The Ghetto of Nostalgia I

They lived in a time, when anywhere, could be photographed to look like anywhere else, so it didn’t matter anymore, where one came from. The memory that people had of a place was indistinguishable from the memory that they had of any other place. It was a morbid era; the era of placid duplicity.   

She walked around the city, always on the edge of paranoia. She felt everywhere simultaneously. The first building, of block one, of any area, would be the Government Liaison Office. She passed by it. 

If she were to go inside the Government Liaison office, she would not encounter a person. It was thus that she skipped it. 

Human Labour, had been done away with in case of mundane drudgery. Instead, it was now engaged in producing hacks, which were innovative enough to keep everyone thinking that they were part of something, which was going to achieve something, but never enough, to really actualise the belief. It was a collaborative world. People worked together. People produced together. 

The myriad hacker collaboratives had created everything short of harmony. No one wanted to create harmony. It didn’t bring you the same frenzied gratification that creating a 3 dimensional, hologram mounted drone did. This is how most people shopped now; a hollow reflection of yourself hovering to the Utility Ports. No one saw the irony. No one was required to make the treacherous journey down the street. No one was required to walk on cobblestone. 

She too worked for a collaborative, trying to revive languages that had no script. Languages that could not be coded, because of the lack of a script had been lost. The first words of humanity, the grunts of labour – lost because of the absence of a written signifier.  

She continued strolling. It was tragic that all windows now, were a standard Government Issue size. All windows same; all perspectives same. It is disconcerting to never feel the touch of the magic of difference. 

She came across the face again, this face was on every third holographic projection – he was The Architect and you could not walk down a street, without being introduced to him thrice. She hated the face. It was him that was generally credited with what everyone thought was a phase of prosperity for humanity. She wanted to escape the face and never could – she was always twitching to avoid looking at that face, it represented something so sinister to her. 

Finally they were all in a prison because you could never be anywhere else. You could not escape, except to a rumour - they whispered of a place that was so resilient to change, of the kind that the government deemed progressive that it had been left to its own devices. They called it The Ghetto of Nostalgia and it was fabled to be in the east. 

She had often thought of going away; there is no east, when everywhere is the same and how do you get to a place that exists only in rumours. She just screamed and screamed and started running...