I get to the escalator and walk across it as fast as I can, moving with a kind of efficiency that only the top lifestyle can bring. I essentially haul ass through a series of conveyer belts until I get to the Office in the Sky. The Sky Office as I so often refer to it encompasses some of the major corporations on the planet right now: McDisney Six Flags, RaytheoMartin Boeing Inc., RandomPenguin and Columbia-Yale Press, Starbuckian Fisher Price, and, most importantly where I am working today, Apple’s MicroSonySoft. I have been working for Apple’s MicroSonySoft for the past few weeks naming various products from the virtual reality machine they just designed that allows one to adventure out into the top world in virtual reality running along escalators and interacting with those they meet on the way all while they are on their way to work for none other than Apple’s MicroSonySoft, which I have cleverly titled “Virtual Reality for the Non-Virtual.” They didn’t like that title so much, so I have been asked to re-title a number of the things that I have worked on this being one of them. They decided that they really weren’t sure they wanted to advertise to the “Non-Virtual,” to which I replied that perhaps it was in their best interest to simply explain that the product itself is boring as hell and maybe they should come up with a virtual reality machine that, you know, fucking does something. I did come up with a new title on the way, “VR for the Really Fucking Boring,” but I don’t think that they will like that very well either. I really hate this job, but at least they give me an office that overlooks Mt. Fuji and so thus I can spend most of my day thinking and trying to develop some solutions to the problem of society, as opposed to, actually working. They seem to think that coming up with some sort of stupid name for their products is actually really hard, of course, the best they could come up with for their machine is “VR for Someone.” So, perhaps, it is just the fact that they are simply as boring as their idiotic products. I decide to get done with work as fast as possible today, I don’t want to be in this shitty office all day, even if it is the Sky Office. I decide to come up with a few simple titles: “The Conscientious VR,” “Consoling Home,” for a new product that makes home life simpler via a computerized human voice that hands out positive affirmations as though they were free, but the program costs three thousand Dollar-Yen, “Convoluted Idealism,” for the computer program that teaches that the canonized writers of the past are simply that writers of the past that were hoping they could fix the world but ran against some sort of block and didn’t change anything. I particularly hate myself for having anything to do with that at all. It seems that working on such a project is a complete breech of all morality in my mind, but of course, this program was funded by the Government of Eight. The Government of Eight is a team of Presidents from the eight superpowers still left on the planet: Japan, China, Russia, The U.S., England, Canada, France, and Germany. Most of the other countries on the planet were destroyed by the five consecutive years of war, and those that weren’t, nobody ever gave a shit about, like any country in Africa or South America for that matter. I have now titled six products, all of them equally worthless, but that is the minimum quota for one day for me, so I decide to leave after only an hour of being in the Sky Office, explaining to the door guard, not the office guard, but the guard in the door to my office, that I will be back again tomorrow, but today I am feeling like perhaps I need to get my mind into a virtual reality machine because I have experienced too much reality for now. The guard in the door sees this answer as sufficiently plausible, but they are programmed so poorly that almost anything I say will suffice as long as it seems to mesh with the popular style of whatever the hell is new and interesting at the current time. For instance, I could have told it that I was going to go see the Gigantatron Imax HollyBaliwood film that was just released to make sure that my ideas were consistent and friendly towards all those around me and that would’ve easily gotten me out of the office easily enough, but I used that excuse last week.
I walk out of the Sky Office remembering what it was like to see the sunlight after a long day of actual work, the days I used to spend in my studio writing music and literature, but there is no sunshine this high up in the sky anymore. The only place one can find the sun’s light now is on the ground in the middle of nowhere, like middle America: Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, etc. Because of the ozone layer collapse due to the Sky War of 2012, the ozone layer was completely destroyed over most of North America and Eurasia, thus leaving the sun’s rays to develop skin cancer to anyone and everyone who was exposed. The defense contracting companies worked with the Government of Eight as it was being formed to develop a certain UV ray protective layer above any part of any city in the country that rises above eight thousand feet. It’s like a gigantic pair of sunglasses for the country as a whole, which is the way it was marketed. There was a lot of pissed off people when they heard that the ozone layer had been completely eradicated and now there would be no more sunlight, but where the hell are they now? That’s my question, what did they become? Did they join the ranks of society and progress into something more and more amiable until they made so much money; they stopped giving a shit about anything important. There are children who grow up that cannot decide whether the sun is yellow or brown or red or blue depending on what city they live in. I see them having arguments about it in the holographic arcades from city to city; the defense contracting companies decided that people would buy the idea better if they were able to vote on any color they wanted their city’s sunglass color to be and so a vote was held in each major city, but the children don’t understand what these things mean and their parents have forgotten how to explain the sunlight, the warmth a few minutes of sunshine can bring and the way it feels to wake up in the morning and drink a cup of coffee while looking out the window watching the sun shine on the birds singing outside. I miss the sun and it is that simple, but why doesn’t anyone else. I have seen the sun VR machines, except they cannot seem to perfect the way the sun feels and it is just virtual reality, so what’s the point anyway?