Slum Enterprise - Chapter 28

CHAPTER 28

Lee’s 8 hours were up, he went home. 

His head was rushing through all the potential pitfalls in their plan. But, he forced himself to think that this was the correct thing to do. 

As he drove Lee became angry. A rage filled him, it was a feeling that only happens a few times in a life. A fury where you think of every bad thought there is to think, where you start to conjure up sinister evil plans to escape it all. Deep down, all you want is someone to understand but there is no one that will listen. 

Lee is held by phantom shackles and thrown into a dark cave left to fester and rot. He perishes while the world above him moves onto complete destruction from humans capitalist trajectory. Lee wants to quit and never give his 2 week notice and say “fuck it all, I dont have to see Stan, Scott, Murphy, Joe, or anybody ever again. But, where would I go, what would I do? The Life System requires me to work. Have I created my own shackles”

He rolled on to the curb and parked the car and went inside his house. Lee talked to himself.

“I need to let off steam, I can't let Annie see me like this.” Lee dropped bags on the floor and started to pace all around the house.

“Annie must think this too… doesnt everyone think like this… its all unsustainable and no one seems to care, has everyone secretly accepted that we are all screwed and are riding it out the best we can? How does one even enact change to a problem that is unsolvable? Do I call my representatives, the senators, protest and burn down government buildings? This whole thing was designed for failure. To let the rich conquer and build island bunkers and let the rest of us fend for ourselves for a couple years until one group of crazies starts a new atomic religion and builds a nuke and bombs themselves and everybody else into oblivion.” How do we stick it back to the man?” 

Lee’s hands and feet are tingling and his breathing is fast and shallow, panic is eluding his vision. He starts to forget who and where he is, the ego is dissolving. A mania takes control. He sees himself while floating above in the air, the living room doesn't look like a living room, it looks like a street corner in the worst part of town. Trash was everywhere and it smelled like opioid residue and shit. 

Then geometric fractales consumed it. There was ringing in his ears. Lee could only feel his heart rate, extremely fast and powerful. Then the room turned into the Nature Reserve, he could smell the wetlands and algae in the water and hear cattails thumping against each other in the wind. Outside the Reserve he could see a giant heap of landfill matter falling like an avalanche into the prairie below. The land, Lee himself, was being poisoned.

“How do I live like this, why do I live like this. There is no such thing as balanced materialism, it just chokes the senses and makes slaves. People have gotten so comfortable in this failing nation that no one is ready or willing to make a fuss about it or start a ligament cause to action. The poor will get poorer and left behind, the middle class will become the poor, the rich will become gods and use the earth as its sandbox… hell, they already have. We all sit in our corporate owned apartments,condos, and houses and try to be happy.”

 “No future, no hope, no point. The 500 club in collaboration with the 700 Club controls the money, the politics, the tax cuts, goods, material, faith and comfort. All the money will soon be directly siphoned right into their bank accounts. We will all become a fox stuck in a bear trap trying to gnaw off its own foot only to die of blood loss. The only escape is to not be born at all.”

“The HR SWAT will turn into the new police, it will overrun the military and set up new operations. The foreign policy feud will be put to rest once all the nations realize what the real goal is. The plan is to create a heaven that is only attainable for them and let the rest die off. They’ll create a new god, themselves. They’ll convince the survivors that they are the one and only true god.”

“To sustain all of this, to make sure the manufactured heaven will last a millennium, DNA will be tampered with, the rise of machines will take place for original thought, it will all become pattern recognition. Humans will be farmed and used to run the machine, the new world order will only serve to the heaven.”

 “Why?, what is this all for, can't the madness stop. Oh god help, end this stupid way of living, stop the advertisements, the consuming, the junk, the toxins, bring forth the truth, bring forth justice, bring forth the true way. Bring forth love, the love that is buried deep in all of us, don't you see? They are turning us against each other, stop… wait and think, don’t let it happen, don't believe what anyone says, not any screen, look through your eyes and see the truth. See what's going on around you, that's the truth to live by. Please do this for yourself, do this for the people you care about. Looking deep within, we call out to heal and make the necessary change towards redemption. A redemption is the only way now, maybe we should just burn it all down. Then rebuild, rebuild it our way in the way of truth away from the slums that consume us.”

Everything turns black and Lee falls to the floor with a loud crash. His head barely missed the coffee table in the living room. He lays there for 15 minutes on his persian rug. He comes too.

“What happened, where am I?” he thinks. “Im in my house, the living room, the lamp is on, besides that its dark everywhere else. Wheres Annie? Wheres Penny? I must have scared her, she's likely upstairs in the dog bed hiding."

Lee collects himself and his brain rewires to normal operation status. He feels a dread forming in him, he is looking out to the next few days, “what would happen?” He thought. 

Lee sat on the couch until Annie got home.

Lee hears Annie park in the driveway. She walked through the front door to meet Lee. He stood up and greeted her with an embracing hug and kiss.

“Hi honey, is there something wrong?” Annie said. 

Lee didn't say anything and kept holding her. Lee could only think about her. The world turned black again, but this time it was peaceful. Instead of the planets circling the sun, the planets and all the matter in the solar system circled around their embrace. For a brief moment, time stopped all together. Annie and Lee became frozen in a different dimension of their own creation. Every atom in their bodies became quantum entangled. A complete euphoric bliss came across Lee. Annie felt it too. The embrace was important, it was something that could be held forever, it signified that the souls were meant to be, a very rare occurrence due to the massive unlimited size of the collective mesh. The blackness that surrounded them started to turn grey, then into white. Colors of all sorts began to spin around them. Lee could feel himself becoming part of the background. He became entangled in everything else. That was okay, Annie was still with him he thought. Anything that would and could happen would be okay.