The Devil’s Panopticon: And God’s Grin
The room filled slowly with adults. Most of them were men with the rest being something else, all tolerated, all gathered in the same bland auditorium, as most knew the more hype places would be crawling with college kids and actors, people who were useful but not at the present. Foolish clowns and dancing divas would submit to their higher power soon enough. After all, the people in the auditorium recognized the experts as themselves. With high IQs, they need not exert themselves just yet. Fools are fools no matter, flat characters in a round world. Spend, spend, spend.
“All Pronouns, I have gathered you today to share my personal thoughts and opinions on how we can make a better world with the technology we have gained. It is in our hands to use our gifts and the gift of technology to alter the course of mankind. Do not worry about your phones being hacked, the ones the doorman politely told you to keep. It runs on new wheels now, and no one can access it but you, as it knows you. Fear of the unknown need be no more. We’re in charge with our tightly folded cortexes.”
“Oh, I see a question already. Shoot away…” the man dressed in a violet suit said. He stopped pacing the stage, turning his full gaze to the third row.
“How will we blend in with the public? I didn’t see anything about that in the five-hundred-page introduction to this conference.” The man, obviously obese, had sweat rolling down his bald head into his lips. Prior to the conference, he’d eaten a bag of Cheetos, delicious morsels, licked away with molecules left, as he saw all there was.
“It’s simple. I suppose you missed page four-hundred and fifty-two, my fine sir. Have you ever heard of relating to, ‘That which is denied?’ The public wants certain sympathies and has many triggers due to the sheer vanity of our population. Tell them they have emotional intelligence, that even you are a bad test taker, that you don’t need college to succeed, that you worry about the arrogant who cannot relate to the public. Oh, rest assured, if my name isn’t Tony, that they all will fall for it. Tell them there are wormholes to Mars,” Tony said.
“Yes, yes,” the man said. He wanted to lick his thumb again. So small, so delicious.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is our domain. We control the range. After all, it is with our great feats that tell of our genius, of how we raise the children to appreciate our skills, to guide the childish who have the ability but not quite mix of genius of perspective. It’s in our DNA to rule. All of those who are present today have received the results of their tests already, I presume. We’re all related to royalty. It connects us together in superiority,” Tony said.
The crowd nodded its head as the projector flashed behind Tony.
“Let us begin.”
“The Panopticon, the architectural design where the means of control are in a watchtower
in the middle of a group, originally this was used in prisons. The people within surveillance are unaware that they are being minded twenty-four-seven. In this way of raising humanity, people are not aware they are being watched. This keeps the ruling elite safe and away from abuse. It also keeps the unintelligent persons from exerting control over the man in the watchtower. All people want their interests taken care of, but they do not deserve it.
Imagine how far we’d be if people would give up their governance to the competent and let us handle the challenges in which truly reflect the benefit of existence on this planet and to others.
In closing, I would like to quote Einstein, “What the inventive genius of mankind has bestowed upon us in the last hundred years could have made human life carefree and happy if the development of the organizing power of man had been able to keep step with his technological advances. As it is, the hardly bought achievements of the machine age in the hands of our generation are as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a 3-year-old child. The possession of wonderful means of production has not brought freedom–only care and hunger.”
“Thank you to all who are watching. I’ve kept this part brief, not to bore you like hogs.”
The man who questioned Tony wiped beads off of his head.
“The best, the wisest, he who masters the art of ruling… as Plato said. That’s us, together, to regain the world’s purpose.
“Then they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.”
The Tower of Babel
Skyler got out of bed. Already the morning was making demands of her. She had to turn in yet another English paper on the War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. She grabbed it after hitting print on her old laptop that had three blue screens to its count.
“Literature class is so boring,” she said to herself, “It’s archaic garbage designed riddled with sayings and events that don’t matter anymore or could have never happened. The aliens can’t handle water? So you’re saying that some highly specialized and evolved organism comes to Earth and doesn’t realize that the planet is two-thirds water? Yeah, believable.”
“Skyler? Are you talking to yourself again?” Randy asked from the living room.
“I’m talking to the voices in my head, Randy. They say I want coffee,” she said.
“Really? My voices are saying something a bit lower.”
“You horndog,” Skyler returned. She walked into the small living room she hoped to move out of and to a bigger house in the suburbs. Apartment life with all of its people close by, especially in the cheap ones they stayed at, left annoyances of dogs barking, people fighting, dogs fighting, and sopranos.
“I don’t have time today. I have to turn in my paper on War of the Worlds by the socialist pig. I’m too much of a capitalist for you, aren’t I, Randy?”
“I believe in humanity,” said Randy, “I know that bothers you and that mathematical mind of yours, always tracing how far numbers can go.”
“I wouldn’t be with you if that were true.” It was. Randy was a mechanic at a small shop on the outskirts of the town. They’d been childhood friends turned lovers and High School sweethearts. Skyler assumed that opposites attracted. She was the negative and he was the positive of the relationship.
“You know you can do better than him,” her mother had told her.
“Mom, he has a soul,” she said.
“So do all dead people who die from starvation,” she snapped back. Her mother grew up in poverty, out in the country. Her heart had hardened due to the challenges she’d faced, hunger, embarrassment, and ridicule. What doesn’t kill you can make you evil, Skyler assumed.
“They had brick for stone, and they had asphalt for mortar.”
