Zircon de Miek woke up in a cold fright after a dream about a giant serpent. The bleeding eardrums and the omnipresent strike of blood splattering against flesh continued across his mind. The whirling tubes of flesh stretched and expanded their way into the nucleus of a mind. 

Orange veins and a crimson sun hung in the sky. He saw the red lightning, as a voice crept and crawled into his mind, talking soft, unintelligible words to him. He remembered soaring in the strange sky, watching the red forever, letting the sky burn his forehead, and the great crackle of the serpent's jaws, as the blades unsheathed and he screamed aloud in great, agonizing pain. 

Sweat dripped from his forehead and crept into the mattress.

Near him, the PO-KT gave a quiet whine whilst it saved the dream as an.IKO. Into a collection of vast memories, the infinite skies, oceans, and years of memories, all piled in a pocket file. One by one, with bytes going from his slow, draining mind, into the sky. He wondered, remembered, envisioned those skies, the strange flight of his timid wings, and then quieted. Slowly, the PO-KT whined, hissing out steam from whirring fans. 

“Complete”

He straightened, stretched, while the cord connected to an earpiece in his head strained and tightened. 

Information from the newsfeed flooded his mind. A new drug, a football game. Tribe-like primitives living outside the State. A rebel had exclaimed that Knowledge was no longer a precious jewel. A death. A life. And more facilities, more experimentation, more progress. The State was growing like a grinding, eating, starving machine. Thriving, living, expanding...

Government cartoons featured the wide, dumb grins of two Ainomians. An article by W. Samson encouraged mass enlistment. A message detailed how ‘Today was the Glorious Massacre of the Barbarous Rebel Day’, the words curling across his tongue, purely flowing like all words from the State. He thought about festivals and Ferris wheels and hot chocolate and metal robots, the warmth of a blanket, and the plastic eyes of a fluffy bear.

It came in only a second until Zircon knew everything that had happened yesterday and that night. Files of it came into his mind, pulling him out of his drowsy, helpless state. He shivered and shuddered, laughing wildly, and wrapping himself in the thick sheets.

He smiled. Pleasure unfurled across his mind, spiked rapidly, and made his heartbeat strangely strong. 

The State triumphed overall. Victory over Ainom! From the trumpets blasting loud red, and orange whirling in flames over those deteriorated rotting villages. He repeated the words to himself, in his empty home, and imagined a raised arm, the red and gold stripes, binding together. From a poem he’d learned long ago, he recited those words again and again in his head, in false Poetspeak, with syllables jumbling awkwardly together and splitting apart to form a strange creation inside his mind.

Thoughts rippled across the water of his consciousness, slowly gathering into large waves that battered against his skull. He dreamt and thought and wondered. Sitting by himself in the cold of his home, idling away his hours. Rambling, muttering, remembering old thoughts, thinking of a dead world, thinking of the State, the army.

He wanted to enlist... He wanted to see the sun, the moon, the stars, the cold breath and icy frost, the fog of war… He wanted to feel the icy blast of the full cold and the full grey… But he had heard of the ice, the snow, the avalanches, the death’s, seen the corpses, the people, punished. His friends had gone. Escaped the State and left their homes. The army stood strong, full of guns, great people, men of higher cultures….. But he did his duty and stayed to work for the honorable, venerable State. Day after day… toiling away, giving speeches, growing old…

Seeing those days pass, watching the days unfold, no surprises at all, the boredom passing through, grumpy, awakened by the dreadful drudgery of work. 

Time was fleeting, strange across his hands, loose like sand, gone, gone, going away, fading away, softly, like falling dust, gone, gone…. Gone… Gone… Forever and ever, eternity going on and on, people he hated, people he disliked, people he bid farewell, gone, all gone. All gone! The ages, the years, the candles, gone… Gone!

Forever and ever, the cycle… Forever and ever, like a fiery wheel turning. Forever and ever...

