February 2085

  First letter of Norman the Orientien

  My name is Norman Friedrich, and this is my letter—from the future that has arrived and is not what was dreamed, to a future yet to come, illuminated in mystery.

  In the year 2085, the Orient, a nation of some eight thousand islands, islets and newly-conquered archipelagos, is a totalitarian state. When I speak of totalitarianism, what must immediately come to your mind, my unknown reader, is a sytem of social organization kept in by high walls that are made gray of decaying, solitary dreams. They are places encircled with cruel barbed wires that slash-and-tear and rust-bleed each other, where there lingers within like half-corpses holding on to dear life a herd of abject, civil population that is ominously disproportionate in comparison to the number of state officials. The latter, necessarily and without qualms, serve a dictatorial state. This is only partly true.

  Totalitarianism, especially ours of this future time, has adopted ever more sophisticated and complex forms. History itself must be confounded, and even the wise dead could only have faintly envisioned the phenomena that has come to master this side of the earth.

  It is a loveless, heartless era. Once, in the heat of day in the commercial district, I looked on while a man certainly, slowly choked to his death. He is a citizen of the Orient (non-citizen, as I would learn later from state news, that is, one who is disavowed and disenfranchised, a social nonentity). I am among the people. We are a mass of pale, subdued faces, a ring of numb bodies, in a city of chilling aloneness. But nobody was more alone than that man, struggling for his life. Nobody helped. It was the man's time to die, and every citizen who stood watching including myself was aware. The bread in his mouth and the pain wringing the man, symbolized the irrevocable judgement of the Oriental leadership. This is one condemned to die as an enemy of the state.

  The Orient leadership exercised total, centralized control of all affairs in the Orients. A vestige of freedom was maintained on the surface of things like a veil that concealed the mechanical extent of state management. Everything, in essence, is a monopoly of the Oriental governance. The deceptive sense of freedom is the trick. One simple shop and each grand establishment is a link in an imperceptible yet very real chain of power which lead to and ends in the Oriental state. It is the one organ that unilaterally and unequivocally decide destiny, destruction and death for citizen and non-citizen alike, in worse way, necessarily, for the other. State members and faithful subjects were indulged with graces and favors, while opponents and enemies were targeted and pushed into desperation. Followers were honored; the dissidents isolated and led to die lonely deaths.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  There was a time in the past when the Orient was not even known as such. It was a nation known as the Philippines. How one became the other can only be credited to the long-suffering and glorious labours in ideology and warfare of the New Orients Party under the leadership of High Leader Griston Crocus.

  In a purge that is sarcastically called Hunger Suicides, enemies of the state were put on trial, their fates sealed beforehand, for causing public disturbance for what the Oriental leadership deemed were unscientific accusations that foodstuffs in the market were Party associates-manufactured to harm the people and certain ‘target populations’, effecting a monopolistic consumption of Party-produced goods. This is in keeping with the Party principle of total social control.

  The capital is Zone 1. Long ago, this was Manila. Under the political changes introduced by the New Orients Party, the city has become the center of infamous rallies and of mass mobilization, of grand monuments and of the multimodal performance of party propaganda. In other words, it is a city where almost every fellow citizen you encounter, whether on the roadside, in the restaurants, in the government buildings and public spaces, wear a look of certain firmness in principle, an unwavering faith and firmness in party dogma, a camouflage of total subjugation that fears being detected as otherwise. Hence, there prevails a general atmosphere of repression of spontaneous self-expression of emotion and thought. Every man is in any moment and at any place simultaneously a loyal ally and potential foe, both an active originator of praise and reward, or of condemnation and liquidation. Upon reaching a certain degree of social consciousness, you start to feel nothing towards the next man - no warmth of life, no sympathy for his plight. Every citizen keeps to himself as if in a straitjacket the strong, unavoidable sense of being a herd of common subjects to a power that is too high for understanding, obscure, out of reach and unknown, along with the necessary hidden hostility and suspicion...

  *

  After completing a great part of this letter, my body began to shiver uncontrollably in a way it has not for the longest time. I quickly make for the sink, feeling deeply sick. I am anxious and feverish, yet light and liberated, like a small bird carried away by storm winds. The cold is unsettling. It is the soul-penetrating, frozen sensation of realizing oneself abandoned, doubled by the instantaneous reaction of asserting oneself and cutting loose of all imagined social ties and spiritual anchors.

  I look at my reflection. Of the face in the mirror, longish, blood-drained and wearied down with drooping, alert eyes, I have learned to project what can only be rightly described as both a nervous and aggressive resistance to unorthodox thought and feeling, a mechanism got by long training in physical and mental discipline, courtesy of the strenuously active committee on behavioral engineering. Such primitive functions are condemned as the root cause of chaos and division in long-forgotten times. With the Party in power, they are made obsolete by the infallible order principle. It states that all which a citizen of good faith must be is subject to the determination of the Oriental leadership.

  The sad, frowning being, taking form in the fantasy of alternate reality and its unthinkable absence of the sense of omnipotent control, and myself as an absolute subject with no vested power to create my own independent form and substance, but with straight-backed pride for my identity bound in creed and dogma, had been unknowns to each other.

  End of chapter 1