The Ballet, online Part 5

Miriam left the station and started walking to her office. The state had retrofitted every building in town with electro-synthetic screens much like the ones on the train, rx only on the buildings the ads, purchase exhortations to join iGod, and political messages were 200 feet tall and as long as a city block. Impossible to ignore, over the last 25 years or so, most everyone had joined the state and signed away any privacy rights to Google. People did this willingly at first, lured by the bright shiny promise of convenience, but then, after the state realized access to what used to be private information could help them “organize” society “more efficiently,” people were coerced into signing away their souls with the even better promise of new homes, new jobs, even new spouses and families if they wanted. Most of these promises were actually kept. For some reason, that just made Miriam feel worse.

Miriam and most of her friends from the brownstones were among the last holdouts. They hadn’t joined iGod, and refused to give any information to the Google state. This made them outcasts at best. They knew it was just a matter of time until they were declared outlaws, some fake charge brought against them to force them to goose-step in line with the rest of the zombies who were too apathetic or too worn out to care anymore. The funny thing was, Miriam cared deeply. Her neighbors cared deeply. They were old enough to remember the days before the Google-iGod state, when windows were windows instead of billboards, when people could live where they wanted and associate with whom they wanted, when people dated and fell in love and made lifelong commitments to each other, when religion was about a higher state of being, instead of about being controlled by a higher State. The question that kept running through Miriam’s mind today was, “Do I dance with the state, or sing a new song, and probably suffer the consequences?”

Next week: The Children, Part 1