Dutch East India

Awake. Eyes uncertainly gravitating, fixed finally upon the smallest, most automatic function of secondary impulses. Inkiere' felt heavy and exhaled dismally as he stood, stretching his abdomen to relieve the burning tightness. Finishing this, but feeling no better, he approached his room's singular, blinded window in half-conscious baby steps. He felt barely motivated and reluctant to face the day.

Mechanically, he displaced a few of the colorless blinds and with malaise forced himself to observe the people outside, below him--all of them behaving as though they were so small. The ugliness of it bored him painfully.

He stood holding his breath, observing the little bipeds, and felt protected by the anonymity of his perspective--a room in the midst of a row and a building of identical rooms, and identical to the rooms were the pre-fabricated things which lived in them...pre-fabricated people. What factory had produced them all? He could never quite say, but guessed according to the interconnectedness and economy of things that it must have been a factory owned by the same or at least a subsidiary business operation: Reality Incorporated.

Of course, the corporation had other factories. It produced all sorts of ornaments and personality types. It sold lifestyles, ideas, parents and children, cheeseburgers, frisbees, and shit. It was a world-market where televisions blared inside the mind and advertisers had replaced the billboard with the body. The pre-fab people buying their pre-fab, plastic bits of pre-fab happiness. Now, he felt malaise transmute to nausea.

"And I'm one of them," he said aloud, although realizing and appreciating that he was alone. "We're all one of them, the entire world. The exact same model, Homo Redimo: the buying man."