Welcome To Hellville - Part 9 By Rich Mills 22nd November 2040

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The analysis of the VHS tapes have come back. Keith reports back that indeed one of the tapes did contain episodes of He-Man, along with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Inspector Gadget and Battle of the Planets. Be worth something to an animaphile out there. I will stick it on eBuy-GUM, the online Global Underground Marketplace. I'm sure I'll get a few credits for it, or swap it for some more books, or get some parts to retro-fit my jumble of aging video, audio and ancient computing gadgets and gizmos.

Anyway, it was the second tape that yielded more interesting stuff by all accounts. Keith thinks it is some kind of TV game-show, but he hasn't been able to place it yet among the piles of faded and dog-eared TV schedules of yester-year. He says it is of the kind that was popular during the first quarter of the century, a genre of programming that proliferated across the hundreds of TV channels, a genre known collectively as Reality TV.

A phenomenon that has now all but died out started back in the latter decades of the 20th Century, but such programming dried-up with the development and global distribution of the first mass-market Tru-Cam. TCTV has since taken over the world of TV entertainment. People simply just watch each other all the time. People watching people watching people. Reality TV as was, now taken to its most mundane extreme to become little more than banality TV. It has reached the point now, where people have been known to have caught themselves up in a perpetual viewing loop.

I heard a story once were two people died while watching each other. The story goes that they were watching each other waiting for the other to do something, like an insane game of staring each other out. They sat for days and days, just watching, not moving, slowly dying. This went on and on, until they both just died where they sat, Tru-Cam's still on, recording there now decomposing bodies.

Now I accept that this is likely an urban myth, but a prophetic one if nothing else. No-one ever meets up anymore, no-one ever interacts in the normal human physical face-to-face way. It's all done via some Bio-device or another, empathising by being and all that Neo-Matrix-Age bullshit. Reality TV as it became known, didn't start this obsession we have with watching each other, that started long ago, and is part of who we are as beings. We need to be for others, to be part of the spectacle, to validate our own existence.

However, the phenomenon of Reality TV was a significant surface of emergence as far as the who watches the watchmen issue is concerned.

Everyone embraced the Orwellian notion of a surveillance society. The authoritarianism of Big Brother became entertainment for the masses. They had their hour of hate, while screaming at the poor volunteers trapped in the fake reality created by TV executives and mad media minds. And therefore, for all these reasons, such matters have become one of my particular areas of study and interest. It also seemed that Alan's area of interest was similar too. I recovered these undated fragments. They all came from the same document, and seems to be general pixelated musings he committed to the screen.

I've tried meditating on a number of occasions, but I can't clear my mind for more than a few seconds. I don't exist without thinking, I think constantly. I don't mean in the cogito sense, as it's commonly understood. What I think about are things, abstractions, not of this moment. There are those who'd argue that there is only this moment; that beyond this moment there is nothingness. Reality is just a simulation, time an illusion, never real just a sub-standard reproduction of a fleeting moment lost to an ever fading sensorial history. Reality is the after image, briefly branded into us, quick to fade away often leaving us with some residual scaring on those more momentously impressive occasions…

Continued ....next page,

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