Life is a light emitting diode. In a neonopolis mired in untold millions of dark nights of the soul, at the last, we were left with the lights. The ceaseless wheedling reds, blues and greens, primary colours of persuasion, cybernetic cyanotypes. The massive bioluminous truetone 5D advertising screens, blasting and cajoling and importuning, personalised to within an inch of your life, dictating fashions, creating trends, ending fads and shifting paradigms, all in real time. Son et lumiere, sturm und drang, sound and vision … and eventually, sound and fury, signifying nothing, just an empty echo inside a synth’s dream of electric sheep.

The vast sprawling leagues of crumbling dreams and connective tissue, the pulse and the impulse, the will to power that kept the consensual hallucination that was neonpolis humming, growing, agglomerating, accreting, coalescing … no one was really sure but the rumours were strong. Somewhere high in the clouds of static and smog, betrayed by a vague and opalesent grey-green glow, a few putrescent shades off the stuff that passed for blood in a synth, the Other was pulling the strings, pushing our buttons, leading the dance.

You could find anything you wanted in the pleasure zone. Mostly we wanted imperfection. The second sexual revolution, the coming of the synths, had sated our desires, made us bored with beauty. Perfection was a platitude, symmetry stifling. You might as well be fucking a Stepford Wife or a Barbie doll. Ho-hum. So the new servosynths strove for something else; the flaws, the flab, a whiff of decay, a blast of flatus. The ineffable desirability of broken, dirty things. Most of us had long since lost the ability to deal with actual humans. Why bother? And how would you know half the time anyway?

Keep your electric eye on me babe. Put your ray gun to my head. But this ain’t no moonage daydream. This is the Big Chip. The circuit that never sleeps. Yes, you are under surveillance. The dream police exist. Step out of line, speak out of turn, think outside the stream and you will be terminated, liquidated, vaporised in the blink of an eye in the sky.

You take your creature comforts where you can find them. Because life tends to be nasty, brutish and short, even though we have cracked the genome and can live forever. Eternal life? You can keep it. Give me a cold beer, a hot synth and some spuntini salad.

They’ve been watching you for a thousand years. Which to the Other is a day. The trick is to see and yet not to see. And by doing so, lessen the chance of being seen. Scene: a superfast train, total brain drain. Is she a synth that’s been thrashed within a nanoparticle of her life, plug pulled, dessicated and dejuiced; or just another sad sack of flesh, fluid and bone ground down by neonopolis and its unrelenting stresses and pressures? Only her handler, high up in the towers, knows for sure. But in the cracks, the crevices, the interstitial spaces and especially within the chemicals, respite can be found. In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.

Beneath neonopolis flowed the medium; a kind of ectoplasm that superconducted digital signals and electromagnetic pulses. It was a liquid city
beneath a city, clogged with the detritus of decommissioned synths and the odd human corpse that had been, well, liquidated. If this ur-city had a
lifeblood, this was it, this thin, clear watery soup that connected the dots, made the synapses snap and the wires hum. It was the fuel, really, but we
were putting out the fire with gasoline.

That was the thing about neonopolis. You were never truly alone. Someone was always watching, looking over your shoulder, following in your footsteps,
peering inside your thoughts. They tried to camouflage the mental observation towers but a bit of creeping foliage couldn’t really disguise the creeping dread of complete state control of the populace. In the big smoke, big brother was all up in your business, 24-7. You deal, or you deal yourself out. End of story.

Eventually we were all reduced to shadows. Tune out, turn off? Oh no, you were on the grid, in the grid, of the grid, eternally, inexorably, inevitably and intractably. In the beginning was the grid, and the Other smiled and saw that the grid was good. Good god. Was this what the city had reduced us to? Scuttling shapes, shades, simalcra, human palimpsests, serried ranks of digital elipses; the obverse of the platonic ideal, folorn, forgotten figures flitting through digital twilight.

The white car could often be seen in the city late at night, cruising slowly like a shark, or simply stopped, watching, waiting. It glowed softly through the neon soup. It had no number plate or ID. Did it even have a driver? It flowed along with the bright red corpuscles of the taxis through sclerotic lanes. Was it a white blood cell, fighting some unseen infection? Or was it a new virus?