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I take no pleasure in being right. I really don't, I take no pleasure in their suicidal bliss, their rage and the sickening depressions. I could feel guilty, but there would be no point, no point at all. Honestly, how could you ever explain that the shadow-side to the human psyche will always find its way free of restraint.
I could taste it on the back of my tongue at first, all metal, like sour blood. I saw the monsters bleeding through the cracks. I saw the decay and ferocity beneath the enforced idyll, the stalking nightmares that eeled their ways past the wards of civility.
I tried to warn them, but of course, all they saw was 'Quinn's hobby-horse'. To them there's no such thing as being able to feel the currents, to divine the patterns in the dry data. They're drowning in information, paddling and thrashing in it.
But I know how to swim, to dive deep. I'm like a shark I can smell the blood in the water, and like a shark I have to keep moving, keep breathing it in, to live, to exist.
Down I went, and I saw the rage, the discontent. But of course, the technology was supposed to protect against this. They couldn't conceive of the backlash – the inevitable catharsis, the...massive psychic venting that needs to occur before you can even try to clean a wound properly.
I tried to tell them last year, but by January it was obvious they weren't going to listen.
I saw the riots coming six weeks ago. There was something familiar, something I recognised in the spiral curve of emotional intensity. It took a couple of runs to be totally sure, plus a jaunt back into my own memory. I'm really surprised how much the little pool of my own personal unconscious is mirrored in the larger data-stream and vice versa, though I did it off the books, as it were.
A little bit of self-hypnosis and a lot of experience with the rig confirmed it – on a fractal level we were close to the 2011 conditions. I was hoping I was wrong, but...unfortunately not.
The guy in Observation knows too, though how I couldn't say, any more than I could say how my gut works about these sort of things now. I might be crazy, but every psych-eval I have, I manage to come out sane.
Maybe that's a bad thing – that I can game the system. I don't know though, in some sense, I'm down a level in terms of complexity – not that topography means much these days.
The path up is the path downward.
Don't ask me where that came from. These days the inside of my brain seems odd - bigger but more crowded too.
If my forecasts are right, and trust me, I can read the signs better than most, the riots will push the Act through as emergency legislation. Which means it's in mine and everyone else's interest to sort the bugs before this becomes mandatory.
I'm not entirely sure that's a good idea for me – I've been checking my own data from the times I'm in the rig for the past few years, and I can see something in there. Something I wasn't expecting. I don't know what it is yet, but I know it's not standard.
I wish I could get Observation Guy in the rig, just to see if I'm right.
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