I really get pissed off whenever people think I'm just going through a phase of teenage angst, that I pretend beautiful things are ugly just to be difficult. Once they've categorized my emotions as "angst," they feel free to ignore me or subject me to strange treatments. Heck, the city computer had me listed as a
Teenager suffering from depressive moods 2 deviations above standard; recomend drug treatment and/or counseling.
And then the bastards slip God-knows what brain hormone into our household's allotment of nourishment that makes me happy and normal and complacent.
Last year, they had me drugged for a couple of months without me knowing it. One day, I found myself inexplicably happy. Mom thought I was finally normal, and stopped being so worried all the time. I made lots of friends. I programmed my room to be a model of Athens c. 450 B.C.E., using a fractal algorithm to model the complexity of human interactions. The Educators took notice of my fractal model, gave me some bullshit award, and put me on the Government Programmer Eds. track. It was cool, I learned a lot of computers and networks and AIs and maths and stuff, and they moved my mom and me to a better apartment and gave us a higher daily calorie rating, with more variety in meal choices (as in, "do you want Red Goop or Brown Goop?"). Well, one day I was working on an eds. assignment about how to design useable visual metaphors for cyber-processes. I flipped through a color palate to choose the color to paint a trojan-horse virus processes, and settled on a nice pink tone. The virus would be a pink bunny-rabbit-cute thing, fun and cuddly to handle, but once activated would transform into a drooling and voracious beast that would tear the innards out of data storage units.
"Pink..." I thought to myself, and laughed. "I remember when I was a kid, I hated pink so much that I banned it from every part of my life... I would not wish pink (pink!) even on my most hated enemy. Of all the colors to choose now..."
But then I stopped laughing, because I could not recall ever stopping my hatred of pink. It was just a dammed color, but it really bothered me. Once I started to think about it, lots of my tastes had changed. I started reading my diary to see if any event caused such a change in tastes, and I noticed that the entries in my diary abruptly changed in a subtle way in the recent past. It was as if a different person was writing my diary, pretending to be the me who had always written in the diary. To confirm my growing fears, I scanned in sections of my diary, ran textual and psychological analyses, and compared them... yep, there was a definite, but slight, difference in the entries before and after a certain date. What the hell had happened to me?
Puberty?
I cracked open the city medical monitoring file (I was being trained as a government programmer so knew a few basic hacking tricks), and checked my hormone levels... nope. Nothing new there.
But even so, my entire personality had changed and I now liked the hated color pink. It sounds like a silly thing to get hung up on, but, well, I was disturbed. I mean, it was a fundamental foundation of my psyche that PINK SUCKS! So I started cracking any database that had information about me, any database at all. The matrix of data that is the net is mighty formidable and has lots of nasty protections to prevent people like me from finding what I want to know. But in a huge block of data-code in the highly protected (but foolishly protected, as it turned out, because I managed to sneak in a rarely used data overflow channel) city data core that maintains the ferro-concrete cube hive I call my "city," I came across a subsystem of the security block called "Citizen Maintenance." It made for some very interesting reading. Basically, each citizen's personality profile is given, with links to lots of other data about the person ranging from the general (as in what they look like, their sexual habits) to the specific (as in, how much of their last cup of coffee did they drink?). If a citizen's profile falls outside some norm, their file is marked "needs correction" and some treatment is advised. Well, my file fell in the "has been corrected" pile. It had a remark that the subtle drug cocktail slipped into my daily food serving was sucessfully correcting my depression and lack of productivity.
Before this, I had no idea that I was being drugged, that I was being forced into some happy norm.
I was furious. I really hate pink, and these assholes had made me like pink. So, I did what any conscientious monkey-wrenching hacker kid would do. I created a listener bug (metaphorically represented as a small, flying eye) which I sicced on the city police commissioner's login account. The next day, my bug came back to me and informed me that it was not able to follow his flow from his home-room to his office-space because it was bounced by the firewall security protecting the police data net. I modified the bug to look like the normal data associated with a person slogging through cyber-space metaphors of data -- in this case, the bug would appear to the security wall as a parameter setting about the police commissioner's metaphor type preference. So, the next day my bug flies home to me, and shows me how the police commissioner flowed through the security levels of the city's police protection grid to the highest security clearance. I erased my bug, and promptly set myself up a hidden high-level city account, with a login as a meta-police-commissioner. I used my newfound access privaleges to stop my drug treatment, and as and afterthought proscribed laxatives to the police commissioner and all the people on "Citizen Maintainence" payroll.
So, enough story-time. The point is, people are drugged all the time.
|
It is a good thing to drug people into normalacy: |
It is a bad thing to drug people into normalacy: |
|
|