Cool Zone Media book Club book Club, book Club, book Club, book Club.

It's the Cool Zone Media book Club.

Hi, welcome Nicols On Media book Club, the only book club where you don't have to do the reading because I do it for you.

I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy.

And we are getting towards the end of the book.

We have been with for more than a month.

We have been reading her Medica by Alan Lee.

Allen Lee is the science fiction pen name for a nonfiction author, well many things author, but including nonfiction, most famously author named Peter Delderlos.

And yeah, we are reading her Medica.

It's part six out of seven, so you might want to not start here, And if you do, I'm not can I tell you everything that's happened from the beginning, But I will catch you up a little bit on what happened last week because last time on her Medica, days ended up in jail and was next to a guy named Robert who was not from her Medica at all, who seemed to have been from a right wing part of America called the Secession.

And that's where we're starting, is the jail.

Much to Robert's relief, they he was sent somewhere else.

After another day in the cell next to Days, they had not gotten much farther in their conversations.

Really, each one of them represented to the other an NBS.

Days was shocked not only by Robert's ignorance, but by his complete lack of curiosity, his inability to be challenged.

Whoever ran the secession, If there were people there who knew it was a lie, Like the people who had designed her Medica, they probably had a really easy job.

The transfer happened while Days was sleeping, just as when Robert arrived.

When Days awoke, he was no longer there.

They wondered if there were sedatives in the food.

Did they move prisoners without witnesses to increase the sense of solitude, to reduce the information one had about the place and how it operated.

The metallic column pinged.

Days removed the tray, but rather than eating, they paced around the cell a bit.

They needed music.

The Moonlight Sonata came to mind, but the acoustics were terrible.

The plexi and the lighting didn't help at all.

They labored through a few bars, repeated them when the rest didn't come, and gave up in another attempt to harness their minds.

Wild horses.

They sat down for a few rounds of crunches.

Their motivation soon fizzled.

They god opinate the contents of the tray, paced around a bit, fell into a slumber.

When Days there was a new person in the next cell.

They were older.

Days got up and walked over to the plexi.

Would this become a routine?

Hi?

I'm Days, Hi, Days, I'm Shauna.

Should I use they?

He?

They is fine?

You go by?

They?

Days nodded, happy that Shawna didn't seem to take offense at the question, what storyline are you from?

Storyline?

Shauna bit their lip.

What do you know?

Days gave a long sigh.

They could tell Shawna knew more than they did, and certainly more than Robert had.

I grew up on a ship called her Metica.

But it turned out we've been on Tara the whole time.

Shawna nodded sadly.

Tara, Yeah, we call it Earth here right Earth.

Days couldn't keep the bitterness out of their voice.

You asked me about storylines?

What did you mean?

Shauna looked around slowly and leaned in hand against the plexi.

A few decades ago, actually, it would have been right around the time you were born, things were really bad.

Society was falling apart.

The program was so dysfunctional even those who benefited the most couldn't ignore it.

Systems collapse at every level overheating, starvation.

Then there was a pandemic, massive deadly, then a coup, attempt, a lot of fighting, so they initialized the compartmentalization.

They at a certain point the government signed on took over, but in the beginning it was the ones who owned the technology.

The idea was to separate people as much as possible, diffuse the conflict.

Actually, they'd already been doing it for a long time.

I guess it started out as just another marketing scheme, but it got out of control, and in the end the only solution they found was to make it total.

Make what total?

What are they doing?

Shawna looked into Days's eyes a long, long moment, weighing them, then let out a deep sigh.

Parallel worlds, parallel worlds?

What did that mean?

It actually goes back way back decades.

They started selling the idea that you had to buy your identity, the clothes you wore, the music you listened to, the hobbies you had, the vacations you took the car you drove.

They sold the idea that all that stuff was the way to express who you were, and people bought it.

They bought it big time.

I guess it was inevitable that after buying their identity for so long, they would buy their reality.

How did that work?

Days only had a loose idea about buying things, and they weren't sure if it was that or the concept of parallel worlds giving them the most trouble.

You got to understand by that point, ninety five percent of people's perceptions were managed through social networking, their news, their history, their science, even their enemies.

They only chose things that fit their identity collectively in groups.

You could think of it as separate columns in society.

