Nothing interesting happened while I was at Marisa’s grave, but then again, I picked this specific area precisely because nobody comes around here. I hang around there for about an hour or two before I figure that it’s best for me to head home. My apartment’s not too far from here, only a ten-minute walk. I don’t have the money for a fancy gated high-rise apartment, but the place I live in is good enough. The walls are thick enough that I can’t hear what other tenants are doing in their rooms, and the rent’s pretty reasonable. The only issue I have is that my landlord has a habit of being unreliable.
He’s a member of the PearlCoin Organization, so he’s usually busy dealing with those sorts of people. As a result, it takes him forever to get to things that need maintenance. The worst part is that there’s a box on the front desk where us tenants slip in pieces of paper that’s supposed to help notify him of problems in the apartment faster, but it hasn’t worked. For example, my heater has been broken for three months now and he’s yet to fix it. I guess it’s not that important anymore since the weather’s getting warmer, but I’m still pissed about having to spend all of winter freezing my ass off.
My room is on the third floor of the apartment. Since I don’t trust elevators, I use the stairs. The nice thing about using the stairs is that merely walking to and from work gets me good exercise. At least I think it does. My mind’s focusing on other things as I reach up the stairs, and because of that I accidentally bump into someone.
“Ah, shit…Sorry. Are you okay ma’am?”
The small albino woman I’ve bumped into is my current next door neighbor who moved in shortly after Marisa’s death. I don’t know anything about her beyond the fact she seems to work at night and sleeps during the day. Really not all that different from my life. She looks up at me irritated and sighs.
“…I’m not going to get mad at you because we’ve never actually talked before, but despite my looks, I am a man.”
With that she…He walks off. I seriously spent the last seven months thinking that guy was a woman. Turns out traps are lot more boring in real life. With that thought in my head, I unlock the door to my apartment and head inside. My apartment isn’t the biggest out there, but it’s not cramped at the very least. As long as you don’t mind the random crap strewn about all over the place. I’m saving up money so I can move into an actual house, but that’s not going to happen for a while. I recall Marisa once suggesting that I sell my DVD collection. I of course rejected such blasphemy, and this resulted in an argument between us.
The first thing I do after I come home is start rummaging through the fridge for dinner. Something I usually do before heading out to work, but the whole ‘having to work a different shift’ thing has messed up my usual schedule a bit. I pick out some microwave chicken dish and boot up my computer while it heats up. Computers in the territories tend to be a bit slower compared to the ones from LOVE, but at least you get a fully uncensored internet. I know all of the websites on servers in LOVE use .com and .org addresses and they block anyone not from LOVE so it’s extremely difficult to access even with a VPN.
When I open my browser, I look through the recent emails I’ve got. Most of these are spam, but one of them seems to be from… Bernie? The guy who got sick? I’ve never even so much as greeted him before. I know Mildred has a clipboard in the backroom at the store where employees can write down contact information they’re comfortable with sharing…I only just now remember that. I also just now remember that I put my email on said clipboard because this is the first time anyone from work that’s not Mildred has bothered to message me.
Hi, it’s me Bernie. From Mildred’s. I hope I don’t creep you out too much by sending you this message. I just wanted to apologize for needing you to work my shift. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit, but it turns out I didn’t actually get food poisoning. Something went wrong with the pharmacist at the drug store, some medications got mixed up, and my usual allergy medication was mixed up with laxatives. I did need the day off, but I apologize if I made my situation sound more serious. My stomach’s feeling better now, and I can work my shift tomorrow. I know I should tell Mildred too, but I can’t seem to get a hold of her.
Reading this email left me with a few concerns. First of all, I hope that pharmacist was fired. That’s the only drug store we have for miles, and while I don’t really need to visit there often, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard of an incident like this happening. I suppose things like this are why medical licenses were a requirement for medicine back in the old world. All that happens now is that if you spend enough years as an apprentice for a senior medical worker, then you can get a job in said field. The quality of the medical workers to come from this practice usually comes from the quality of the senior medical worker.
So, if the senior medical worker is bad and fucks up frequently, then their apprentice will also most likely end up the same way. Some territories have excellent health care, while others are so bad, you’d be better off just trying to treat yourself. I think the healthcare around here is decent enough. At least the people at the clinic are good, but the pharmacists tend to be of mixed quality. As such, incidents of mixed-up medication aren’t uncommon around here, and have even led to death a few times. Still, it’s not all bad. There was one positive incident where a man’s sildenafil prescription got swapped up with some hypertension meds. But of course, one positive exception doesn’t change the fact that you need to be really careful when visiting the drug store.
Secondly, would it really kill Mildred to send out notices to everyone whenever she’s out on one of her expeditions for more old media? She can be pretty irresponsible for a store owner at times. The most she does whenever she’s on one of her trips is tell maybe one or two employees about it, and then leave a small note on the counter that always gets thrown away by the next person on shift. All she needs to do is send out a group email when she needs to (you know, just like the old world businesses that she’s desperate to emulate). I even suggested this to her once, but she refused for the reason that not everyone has computers… So, I guess she just prefers the majority of workers to be out of the loop, compared to a few people not knowing what’s going on. I write a small email to Bernie wherein all my thoughts are expressed in three short sentences.
