• Home

4n0nym0u5

Posted on January 24, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

Jenny4, that’s an easy one. 4RT3MI5 takes a little getting used to. n1n4 is easier if you capitalize those letters and n1vl3m needs to be read back-to-front. This is the world I inhabit, these are the people that are my friends and I don’t know a single one of them. I don’t know what they look like even though there is a pictorial reference attached to each and every one of us. Pressed up against each other in a sweaty subway I am most likely face-to-face with 4M3L14 but I would never know it. Even if she smiled, suggestively raised a hand between our two bodies and popped a breath mint in my mouth so that I wouldn’t be afraid to introduce myself.

You see, in our world, it pays to be anonymous. Two years after the war, actually two years after the war began, the government in its infinite wisdom saw fit to curb activities like ours. What is it with governments and their choices? They clamp down on those activities that could keep the populace so occupied that there would be no time for crime, disorder or dissent.

Any humans in power seem to forget what it is like to be human. Each and every one of us expects something in return for something that is taken away. People in power seem to believe that it is their duty to simply take. Those same people in power become outraged or feign surprise when the populace refuses to give any more or forms secret organizations or support groups to be able to do whatever it was they did before a certain right was taken away.

Ours is one of the most peace-loving groups in the world. The roots of our movement were sown close to a hundred years ago. In the Swinging ‘60s as they were fondly called, the time of Free Love and wanton sex. A return to the hedonism that was one of the very foundations of early human civilization. We collected the books and saved copies of the videos in their various formats: 8, 16 and on the very rare occasion, 35mm film, VHS, BETA, Laser Disc, VCD, DVD, Div-X, UMD, flash drives, GrDVD and CaroDisc. Everything had been digitized, cataloged and backed up.

Much as we were loathe to do so, we made our peace with the destruction of the original media because it became abundantly clear that it was more important to save the message. Preserving those moving images and their accompanying music and sounds was more important than saving the physical manifestations of their widespread distribution.

In a world that forbade physical contact except by governmental sanction and that too, solely for the purpose of procreation, all we had was our pornography. Trading those files is what sent a pulse racing through our veins. Devising ever more clever aliases and finding a brand new, unseen file in our communication ports was the only thing that made being alive worthwhile. That, and waiting for the war to end; so that we can begin to try out some of the positions and combinations most of us know better than we know ourselves.

Comments