Zed

By Rai Gbrym

In the future we saw coming but failed to prevent, we live isolated in cells, and the only reliable source of information – for anyone still conscious enough to use it – is our own intuition. In a climate saturated with "necessary" particles and frequencies, this is a challenge more demanding than the gurus of the old world ever faced. And yet, as if drawn from a spring of ancient memory, a few souls carry forth a guiding light through the transbiological fog.

 

In a psychoanalyst's office, somewhere near the subsurface, a routine consultation reveals much more than one man's battle to break free of the operating system. In a world where everything is recorded — and not just the conversation — we are the Red Tape eavesdroppers, listening in on a psycho-spiritual nosedive into the mind of the Machine.

 

Zed is a confidential document of a society just a substrata removed from our own, and a handy pocketbook of Truth and Delusion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Easterbee
• Release date: Mar 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393484004

Book preview

RE-ROLL

"Somewhere beyond this dome there begins the curve of a foreign dome, and between and around them lie the open oceans and the outlands that have become so unknown as to become known only as Outside.

How he got..."

[Door opens; Playback stops]

Evening, sir.

Why’s it so dark in here?

It’s these lights, sir. They make my eyes hurt.

What? Don’t be so soft, Meadows. What are you – a zingaro?

[Lights are switched on; Candles extinguished]

Where did you get these?

From a wholesale cell up in the mid-levels, sir.

I didn’t know candles were still legal. You’d better give me the address and I’ll get it looked into.

Yes, sir.

What was that you were playing?

Part of the doctor’s last entry, sir, from the subsurface. I was just getting it annotated, but I don’t think this tape really needs any.

[Section Officer expels breath]

Okay, let’s get on with it.

[Seat upholstery expels air]

Take it from the top.

RECORDING BEGINS:

Red Tape #IG-2046-0001-IN

A.S.R. Transcript

Auto Annotations setting: minimum

TAPE 1

[1]      

POSSIBILITY

Now is another time. Now is a different place. You’ve seen the funnel ads:

What are you looking for? You out for love or revenge? You going future or retro? You want an adventure? Wild West or Far East? You wanna be a spy? Or a private eye? You wanna be a hero? Name your escape vehicle.

There’s a cell for everything. You can leave your cell, get in a pod, go to a multi-cell, stay there all year and come out again the same evening.

Never use them myself. They screw you up.

Be that as it may, you’re still craving a now that isn’t now. So what is it that smoulders inside you?

Hard to tell. It’s been smothered so long by the muzak and infotainment.

And the obligation? The routine?

And that.

But you can still feel something because it bothers you.

Yes, I can feel something. Feels like leeches under my skin.

So what is that energy that society acts upon you to suck dry? What is that force screaming to break free of its cultural cage?

You’re the doctor. You tell me.

I believe they are the cleft nucleus of who you really are. That energy and that force are the yin and the yang of your inner universe and what you feel stirring, like the persistent pull of two magnets held apart, is their urge to come together and produce an electrical field of possibility.

Well, as diagnoses go, that’s pretty original.

When these stirrings occur (in the language of the Machine) they denote a fundamental malfunction of a societal node. The node being a person with an excess of awareness.

There are, of course, many kinds of suppressants that can deal with a problem like yours so that the magnets of force and energy can be kept just far enough apart to avoid an electrical discharge that could blow the circuit and the mind. The most available of these are consumed, imbibed, smoked or watched voluntarily as a way of keeping such disturbances at bay. But when these methods cease to have the effect they once did, the malfunctioning node develops symptoms of intense discomfort. One might call it a sense of dis-ease, as in, the opposite of ease.

The clinical psychologist, by contrast, is trained to see the dis-ease as a disease. This is because the clinician’s role, as a well functioning node in the Machine, is to keep as many other nodes from malfunctioning as possible, and he or she has a panoply of suppressants that will do a far better job than you of curing the symptoms (and not the cause) – or at the very least, of putting them into remission.

As long as your excess awareness is aware of that fact – and as long as treatment remains a choice – you can avoid being suppressed back into numb acceptance and instead attend to those stirrings within, recognising them as the calling of your true self.

[2]      CREATIVITY

I saw myself walking alongside an endless highway: barefoot in a suit, walking and walking as rows of vacuum pods raced past – plastic pockets of perfect isolation all rushing to get from one cell to another. I grew tired. Night fell. I held out my hand, lights streaking. Nobody stopped.

Why did you come here?

I’m lost. I need someone to tell me what to do.

Of course you do.

Tell me. Why are the magnets of force and energy held apart when their nature is to unite?

Because