Life is a light emitting diode. In a neonopolis mired in untold millions of dark nights of the soul, at the last, we were left with the lights. The ceaseless wheedling reds, blues and greens, primary colours of persuasion, cybernetic cyanotypes. The massive bioluminous truetone 5D advertising screens, blasting and cajoling and importuning, personalised to within an inch of your life, dictating fashions, creating trends, ending fads and shifting paradigms, all in real time. Son et lumiere, sturm und drang, sound and vision … and eventually, sound and fury, signifying nothing, just an empty echo inside a synth’s dream of electric sheep.

The vast sprawling leagues of crumbling dreams and connective tissue, the pulse and the impulse, the will to power that kept the consensual hallucination that was neonpolis humming, growing, agglomerating, accreting, coalescing … no one was really sure but the rumours were strong. Somewhere high in the clouds of static and smog, betrayed by a vague and opalesent grey-green glow, a few putrescent shades off the stuff that passed for blood in a synth, the Other was pulling the strings, pushing our buttons, leading the dance.

Time has no meaning to a synth. Oh sure, your average synthetic can reel off definitions, expound on concepts, parrot shared intelligence, thanks to ancient breakthroughs by actual humans. But what really goes on between those 3D-printed, made-meat ears? Do androids dream of electric sheep? Do synths really think about space and time? Or do they just drone on in their electric dream, slave to some greater good, oblivious to the ticking of the seconds, the hum of passing hours, the shuffling off of mortal coils. To be immortal is to be ineffably, unutterably cursed, and not to care because you can’t.

Vanishing points
Time has no meaning to a synth. Oh sure, your average synthetic can reel off definitions, expound on concepts, parrot shared intelligence, thanks to ancient breakthroughs by actual humans. But what really goes on between those 3D-printed, made-meat ears? Do androids dream of electric sheep? Do synths really think about space and time? Or do they just drone on in their electric dream, slave to some greater good, oblivious to the ticking of the seconds, the hum of passing hours, the shuffling off of mortal coils. To be immortal is to be ineffably, unutterably cursed, and not to care because you can’t.

Dark night, black night. Ah, around sequential circuits with interspersions of insipid neon they go.  All the while the rain comes down. Incessantly. The precipitation lubricates the tracks. Ah that glint and shine. It's almost hallucinatory. Certainly those wet verges, smeared rainbow colours don't appease the eyes.  They dazzle and frazzle an already disturbed mind.  

Then there are the ears and what they hear. The rattle of the big boxes. Mobile boxes with seats. The hard pressed, into those seats,  listen to wheels on steel. Steel on wheels as they fettle the metal.  Screech.  Power lines hum.  The commuters bums are numb. It's a long drag to the Sub_urbs. Where the neon glow recedes into the dark night.

The chameleon changes its colours to assume the hues and textures of its environment. In the rainforest, there exists a lizard that thermoregulates, adjusting its temperature to the ambient surroundings, rendering it invisible to
snakes and heat-seeking predators. In the city, it paid to blend in, to assimilate. Thermoregulate, even. It was an art. There were tricks, tools. You
learned or got burned. We all fade to grey.

Zhang sits in the back of the white saloon, radio on. Traffic at a crawl. It's Radio VOZ. Voice of Zootropolis. Beamed out globally from the ultimate UCM, a city of 100,000,000. Regarded as the voice of the free world. "It's days are numbered' Zhang chortles to himself.

You could find anything you wanted in the pleasure zone. Mostly we wanted imperfection. The second sexual revolution, the coming of the synths, had sated our desires, made us bored with beauty. Perfection was a platitude, symmetry stifling. You might as well be fucking a Stepford Wife or a Barbie doll. Ho-hum. So the new servosynths strove for something else; the flaws, the flab, a whiff of decay, a blast of flatus. The ineffable desirability of broken, dirty things. Most of us had long since lost the ability to deal with actual humans. Why bother? And how would you know half the time anyway?

You could find anything you wanted in the pleasure zone. Mostly we wanted imperfection. The second sexual revolution, the coming of the synths, had sated our desires, made us bored with beauty. Perfection was a platitude, symmetry stifling. You might as well be fucking a Stepford Wife or a Barbie doll. Ho-hum. So the new servosynths strove for something else; the flaws, the flab, a whiff of decay, a blast of flatus. The ineffable desirability of broken, dirty things. Most of us had long since lost the ability to deal with actual humans. Why bother? And how would you know half the time anyway?

Keep your electric eye on me babe. Put your ray gun to my head. But this ain’t no moonage daydream. This is the Big Chip. The circuit that never sleeps. Yes, you are under surveillance. The dream police exist. Step out of line, speak out of turn, think outside the stream and you will be terminated, liquidated, vaporised in the blink of an eye in the sky.

You take your creature comforts where you can find them. Because life tends to be nasty, brutish and short, even though we have cracked the genome and can live forever. Eternal life? You can keep it. Give me a cold beer, a hot synth and some spuntini salad.

