Perception Must Preserve

Issue #75: Unveiling Zoothesia, a new story arc

In this issue: A world where augmented reality overlays are widespread, offering their users beautiful facades – day, after day, after day… until even the most beautiful sights seem tame and lifeless. The first installment in a new series from Spencer Nitkey.

---

I never saw a drug dealer on the corner of Second and Poplar until I was looking for one. Sure, there’d been a taped off construction zone – one that, frankly, I was getting pretty sick of having to walk around – but never a dealer. Everything else was the same as always. The same “perfect” sunny 72-degree day my overlays had been feeding me for three months straight. The same subtle sting in my lungs on each inhale, remnants of some distant fire winds had dragged southward into Mayaford City that the overlays couldn’t remove – skin deep AR is, well, not the same as lung-deep, I guess. The same khaki parade of commuters I saw every day, but couldn’t ever erase. The goddamn Zoothesia Protocols let you manipulate everything about your overlays except the one thing I’d really want to turn down: other people. (Zoothesia! Presence is a Present! *gag*). And, OK, I would rather experience a beautiful day than whatever smog-filled sky was really beyond my overlays, but the collective weight of all this sameness was getting harder to bear. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt danger.

I rarely even felt discomfort. That feeling was consigned to a memory of watching horror movies between spread fingers, as a kid in my cousin’s basement.

Hence, my quest for drugs. If my imagination, atrophied and overwhelmed by choice, couldn’t rouse me, I needed a synthetic solution. I’d settled on MDMA, after some research, because I wanted something guaranteed to make me happy. These days, even smiling children irritated me. I spent weeks trying and failing to figure out how, or where, to buy drugs.

Then I saw him, suddenly occupying the barely-under-construction corner. He wore a large jean jacket with a Keith Haring reprint stitched on the back, an 11pm shadow, and sunglasses. I watched him slide a woman with tattered clothes a bag of something. She smiled, gave him money, and walked away.

Buying drugs was easier than I thought it’d be. I asked for them, he asked how much, and when I looked at him panickedly, he rephrased and asked how much money I wanted to spend. He was shockingly polite, which cut hard against my sense of drug dealers as grimy, life-ruining assholes. The last thing he said stuck with me as I left.

“I’m out here every day.”

I walked past this corner on my daily commute. I’d never seen him. Not until I wanted to, I guess. How much of life was happening beneath the veneer of my own inattention? Everything I seemed to notice was boring at best. Hopefully, the drugs would shake something loose. Or I’d at least feel something for a few hours.

I probably shouldn’t have bought them on my way to work. I was new to the whole thing. All day long, I felt like they were seconds away from spilling out onto the beige carpet of my office. To soothe my nerves, I selected a calming ambient track from an opaque overlay menu that popped into view with a chime and a note about my elevated heart rate. I picked a whale song titled Marine Serenity: Safe Waters in Your Social Seas. One of my coworkers kept talking to me about his children both having ballet recitals at the same time in different places. Lukas, this. Lukas, that. Lukas, you wouldn’t believe how conflicted I am. I tried to drown his voice out, but the volume limiter obnoxiously reminded me to be present in the present. You couldn’t fully mute any living creature. Though you’d think they’d at least let me mute my neighbor’s basset hound at five in the morning. The protocols were like those obnoxious hippie parents. They hovered just as much as helicopter parents, but were less honest about it. I sighed and contented myself by selecting a saccharine pastel visual filter (Pink Sunrises) from another suggested menu, tuning him out the old-fashioned way.

After work I took a cab into Center City and checked into one of the dance halls off Market Street. It was still early evening, but there were plenty of people on the dance floor. Nearly half the dancers had the same kind of “firework” projections – virtual “clothes” that automatically populate others’ overlays – that I’d been seeing everywhere. Waves of neon, jaguar print, and blooming flowers. They all looked like bad genAI Pollock pastiches, and I did not understand the appeal.

The music was loud and a little grating. I almost left.