He lay back in his bed, tilting his head back. He let himself be enveloped by the silence and heard the rustle of a burger wrapper against the air-conditioning. The soft sheets wrapped him loosely, dully resting with him, as he limply reached to the ceiling with a finger and traced a star. Then a circle. Then a nose. A mouth. A face. Some lips. Then nothing else.

He sat up. A spike of adrenaline poked through his head... Rushing through his mind were thousands of pocket drops from the PO-KT. Glorious things, they were. His brain buzzed. He smiled, a wide grin filled him, as excitement rushed from his mind into his legs and made him shiver. The air grew soft. The coffeepot whistled as steam blew from the spout. 

He grew silent, quieting himself, and listened to faint tapping of the sink, then the cold wind’s damp blasts.

He grew calm, passive, lying back in his water bed. The light from the infinite snowy mountains made the world gray, dreary, silent, peaceful, and happy.  Soft light danced across his eyes, and he wondered, dreamt quietly, strangely humming a tune in the silence as something made him buzz, shriek, laugh.

Outside, the waters surrounding Everest churned and frothed, smashing into the mountain once or twice. The ocean boiled, glaciers sailed like bone-white ships, and the wreckage of metal cities floated to the surface. Rusty boats, rusty radio antennas, rusty airplanes floated upon the seas, before sinking once again.

After a while, he changed into a lumpy suit and tie, stood up, and walked across the cold glass floor. He glimpsed at a view of the glorious place, to the concrete government offices to the places with smashed windows and poor people, where Soros lived. He ignored most of it, caring not for any of them below, but the food.

The coffee, freshly roasted, and the pancakes, sweet and soaked in syrup. He craved it all now, starved and thirsty after a long sleep.

As he sat and ate, he went into deeper thought, mumbling to himself about the absurdities of certain things. 

He wondered about money, things to buy, things to try out, dreams, success, jokes, the government, politics, the rebels, the people of Ainom, and the ruin of the State. Whirring strangely, steaming with freshness, as it filled and filled overflowed. He sat in a little corner of his mind, watching the world, the people, the tiredness overwhelming him, making him angry, hateful…

The people of the State, most of them rebels, most of them lying thieves, hypocrites of the modern world. He despised their fears, their loves, their hates. They were the cause of the mass killings, the useless riots, the strange rebellions that plagued his modern world.

Finally, he quieted. Silent. With a remnant of regret inside him.

He drifted deeper and deeper, the excitement of the morning fading away. The hope he saw in the State was gone. His eyes grew dim, the coffee he had forgotten about grew cold, and the pancakes dissolved into mush.

When his work alarm rang, he stood up, dumped the leftovers into the garbage chute, and went down the elevator. It rang, someone came out, and he went in by himself. Alone, listening to the whirring of gears and motors. He saw himself running out of the State, into the cold, shivering…. He wanted to, he wished to, He saw himself in that wild, energy, the great chaos...

He touched the down button with a limp hand. The elevator rushed down, silently clicking as it reached a launchpad. Zircon arrived, in the colorful dazzle of neon and plastic bulbs, in a daze. Tired and confused, he rang up an Auto-Taxi instead of Biking, as usual. But when it didn’t arrive, he walked in the cold instead.

A billboard lit up with crushed bird’s nests, shriveled squirrels, all over an infinite lawn, as the lawnmowers tore them up into furry shreds. Another one rambled about the flood, shifting into wrecked buildings, jungles of seaweed, fish, and nature intertwining around broken columns. 

People waved to him on the street, the National Guard, the Relieved Cross, and the Policy Reformer. All great people, working for the government. Keeping track of those dirty, grimy stupid faces. But he loosely ignored them, his thoughts distracted him with strange ideas.

Schubert played from the speakers above, and the Minister Of Conversation began to talk about the news outside of the State in his ordinary droning voice. 

On the television, a mustached man decried the Ainomians for killing and massacring citizens, bombing the State, attacking the State. Frozen bodies, dead soldiers, and a young boy, with his skull, stomped out. The casualties of an Ainomian Massacre, after a bloody attack by the savages. Another screen exclaimed about Robots, lighting up the icy world with pink and blue flashes. 