They just constructed their own realities.

It wasn't entirely up to them, of course, it was a managed process.

Only profitable realities could be produced because of who owned the technologies, the metrics they used.

At first, it was just that streamlining the whole process of buying and selling, but it had unintended consequences.

People refused to believe anything that contradicted them.

When the pandemic hit, hundreds of thousands of people were dying, and one group they just denied the entire thing, said it wasn't happening, that it was some plot, and they tried to take over.

They were attacking doctors, killing immigrants, black people, black people.

Oh boy, all the lines on Shawna's face deep in tenfold.

I don't know how much Earth history you read on her Medica.

This country from the beginning, it was based on kidnapping people like me and forcing us to work as slaves, and then they made us call it the land of the Free days.

Didn't know what to do with that information.

That's perverse.

In a flash, all the movies they had ever watched came back to them, all the ones with terran actors, the pasty skin of the protagonists, and how all the actors of darker skin played auxiliaries or villains.

Of course, the actor spoke the lines the writers fed them, but they still had to stay within the register established by all the performances recorded into the database.

While those actors were still alive.

The AI couldn't make a movie out of whole cloth seeing those performances within the blissful comfort of their module.

Their outrageous high jinks, their impossibly good luck.

Their motivations inhumanly heroic or petty.

The protagonist's rare skin tones had simply amplified the exoticism of it all.

In the original context back on Terra on Earth was the entire purpose of those movies to reinforce a vast and arbitrary order to confirm the dominance and entitlement of some and the inferiority of others.

Yeah, it is, and some of those people they never forgave us for what they did to us.

So I guess, if we're going to be completely honest, some people have been living in parallel worlds for centuries.

Maybe the whole thing was destined to fall apart from the start.

So they were killing you people like you.

Yeah, Sewn moved their hands so it was closer to days is just on the other side of the PLEXI people like you too.

I don't know your background, but if you ended up on her Metica, you're not one of them.

Days.

They probably killed your parents, maybe directly, more likely through negligence the pandemic my parents days asked numbally.

The thought was overwhelmingly strange.

They told me I was from an artificial insemination from a harvest today like all the others.

When the government decided to take it over and go total, it was the pilot program.

There were a lot of orphans, the pandemic, the social breakdown in general, the youngest ones.

They decided to give them a chance for something better once it went total.

The compartmentalization, I mean, every parallel world had to play a function.

They had to produce something like what her Medica produces.

Scientists, some of the best.

They think they're working on the ship, improving the life support, propulsion, getting ready to terraform a new homeworld.

Actually, their research agendas get fed to them from outside of her Medica based on the needs of different agencies here on the outside.

Every researcher on her Medica has such a tiny window, such an extremely hyper specific line of inquiry and experimentation.

They never know, but everything they develop is linked to some program out here, improving an efficiency, cleaning up the disaster, carbon sequestration, geoengineering, medical research, social surveillance, and pacification.

So they're imprisoning us, all of us, and just using us.

Yeah, I'm sorry you had to find out this way.

How do you know all of this?

Shauna looked down towards the ground.

They're gaze dissipating into a blank mirror.

I'm a writer, what I work on the storylines.

Days didn't know whether to feel infuriated or fascinated.

They held their tongue.

I am Shauna swallowed.

The systems are mostly self managing the different worlds.

I mean her Medica was an exception, but the older people involved, the ones who educated you, they've been mostly phased out as the first cohorts reached adulthood.

The other worlds, they're all held together by the subjec themselves in good programming.

But to start, they needed the right stories.

Most of the stories were already there, latent in the different columns.

I described the beliefs that people had a raid around themselves to protect these identities they created.

They already had all the elements.

They just needed to be organized, given a good plot, and then they were set in motion, and we'd keep an eye on them, introduce new elements if it was needed, if people were getting bored or starting to have doubts, and here to introduce new elements to keep you from getting bored.

To tap the fifteen second four button on your phone.

It's ads and we're back.

You made this, Shawnas swallowed again.

Other people made it.

It was already underway when I started.

You helped make it.

You kept it functioning.

You just said so yourself.

I wish I'd had other choices, but I needed to make a living.

Did you write my storyline?

Did you write her medica?

No?

I got recruited for another storyline.

What does that mean?

You were recruited?

