My preceding account of this world I found myself in is under WAW: The Owners of Dreams.



The techs and the director of th VR slave factory stood trembling as I, or more accurately, my mouth prophesied doom in seven days hence. The poor residents of the cocoons were denied the true taste of reality and played in an endless succession of “park days”, while their unconscious minds ran the software that ran the robotic factories for the Priviledged, the Sunshine Children.



The techs took me up to the surface through an elevator. People got on. They were dressed somewhat nicer and more individualized than the techs who they snubbed. The techs in turn smirked behind their hands.

“Hong Kong, Please.” And the elevator sped, and lurched, and the speed numbers displayed on the side of the elevator astonished me with their rapidity. But I felt no high g’s.



They got off, and I could see a crowded, very crowded Hong Kong beyond the door. Two extremely proper Brits got on. They went to London, or so the elevator system claimed. Using an inertial direction finder I picked up in the famed Rigellian Junkspace, I determined we moved less than forty miles from ‘Hong Kong’ to ‘London’.



I inquired as to the meaning of this.

“Oh, those people think they live in a crowded planet troubled by overpopulation. The suckers are propagandized to believe twenty billion is the maximum sustainable population. They live in an underground cube, and they travel everywhere by elevator, and they submit to the most horrible indignities because of ‘overpopulation’.”


I found there was at least ten such ‘cubes’ dotting the crust of Earth, and these techs were sneered at as janitorial help while actually they ran the system they said. They served as the interface between the VR factories, and the ‘cubes’ and the Sunshine.



Looking at them, I could not see a ruling class. They were too petty, stupid, self-centered. It was the influence of evil, I theorized. The mighty and the powerful would shrink to being weaklings under evil’s domain.



They took me to the Sunshine, and showed me their estates, and then prpepared for me to make appointments with the great among them who had even bigger plots of land. For nearly an hour, I bit my lip to keep from laughing.

“For I have touched the sky.” I murmured looking straight into the sun without hurt.



Leaving the poor dupes who imagined they lived under the Sun behind, I flew by force of will into the sky, and tunnelled through the rock to the true outdoors.



It was wild and unspoiled. Herds of buffalo stretched for miles, and passenger pigeon flocks darkened the sky.



“Magnificent.” I breathed out, and then in as the clear, unfiltered air revived me.

“I’m glad you like it.” Said an old man in a wheelchair. He was a hologram.

“I do. How many people truly live on the surface?”

“Just me. I guess I’m the World Dictator.” He said.

“This is wonderful. Do you imagine this excuses the conditions your fellow humans live under?”

“Suckers, suckers all. P.T. Barnum was wrong. There is a sucker born every second.”

“I’m going to have to insist you change.”

“Really, and how are you going to do that? I have defenses against any possible attack.”

I look at him sadly.

“Against fire, and acid, millions of desperate attackers, nuclear devices, etc.?”

He nodded with a smug smile.

“I’m the boot that will twist in the face of Humanity forever.”

“I read “1984″ as well.” I inform him and add

“Menes, menes, tekel, upharsin.”
“What’s that?” He said with a sneer that hid fright. He was dangerous, but essentially pathetic in his evil.

“You have been weighed in the balances and found wanting.”

“Don’t tell me you are going to preach to me.” he laughs. “Appeal to my conscience and all that rot.”

“Like Nebuchadnezzar, go forth.” I say, and he pitched forward out of his chair, and began to eat grass. His eyes were unknowing like a wild herbivore.

I told some people of the world the truth but I waited for the completion of the seven days to inform ‘Sunshiners’ that they must let their slaves go. They did and they began the long process of sorting things out. It got a little hectic at times, and toward the end of the first year, I was caught in a street riot in Earth Cube 8. Bye-bye world.



Tadeusz