Beauty is for Beasts

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! The alarm clock noisily announced the arrival of 4 a.m.

Chi Carroll 003E00 woke immediately, showered, shaved, dressed, ate, and was outside his apartment in a matter of 7 minutes. Glancing nervously at his watch, he strode purposefully away from the twenty-story building where he lived. His workplace was south 4 blocks, west 2 blocks from his apartment building, but he was walking in a very peculiar direction. He was walking east.

It was illegal, of course, to walk east before noon. It was just as illegal, in fact, as walking west after noon. Both crimes were punishable with a week of confinement in the Underground, the abandoned subway system beneath the city. The laws had been established almost 100 years prior, and few people still knew why it was that the laws were in place. The laws had been established as part of the New Age of Reason, a Unified World project designed to fix everything: unemployment, crime, pollution, unhappiness, and religion. The plan to bring about the N.A.R. project was twofold: 1. greatly dull peoples' emotions with mind altering drugs, and 2. leave all decisions to computers. Building computers smart enough to develop solutions to unemployment, pollution, and so on was the easy part. Designing a drug that repressed human emotions was also relatively easy. The hard part was keeping those emotions repressed.

"Beauty is powerful. It's much more powerful than any chemical substance known to man." - Delta Alzheimer 9B1405, a Unified World physician

To Be Continued...