Imperception
It happened slowly. So quiet and deliberate, no one realized that the world they saw when they went to sleep was slightly different than the one they woke up to the next morning. Compounded day by day, the world transformed into something its citizens had no idea existed.
People disappeared. Dirt and cracks in the sidewalk thickened. But citizens only saw the perpetually blue sky, storefronts that welcomed visitors who never set foot in the small businesses, landscaped lawns, and the hum of thriving cities.
Those who wanted us to see something different manipulated the world. The quiet patience of individuals coming into power was stronger than the desires of heroes for their names to be remembered in our histories. These men didn’t want to be remembered; they preferred to live in a world forgotten by those who inhabited it.
Passing shadows, errant raindrops, or a scream too loud to ignore would push us to the brink of recognition, but an invisible force would reset our slender, oblong metal bits, showing us an environment programmed to be perfect. The only imperfections in the spaces we lived were ourselves; the powerful could not be bothered with self-esteem.
It began when humanity bent over the knee of technological progress and accepted the inevitable rewiring of our devices and ourselves. The oldest among us remember the implants; lining up outside assignment zones, temples bared to the suits in grey, and five seconds of searing pain that meant our brains were forever connected to a tiny pill embedded beneath the flesh of our skulls.
Once turned on, our minds awoke to new signals. Addicted to the cacophony of information, the hyper realism of tactile living meshed with the virtual spaces created ostensibly by ourselves, yet data puppeteered by the powerful manipulated our realities. Despite what our brains told our eyes appeared in front of us, titanium roadblocks altered this perception, telling our sight organs something different. Such delicate changes became accepted by our minds; truth was not what we saw but what we were told to see.
The promise of a mental utopia outweighed the potential for a sovereign society to unwittingly bow to those who controlled the vision, for when terabytes took up muscle mass, the idea of a power making playthings out of people could not have crossed our minds. And even with limitless knowledge, we had no idea what was happening right in front of our eyes.
In the beginning, they altered the physical environment; blossoms removed and replanted, a tree transformed to a seedling and then empty space. All the while our minds were tricked, our physical bodies understood limitations we did not see, making it impossible for us to realize what was happening by bumping into a building we did not know was there. Soon, alterations spread to people: Street folks removed and young children stolen from families, forgotten the next day.
No one really knows how the first deserter observed the folly of his reality and escaped his mental prison, coming back into all his senses and recognizing the irrationality of the place of existence inside his eyelids and those of the people around him. He is called Zed, the first human to be fully and naturally remembered by anyone with an implant. Like him, many of us have taken knives to our skulls, removed the tiny spheres and regained our sight, wondering how it was lost in the first place.
We must watch and wait with the patience of our tormentors, as individuals disconnect from the hive one by one. The powerful built an army of false existence, and we must operate in the shadows to regain independence of mind and body. They can’t control the whispers, only visions, and our network of voices grows stronger as visual impossibilities disappear with each stranger who listens.
To see the truth is to accept that all is not what it looks like. We must fight for a perception stolen and altered, to create a world we can see and explore and thrive in.
