us don’t want truth. We want stories that back up our existing beliefs. Flood the world enough with information, and I will pick out only those bits that uphold the virtue and rightness of whatever corp I’ve been taught to love.
Monsters do not die quietly, not the corporations, not the corrupt democracies and kleptocracies before them, and certainly not the monarchies, the feudal lords, the god-emperors, and the oligarchies. Most of those old leaders had to get their heads chopped off to step aside. That’s what moved them, finally.
There is no bloodless revolution, only necessary revolution, when a system becomes so deeply broken you can’t affect change from the inside. When the system itself has become calcified so permanently that change is not possible . . . that is when the knives come out.
I used to believe, as others did, that we could work within the existing system, that moderate change was possible. But when you take away the ability of the people to effect change within the rules of the system, those people become desperate. And it is desperate people who overthrow their governments.
People should not be afraid of the corporations. Corporations should be afraid of the people.
Truth is a point of view. S: So says every great tyrant.
Under stress, the human mind is more likely to see patterns in everyday noise. Show them a picture of random black-and-white dots while primed to remember a moment when they were out of control, and they are more likely to see an image in it. The more stressed we are, the more we believe we can alter outcomes.
Quantum particles behave unpredictably. Unpredictability rules us at the most basic level. We yearn for certainty, but the fact is that certainty and absolutes are a fiction.
Ordinary people would do anything for authority figures, as long as they could be insulated from the blame. But they would do anything for the people they loved, too. Even if it meant disobeying orders. Why didn’t anyone do an experiment like that?
“What’s the purpose of your brain?” “To interpret . . . stimuli.” “So what is this?” “Stimuli . . . but listen, what’s the difference, then, between this and the real world, if they’re both just processing stimuli?”
I knew the enemy was not a tone or a texture, but a system.
Whatever happened out here tonight, Andria wanted me to put it on her. She’d put it on Captain V. Captain V would blame the lieutenant colonel of the battalion, who would blame the colonel of the regiment, who would blame the major general of the brigade, and up and up, until what happened tonight rested on the peacefully sleeping head of some CEO who would never get her hands dirty.
New like nothing on the rest of Earth was new, all of us building on top of the dead cities that had come before us, the ruined landscapes. Seeing their untouched city, even our best made us look like what we actually were—vagrants living on the bones of something greater.
share what they had learned when they transformed Mars. They had made a beautiful world from the over-heated toxic desert we’d created, and we hated them for it, because they were free to create a better world. No one owned them.
“The human mind has always been among the deepest mysteries of our bodies. We want to pretend science has all the answers. But it simply gives us the tools to uncover those answers. It doesn’t mean we have them. It’s why so many still cling to religion. We need answers to the unknown.”
“Every soldier is a sacrifice. You are owned by the corporation, or the state, before it, or the king or landlord before that. It’s the first thing they drive into you in training, isn’t it? Your body is not yours.
I want my bleached bones scatted across my own land, broken and sucked clean of marrow, half buried in snow and finally, finally, covered over in loam and ground to dust by the passage of time, until I am broken into fragments, the pieces of my body returned to where they came. I could give back something to this world instead of taking, taking, taking. That’s the death I want.
Our lives are finite. Our bodies imperfect. We shouldn’t spend it feeding somebody else’s cause.”
We gave our lives to the corporations in exchange for clean air, clean food, infrastructure, shit we could have collectively done for ourselves. We forget that people are power. It’s why they work so hard to control us.
People can always be convinced to turn on one another. All you have to do is convince them that their way of life is being attacked. Denounce all the pacifist liberal bleeding hearts and feel-good heretics, the social outcasts, the educated. Call them elites and snobs. Say they’re out of touch with real patriots. Call these rabble-rousers terrorists. Say their very existence weakens the state. In the end, the government need not do anything to silence dissent. Their neighbors will do it for them.
