Brave New World

I lie on Mr. Blues’ unoccupied bed in his and Hayato’s hotel room, staring into the ceiling. I force my brain to wander away from Hikari as I wait for Mr. Blues to return, so he can undo the curse afflicting me, allowing me to physically reunite with her once more. I wonder how she’ll react to finally seeing me again after all these years. Maybe there is some good left in this strange, unfair future. Even still… The modern world… This future…

How did Dr. Yamamoto’s proposal ever catch on? No, that couldn’t be it… The modern-day world can’t just have been defined by the spread of herkular genes and corporate superheroes, right? Right? Superpowered warriors clash in the streets every single day, leaving families hurt and homeless, and people just shrug and say that ‘it is what it is?’ What kind of unsatisfying dystopian future is that? Letting out a sigh, I pick at Hayato about the present day a bit more. “So, what are the technological improvements? Surely, there’s more to what meets the eye to this Neo-Tokyo, right?”

Hayato tilts his head at me. “Neo-Tokyo? Why are you calling it that?”

I turn to him for clarification. “Tokyo has been rebuilt since it was destroyed, and we’re in a new epoch, right? I'd assumed it would be called Neo-Tokyo or something like that.”

He simply stares at me before bursting out with laughter. “We’ve actually rebuilt the entirety of Tokyo twice, and we haven’t considered changing its name to Neo-Tokyo. Even after the entire metropolitan area was leveled by The Great Rupturing, it was still only Tokyo. It’s pretty weird to actually add ‘Neo-’ onto a place name as though it’s so much newer and futuristic than it was yesterday, isn’t it? We’re practically patching up areas of the city every day, but it still wouldn’t warrant adding such a prefix to it.”

I slowly nod, coming to terms with the reality of this new world. “Right… I suppose for you guys, everything changed gradually over time, so it doesn’t seem like a sudden leap forward in time like it is for me.”

“Mhm…” Hayato kicks his feet in the air as he scrolls through his phone on his bed.

I sit there, still trying to adjust to this new world. “And sorry for asking so many questions, but what… exactly is The Great Rupturing? You keep using all these terms and referencing these events as if I have any clue as to what they mean.”

“Oh! Sorry about that. How can I explain The Great Rupturing… Actually, you know what? Take a guess. It’s basically what the name suggests."

"Uh, something... important ruptured?"

"Yeah, I guess the Earth is pretty important." Hayato almost laughs again but stops himself. "I shouldn't laugh. It was a pretty devastating event for everyone who lived through it. I'm just being insensitive because I wasn't even born when it happened."

"Uh-huh... What, um... What exactly do you mean by that? The Earth rupturing..."

"Around twenty years ago, a villain who called himself Vulkane showed up and decided to start tearing the Earth apart. Buildings collapsed, cities crumbled, and magma poured out everywhere." The smirk he tried to wipe off his face earlier returns. "On the bright side, there are a few more tropical islands for old people to go on vacations to now.”

I stare at Hayato with my mouth slightly agape as he recalls details of the story, yet I notice that I've already begun to become desensitized to hearing such horrific events. The fact shocks me more than hearing of The Great Rupturing itself, but maybe it's only because that the scale is so comically exaggerated that my brain is failing to truly understand the damages of that day. 

Considering that CVAs are just as much my own legacy as it is Dr. Yamamoto’s, I take the opportunity to pry a bit more into that, though none of it still feels real just yet. “And the CVAs didn’t stop this? Wasn’t that their job?”

“I'm honestly not too well versed on this topic since it's such an old story but I think there were just no competent CVAs at the time to prevent it." The young boy continues as I internally reel from hearing him say something from twenty years ago old. "If I recall correctly, the hero industry was experiencing a honeymoon period where no threatening villains really existed, and CVAs at the time didn’t really have to try to do their jobs, making them unprepared for such a sudden world-ending apocalypse. The fact that it could've been prevented made it all the more tragic.”

I can't seem to stop seeing flaws in the idea of CVAs, still struggling to understand how they came to be. “So… Doesn’t that prove that CVAs are ineffective? Why are they still so popular?”

The boy scratches his head. “I don’t know what sort of competition you think might exist to replace them. It’s not like such an event would ever happen again anytime soon anyway.”

Hayato sounded so confident that I could see the red flags sprouting on his head. "Why's that?"

"Well, this latest generation of CVAs have proven to be more competent than any before, and there are some really threatening villains like the Flair Grenades to keep them on their toes nowadays."

"Right..." I quickly tire of this topic, realizing that each answer and solution comes with its own set of questions and problems that people seem to just be okay with for some reason. I dare not even ask who the Flair Grenades are.

“Anyway, you were asking about technological advancements, right?" He scrolls through his phone as he continues. "Oh! Um, so smartphones basically also serve as PCs now! That wasn’t a thing in your time, right? They do this really cool thing where the screen projects a holographic interface of a PC directly into your eyes, and you can interact with it using your hands. That’s pretty neat, right?”

