Crash Flux 1: Welcome To The Machine Read Online Free Page A

the world outside Datcora.  “The Great War came, and the Earth was devastated.  Men scattered to the winds, struggling to survive in the wasteland.  Two Hundred years ago, a group of beings called the Keta set out to design a city, a city that could exist in a land where all the natural resources had been stripped clean, a land with no metal, no lumber, no clean water, no arable land to grow crops.”
    The view above them shifted once again, to the fledgling arcology.  “Datcora.” said the dragon.  “Survivors across the continent fled to our nation-city in a desperate gambit to survive the desolate wastes.  They brought with them something they had not had in many years.  A thin, fragile hope.”
    “But the Keta had other plans.  They sought to build a perfect city, a city without war, without violence, without pain or suffering.  A world… without freedom.  Abandoning the earth that gave us life, the Keta created an artificial reality, a simulation so advanced that it would allow hundreds of millions of people to experience this utopia simultaneously, but something went wrong.”
    “The human spirit would not be confined to an artificial prison.  Soon, men began to seek out the earth, to desire to once again set their feet upon the ground and breath the open air.  The Keta created a complex system of codes, conditioning mechanisms, psychological tricks designed to do one thing, to control the human mind, to deny man his impulses, his intuition, his emotion… his soul.”
    “We reacted, desperately trying to escape the city.  The Keta’s vision could not allow for the people of Datcora to leave.  The resulting violence of the exodus revolution led to harsher conditioning, which led to greater violence, an endless cycle that continues to this day.  The emergence of the castes followed in its wake, those privileged few who were selected to serve the Keta living on the surface of Datcora, given the freedom to design their own reality, a fantasy land in which anything was possible.  The Keta played on mankind’s darkest desires, and created an upper echelon, called the Second Estate, to assist in their control.  The Second Estate created the Humantix Corporation to rule over the surface of the Arcology.  The Keta promised them whatever they desired, no matter how vulgar, twisted, or horrific, and in return, they made the Keta disappear.  
    Within a generation the Keta were no longer real.  They were a myth, a legend.  A demented fantasy of delirious malcontents, a paranoid delusion shared only by those who were incapable of adapting to the glorious utopia of Datcora.  The Keta created their agents, men selected from birth to serve as ghosts in the machine, called the z-men.  They are all around us, watching us, taking away those closest to us for crimes as petty as listening to subversive music, to spend the rest of their lives in total isolation, alone inside a tank with no sensory input, no human contact, nothing but their own thoughts and feelings.  You can not consciously see or hear them, yet you know they are there.
    The image of a silver dragon reappeared above them.  Its synthesized voice rained down upon them, “For years I have been telling you about the second estate, controlled response programming, and the zero men.  Now, I have proof.”  Scrolling down the screen in text too small to perceive with the human eye, at speeds too fast to read, the figure broadcasted the C.R. code that Raydin had appropriated from the Bulldog corporate mainframe for this sector.  “With these codes you can access your own C.R. programming, which you have been subjected to since infancy, through the various media owned by Humantix’ subsidiary corporation, Holografix incorporated.  One set of tones in correct sequence will trigger most of your basic functions.  The memory loss after being triggered is normal, part of the conditioning.  Many who run the cracks of Datcora will have recorded