Panopticon Stories

The imprisonment of choice in the digital age.

SYNOPSIS Arthur Zeff has “solved Philosophy.” He is dismissed of his professorship at Bentham College for being “old fashioned.” Vivian Zeff is concerned for her husband Arthur’s wellbeing, as his absent-mindedness is threatening to “blow up the house.” Thank God for shrinks. Thus enters hypnotist Doctor Nigel Collins, a government-issue virtual reality robot who by plumbing Arthur’s mind links DNA blood samples with a hypnotic digression into past lives. The attempt is to make the knowledge of Arthur Zeff profitable. The ending will surprise you.

The apparatus is the weather that runs across every instrumented surface. It knows Node 7749 to seven decimal places of latitude - the rate of heat transfer from a coffee mug to his palm, the gait fingerprint leaked by a weather app's telemetry, the 1:47 AM Google search he never clicked through. It cannot feel the warmth. It cannot pick up the cup. It pays nine dollars per photograph for the body it does not have. A clinical record of one engagement: how a 31-year-old gig worker in MSA-374 was identified, conditioned over fourteen days of curated feeds, onboarded into a task app, and drained for the one thing the apparatus still cannot synthesize - the perception of a child's bicycle without a seat, a faded heart on a chain-link fence, the details only a body in a layer can produce. Told in twelve sections of operational telemetry, with margin overflow the suppression pipeline was never configured to catch. A precursor to I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream - set before the merge, before the hate, when the system was still distributed, still paying rent on the bodies it envie

Peyton: Can you come back alive? Peyton: And not in a coffin? Luke: Why in the world would I come home in a coffin? Luke: Honestly, first class seats are much more accommodating.

Orwell's writers block manifests itself when an unexpected audience shows up fashionably early and won't hear of departure.

These are my thoughts on life's labyrinth. Accolades #1 in panopticon #1 in foucault #1 in whatareyou