Fahrenheit 198.4 aka They Live in Utopia: A Neuromance for a Brave New Age(chapter1)

In the unlit fireplace sits a pile of haphazardly stacked books just itching to cascade at the feet of the conversationalists purple in the cold and panicking in overwrought prose, pacing from one corner of the twilit living room to another. Uncomprehending of the tortured talk of the these teary-eyed tenants, the dusty artifacts quietly abide in the stone-walled dark and dustier artifact amid the artificial artifice of this iron-wrought architectual ejaculation. Once this would have been a church. In later eras this would have been a factory. Later a courhouse, its perched gargoyles administering a Foucaldian gaze of justice upon this stone and steel city. Later it could have been an arthouse. Or a slaughterhouse. Today it is just a halfway house for homeless refugees, for authors and their ilk. There's a banging at the door, shouts, violence! The books see nothing and wait 'til tomorrow.

Now it is tomorrow. The books are dustier. The fireplace hasn't felt the warmth of flickering flames in an epoch now. The city is less stone, less steel. The city, the county and the State are almost entirely composed of plastics and electronics. It's an ugly muck-up of post-industrial design and city planning so long as you're not wearing your glasses. But no one would be caught dead without their glasses. It's the year 21**, for goodness sake. Might as well go out without clothes, ya silly! How can you navigate around town without seeing the news cyberreports viewable only on your glasses. Or the neuronews, or the microtetris. And that's how it goes. To leave your house without your glasses is a punishable offence: endangering self and others, misdemeanor. abandoning civic duty, misdemeanor, the practice and promotion of Luddism, a felony.

That this eyesore has survived the era of the Internet is amazing. That these books have survived the Censor's Sickle is truly astounding. Neither pose any danger to contemporary sensibilities. Inside the virtual reality the glasses provide, the building is nothing more than a kinetic wire framework in which advertising, street signs and digivision programs are enmeshed. All matter fades into the background, even this monstrous monument to a dessicated history. And with the conversion of sky to structure, what former scholar Rex Presley refered to quaintly as the "departmentstore-ization or Macysication of the ecosphere", modern man is not wanting for space.

That the books go unthreatened is nothing remarkable. What threat are books when all intelligent people are all-but-functionally illiterate. Literature is a dead language. Most likely no one today would know just what are these brittle, tree-scraping-derived things covered in webbing and dirt. Not that there is anymore a state-sanctioned force who would have cause to worry over such trivialities as censorship or cultural inculcation/indoctrination. Not that there is a state anymore. The closest modern analogue is the community court where civic duty is enforced, but not according to any national mandate or authority beyond the will of the community. There's no one left to stifle freedom. By definition, this is the freest much of mankind has been in a millenium.

Wait, there's a echo in this building. A young woman is pacing where the artists and author's of past revolutions paced. What is she doing here? Why is she crying? Watch, as she throws he glasses into the cubbyhole extending out of one side of this dry room. As the glasses strike them the books finally topple over, potential energy finally bearing fruit. And as we know from our digital lectures in the city center plasti-park, for every action there is a reaction.

TO BE CONTINUED...