The Tower of Babel
The angels zeroed in on their first target. Jill and Megan were their names. They peeked through the satellite’s viewpoint.
“There are no angels to protect you from me, just flesh and teeth,” said Anna. She laughed under her breath. “You’re a tiny maggot in a big world. You would have grown to be so cute, so charming, so costly. We cannot afford your future. Everyone has their price, you see. You can sniffle one last time.”
The baby took in a breath and then choked before crumbling off Earth and into the void.
“Yuck, he managed to wet the bed through his diaper,” said Jill to Anna.
“They won’t need that bed anymore. They’ll whine and cry after first, but the strong must conquer the weak, or there will be no survival. This is ‘do or die.’ Think of all the refugees out there, all the starving children who could have been normal, yet we save brats like this who came into the world with weakness, cries, and would never have anything to give only selfishly take,” said Anna.
They moved on to the next target, hitting an old man with his drool covering half his face. His legs were partly split with his side arched up.
“Love me and kill me, baby,” Jill said. She hit the ray. The man with his tired face shot out some snot that mixed in with the drool and wrinkles. He let out a cry as he felt again in regions abandoned since his wife died at thirty.
“Marsha,” he whispered out.
And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”
–Tower of Babel
The people who had engaged in the first meeting with Tony began making public speeches about the coming of a New Age, a paradigm shift that would bring humanity the fruits of its labor.
“As the good Lord says,” said the man who had licked the Cheetos off of his finger in the bathroom at the conference prior sang out to the church, “By their fruits, you shall know them! Aren’t the techies working miracles? I want you to become those miracles. We could eradicate poverty, get rid of pain, stop every war with the power of the mind.
“I all know you hear the cries from the poor, the ones who were cheated by madmen and greed. With Tony, we can start a new chapter. The wicked will find a place on Earth no longer. They will fry in the flames and be no more but a spirit who tries to con God. No con-artists is on the level of God himself. The wicked are the fools with don’t have faith, who do not stand with the Lord. They show you their fruits. Give me an AMEN!” Marvin said.
“AMEN!”
Tony left from where he was behind the screen.
Already, he’d gained the favors of officials, and he had the army dispatched around every city. He had full access to all of the information of the world, and he knew he had filled the role of God. The panopticon would enslave the world, and it would follow his command. After years of suffering at the hands of his father, who was never pleased and now dead, and through higher education where he learned manipulation and how to lie, or be “creative,” as he called it, he would end the reign of all other humans. He wouldn’t have to show them. He’d know them after all. He laughed at his rhyme. Rhythm and rhyme fooled the best of dogs. Smoke and mirrors were necessary now but not for long.
Skyler stopped her car and stared forward.
What? She asked the light, “Go? It doesn’t say ‘go,’”
She turned her gaze to a yield sign that smiled. Angry, she hit the gas and slipped on the road. The median turned into a line as her speed increased. A new emotion filled her: rage.
“You know you should listen more in English class. These things have odd predictability about them. It’s almost like they are and were alive.”
“Shut up!” she said to herself. “The only things that are predictable are equations. There are answers. I know there are!” Her emotions amplified more and more.
“Have you ever tried, “Undefined? That there are two different answers to the same input?”
I’m arguing with my own thoughts. I can’t think!
“Don’t worry, the last time a girlie was on the list it was just as cliche. You’re nothing special. A flame. A fly. A contradiction through time.”
Skyler passed another yield sign. She felt her insides turn in emotional rolls. She parked her car on the side of the street and ran into the woods. She didn’t know why.
Her legs pumped through the brush. Trees slashed her as thorns ripped into her autumn capris. She started screaming. Each feeling from her head to her body was alive with energy she’d never experienced before.
The car didn’t stop.
Tony slammed into Skyler. He saw the woman’s body fly over his hood. Not wanting a lawsuit, he was prepared to pay, but it ruined his afternoon. The satellites were all up. He had control over the entire grid of the world as his employees translated it onto a supercomputer.
The woman began to stand up covered in blood with a patch of the skull showing. She didn’t move.
“Can I help you, ma’am? Are you okay? If you don’t mind, I can pay you any amount of money to say you fell on your own,” he said to Skyler.
“But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them,” Skyler said. Her smile went up, and she walked toward Tony who became paralyzed with fear from her appearance.
“A man in a box,” she said, staring at the yield sign, “hope in a box.”
“L-look,” Tony said. I’ll give you the car, everything, let’s get this meeting over with. I’ll give you anything. Say it!”
“I want the box. The one in on the dashboard.”
“I-I can’t give you that,” Tony said, wiping fear off of his brow.
“I can’t seem to give you anything, “Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”
Tony began to choke on his words. He slurred them and pushed them out with the effort of one masturbating with his head in a plastic bag.
The thrill of being human.
“Give me the box. I’ve already killed the girl to enter from which a human cannot define, or zero. As it was said last time, “ let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”
Tony ran to his car and grabbed the controller to the world.
“What a good man,” the voice said, a low note of Skyler’s voice. “I wouldn’t want to burden you.”
Dead Skyler took the controls and smashed it over and over. Every power grid fell, every server, frying, frying, frying until the world went black. Nations began to blame each other. They fought in what they had left.
So the sun went down at the dawn of a new Dark Age.
“Try again, you pesky beings!” He grinned. “Blah, blah, blah.”