I didn't fit into any of the columns.

There were a lot of us who were problematic for the compartmentalization.

Some of them are still out in the streets in one of the dead zones, trying to stay alive.

Most of them are gone already.

Others we got recruited.

What did they give you?

Days reached out for the archaic word they knew from their novels.

What did they pay you to do this to us?

Shawnasplayed their hands in tired resignation.

You don't have to offer much when the alternative is going hungry.

Days nodded.

They didn't know what hunger was not personally.

Mathematically, X is greater than why or why equaled Shawna's integrity an X the price they'd offered with no way of ascertaining the value of leaving behind hunger and uncertainty.

They had to admit they had no information concerning the value of why they let it go.

How'd you end up here?

Sabotage?

Days raised an eyebrow.

I started putting some clues in the storyline.

I was overseen some open ended plot elements.

I wanted them to have a chance.

Days went and sat back down on the cot.

Now they felt bad for getting angry.

Days had gotten locked up here for trying to free themselves.

It seemed Shawna had gotten locked up and had possibly lost a good life for trying to help others get free.

Do you hate me?

I don't know you.

I know you don't want to hear this, But when has it ever been any better?

People see what they want to see.

Days couldn't argue with that.

They curled up and pulled the covers high, thinking of it, snook another tray another meal.

Days went back to the plexi they shared with Shauna.

Graciously, Shauna rose to meet them.

The person there before you they he was from the secession.

Shawna nodded, that's a pretty awful place.

Did you write that one?

No, Shawna said, vehemently.

That place was there way before I got in.

You said, her Medica was the first one, the first one the government created, the secession.

That one got built up as soon as the technology existed, all the most profitable stories in one place.

Days narrowed their eyes suspiciously.

Days listened to me.

They looked up and saw pain in Shawna's face and realized they were being self centered.

They felt sure then that Shawna had been throwing worse hell than they had ever endured on her Medica.

That place is real, too fucking real.

We didn't make that.

That's on them.

They were actually going around killing people.

You've got a sense of that, didn't you.

Talking to him, Days nodded, What were we going to do with them?

Put them all in one place, Let them think they've won.

It's the least violent solution.

Both the hell am I saying we like it was my choice, like I was in charge.

Sean A banged to fist on the PLEXI.

That's how they do it.

That's how they get in your head.

They get you to think you're part of their wi we the people.

They invite you into their shoes so that you can see how perfectly reasonable.

All their decisions are and it's tempting to put on their shoes when you have to go barefoot.

But it's a fucking lie.

I'm in here with you.

Before when I was working, we were just adding the colors to a structure that had already been built.

If we stopped, they found others.

There were thousands of us.

We were cheaper than old pennies.

We provided a service, but we never had any control.

Who does the same ones who are in control when everything's going to hell, the same ones responsible for going to hell in the first place.

It's not a group of people days, it's not some cabal.

It's just whoever happened to be on top?

How do you get to the top.

It's the most ruthless ones, the ones willing to stab anyone in the back to get ahead, and then their children and then their children's children, staying on top as long as they can.

And those ruthless motherfuckers.

They were encouraging the people in the succession from the very start, giving them everything they needed, never shattering their fragile little bubble.

Why should they worry?

They weren't the ones getting killed.

They believed a lot of the same things as those nutjobs.

They were on top because they deserve to be on top.

It's nice to believe that.

It's nice to have cheerleaders who become attack dogs when anyone stands up to you.

But the denihialists, they just couldn't stop killing their masters tightened the leash.

They started to bite the hand that fed them.

They couldn't tell the difference, So the government stepped in, absorbed them into the compartmentalization.

Let them think they broke away.

The programmers simulate a border skirmish every now and then, so they stay interested.

It's always a war for them.

In fact, the government's original plan was for the secession to produce mercenaries, but nowadays all that stuff has done with drones and bots, so they don't need them.

They do food production.

Now you mentioned a farm.

Yeah, they have a simulated money economy.

The modelers found out they need a simple rewards system, like training dogs.

They don't seem to understand math.

You have them driving tractors around all day.

They bring in one hundred kilos of produce.

You know how much they keep half a kilo in money value, But they know the exchange rate and they do it anyway.

You know what keeps them in line, besides doing night watch and going on border patrol.

