The year is 2041. No one is sure exactly how it happened. I suppose it was sometime after 9-11 when “homeland security” became the reason that we as a culture accepted there is no such thing as privacy. For the sake of the country and world safety, we lost our human rights; it just seemed like a sign of the times. Suppose we should have questioned in 2009 why the government cared how clear our reception was on our televisions essentially requiring that in order to receive a television signal, we had to have either a digital television or a digital converter box. Sure the perverts knew they weren’t the only ones who knew exactly how many times they ordered “adult” programs or the nature of the programs they watched, but it went over the heads of the masses that sonar technology… yes the same technology that people use to look at their unborn children in the womb or track sea life is the same technology the government used to see into our homes. I wouldn’t dare insinuate the government had anything to do with the GPS devices that Americans voluntarily carried with them. Our dependency on satellite radios in our cars, GPS navigation systems and not to mention mobile telephones was purely self-inflicted, but hella convenient for the establishment in their master plan to control and see all. Our lives were not our own for sometime, but we were too trusting and naïve to realize it. It still baffles me how we got HERE. Don’t know if it is true or not, but I had a teacher once tell me that if you put a frog in boiling water, he would sure as hell jump right out of it, but if you put a frog in cool water and slowly turn up the heat, he’d be fool enough to sit there and let you cook him. Well, I guess we’re all cooked. Before any of us knew what was happening, we were living a nightmare more egregious than George Orwell’s 1984. The only people who escaped were the undocumented people now commonly referred to as the Undocs. You see, they were like the invisible people unaccounted for in the census… in the world. They could see everybody, but no one could see them. In many cases they had intimate knowledge of the architecture of America. Hell they built it. Because they knew the bowels of America’s cities, the Undocs established a world, an exciting lively (only dimly lit) place underground that had the spirit of the speakeasys during prohibition and the potential of the mobster ridden early days of Las Vegas. Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t just a place to escape and have a good time by listening to forbidden music and spoken word. No the Undocs created a complex society with a hierarchy of its own. It was what one would have assumed the future of the world have been. To call it high tech doesn’t do it justice. The labyrinth contained structures were bizarro skyscrapers affectionately called core scrapers. There was a self-sufficient world for those who knew about the paradise the Undocs created and those willing to risk their lives to escape the robotic existence in The Perimeter.