“That... That’s it? You’ve managed to put a PC into your pocket and give it a slightly more quirky user interface?” The disappointment crushes any expectations I could've had. "What about cybernetics and completely virtual worlds?"

He tilts his head at my seemingly strange expectations of the future again. “What kind of society did you come from where the common folk could just afford and upkeep such expensive and high-maintenance technology? The smartphone thing was just the first thing that came to mind. I'm sure there's more... Let’s see… With fabricator technology... we’ve been able to pretty much fix the environment!”

“Oh!” I jerk up in response. “See, that’s good! That’s a very pleasant surprise.”

Hayato squints as he puts a hand on his chin. “Come to think of it, wasn’t there that one guy who tried to pass a bill putting a tax on access to clean air…?”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s nothing. I just happened to remember it while we were on this topic. It happened. The internet got upset at it for a week, and then we kind of just forgot about it. That tends to happen a lot. I haven’t looked into it since, but hey, I still haven’t paid a single cent for clean air… So I think we’re good?”

His apathy once again does not fail to baffle me. “How do you people just keep letting these things happen!?”

He shrugs once more. ”I don’t know. It’s just not worth the effort to try to stop it, I guess. I mean, there are some countries that literally breed generator herkahumans and use them like slaves as living power sources in extremely cruel and inhumane factories, but what are you going to do about it? Boycott electricity? Yeah, I’m sure your decision as a single individual to abstain from their product will make them realize how bad their business practices are, and they’ll surely change their ways.”

Hayato adjusts himself to sit upright on his bed and shows the screen of his phone to me. "So I need a new phone case for my new phone, but I've been struggling to decide between this Overtime case and this Paperbag Head case. Which one do you think looks better."

I look at the two designs he shows me on his phone, both with a surreal yet traditional aesthetic with its strokes and shapes before just picking one out at random. "I, uh, I don't know who these people are, but, uh, I guess the Overtime one looks cleaner?"

"Hm? Really? I like the palette of the Paperbag Head one better though."

"Then, uh, j-just go with that one." Shaking my head and still suffering the whiplash of Hayato's transition from talking about one of the worst things I've ever heard in my life to picking out phone cases, I look down and directly through my own body, staring at the white sheets beneath me.

I’d like to complain about just how ridiculous the world has become, but come to think of it, even back in my time, such atrocities occurred on a daily basis... Just not to this extent. Even back in my time, injustice resided all throughout the world, yet most people did nothing about it...

It’s always been the same society that’s robbed everything away from me. That much hasn’t changed. I guess that’s how it's always been. Over the next few decades, society has begun developing systems for the new and foreign, and yet it seems with every adjustment it makes for the marginalized, even worse consequences follow…

I think I’m starting to see the truth… Wouldn’t it just have been so convenient if dystopia was the result of a single catastrophic event? Isn’t it nice to imagine that we’d be able to recognize dystopia and rebel against it when it comes? Dystopia isn’t a society with… evil, oppressive regimes, or… powerful corporate entities… or total anarchy and chaos. Dystopia isn’t a state in which a society can be…

It describes a process that a society undergoes… Dystopia is when a tragedy occurs, and we forget about it next week. Dystopia is when someone jokes about an ongoing atrocity to cope. Dystopia is when systems fail and the world falls apart, and the only thing people can say in response is that ‘it’s the best we’ve got.’

The greatest obstacle to social change isn’t the iron fist of a dictator. They’re not keeping us down with force. They’re drugging us with complacency. There’s no endless rebellion against the system. There’s no restless spirit that carries on through the darkness. There’s no epic clash to change the world. We’ve lost by not even showing up to the starting line.

This dystopia isn’t the cruelty of Tokyo Xenoprison that makes you want to fight on and persevere. It’s the cold lifelessness of the Permafrost Panopticon that leaves you dulled and hanging on by a thread. What an unsatisfying dystopia… And here I was, waking up to the future thinking that it might at least be a familiar, satisfying dystopia worth rebelling against. What a foolish presumption to make. Of course, the reality of dystopia was never going to be satisfying…

It’s all only ever been coping mechanisms and distractors. It’s all only ever been a give and take to keep us in order. It’s all only ever been differences, conflicts, and divisions that occupy our time and mind space. There’s simply too much to care about and too much to argue about. Everything’s always second in priority to something else like an impossible knot.

Society doesn’t change if it doesn’t have to. It’s mutable and adapts to whatever it needs to be. Was the doctor correct? Are we all only cogs in the machine? Is there really no way to be accounted for by society without being integrated into it, used by it, and abused by it? Is it a dungeon of our own design? Where is our goal post? What is there to even rebel against?

In fact, maybe there isn’t even a ‘them.’ Maybe there is no easy enemy to point to. There is no single group to unite against except for the natural order of the universe and its results. Words like ‘society’ and ‘the system’ don't mean anything! Even pinning the blame onto such empty words is only a method of coping against the indifferent nothingness that keeps us trapped in this sheer absurdity of existence. And even upon this realization… What of it? What am I going to do with it? What is there for me to do about this accidental dystopia crafted by an uncaring universe?