The Markers

It was the future past and present. It was now. Existence not living. Living not laughter. Time ceased to exist when the realization occurred of what was happening . If you are viewing this then you are charmed and have salvaged reading materials. Possibly, a miracle occurred and peace has returned and life is balancing out . I am scribing this journal in secret to warn the upcoming of the preceding. 

Praeterita Vita

My past life - my future death. 

My identification listed me as Fisher Green. Similar to other gists because I was actively laboring in a post that I abhorred , syphoned out money for a mortgage that was bankrupting me and pursuing hopeless dreams of grandiose. Until one day when Torris Mentira sauntered into my office and transformed life Eternal 

And so it ends......

College terminated, graduated, attained. Attained what? . I was tenderfoot. Obtaining a plethora of credit cards during my educational years, I became financially independent. Or so I imagined. This was the juncture in time that “people”started evolving. 

I received a degree in mathematics and began a career as a paper pusher with the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. The most glorious thing about my new employment is that the job itself was full time. An adjective that was very rarely uttered by American mouths in today’s world- Changing laws in our society and changing costs of insurance by the employer had made it almost impossible to provide citizens of the hard working world with forty hour work weeks. Employers who did provide full time benefits were looked upon like underground speakeasies . Secretive and allure— benefits became more valuable than the pay itself. 

Grande Fascia

And so began what was known as the Great Haze. Initially it was invisible. And then it started to show itself more clearer as the years progressed. Grey became a color of choice in Fashion and decorating. Politics that lacked real Politicians. People unwilling to interact with anything but a robotic device. Everything was altered by the Haze. Failing to notice it’s effect on me, and thinking I was immune to change, one day I was attending the monthly meeting for work when I realized the Haze had taken hold of me as well. 

Prima Facia

I stared at a photo on my office desk. Work..employment. drudgery. Dream killer. My task was to analyze statistics of employment vs unemployment and then present a PowerPoint lecture predicting future job loss--making money because of somebody else’s misfortune. This was not exactly the romantic sunshine filled life I had envisioned in my youth. Life had changed. People were changing. And this wasn’t the world I had grown up in. The Haze had arrived. 

I missed my friends. They completed me. I was forced to move a long distance from home in order to maintain a grey life. It was routine. Simplistic. Grey. Paid the bills. 

The old style photo on my desk was a tattered actual paper panorama showing a group of three kids. Tattered, and out of focus, the snapshot not only captured a moment of time but of our livelihoods. Two girls and a boy whose arms intertwine and whose beaming smiles abound without care or concern. We thrived in between poverty and below poverty, completely unaware of the shortage of money, always knowing that we had each other. Sharing an unbreakable unity ,my heart beats slower each day that I am separated from my tribe . The colored dreams of my youth are starting to veer into discolored turbulent obscurity  and the echo of my past is what I desire the future to manifest  

The Haze started to blow in when my friends and I were in high school. Witnessing our parents job losses from The Great Recession, we endeavored to salvage what we could and venture into the career of STEM. Thinking it was our idea and we were being helpful we marched onward into the grey world. as we would later find out nothing is or ever will be an original thought. 

The initial idea of maturation and getting the job that you dreaded and working forty hours for a retirement that might feed you for a week became increasingly unappealing to the masses of younger urban audiences. The cost of insurance was equal to one paycheck and let’s not get started on cable and phones. Life became more about hacking friends devices to save a penny than it did learning a trade. The Great Haze as it would come to be known was the time after the Great Recession had ended when prices of homes skyrocketed and insurance costs were so high that people did without health care. It was a confusing time of diversity and acceptance. Diligence and hard work were exchanged for quick and savvy. Neat sophisticated hair cuts were thrown into slapdash and disheveled headdresses. 

Mundet 

The cleanse

The Haze was also the term used for the time of our lives when the pandemic hit. The mysterious virus lingered longer than we could have imagined and the silliness of our tattooed summers became our lighthouse during many fog filled years. Society remained frozen and separated from each other. Only responding through digital devices. Growing grayer and grayer with each passing moment. 

Consilium incipit 

The plan begins

Torris Mentira had attained the colorful livelihood I yearned for—wearing tailor made silk suits and smiling with a mouthful of polished reproduction porcelain. Mr. Mentira had acquired the virtual reality company Olifanti when it was a dying wasteland of nothingness. 

It had obsolesced because of poor marketing and mismanagement of funds. However, Mentira saw a glimmer of rusty gold in the otherwise futile efforts. Snatching it up for pennies on the dollar, Olifanti would later become a household name. And Mentira the worlds new deity. 

It was the first Thanksgiving of the Great Haze. I had been laboring away at my Thankless job for 6 months. Luminosity and tincture had almost completely abandoned my psyche . A reunion with my bygone days was the only commodity that would allow my soul from disappearing completely . Simply speaking into the unmanned messaging system and uttering the name of my lost friends would allow the machine to locate them and send them pre-programmed messages. Olifanti labeled this machine “The HearAfter” It was my salvation out of a colorless confinement. I spoke slowly. “Jack- E Day.” My eyes grew heavy as did my heart with seconds seeming to turn into hours. . The screen on ‘The Hear After ‘ lit up and before me, like magic ,was my long lost childhood friend-color began to fill my cheeks. 

Mia Mera ti Fora

One Day at a Time

Jackie spoke slowly... somberly. The Haze had creeped into her life and left me with a robotic friend. Tears formed in my eyes but not in hers as we managed to exchange courtesies . . The beautiful laughing red head that always managed to win at Manhunt and Monopoly sat like a lifeless colorless emoji in a flat emotionless world. Her half acre presence still managed to stimulate my hippocampus and I perceived a tinge of peace of mind and warmth while at the same time feeling a desire to prevent this cloud from spreading. . now I understand that my mission in life was not to numerate worklessness . It was to stop The Haze and determine who was behind it!

Mera me ti mera 

 Torris Mentira slithered into my office and changed everything about my future and the rest of humanity . I had just finished using “The Hear After”to “contact” Jackie. Memories of my past still filled my cheeks and color was pulsating back out of my soul. Mentira slinked in , smiled his Cheshire Cat grin, and presented me the most interesting grey offer. 

“Based on your performance with Labor and Statistics, I would you like to work for Olifanti as CEO of a new division.”

After nearly collapsing out of my pathetically scrawny chair, I brought myself to question “what division and why me?” I felt myself slowly dying inside. The color had faded from my soul once again. 

Smells. People in today’s world know smells from artificially produced scents that are piped through airflow. Or candles that produce the smell of what a pine tree is supposed to smell like. But the civilization of the past, the one that I embraced and hated at the same time, smelled actual items. The smell of salt air not simulated salt air. We felt the real sun our skin and didn’t care about cancer or birth marks or wrinkles. Now we live in odor free bubbles fearful of catching any germs when in fact we have caught the one thing that will kill all humanity. Solitude. Or is it Olifanti.

Justifying his actions as peaceable, Mentira explained that Olifanti had merged with the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics and was going to start marking every newborn baby with an invisible tattoo. 

This tattoo would only become visible with a laser from Olifanti labs. The Mark would determine the baby’s pathway and lifestyle and the government felt that this “tracking device” would eliminate crime and prisons and help revitalize the future.

I needed to stop it. I spoke into the HearAfter.....