But I swallowed the pills and the world opened. The music pulsed with my heartbeat. Strangers’ eyes were warm and empathetic. Colors bled and bodies dissolved into light. I wanted to be everyone’s friend.

A few hours later, the dance floor was too small. I spilled out into the city. My skin hummed. The entire metropolis wasn’t wide enough to contain me. A stranger streamed past me on an electric scooter, his entire body shone as if gemstones were embedded into his skin. I’d never seen anyone like him before. The sky was a burnt orange, the lights of the city diffuse against the dome of smog I’d felt in my lungs all day. The drugs were working. My overlays had stopped hiding the true sky, probably because they were unprepared for the drug-fuelled vigor with which I was perceiving the world.

I decided to take the line all the way to the Nayanaport docks at the city’s edge. The line hugged the river that bordered the city’s eastern limits. I pressed my face to the smudged glass. In the space between the trainline and the river a canopy of tattered tents interrupted my view. I’d never noticed them before. Small fires burned between the tents, and bodies shuffled, half-shadows. Somewhere in the mess a larger fire burned, sending flames skyward. The tents stretched for a mile, at least.

Soon, we were at the last stop. The drugs were beginning to fade, and the smell of the car was stronger than I’d realized.

On the way home, I couldn’t see any sign of the tent city, just long stretches of river and the sun slowly intruding into the dawning horizon.

I called in sick the next morning. As my neurotransmitters slowly returned to their regularly scheduled programming, I looked up “tent cities along the river.” I couldn’t find anything. Puzzled, I made the same train trip later that afternoon, and saw nothing.

The dealer was still on his corner, though.

“Hey, man.”

He looked me over, then grinned. “Back already? Careful. Serotonin syndrome’s real.”

“I’m good. Does that stuff ever cause hallucinations?”

“Not usually. Why?”

“Last night I saw this whole tent city along the river. This morning, it’s gone”

“A suit saw tent-town? That’s some endorsement for my product. Tent-town is an off-grid alternative living community. Weird stuff. Shocked the Zoo let you see it, though.”

“I thought the protocols had to keep everyone visible at least?”

He gave me a pitying look.

“You don’t know? That was like gen1. The protocols are to ensure that perception doesn’t cause harm. Turns out, sometimes seeing things makes you more likely to do harm. Remember those bugs that screamed when you stepped on them? People started killing them on purpose.”

My head spun. Nobody actually read all the PSAs and changelogs. A billion lines of code and thousands of pages of terms of service hardly made for good beach reading. Last I’d heard, they were adjusting the whole dying animals thing to lessen psychological stress. I hadn’t kept up since then. No one I knew had either.

“Why’d I see it, then?”

“MDMA can spoof the filters. It kind of makes you harmless.”

I knew the protocol wasn’t a person. It wasn’t thinking, but still I wanted to prove it wrong. About me. About all of us.

“How can I see again?”

“Sober? You’ll want a kapala halo.”

“Can I get that from you?”

“It won’t be cheap. And when you get out there, be careful. The Mayasiddha Saints that live there are weird weird. Watch out for the robed ones, especially. Those are the true believers.”

---

Oren, the dealer, led me through empty alleys and buildings that suddenly hummed with invisible potential. He said he’d get a decent finder’s fee for bringing me to the saints. I wondered how much of the cash in my pockets would end up in his, but I didn’t have another way into this world. The thought of maybe robbing him and getting my money back once he’d secured the halo for me wandered through my mind. It’s not like it was that wrong to steal from a criminal, right? I pushed it away.

“You ever seen a kapala halo before?”

He didn’t pause to let me answer as we walked.

“Adapted from tantric skull cups they were.”

I got the sense that he enjoyed the sound of his own voice – or hated other people’s.