But some people didn’t listen, throwing rocks at the screen to watch it shatter. 

“Death to the State!”, the rebels yelled the strange Marxists, the childish Socialists, the Egalitarians. All against his glorious State.

They dumped and threw hard ice and snow onto the NewsKeepers Monitors, eventually breaking it into fragments and stomping on it with their tennis shoes and slippers.

They held tattered flags and yelled Liberty with no recognition of where true liberty lay. A young man wearing thick glasses screamed about the greatness of Ainom and decried the crimes of the better State. An Ainomian Nationalist again, invading the once-great youth and infecting the tank-borne with strange thoughts.

It was all taken care of after the police marched forward, deployed from their fellow Swarm, and grabbed the Resistors, and threw them into black vans, where the muffled yells were drowned out by gunshots and the Anthem Of The Stars. Poetspeak rang out into the air.

“Of thine, of such great worthy worship, we are to the great blood of the land. Running red, blazing furiously. Our tongues binded by the words of the mayoral candidates, greatness to arrive in our own time, we are the death-mongers, the arrival of the men of the police. We march further and faster. Fleeting is thine, of time, of life. But, of thine, we are the men of the city-state. Further, marching, furiously, greater than the Ainomian counterpart...”

It rambled on and on, growing unintelligible as it played further. He saluted, with a hand on his heart, smiling softly, as the rest of his brethren did, and continued along the way. 

A rocket fired, fire burst near him, smog crept into his lungs. Debris crept onto his face, smashed his nose, and let blood spurt from his lips.

“God!” he screamed suddenly, strangely, like an animal. He spat out blood and could drink the blood practically. His legs rolled strangely along, forward. He felt detached, discontent, gone… Gone from this world, faded away like a piece of dust in the wind, gone, useless. Legs wobbling along, stumbling along, almost tripping as the blood ran like thick stew, lapped up by dead bodies and fluffy dogs that bounced along. He saw that the people around him were running and fleeing, as a dead man croaked, and a stroller rolled carefully down the steps, something screaming from within.

More and more rebels flanked the police, shooting with their guerilla weapons, attacking all who approached. They dropped in from all sides, from wires, from lampposts, from PO-KT wires. Capping grenades, and smiling to themselves.

“Back away!”, said the Protection Officers, pushing him away from the battle. Their strangely steady eyes faded with exhaustion and weariness.

He stumbled into a bakery, rubbing his hands together in the warmth of the AC, grabbing a paper towel, and letting the blood soak from the open wound. He wrapped his nose in it, taped it with bandages and band-aids from the store owner. Laughed to himself quietly, and lazily walked over to the window. Along with hundreds of others, he watched the ensuing chaos.

Blood slashed from open wounds as snipers fired from tower to tower and the police marched forward to put down the riots. Grenades burst and fired rubble into the sky. Fat bunches of smoke floated into the air. Men screamed, guns blazed, and robots ran their great engines to fire .50 rounds into the rebels.

“Forth! Forth! Forth!”, screamed an old man wearing a black hat, screaming louder as a grenade hit him in the back and launched him into the sky. 

Guns and knives flashed as the light of the State shone on them. People grimly looked, laughed, or shook uncontrollably at the sight of a darkening balloon launching guns and rockets and bullets.

“We’re all dead!” screamed an impoverished, poor-looking man, who screamed onto the streets and was killed by the bullets. 

“Help! Help! Help!”, someone on fire screamed forth and rolled around in the bricks and stone. He continued to run around until somebody poured a bucket of water over him. But all that was left was a curled, crumpled, blackened, burnt chunk of flesh, whitened with ash.

Then, the rebels were dead, the smoke cleared, the New Republic’s flags were burned. The trucks took the rebels away, where they were stuffed in large piles, bound together by nets. He saw their awkward squirming, their strained faces, and tortured yelling. 

He went outside, eating a cream-cheese bagel, enjoying the fresh air, and watching the show.