Hey, I’m not creeped out, it’s fine. You should talk to the pharmacists if they’re screwing with your meds like that. Don’t mind Mildred, she’s out on an expedition getting new stuff for the store.
Hopefully the message is sufficient enough. After checking my email, I browse through fuhenfutou.xyz. A terrible “generalized forum” filled with awful people that I only really bother with because it occasionally has some neat things related to stuff I like posted. But even then, I’ve been finding myself contemplating if it’s even really worth it to continue having an account on the site. Especially with the negative posting score I have that makes it impossible for me to comment more than once a day due to reasons I’d rather not think about right after work.
I guess I find the political threads kind of funny, in the same way monkeys throwing their crap is kind of funny. It consists of nothing more than Outside LOVERS and HOME Lodgers (they used to call themselves Outside HOMERS, but the memes involving either an Ancient Greek poet and a popular cartoon character killed that off) getting into arguments with each other, with plenty of pseudointellectual paragraphs thrown at one another. I don’t feel like melting my brain with poorly thought-out politics today. I just browse a few decent boards related to my interests until the microwave indicates to me that my dinner is ready.
After getting my dinner, I move on to pursuitspecial.xyz, a blog by some anonymous people meant to collect news of what’s going on in LOVE, HOME, and the territories. It’s an impressively accurate blog, and the only real way to know what the hell is going on in the world without any bias in the reporting. They also have a small forum, pursuitspecialdriversseat.xyz where readers of the blog can mingle. Maybe it’s because of the more serious nature of the site, but the people here are a million times better than the asshats at Fuhenfutou. The fact that there’s no voting system on posts helps too. There doesn’t seem to be anything big today.
I can see there are some reports of political dissidents in LOVE having their LOVE POINTS reach zero and being sent to mental health centers. But that’s as newsworthy as saying the grass is green. However, even on slow news days the forum is always bustling with conversation. The most common threads are people who grew up in LOVE or HOME retelling their experiences. The mods also put in effort to make sure no one’s lying and making up bullshit stories for attention gets you permabanned. I’ve read enough of these testimonies and anecdotes that I have a pretty good understanding of how the world came to be what it is today and what it’s like to grow up in LOVE and HOME.
I’m not a history expert, but my understanding of the history of the modern world is this; sometime in the first half of the 21st century the world split into three different factions after a series of political strife and conflict. The specific details are complicated, and I don’t have the best understanding of the issues. But it would seem to be that people were finding it more difficult to find any sort of agreement with each other. As time went on, conflict slowly but surely escalated until the year 2030, when the “old world” officially ended, and the split occurred after much bloodshed.
In LOVE, the first faction, the people are born and raised in a “residential tower” that they’re not allowed to leave due to the government’s claim that there are deadly spores outside that will damage their organs. Granted, organ damage and death from such is common in LOVE, but it’s due to the monthly “medicine treatments” that citizens are required to get. Those deaths are blamed on the spores. The people spend all their lives in these towers. Living in their own “suite”, they’ll spend their lives being sent to various “education rooms” to get the LOVER education of propaganda. Once they come of age, they’re assigned a career by the government and then spend the rest of their lives on that career. They may also be shipped to another residential tower depending on said career.
Thanks to the incredibly advanced technology, the average citizen of LOVE has all of their needs met by the government as long as they keep their LOVE POINTS high. LOVE POINTS being a currency of sorts. Every person in LOVE is born with 2000 points that then rise or decrease based off their actions. LOVE POINTS are earned by doing as one is told. By repeating the propaganda about spores, by doing well in your studies and work, by punishing those who disobey…you get the idea. LOVE POINTS are decreased when one spreads “HATE”. “HATE” being whatever the government dislikes.
So, disagreeing with/criticizing government propaganda, not following along with the career you’re assigned, rejecting “medicine treatments”, trying to leave the residential tower, having more than one child, things like that. Losing LOVE POINTS causes one to lose access to personal belongings, food, healthcare, and other such things. Violent persecution against the people spreading “HATE” is also highly encouraged. When someone’s LOVE POINTS reaches 0, they are sent to a “mental health center”. These “mental health centers” are prisons where prisoners live in the worst conditions imaginable and are then subjected to horrific experiments by the scientists of LOVE.
In order to avoid that, most people in LOVE do as they’re told. Especially since there are surveillance cameras all over the residential towers, even in private suites. With all this in mind, it would seem that if one was miserable living in LOVE, they would have no real chance of escape. However, escapes have and still do happen. There are groups in the territories dedicated to helping people from LOVE escape. You see, for as strictly regulated as LOVE’s internet is, and for all the surveillance cameras out there, the more rebellious people of LOVE have found a way to be able to hack their computers and access websites they shouldn’t be able to have access to without being discovered.
Through this, dissidents who want to defect from LOVE are able to contact these groups and figure out an escape plan. These escape plans usually involve hacking into the surveillance systems and getting the defectors to leave via the sewers. However, there can be variations in how escapes work. Although the government of LOVE does have severe consequences for failed escape attempts, those are thankfully rare.