What the system is rigged so that every now and then one of them gets an insane amount of money.

It's presented to them as a lottery or some insurance windfall, and that person buys a huge house, more cars than they can drive, and a swimming pool.

And you know what, the others stay happy.

The others.

Yeah, I even checked the data.

The ones who were scraping by giving away everything they work for, their biostats go up the most in two situations, after a skirmish at the border and after someone in their circle wins the lottery buys a big house.

When do their stats go down if they're the one who wins the lottery about a month after moving into the new house.

Yeah, Roberts seemed pretty weird.

Did he tell you their theory?

Which one?

They think the earth is flat?

No?

Yeah, they do, they really do.

No, that's impossible.

He said.

They have mountains.

He said he's been to the ocean.

Shauna shrugged.

Look, I know, I thought I grew up on a spaceship, but they built our blocks so we could never see the horizon.

If he can climb a mountain or go to the ocean.

He can literally watch things go down below the horizon.

People see what they want to see, lunar eclipses, Days protested, you can see the shape of the earth.

They see what they want to see.

And you know what I want to see.

Right now, at this exact moment, in the middle of this story, I'm reading for you sweet savings, satisfaction guaranteed with all these products and services, and we're back the next day.

Shauna was still there.

Days was feeling introspective, but eventually their thoughts overwhelmed them.

They approached the PLEXI.

Shauna rose too.

I always wanted to work on the sky when I was growing up.

They told us it was a projection, you know, designers working together with meteorology recreating the sky on terra thought.

I got rejected because I wasn't good enough.

I guess I just had impossible dreams.

Yeah, I wonder would I be here if I had done better?

What do you mean?

Maybe I could have lived down that failure not getting the sky, if I'd at least gotten halfway, if I'd scored higher on the aptitudes and gotten a more interesting work assignment.

If my mind were more engaged.

Maybe I wouldn't have gone scratching around the corners.

I've never seen what other people see, not all the time, but maybe I wouldn't have gone looking so hard.

What was your job, palliative therapist?

I gave back rubs sewn aside.

You didn't get your work assignment from the aptitudes.

What the aptitudes are a ruse.

They add a little bit of data about how you perform under stress, but the system already knew your exact capacities, physics, biology, mechanics, calculus, emotional intelligence, social hierarchy, tendencies, you name it.

They were testing you since you were born.

They're always testing.

They're testing us right now.

Days looked around, So why do the aptitudes at all?

They could just tell us our work assignment is based on our cumulative performance scores rather than a single test.

The test is important, Shanna replied, but it's not what you think.

They need you to believe that your entire future, your ambitions, your integration into society are based on one single exam, and then the day of the exam they pop o a little trick question.

It's usually not in the exam itself, but something related different every time.

On her Medica, what they need to know is are you willing to falsify information or to unsee something you have seen when you are asked to do so.

Days rocked back on their heels.

Yeah, it's even more insiduous than you think.

For the test to work, disobeying can't come with any immediate consequences.

The subject has to think that disobedience will not be immediately noticed, but presents a small risk of a lower performance score and might therefore put their social integration their ambitions at risk.

The people on her Medica are given really powerful tools.

They could quickly discover the nature of their reality if they put their minds to it.

Integration performance had to be more important to you than the truth.

So if you hesitated when you got to that trick question, even for a moment, you were out days detached, feeling estranged from the memories that washed over.

I think there might have been two tricks like that, they said, slowly.

I left them both blank.

Yeah, Shauna nodded sadly.

They also test for rebellion likelihood of protest.

Days let out a bitter laugh.

I'm sorry.

Well, I guess they had me figured out pretty well after all, Shanna took a moment to continue.

When I was getting reassigned after my first storyline was operational, I read up on the scripts of some of the other options.

I read a lot about her Medica, how it worked.

I turned that one down.

It didn't seem right.

It's not right.

No, are any of them any better?

A lot of them aren't so cruel or so restrictive.

Most of them don't start with a big group of orphans and put them in near total confinement.

But confinement is an element of all the columns.

Days looked around at the cell.

Yeah, this place could be on Hermetica.

Then they had a thought.

Robert said he didn't travel much, but he could he can move around.

Anger flashed across Shanna's face, followed by exhaustion.