“They’re wild. They came from these old skull chalices that monks would drink from while they meditated in these gnarly open burial grounds,reflecting on death and impermanence and all that shit. Once the Zoo updates started rolling out in earnest, system admins and social workers needed a way to spoof the protocols to be able to see everything. So, bam, the halos. They synthesize the neurochemical signals of a saint, and spoof the Zoo into thinking it’s safe to show you everything. Of course, now there’s a whole supply of, how should I say, black market ones. But don’t worry. This guy’s legit. It’ll be safe.”

Official kapala halos were used to troubleshoot rendering issues, and occasionally by social workers to interface with communities they might otherwise not have access to. Black market ones were used to pry.

The more he explained, the angrier I grew. Not only had the world been hidden from me by some paternalistic prediction model, but access to it was reserved for criminals and social workers. It was bullshit. The whole “protocols for the people” slogan was just marketing.

Oren sat me in a chair on an empty warehouse floor. He told me I’d feel a slight pinch and asked if I was ready. I didn’t see the thing he affixed to me. I didn’t see the person who’d given it to him. I was ready to see the world as it was.

Something cold pressed against my head, and a series of needles pinched along my temple. Oren flipped a switch, and the world cracked open.

A man with six ears growing up his arm was counting my money in the corner of the room. Oren noticed me staring and laughed.

“He foulmaxes so fewer people see him. Helps in his line of work.”

I left the warehouse, immediately disappointed that it didn’t look any different. The buildings were not secretly burning. The corner stores were not secretly fronts for organ dealers. But there were more people than I’d ever seen before. I understood why some had been hidden from me, sure. People who had grown fur atop their skin and implanted shoddy electronics that jagged from them like broken bones. People licking at perpetually open wounds lined with metal. But beyond them, there were far more normal-looking people than I was used to, and I wondered what the protocols had determined was wrong with them. Or me.

I stopped in front of a glass window to look at my reflection. An ivory colored crown affixed to my temple with needles blinked in the daylight air. It was jarring. Was I now excluded from the view of others like me?

We’d come out of the warehouse close to the water. I walked toward where I remembered the tent city being. I smelled it far before I saw its tattered skyline. A ruinous stench. Urine and sulfur and rot – rose miasmatic. It stuck to my skin.

I walked the fence line until I found an archway cut out of it and entered.

A small group of shirtless children with knotted hair nearly tumbled into me in a mad dash toward a bowl of raw meat. They laughed and spoke in a language I couldn’t understand. My anger rose. There were hurting, dirty, abandoned children in this world, and we could help them if the protocols would let us see them.

I continued inward. The smell was so bad I was on the verge of vomiting. A sickly-sweetness undergirded the sulfuric stench. I peered inside a large tent. Dozens of kneeling, dirty men and women waited in a long line. Their exposed backs jutted with blinking metallic rectangles embedded into their skin. With each flashing light, their bodies tensed. Their faces grimaced. Some even muffled cries. A small woman with dyed, black eyes began taking the rectangles from their bodies one by one. As they were removed, the men and women sighed, opened their eyes, and fell upon the ground. Most smiled, blinking, but a few grabbed at the woman’s wrist and begged her to reinsert it.

“You will receive pain again next week. That is enough for now.”

I shuffled away and hoped no one had witnessed my intrusion. The sin of my sightlessness ate at me. Here, just a mile from my home, while I sipped cappuccinos and laughed about superhero movies and LLM release schedules, there was this place where misguided and brainwashed masochists begged for pain and children ate bloody red meat from bowls like dogs. How could we fix the world if we couldn’t see it?

I did not look inside any more tents as I walked. I considered running, but wanted to prove to the paused protocols that they were wrong about me. First, I would handle this scene, then I would fix it.

A tremendous boulder blocked my path. I considered scaling it before I saw eyes blinking between pink and green gemstone cavities in the rock’s surface. Small, swallowed faces in the rock facade opened and closed their mouths in slow, heaving breaths. They’d somehow been completely embedded in the rock and couldn’t move. I walked around them, nausea cresting, until the tents stopped by the river’s edge, and a bonfire stood before me.

