It is time for the culling's to begin again...

This piece of freewriting was done to Joan Jeanrenaud's Transition. I began by writing the word "avatar" in the middle of a piece of paper, and then word associated (well, concept associated) outwards from there.

It is time for the culling's to begin again. You can always tell when it's about to happen - there's a sort of frission in the fabric of vreality, and then like clockwork a few days later the troops descend. There's no way to tell who they'll target, so everyone begins to prepare. They descend, dark faceless blobs, and interrogate us one at a time, in our vhomes, in our vworkplaces. They intrude into our vlives and we can do nothing but take the time to respond. They grill us on our backgrounds, on our habits and hobbies. They ask us about our children, our families, the places that we like to go when the working vday is done. No one's sure what they're looking for, so you're never sure if you're the one that they'll take - absorb into their formless blobs and disappear you. Is it a population control mechanism perhaps? But if so, then what exactly are they looking for?

A friend of mine had a theory. I don't like to talk about it much, because he told me and then during the next culling he was taken. But he has this crazy idea that we're all living on some sort of server somewhere - that we've paid in some other world to have our consciousnesses uploaded, downloaded, copied over, whatever, into a virtual reality. And that the government that comes to cull isn't actually the government at all - it's some form of system software which routinely goes through the data and deletes any obsolete or rogue information. Anyone who doesn't do their job, or who's registry doesn't line up is obliterated from the system.

I hope he's not right, but i'm beginning to believe it more and more. The only thing is, if this is some sort of virtual existence, why would I have signed up for it? How terrible must my real life have been that I would have preferred this workaday, repetitive life?

---

While I liked this music, I found it difficult to write to. Or perhaps that is just my brain rebelling against doing any work - wanting to enter the virtual world itself and take a holiday from stress and responsibility. Unfortunately, as I came to think during this exercise, if we move to a completely digitalised existence then our responsibilities and stresses will just follow us there. Digitilisation as a form of escapism only works if it is an escape, and not the norm.