Nothing is real

We are the children of concrete and steel
This is the place where the truth is concealed
This is the time when the lie is revealed
Everything is possible, but nothing is real

Living Colour - Type

Ryuichi had to get out. The kids were running around the house and screaming, their juvenile energy levels blending with the boredom of a cloudy Sunday morning to form an explosive mixture. He checked the viral pollution levels and left unceremoniously. It wasn't ok to leave Lingzhao alone with the kids, but still he had to get out or the noise and shouting would get to him and erase all possibility of having thought. He needed space to think, and silence.

The streets had not yet filled with people, only a few families strolled, then shining beautiful Black faces gleaming in the African sunlight. The Chromatic Cure had worked its wonders, he thought. After the first "baby pandemic" of 2020 and the 2nd civil war for racial justice came the Dinosaur diseases, caused multiple strains of airborne virus out of the remnants of Siberian permafrost. It affected people with light skin color disproportionately, which had eventually led to a treatment. The skin's pigments were modified to transform UV light into virus-defeating proteins, but it needed Black pigments to work, a lot of them. Ryuichi vaguely remembered from his medical biochemistry class in kindergarten. "And that is why everybody is Black now", the teacher had said. The Unified Society logo on her uniform caught his eye, it was one of his earliest memories.

Weekend or not, those remaining pesky white supremacists were still trouble, Ryuichi thought. Their enclaves were on life support from the Unified Society. Large compounds, former prison complexes that had been sealed airtight and determined to hold out, fueled by conspiracy theories and delusion. Endless debates had ensued whether the move to reactivate the old underground supply channels to keep them alive was a justified use of scarce resources. Compassion won out and the prison enclaves became the only refuge for white people who preferred living with other fellow white male supremacists.

Ryuichi worked on the team that intercepted electomagnetic signals and gathered intelligence. Two individuals, bugmold and GDJ, had emerged as leaders, one based on ideology and the other seemingly controled the software that kept the modified prison complex working. Very little was known about the fate of women in the prison complexes; there had been many who chose to give up freedom to retain their skin color. But violent fights had erased all but a few, who willingly accepted bugmold's tales of superior intelligence and the day of revenge, and GDJ's programming school of thought in order to keep the automated manufacturing going and launch InfoSec and fake news attacks on the Unified Society. The brutal fights in the White Supremacy enclaves had become a pattern that repeated itself once a decade. They even had a name for this: Natural Selection.

Ryuichi found a bench and took a break from his walk. It would soon be time.

Compassion also was the argument that led to the Plan being accepted. The intelligence gathered from Ryuichi's group revealed more and more signs that the crooked ideology and its implementation through software protocols led to prisons being a place of crimes against humanity and intolerable suffering, and human rights group revolted. The cure had been perfected and encapsulated; no complicated week-long procedure was necessary anymore, the biochemists of the Unified Society had created a new airborne virus that would set off the process of transforming the skin color. Everybody has a right to keep their skin color, the chairman of the assembly said, as long as it is Black. Even the most ardent supporters of "tolerance" could not bear the tales of natural selection.

Ryuichi checked his watch: it was noon. The sealed gray metal boxes with today's supplies to the prisons, delivered synchronously on a global automated schedule, just opened with a click. He smiled and thought, now that White is history, the team will be asking for a new project tomorrow. But it was the weekend, after all. Time to get back and see what the kids are up to.