At the feet of the fire, for yards in every direction, dead and dessicated corpses lay. Maggots and flies covered the bodies. The putrifying field wavered with the heat of decomposition in the summer sun. Worse than the dead were the dozens of living men, women, and children who lingered at the periphery. A man with a large group of children behind him pointed to bones and limbs while the children shouted out the name of the body parts, and were met with approving nods. A woman raised a wooden chalice, poured half of its contents over a skinless corpse and then laughed as she passed the cup around to her friends, who each took a sip. A couple was making out against the worming backdrop of bodies, and I couldn’t understand why everyone was acting so goddamn happy. Were they deranged? Brainwashed victims? I couldn’t understand. I could barely breathe in the stench and rot of it all, but everyone here seemed happier than anyone I knew. No one was supposed to live this way.

I resolved to come back with someone. Maybe the cops? At least a flamethrower. We’d rescue the children, the brainwashed, and unscar the land.

I turned to flee, back up the road winding through the tents that I’d followed. A man in a cage rolled down the bumpy dirt, blocking my way. Dozens of logs rolled beneath him, and a bevy of followers dressed in tattered orange robes hurriedly moved the logs from behind the cage in front as the movement continued. These were the Mayasiddha Saints Oren had warned me about. When they reached the edge of the grounds, they lifted his cage from the logs and set him on the floor. In rhythm, they moved the many logs into the fire, feeding it. It roared, and the heat slammed against my face, intensifying the smell of rot.

They carried his cage next, wading through the bodies. I moved at the same time I understood their purpose. They meant to burn him alive.

He spat on my face from inside the cage.

“Who barks in this temple?”

He spat again.

“I’m trying to help you, idiot,” I said, wiping my cheek.

“Bakāsura!” He slung the word venomously.

“You wear a halo but act a demon. First taste of true-sight and you swing like a blindfolded child at everything that scares you. You are no better than your protocols. Play-pretending my father. You who have never smelled the burning marrow. Never watched the shadow rend from flesh and join smoke. Never watched a soul dance dharmic in flaming freedom. Keep your wretched half-life, and leave me my sunning death.”

“There are children watching!” I screamed, unsure how else to react as the rage in my chest flooded my entire body.

“Good.” He turned from me, nose high, like I was an unwelcome stench.

One of the robed monks pushed me back, and they resumed their march toward the fire.

“You shouldn’t be here, phantom.”

As I considered how right he was, my hand grasped a long bone. I would help him, whether he wanted it or not.

I raised the bone above my head, and the world went dark completely. No sound. No sight. Not even the wind on my skin or my heartbeat in my ears. Even with the kapala, my panicked rage and imminent violence had triggered the Zoo. In the absence of anything, I fainted.

---

I woke with the kapala in my lap staring at the muddy banks of the river. I looked behind me and saw a field of grass that ended in the far distance with a fence. Free of the smell and sights of horror, my senses returned. Without the viscerality of the scene, my reason returned too.

I walked a great distance along the river, thinking through what I’d seen, grateful my AR overlays were functioning again and that I was not being barraged by disgust. The man’s words haunted me. Did I have the right to take his death from him? To judge the lives of those whose urges were completely alien to me. In my rage, I would have burnt those tents to the ground. I’d have bulldozed the boulder. I’d have destroyed their whole city and thought I was doing the right thing.

But would that really have been so bad? I remembered the laughing children, face-first in offal. I remembered the suicidal man, who was not talked off the ledge by his peers, but led to it, told it was meaningful and right. My life had been boring, sure, but it hadn’t been disgusting and painful. It hadn’t been wrong.

I did, begrudgingly, have to admit that the Zoo had been right about me in one way. I was not ready to see the whole world without hurting it. But, I think it was wrong, too. Maybe some things deserve to be hurt, hunted, and erased. Surely I wasn’t the only one who had seen the things they weren’t supposed to and wanted to do something about it. I’d find them, those others, and we’d find a way to act on the world as it is, with or without the Zoo.