Emergence 3.0 - Section Six, The Empire; Part Thirty-seven, Bureaucrat; Chapter Five, Monitor

Emergence 3.0

A Novel – In One Page Per Day

Day 271, Friday

September 28th, 2018

Chapter Five: Monitor

The Empire required and relied on bureaucratic controls. Through them it governed the movement and aspirations of trillions of people. It managed every aspect of their lives, slowing some down while creating lanes of opportunity for others.

The Empire established paths of predictability for the vast majority of its citizens, and used the byzantine structures of the bureaucracy to exercise its capriciousness as it desired. 

The vast Imperium utilized monitoring at every conceivable level of the social order. It monitored the movements and behaviors of its citizens, for economic purposes, for security purposes, for historical and religious purposes.

It monitored their behaviors on levels that few people outside of the Collective suspected, because it monitored them for the benefit of the Collective and the Continuum alone.

There was no such thing as privacy in the Empire.

Every citizen was the property of the state. Their entire lives were meant to be organized as a gift, as an offering to the Gods, this is what they learned in school, and that is what was beat into them through the ritual conditioning of the Imperial cult.

The individual person was merely a link in the great chain of being.

In time Jim rose to a position in which he reported, and analyzed a wide range of human activities and behaviors, especially among those rebel groups that he had once been a member of.

He became aware of how futile his life had been.

The Empire knew everything, had always known everything about him. He had only ever been a blip on their list of concerns.

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