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Real Eyes Realize Real Lies
#WritcoStoryPrompt45
Write a story based on this famous excerpt from The Night Slowly Came by Kate Chopin:
I am losing my interest in human beings; in the significance of their lives and their actions. Someone has said it is better to study one man than ten books. I want neither books nor men; they make me suffer…
°°°°°°°°°°
He hadnn't been out of the house in over a week. A brief and cursory glance at the news before he left to check for any disasters or new regulations said it was anything but a mistake. There were over 1,400 more people sick just today in his state and well over a quarter million dead before a complete year had even passed. That was since they had officially started calling it a pandemic. Those numbers, of course, were just in the country he inhabited alone. Worldwide it was turning into what would be refered to as a disaster in planning for what he could only assume centuries if not eons to come. It wasn't so much that they didn't know what precautions to take and weren't trying to get people to do so but people were resistant to anything that even appeared like someone else telling them what they should do, especially whenever they had grown up fighting against exactly that.
He supposed that the main thing that surprised him about the day was the fact that there were actually people out in public wearing masks. Here in the heartland of America he lived among the sort of people who would not have their freedoms encroached upon. Weeks, perhaps months in all honesty, whenever he had gone out to eat, he had noticed that literally no one had masks on. It wasn't that people didn't understand the base concept of herd mentality, let alone immunity, what they missed was the fact that at it's base freedom entailed taking care of your fellow citizens and maintaining one's freedom while doing no harm to anyone else.
He could scarcely cast conjecture on the people closest to him, simple yet pure, whenever there were clear signs that people in the more well-to-do areas of the country were, in fact, rioting over the precautions that had been enacted and assaulting one another daily. Even more shocking was that in other countries there were even instances a vaccine centers being burned in protest.
He found himself laboring to actually care that humanity survived at this point in history. People seemed to be ready to blame people with no ties to anything other than humanity itself when the problem was what no doubt must have been engineered, even if only as a safeguard, to reduce it's numbers.
It was always somewhat troublesome to try and decide what evil lurked in the heart of mankind when one encountered it on a larger scale but in general the survival urge usually kept individuals from simply self destructing, he thought.
He smiled as he saw the organic old-fasioned ginger snap cookies had in fact been restocked and found some solace in that as he absently remembered where had read just a bit earlier about an actual person who had spent over 10 years in medical school to become a doctor. This person somehow, in their daily routine, had come to believe that the Earth was flat and had through his own decuction and patterns had decided that the lizard people that were out to destroy mankind. Not through and utilized and engineered biomechanical weapon that readily adapted itself and was specifically created to create new strains within perfected host that were prepped by chemical and mRNA manipulation. Instead he had come to rest on the idea that a sorftware engineer, no doubt a lizard person in his view, had engineered the vaccine and the very 'panic' itself in order to inject microchips into us all.
He had, of course, reported and directly documented all this on his GPS tracked cell phone, which literally could not exist on a flat earth and then destroyed thousands of doses of vaccine as a 'champion' trying to save mankind from...something.
He sighed as he made his way up to the self-checkout. Insofar is he knew he had been in this Dollar Store some dozen times and at no point had anyone, an actual person checked him out. He had seem someone who he assumed to be an employee a few times and even a manager he thought to ve stocking shelves but more than not there was never more than one, maybe two persons working there at a time. The old days of people crying that computers and robots would take their jobs was apparently over and the brave new world was here. He had come in for five different things and only found two. The shelves were never stocked either.
He had seen on his device just a couple days before that Walmart was going to have new robots that would roam the aisles and scan the shelves to tell what was missing in order to know what it was that it needed to reorder. He assumed that the next step would be to have robots that were loaded with certain items in a closed and maybe even remote environment that could stock the shelves. He was certain that if he had thought it someone else had.
Years ago, when he was in high school, the SMART system took care of all of the ordering but the employees still had to use the handheld terminals to input the numbers as they replentished the shelves. He always did enjoy stocking on the night shift abs had made his way up to management pretty quickly not because he was management material but because his mind kept a fair map of where everything in the store was and he never minded interacting with customers.
