from cryptesthesian@lemmy.world to sciencefiction@lemmy.world on 21 Dec 00:26
https://lemmy.world/post/23368337
A New Song for Lya
Novella
“We do not have an ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where we can do right with no effort because we can detect the obvious.” — Philip K. Dick
Synopsis
A New Song for Lya is a novella that briefly explores the existential struggles of Lya and Jack Andersson. Lya, a xenogender woman in her early thirties, and Jack, her slacker husband about ten years her senior, are caught in a dystopian future in the early 2200s, where an Orwellian society of surveillance and control looms over their every move. Amid this oppressive backdrop, they wrestle with profound questions of identity and connection. Their journey reflects the Jungian interplay of opposing forces within the psyche, offering a stark mirror to the uncertainties of our increasingly ominous present.
Prolog
It never stopped drizzling. It never ever stopped drizzling. Hence, the crimson red always washed away. Good, or bad? I didn’t know. I didn’t wanna know.
“Inexplicably dead, this man is, isn’t he?” I thought, and turned to Lya to get her beautiful but sad-looking face remapped in the cybershop window in front of us.
“And totally forgotten,” she replied, sobbing, as she heard my familiar thoughts echoing out through her overtly populated mind.
The dead man was a dharma bum. An anarcho-spiritist monk. Recently ordained, by the look of it—the wet Sanskrit ink on his left hand revealed his true mission in life: Pranava, the fore-sound of everything. He’d been shot several times in the chest. Couldn’t be saved. Too much nanoblood lost. No revivification protocol—no activation of DNA-spliced synthetic neurons grown to mimic the cosmic lattice of human thought—could bring him back. It was a tech bordering on bullshit—or “zoopoieo,” as Lya would put it: life-giving, or something—a whispered science that toyed with the limits of mortality. A big no-no, a fucking TSN, a “Thou-Shalt-Not”—kinda thing, according to the GNU Institute of Science. And a pity, yes, for sure. All the Zen folks in this otherwise stressed-out city were needed, truly, to weigh out the mind rotting platitudes of global consumerism and greed. It all sort of matched the old graffiti on the so called “Wall of Fog,” the United Nations’ giant financial skyscraper, downtown: “MONEY BEATS SOUL EVERY FUCKING TIME”.
“Why has this man been killed?” Lya could hear me thinking. “And why the hell has he been lying here for hours, rotting away, without anybody taking notice? Had he bought something in the shop? Something worth killing him for? New eyes, perhaps? I know that the latest cyberoptic implants are really fucking expensive, really sought after by everyone, and especially by the rich transhumanist gangs of New Buckhead, who can’t get them because they’re not sanctioned by the UN. Well, the CTV-drones are on it now, buzzing all over the fucking place, thanks to us, so, yes, maybe they’ll get off their rich fat asses and do something, finally. Those damn UN cops ain’t worth shit!”
threaded - newest