Life for the people in the second faction HOME is comparatively less technologically advanced than LOVE, due to the fact that HOME banned any and all technology made after the 19th century. Originally, HOME started off as just a society of dissidents from LOVE and it honestly wasn’t too different from the territories outside of having a government and laws. They also had an incredibly tense relationship with LOVE, with threats of war and conflicts between the two were frequent. However, a “cultural revolution” of sorts happened at HOME. The people of HOME were finding themselves growing increasingly paranoid about being taken over by LOVE and sought to snuff out anything that could potentially lead to their society becoming absorbed by LOVE.
The conclusion they came to was that modern technology, the sexual revolution, and secularism were to blame. So came the bans of modern technology and “deviant” behaviors along with a shift to theological rule. This came with several challenges. For one, HOME, like the other factions, consists of a third of the world. Which meant that figuring out what religion the theological rule should be based off of was impossible. This inevitably led to a split up between all the states on religious ground. Although HOME still technically refers to itself as a nation, the states themselves tend to vary greatly based off religious belief, and it’s not uncommon for some states to have conflict with other states. This weakening of HOME, along with the destruction of modern weaponry, made LOVE lose any interest in continuing to fight with HOME. Rather, LOVE prefers to use HOME as another way to push propaganda about why their culture is better.
People from HOME aren’t forcefully locked into their homes, they have the freedom to enjoy the nature around them. However, they’re forced to follow the religious beliefs of which state they’re born in, aren’t allowed to express themselves in ways that society considers “deviant” and are forbidden from so much as showing interest in foreign technology. Sure, there is no LOVE POINTS system, no being sent to a “mental health center” with awful experiments being performed on you, but if one doesn’t fit in, they will be the victim of severe social ostracization and persecution. Furthermore, incidents of witch hunts aren’t uncommon in HOME and have led to innocent people being wrongly executed or violently tortured.
Since there are no surveillance cameras and HOME has a cultural attitude of “don’t like it, then leave”, it’s not like a dissident of HOME has to worry about potentially being caught during escape. The issue is figuring out where to escape to. In contrast to LOVE mostly being urban cities, HOME is mostly rural parts of the world that are miles away from the closest neighboring settlement. So, this means that someone looking to leave HOME at best is still going to have to struggle with the elements for several days before reaching their destination.
Which leads to the third and final faction, the territories. There is no real official name, it’s just the territories. I don’t really need to know more about the place I’ve known my whole life obviously. Well, some territories are better than others. I would say I live in one of the better territories, but then again, I’ve never lived anywhere else. Even though there’s no real government or political system ruling the territories, there are still political views. These political views tend to be how much people support or don’t support their local cryptocurrency group, and whether they’re more sympathetic to LOVE (an Outside LOVER) or more sympathetic to HOME (a HOME Lodger). But nobody really has the power to change anything, so they just argue and debate online.
These arguments became so numerous that the mods of PSDS decided to move them to a general thread. Although the debates here are less obnoxious than the petty arguments on fuhenfutou, they’re still painfully repetitive and don’t bring anything new to the table. Outside LOVERS tend to believe that the more horrific stories of LOVE are overexaggerated and that LOVE should be praised for its advancements in technology and acceptance of LGBT groups. Despite their claims of LOVE not really being that bad, for some reason, they never feel compelled to move there. HOME Lodgers go on long tangents on how we could end all strife and problems in the territories if we just stopped tolerating sexual degeneracy and women knew their place again. Conveniently, they ignore the “no modern technology is allowed” part of HOME’s culture.
…It’s all tiresome. I grew up in a family of Outside LOVERS, and I’m not on good terms with them. So, you could say that I hold more resentment towards Outside LOVERS. But I can’t say that I’m really all that fond of HOME Lodgers either and I’d most likely be fucked if either side got what they wanted. It’s easy to just write these people off as just loonies arguing on the internet. But you know, Mildred was there when the split of 2030 happened, and according to her and other people around her age the political strife that led to the split was also seen as just “weirdo fringe groups” as well. Knowing that just makes me feel anxious about the future, so I try not to think about it too much.
I decide to turn my computer off and get ready for bed. Having to wake up earlier than usual has me feeling tired despite it only being 11. I have the day off tomorrow, so that’s nice. I probably won’t do anything special with my day off, I never really do. But you know, it’s always nice to not have anything to do. Even if I wanted to do something, I don’t have any friends I can hang out with. I guess I had a decent social group as a kid but looking back those were just “people I hung out with” rather than “real friends”. Maybe that’s why I feel so much responsibility for Marisa. She actually saw me as a “friend” even if I didn’t see her as one. After brushing my teeth and changing into sleepwear, I climb into my bed and fall asleep not too long after.
Author’s Notes: An entire chapter of nothing but lore dumping? Woooo! Yeah, sorry if this chapter’s a bit boring. I gotta say, uploading these old chapters I had written before is a somewhat interesting experience, mostly because I can notice problems with my writing and tweak it a bit (I’m well aware that I have a problem with run on sentences for instance).