The ones who are really in charge, they have a lot of sympathy for the people in the secession.

Plus those people have a lot of guns, and moving them, altering their story too much would have been costly.

You got to understand the parallel worlds.

They just augmented and entrenched the inequalities that already existed in the earlier system.

This isn't utopia, No, it's a prison.

I won't argue with you there.

You said, they're always testing, testing us.

Now, how how we interact?

What we say, the choices we make, what for they're deciding our reassignment?

How do they do that me?

They know by now I won't keep my mouth shut.

The fact that I'm spilling the beans to you just confirms it.

But they also know at the end of the day, I'll lower my head and play along.

I'm valuable to them as a writer.

They might put me on one of the storylines where it doesn't matter if the people know about the parallel worlds like robotics and efficiency.

That's a boring one, just a sprawling, city sized campus where they focus on social engineering, mechanization, machine learning, a lot of the tech that forms the basis of the other worlds.

From the tractor Robert drives to the social networks that convince people on her Medica that they're on a spaceship with twelve million passengers?

Is that your best case scenario?

Forget really bad scores.

They'll put me in Gangland, and that's where I'll spend the rest of my life.

Gangland, I'm afraid to ask.

Shawna's eyes burned defiantly ask what's Gangland?

Think of it as the opposite of the secession.

It's where they left people who had trouble integrating but who were the wrong color.

They corralled them in dead zones, ghost cities full of lead, empty factories, old trash, incinerators, cities they couldn't save from the rising sea.

A lot of guns, a lot of drugs, a lot of trauma, no medical care, no fresh food.

So yeah, the opposite of the secession, but they have something in common.

Gangland's an old one.

They made it before they had their social networking technologies, before the compartmentalization.

What tech did they use?

Real estate investment, Holemooner's associations, military planes coming back from Vietnam, full of heroin, defunding treatment centers, funding prisons, machine gun toting cops, killing revolutionaries, popping kids for possession.

I hope they don't send you there.

It would be the smart thing for them to do.

It won't matter how many people there.

I tell about the other worlds.

They're not stupid.

They know they're other worlds and that they're not allowed to leave the one they're stuck in.

But it's not all bad.

People are resourceful.

There's a lot of love there.

I guess they can't send Robert there.

I'm starting to suspect he'll get off a lot easier than the rest of us.

You catch on quick.

What'd he do?

He said he shot someone.

Shawna rolled their eyes.

They'll keep him in the secession, probably put him in a mind making fertilizer.

Tell him it's prison labor.

Parole him in ten twenty years if he tests well.

Days hesitated, and me, you're a tough one, Shawna frowned.

They need to figure out where they can make you useful, where you won't cause too much trouble.

You broke out of one of the most tightly controlled storylines, but you don't have the advanced training that would make you valuable elsewhere.

I bet the systems having a hard time with you.

The next day, Shauna was gone.

Days looked up as they awoke, saw the next cell was empty, laid their head back down and tried to take deep breaths.

A while later, they got up, did some exercises, tried to remember what the sky looked like, how it felt to sit underneath it.

They wished they could play some music.

They tried to recall a melody in their head, the right melody for just this moment, But nothing came.

The air hummed, but it wasn't alive in here, not like outside on the block before a storm.

After uncounted hours, the plexi before them went opaque.

Hello, Days, said a voice the cell.

They presumed, your preliminary evaluation is complete.

You may choose your next assignment.

The plexi had become a screen, projecting eight large squares.

Begrudgingly, Days stepped forward.

Each square held an image.

The first one portrayed a block, just like back on her Medica.

As they held a finger over it, the image began to move, showing a sort of montage.

The image shifted from the block to the inside of a module, a supply center, a research lab, friendly eyed people masks over their mouths, walking past the green or sitting on a bench, so it was definitively her Metica.

That's when they noticed.

The first two squares were a muted color, more gray, lower contrast on her Medica that always signified an inactivated button.

The second such square showed a green field and a large standalone house of unusual construction.

Days put their finger over it, and the image moved showing mountains, forests, a pacy skin person on a huge tractor, A short line of people with steely eyes walking along a wall carrying rifles.

That must be the secession.

So Hermetica and the secession were off limits to them.

How considerate of the system to let them know.

They went to the next square.

