From the outcome of the Corporate Wars, the spoils of the world has been divided up by the winners. China is gone. The United States is dissolved. Europe is no more. The territory, populations and assets of the planet are divided into commodities. Those commodity regions are Transport, Food, Communications, Housing, Luxury, and Energy. The masses live and work under one of these categories. All their needs are provided for by the multinational companies running the planet. The corporate overlords only ask is no one “ interfere with management decisions.” To blow off steam, a gladiatorial roller derby meets pinball sport is invented and beamed around the globe. The people love it and it is fanatically popular. Who cares about voting when you’ve got sports?

Very influenced by some of the best dystopian stories like 1984, Brave New World and the multiple novels by William S. Burroughs, I wrote a short story. It was about state sponsored executions becoming popular spectacles as profitable and well attended as Coachella. These killings happening all around the United States. People flock to their choice murder theater much like the followers of the Grateful Dead. Before putting pen to paper, I read an essay by famous existentialist Albert Camus called “Reflections on the Guillotine.” In it, he posits that should people witness executions, they would be so disgusted & horrified that it would eventually subjectively be outlawed. But, I thought to myself, what if it didn’t.

The fly in every ointment of a dark future is the messiah figure. You’ve got your humanistic stakes (Cool Hand Luke), galactic struggles (Star Wars) or metaversal servitude (The Matrix). Rollerball gives us star player Jonathan E (James Caan). He fights the power, wins the crowd and when the film ends, it’s a freeze frame of his image. But we all know how it goes with rebel messiahs. Jesus got nailed to a cross. Socrates was sentenced to death by poison. Even Camus died by the hand of the philosophy he espoused. Killed in a random car accident. But rebels got to rebel and that’s why we love to know their journey, but not live it.

Oh, there’s my alarm. Time to smoke my pain medicine and watch something, anything that is streaming. Meanwhile, the world burns.