such open sharing of personal information would never have come to pass.
I remembered my surprise when I came across pictures of great leaders while leafing through historical archives.
There they were, unadulterated, men and women of power, and most of them were grossly overweight.
Judged by modern standards, someone like Churchill could never be considered a hero. Who would trust a man as copiously fat as that? Any nude painted before the eighteenth century was completely out as well.
I came across an old schoolyard rhyme once.
Fatty fatty, two-by-four, can’t fit through the bathroom door!
Words like “fatty” hadn’t been used in years—too great a risk of hurting someone’s feelings. Not that there was anyone chubby enough to rate the term anyway. Like alcohol, tobacco, and the morally depraved man who paid money for sex with girls, these terms of belittlement had simply faded away. They were soon followed in their extinction by fat people and even skinny people. All gone. Under the constant monitoring of WatchMe and the constant advice of a health consultant, obesity and emaciation both had been driven out of the human experience.
I looked at Cian, my friend who had tried to starve herself to death along with me and Miach.
Her body fit perfectly within the prescribed margins for a healthy adult.
A boring body, in a boring adult size.
I quickened my pace across the airport lobby—itself designed with incredible attention paid to reducing any feeling of oppressive authority the structure might have naturally possessed. A cluster of yellow tables stood out against the burgundy interior, grabbing the eye. As I headed for the subway, dragging my bags behind me, Cian made an effort to match my pace. It was incredible really. For all the vast space here, and the high ceilings, I couldn’t detect a whiff of authority to the place. Admedistrative design was sterile like that. By their very nature, large architectural spaces had a certain fascist scent to them, a prideful authority that came from being monumental and leaked out whether the builders intended it to be there or not. Large structures made human beings small by comparison. Even public places, like this airport, did that.
Which was why the designers of the place had pulled out all the technological stops to reduce the impact of the airport’s size. I could sense the attempt to cover the unwanted stench of power, and it made me sick to my stomach. Calling the place a monastery made it sound too Christian, but it was true that the world we lived in often felt like it was being run by nuns. It was fascism, courtesy of Mary, Mother of God.
The world had been made thoroughly gentle. Even the arts.
My profiling sheet—just one of a multitude of healthmaintenance applications I had to use in my daily life—was like another version of me.
A version of me that accepted everything the real me hated.
My profiling sheet lived inside the admedistration server from where it monitored my daily routine, identifying my likes and dislikes and keeping a careful eye out for anything, be it literature or an image, that might cause me emotional trauma. Any novel or essay I was about to read would be scanned in advance and cross-referenced with my therapy records. If any content therein touched on a past trauma I had experienced, it would often be filtered out before I ever saw it. At the very least, I would receive a warning. This work of art contains potentially emotionally damaging material , or my favorite, This novel contains possible violations to the general morality code, article 40896-A as determined by the Health and Clarity Admedistration Moral Review Board of 4/12/2049.
When all possibility of fear was removed from our environment, a more subtle kind of fear replaced it.
“Do
I remembered my surprise when I came across pictures of great leaders while leafing through historical archives.
There they were, unadulterated, men and women of power, and most of them were grossly overweight.
Judged by modern standards, someone like Churchill could never be considered a hero. Who would trust a man as copiously fat as that? Any nude painted before the eighteenth century was completely out as well.
I came across an old schoolyard rhyme once.
Fatty fatty, two-by-four, can’t fit through the bathroom door!
Words like “fatty” hadn’t been used in years—too great a risk of hurting someone’s feelings. Not that there was anyone chubby enough to rate the term anyway. Like alcohol, tobacco, and the morally depraved man who paid money for sex with girls, these terms of belittlement had simply faded away. They were soon followed in their extinction by fat people and even skinny people. All gone. Under the constant monitoring of WatchMe and the constant advice of a health consultant, obesity and emaciation both had been driven out of the human experience.
I looked at Cian, my friend who had tried to starve herself to death along with me and Miach.
Her body fit perfectly within the prescribed margins for a healthy adult.
A boring body, in a boring adult size.
I quickened my pace across the airport lobby—itself designed with incredible attention paid to reducing any feeling of oppressive authority the structure might have naturally possessed. A cluster of yellow tables stood out against the burgundy interior, grabbing the eye. As I headed for the subway, dragging my bags behind me, Cian made an effort to match my pace. It was incredible really. For all the vast space here, and the high ceilings, I couldn’t detect a whiff of authority to the place. Admedistrative design was sterile like that. By their very nature, large architectural spaces had a certain fascist scent to them, a prideful authority that came from being monumental and leaked out whether the builders intended it to be there or not. Large structures made human beings small by comparison. Even public places, like this airport, did that.
Which was why the designers of the place had pulled out all the technological stops to reduce the impact of the airport’s size. I could sense the attempt to cover the unwanted stench of power, and it made me sick to my stomach. Calling the place a monastery made it sound too Christian, but it was true that the world we lived in often felt like it was being run by nuns. It was fascism, courtesy of Mary, Mother of God.
The world had been made thoroughly gentle. Even the arts.
My profiling sheet—just one of a multitude of healthmaintenance applications I had to use in my daily life—was like another version of me.
A version of me that accepted everything the real me hated.
My profiling sheet lived inside the admedistration server from where it monitored my daily routine, identifying my likes and dislikes and keeping a careful eye out for anything, be it literature or an image, that might cause me emotional trauma. Any novel or essay I was about to read would be scanned in advance and cross-referenced with my therapy records. If any content therein touched on a past trauma I had experienced, it would often be filtered out before I ever saw it. At the very least, I would receive a warning. This work of art contains potentially emotionally damaging material , or my favorite, This novel contains possible violations to the general morality code, article 40896-A as determined by the Health and Clarity Admedistration Moral Review Board of 4/12/2049.
When all possibility of fear was removed from our environment, a more subtle kind of fear replaced it.
“Do
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