All of that had been phased out years ago and now everything was on the telecommunication devices that everyone had in their pocket at all times. If the item was in the store you could easily access the computer system and see that it was there and if it wasn't order it.
people had already been replaced and the reason why was that mankind had lost faith in one another because more than not it, as a rule, noted the lowest common denominator and most offencive person that it came in contact with in a day.
the system had eliminated those people but because of it's inadequacy and inability to the readily focus and parse the correct groups for the right wrongs and the general hidden nature if wrongs the good had been eliminated in an effort to prove itslelf.
The matrix moved too fast, became top-heavy in it's algrytmic procedure, people at the top put too much faith in it, used it exclusively as a labor saving measure, hurt and destroyed people at the bottom and the bottom rotted away and died. The blossom of the tecnological age was in freefall and the resultant explosion, the nuke falling from space when it hit would leave a mar on history that wouldn't be forgotten any time soon, if ever.
He sighed, thinking how he himself had depleted the three stores within a 75mi area of the B vitamins in just three months and that no doubt any other item that had been low volume sales could be depleted in the same manner because there had been multiple faces in the managers chair at each of them. The thing about the budget chain was that it wasn't going to instal robots to check the shelves, no one would work for no benifits, 20hrs a week in the middle of nowhere, alone when they routinely got robbed. The model was broken, the world was broken, it was all in free-fall and the sickness had given everyone a reason to refuse to do not just anything to save it but anything at all beyond watch the free fall.
The upside was he was old enough that he had seen the peak, the spark and now that the dumpster was on fire he was half enjoying the feel of momentum as is started downhill.
He smiled and nodded at the two people waiting for the single self checkout and the both enthusiastically smiled and acknowledged his feigned hurry as he pulled the double reciept out of the printer.
"Oops. He forgot his reciept!" he said and made his way into the parking lot where he had a nice chat with the man. The one upside of people being locked away in their homes and the system being broken is that people helped one another in places where everyone was poor.
Write a story based on this famous excerpt from The Night Slowly Came by Kate Chopin:
I am losing my interest in human beings; in the significance of their lives and their actions. Someone has said it is better to study one man than ten books. I want neither books nor men; they make me suffer…
°°°°°°°°°°
He hadnn't been out of the house in over a week. A brief and cursory glance at the news before he left to check for any disasters or new regulations said it was anything but a mistake. There were over 1,400 more people sick just today in his state and well over a quarter million dead before a complete year had even passed. That was since they had officially started calling it a pandemic. Those numbers, of course, were just in the country he inhabited alone. Worldwide it was turning into what would be refered to as a disaster in planning for what he could only assume centuries if not eons to come. It wasn't so much that they didn't know what precautions to take and weren't trying to get people to do so but people were resistant to anything that even appeared like someone else telling them what they should do, especially whenever they had grown up fighting against exactly that.
He supposed that the main thing that surprised him about the day was the fact that there were actually people out in public wearing masks. Here in the heartland of America he lived among the sort of people who would not have their freedoms encroached upon. Weeks, perhaps months in all honesty, whenever he had gone out to eat, he had noticed that literally no one had masks on. It wasn't that people didn't understand the base concept of herd mentality, let alone immunity, what they missed was the fact that at it's base freedom entailed taking care of your fellow citizens and maintaining one's freedom while doing no harm to anyone else.
He could scarcely cast conjecture on the people closest to him, simple yet pure, whenever there were clear signs that people in the more well-to-do areas of the country were, in fact, rioting over the precautions that had been enacted and assaulting one another daily. Even more shocking was that in other countries there were even instances a vaccine centers being burned in protest.
He found himself laboring to actually care that humanity survived at this point in history. People seemed to be ready to blame people with no ties to anything other than humanity itself when the problem was what no doubt must have been engineered, even if only as a safeguard, to reduce it's numbers.