It showed a group of people smiling, laughing, working on a three D modeler, another person grouping data sets on an HF interface.

A cafeteria of people laughing and talking, barely paying attention to their food.

Two people playing chess, another group playing volleyball, Then a large swimming pool, people swimming laps.

A final cut showing a person smiling triumphantly at tension, divided between a portable and a team of multi jointed robotic arms performing some complex assembly task.

Days went on to the next square.

It was a nighttime scene, people sitting outside, crowded together around tables in the street, laughing and drinking.

Then one of them was painting on a canvas, others were rehearsing in an orchestra.

One was looking appreciatively at a holographic sculpture hand on chin, as though forming an intelligent opinion.

Others were laying in a grassy park, reading off their portables.

The next option showed a couple people in masks operating a team of bulldozers demolishing old buildings.

Days couldn't tell if they had been ruined by war or abandonment.

Another team of machines came laying the foundations for new buildings that started to grow skyward.

Days went back to their cot, turning away from the screen.

There were still three squares left, but they felt estranged, knowing each of those worlds was based on a lie.

Feeling sickened that they were offering them the option to join one of them after finding out that their entire they had been deceived and exploited, how were they supposed to accept anything the system wanted to offer?

Cell spoke again, you have six choices for possible reassignment.

Take your time deciding, but until you have decided, you will not be able to move into the next stage of your rehabilitation.

Six choices should they feel lucky?

Back on their block on her Metica, there were only four choices, four ways off the block, all of them heavily controlled.

Now they had six was that progress?

Days didn't know what to think.

The idea of being alone at the helm of a host of powerful machines bringing great buildings toppling down appealed to the mood they were in at the moment, but the thought of the next team coming through erecting new buildings, and the certainty that the masters of the world would use those new buildings for killed the fantasy.

Sure, they actually had no idea what kind of buildings they were.

They hadn't gotten to the end of the prone, but could there be any doubt They would be buildings filled with rooms.

Each room would have a limited number of ways out.

They would be buildings filled with people, each person locked into a story they had not written.

Days.

Spent the rest of the day in a lethargic agony, somewhere between restlessness and nightmare.

They woke up to the sound of a ping from the metallic column.

Time passed.

Eventually, they got up, retrieved the tray, ate most of its contents, apathetically laid back down.

Some time later, they got up again, paced around the cell, did push ups, punched at the plexi.

Boredom taunted them.

If you do not choose this nothingness will go on forever.

They felt infuriated, trapped.

The walls mocked them.

There was nothing in the cell they could break.

The ping sounded again, water or food.

It seemed it was feeding time again.

Days retrieved the tray, but instead of eating, they flung the contents across the cell.

Something like a semi solid lasagna puree splattered across the floor.

One little sealed container survived the impact.

Days picked it up.

It was something vaguely like putting.

They opened it and assiduously smeared it across the plexi screen, covering up the eight squares the six possible futures being offered.

A hissing sound came from the duct above.

Days awoke, their head hurt.

The cell was immaculate.

There was no sign of their outburst.

The screen remained.

Now there were only six squares.

The images representing her Medica and the secession had disappeared.

Dun, dun, dum.

What's gonna happen?

What's Days gonna choose?

How is it going to impact the rest of their life?

Well, the only way to find out is to listen next week when we reach our rousing conclusion of her Metica by Alan Lee.

And if you like this and you want to read the whole thing and don't want to wait, you can just go read it.

It's a book, it's available.

You can buy it from to trit his books or probably from other places, but to try his books as the publisher, and you can do that if you want, and if you want to read more books by the same author.

They have a lot of nonfiction books available under the name Peter Gelderlos, which is g E L D E r l S.

You can probably figure us about Peter anyway.

I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy.

I have another podcast called Cool People Did Cool Stuff where I talk about history, and I have a substack Marger Kiljoy do at substack dot com where I talk about a lot of things, including history sometimes and also the present world and hope and things like that, and you can check that out.

Most of my posts are free, only the more personal ones are behind a paywall.

I'm on Instagram, I'm on Blue Sky, and I mostly wish I wasn't on the computer anymore, and I won't be as soon as I hit stop and then export a file and then upload it to my amazing audio editors.

We're going to turn it into a thing that you all can read and I'll talk to you next week.

It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.

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Thanks for listening.