Mars Needs Books!. Gary Lovisi

Directives to do as you were told. And warnings about how dangerous and wrong it was to ever question authority—especially The Authority.

      It wasn’t long before most people didn’t even know how to think rationally at all.

      And history? Facts? There were so many versions. Which version did you want? No one remembered now just which version was actually true. Few even cared what events were authentic or real?

      What was reality after all?

      Facts, truth and rational thinking had become the greatest casualties of the high-tech future. No one was even sure if the leaders were actual people anymore, and not just made-up holograms of idealized persons in virtual format. Who were they really? No one actually ever met any of them. What did it mean, when what they said or stood for changed by the hour. There was no way to check anymore with actual written records, hard copies. Most had been destroyed. There was no way to go back now, no way to discover what laws were actually written and on the books. There were no books. The books were gone long ago. Laws changed daily, even hourly now. The digital history was revised by a stroke on a keyboard. No one knew about this, and worse, no one seemed to care.

      That’s just the way the future was.

      But how had it come to this?

      Ryan heard a while back some rumor that The DOC had gone interplanetary. That it had agents, maybe even offices and reps on the mining colonies of Mars, Luna, and all the other planetary colonies and stations. He figured, why not? They wanted to control everything, and it seemed they sure as hell did.

      Rumors abound about everything of course. Facts and truth don’t exist. Most of the bad rumors, the worst of them all, concerned The DOC. Most of them were started by The DOC too. But of course, everyone knew The DOC didn’t really exist. Surely it couldn’t exist. Or so everyone said. You see, no one is supposed to know it exists. And in truth, almost no one does.

      Except Ryan.

      He knew.

      At least, he thought he knew.

      Unless it’s all a bunch of crap he got out of that old science fiction paperback he’d been reading lately.

      Or out of his dreams.

      Or nightmares.

      He was not so sure anymore.

      They play with your mind here.

      Truth means nothing to these people. The truth is, he was not sure of much of anything these days....

      He tried to think back on things sometimes, but it was hard when he realized he couldn’t even trust his own memories or senses.

      Memories.

      What do they really mean? What are they? Really.

      Memories are cold, frozen, and it hurts real bad to think about the past, but if he tries real hard, and if he can stand the terrible pain, sometimes he can free up a few bytes from the granite block that’s inside his head.

      Sometimes he thinks his mind has been tampered with, his thoughts processed for him. Programmed. Altered. Sometimes he thinks he’s crazy. Sometimes he’s sure of it. Other times, he’s just not so sure.

      What if he is right? About being crazy.

      Well, that might be true, but deep down inside he didn’t really believe that.

      Well, what about being programmed or altered?

      That would be the scariest thing of all!

      Sometimes he’d laugh, thinking he was the only sane one! Then he really had to laugh. Sometimes he’d even cry about it. Of course it’s not true, it can’t be true. He couldn’t be crazy but it’s been known to happen. It was hard to explain.

      The world today is a very screwed up place, and if you happen to be very screwed up yourself, then you actually might fit into it very well. Maybe he was a “normal,” at least according to the parameters of his world. And conversely, living in this sewer of a world, maybe he was just plain crazy.

      Or at least he would end up that way before his time here ran out.

      One thing he did know is that whoever really runs the show here, has control of it all. There’s all kinds of subliminal, and not so subliminal, messages in vids, neural implants. Most people pop them into their head slots like eating candy. All the software and info has been manipulated and loaded with brainwash mind-controlling, behavior-modifying codes, and political propaganda. That had been going on for decades on Earth. No one with half a brain—or who has half a brain left these days—can trust any neural software, vids, or implants. No one who wants to keep their own mind free can ever trust any of this modern media. It has all been compromised.

      However, there were some die-hards who stay away from all modern media. They say it is poison for the mind. Some say it is poison for the soul as well.

      These few hard-core “individuals” only read books. Actual books in hard copy. Old books are best. They’re deemed safest. Those cannot be easily infected; meaning manipulated or tampered with. While they certainly can be compromised, it is not cost effective. So hard copy books remain relatively safe and the older they are, the safer they are. Preferably books from LastCen. Last Century. These are almost always paperbacks. These are best. Paperbacks have no screen, no neural implant, no virtual reality disk, no memory chips. There is no interference or interface at all. Nothing but the actual book as written by the author and printed on paper. There is only the paper and ink, and the reader’s eyes and mind.

      Paperbacks from LastCen were common once, relatively inexpensive, and still held truth and honesty in hard copy. The old ones are best, before POD—print on demand—began. From that moment on text could be changed, amended, altered, corrected, or revised even in hard copy, just like what has been going on for decades with electronic media that make up our digital memory today. So the oldest paperbacks were always the safest; those from the pre-POD days of the 1980s—and the best and safest of all were dated from the faraway days of the 1940s to the 1970s.

      In the beginning, the Authority told everyone they did all changes, updates, corrections—for the good of the people. It was done to better society. It was done for only the most noble and virtuous reasons. In the beginning, it appeared they were correct. That was what was so chilling about the changes. People accepted them so easily. That’s how it began.

      Whenever government tells you that what they are doing is “for our own good”—you’d best run for the damn hills!

      Ryan knew the best stuff was published in paperback over a hundred years ago. It had been written back in pre-computer days, during the 1950s and still written and published up until the year 2020. That is when the last actual physical books were published as mass-market hard copy paperbacks. Hard cover books had long before ceased to exist except in the most rarified academic circles and never for fiction. Those LastCen old days sure had been a time when people remembered freedom, and how to live free. It had been a time of wonderful ideas, expressed in delightfully odd little books with amazing and idiosyncratic subjects and content, all lovingly created with effective cover art and design that made each and every one of them special.

      Ryan suddenly screamed in agony.

      There it went again, that pain in his head.

      The pain was powerful. It always came back when he tried to think. Maybe the pain in his head was from trying to access his old memories? He knew they probably had put a psychblock implant to stop him from thinking certain thoughts, accessing certain memories, trying to figure out certain truths. It was a way to block things they didn’t want him to know or remember. They could usually stop you from remembering. His own true memories could be twisted or transformed into things he had never known existed. Truths he thought he knew down deep inside him were now things his mind could be forbidden to access.

      They can do that. They can do anything to you they want. Of course he couldn’t remember much of it now. Maybe that’s why he was here.

      Wherever here might be.

      But