They’ve been watching you for a thousand years. Which to the Other is a day. The trick is to see and yet not to see. And by doing so, lessen the chance of being seen. Scene: a superfast train, total brain drain. Is she a synth that’s been thrashed within a nanoparticle of her life, plug pulled, dessicated and dejuiced; or just another sad sack of flesh, fluid and bone ground down by neonopolis and its unrelenting stresses and pressures? Only her handler, high up in the towers, knows for sure. But in the cracks, the crevices, the interstitial spaces and especially within the chemicals, respite can be found. In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.

Beneath neonopolis flowed the medium; a kind of ectoplasm that superconducted digital signals and electromagnetic pulses. It was a liquid city
beneath a city, clogged with the detritus of decommissioned synths and the odd human corpse that had been, well, liquidated. If this ur-city had a
lifeblood, this was it, this thin, clear watery soup that connected the dots, made the synapses snap and the wires hum. It was the fuel, really, but we
were putting out the fire with gasoline.

ZS, or Zombie Sydrome is a neurotic condition that affects a staggering 80% of ALL the social classes in Zootropolis. Causes the state believes are cramped living conditions, exaggerated use of smart devices, fixation on money and wealth, over consumption of endangered NON replicant species, contaminated O2, including sulfuric rain and by-products of plastic leaching into the food chain. Physical symptoms include slurred speech, a strange walking gait, a general disinterest in the world around them, and a bizarre reddening of the eyes.

A body in motion tends to stay in motion, if you subscribe to quaint ideas like the laws of thermodynamics. Kommand Zentrum made sure the city never slept, kinetic energy made manifest, a transport ballet terrifying in its precision and beautifulin its perfect execution. Synthetic intelligence and refinements of lithium ion transmuted into perpetual motion machines. Equal and opposite reactions to every action. Accidents were impossible. The trains ran on time.

That was the thing about neonopolis. You were never truly alone. Someone was always watching, looking over your shoulder, following in your footsteps,
peering inside your thoughts. They tried to camouflage the mental observation towers but a bit of creeping foliage couldn’t really disguise the creeping dread of complete state control of the populace. In the big smoke, big brother was all up in your business, 24-7. You deal, or you deal yourself out. End of story.

Margins of the matrix
We lived our lives on live circuits. Connected to the hive mind. Part of the mainframe. Brains drained. No pain. Anodyne. Another node, another number.
Life in ones and zeros. No more heroes. Just the hum of the hive, and the shrieking of nothing. Humdrum. Hmm....

At ZUBZ-Station Z-344W, a lone 'REPLICANT' lost in mind chatter walks the East-West feeder corridor, from Cubicle No 9988766 to waiting Zootropolis peripheral shuttle buses, as part of her daily commuter regimen...

Eventually we were all reduced to shadows. Tune out, turn off? Oh no, you were on the grid, in the grid, of the grid, eternally, inexorably, inevitably and intractably. In the beginning was the grid, and the Other smiled and saw that the grid was good. Good god. Was this what the city had reduced us to? Scuttling shapes, shades, simalcra, human palimpsests, serried ranks of digital elipses; the obverse of the platonic ideal, folorn, forgotten figures flitting through digital twilight.

Oh yeah, we’ll always be together in electric dreams. What a joke. The more connected we were, the more at one with the hive mind, integrated into the web, plugged in to the mainframe, the more we were truly alone. Who knew who was human and who was synth anymore? Your closest friends could turn out to be exotic alloys and fancy plastics and tissues grown in a laboratory. Won’t get fooled again, you’d say. But you would. And so the disconnection, the dislocation would begin. You wouldn’t even know if your own thoughts were real, or just another forcedownload as you slept. People who need people are the loneliest people in the world.

The white car could often be seen in the city late at night, cruising slowly like a shark, or simply stopped, watching, waiting. It glowed softly through the neon soup. It had no number plate or ID. Did it even have a driver? It flowed along with the bright red corpuscles of the taxis through sclerotic lanes. Was it a white blood cell, fighting some unseen infection? Or was it a new virus?

NOT FOR SALE

The servo-Synth’s gizmo beeps typhoon alert red...

The coming freakish wind and rain will usurp predictable order. Before the chaos ensues, it’s time to take refuge.
Keep a low profile.
Head north. Fast.

The synth bows to the Huracán Black. Stoops low to get under the hood. Sinks in. Doubles down. And merges with it’s iconic order.

Now they are primed. Ready to go.
At warp speed. Through the night.
So fast the rain won’t catch the

The information would come, mostly at night, from the handlers in the north, usually at an old coin payphone. The shrill blast of an old dial-up signal, and then the cochlear implant would take over. The information dump, and the pain, always the pain. Mostly operatives could survive an infodump. Mostly. Itwas like a dead letter drop from the old days of spycraft, except it was hundreds of thousands of gigabytes downloaded straight into your cranium, ina matter of nanoseconds, digital to analogue.