It was always somewhat troublesome to try and decide what evil lurked in the heart of mankind when one encountered it on a larger scale but in general the survival urge usually kept individuals from simply self destructing, he thought.
He smiled as he saw the organic old-fasioned ginger snap cookies had in fact been restocked and found some solace in that as he absently remembered where had read just a bit earlier about an actual person who had spent over 10 years in medical school to become a doctor. This person somehow, in their daily routine, had come to believe that the Earth was flat and had through his own decuction and patterns had decided that the lizard people that were out to destroy mankind. Not through and utilized and engineered biomechanical weapon that readily adapted itself and was specifically created to create new strains within perfected host that were prepped by chemical and mRNA manipulation. Instead he had come to rest on the idea that a sorftware engineer, no doubt a lizard person in his view, had engineered the vaccine and the very 'panic' itself in order to inject microchips into us all.
He had, of course, reported and directly documented all this on his GPS tracked cell phone, which literally could not exist on a flat earth and then destroyed thousands of doses of vaccine as a 'champion' trying to save mankind from...something.
He sighed as he made his way up to the self-checkout. Insofar is he knew he had been in this Dollar Store some dozen times and at no point had anyone, an actual person checked him out. He had seem someone who he assumed to be an employee a few times and even a manager he thought to ve stocking shelves but more than not there was never more than one, maybe two persons working there at a time. The old days of people crying that computers and robots would take their jobs was apparently over and the brave new world was here. He had come in for five different things and only found two. The shelves were never stocked either.
He had seen on his device just a couple days before that Walmart was going to have new robots that would roam the aisles and scan the shelves to tell what was missing in order to know what it was that it needed to reorder. He assumed that the next step would be to have robots that were loaded with certain items in a closed and maybe even remote environment that could stock the shelves. He was certain that if he had thought it someone else had.
Years ago, when he was in high school, the SMART system took care of all of the ordering but the employees still had to use the handheld terminals to input the numbers as they replentished the shelves. He always did enjoy stocking on the night shift abs had made his way up to management pretty quickly not because he was management material but because his mind kept a fair map of where everything in the store was and he never minded interacting with customers.
All of that had been phased out years ago and now everything was on the telecommunication devices that everyone had in their pocket at all times. If the item was in the store you could easily access the computer system and see that it was there and if it wasn't order it.
people had already been replaced and the reason why was that mankind had lost faith in one another because more than not it, as a rule, noted the lowest common denominator and most offencive person that it came in contact with in a day.
the system had eliminated those people but because of it's inadequacy and inability to the readily focus and parse the correct groups for the right wrongs and the general hidden nature if wrongs the good had been eliminated in an effort to prove itslelf.
The matrix moved too fast, became top-heavy in it's algrytmic procedure, people at the top put too much faith in it, used it exclusively as a labor saving measure, hurt and destroyed people at the bottom and the bottom rotted away and died. The blossom of the tecnological age was in freefall and the resultant explosion, the nuke falling from space when it hit would leave a mar on history that wouldn't be forgotten any time soon, if ever.
He sighed, thinking how he himself had depleted the three stores within a 75mi area of the B vitamins in just three months and that no doubt any other item that had been low volume sales could be depleted in the same manner because there had been multiple faces in the managers chair at each of them. The thing about the budget chain was that it wasn't going to instal robots to check the shelves, no one would work for no benifits, 20hrs a week in the middle of nowhere, alone when they routinely got robbed. The model was broken, the world was broken, it was all in free-fall and the sickness had given everyone a reason to refuse to do not just anything to save it but anything at all beyond watch the free fall.
The upside was he was old enough that he had seen the peak, the spark and now that the dumpster was on fire he was half enjoying the feel of momentum as is started downhill.
He smiled and nodded at the two people waiting for the single self checkout and the both enthusiastically smiled and acknowledged his feigned hurry as he pulled the double reciept out of the printer.
"Oops. He forgot his reciept!" he said and made his way into the parking lot where he had a nice chat with the man. The one upside of people being locked away in their homes and the system being broken is that people helped one another in places where everyone was poor.
