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You've covered for it neatly, except for an inescapable residue of restlessness around the edges that probably acts as a control valve in any case. The collective state of consciousness as it averages out to its safety level has so far been completely convinced, for all practical purposes, that those faint impressions and dream—like scenes never quite retrieved from the turbulence of sleep (of interplanetary shuttle—tours routinely ferrying teams of priority technicians, military personnel, scientists and city planners along with mysterious cargo of crates and tubes in a night—version of Noah's Ark) are subliminal previews of coming attractions, not a Path¢é newsreel of current events. So thorough has this conditioning been accomplished, indeed, that there is negligible concern should the very same consciousness collide—as it occasionally does—with direct daylight evidence of the current/continuing program of "brain—drain" bleedoff; with random discards of the "batch consignment" program involving surgicalchemical alteration of shanghaied draftees (in reduction to interchangeable units of a slave—corps suitable for construction and menial Martian work); or the overall, elitist effort to transplant a swatch of alienated culture to the soil of an alien world as if such a virulent 1 1 ” c coe aa There was a ready-made, futuristic camouflage for all such contretemps, a stressed cultural suggestion which the pleasant agreeability of the general mind willingly embraced, voluntarily donned so as to fit all refractory facts to the awaiting mold of programmed expectation. So it was all "seen before", previewed as a trailer of times—future as far as consciousness was concerned: the zombificd mass of a "mutant" labor—force indentured to work in the pyramid mines, high tech intracerebral tracking and mind—manipula- tion for both espionage and recreational purposes, the mighty tun— nel—borers with toothsome drill—bits the likes of Messala's chariot—wheels in Ben Hur, (never suspected to exist outside the dreams of Dream Quest except for puzzling presentations of "that Cooper fellow" with his curious photos from Rand...) Yes, as project Chief of Internal Security you've done your job well—the occasional discontinuous anomaly, the unseemly burp of an embarrassing bit of data from the back of the hall, the inevitable random drifts through windows of parallel worlds (artificially "alternative" realities) all covered in comely fashions of the popular culture so that, for practical purposes, they may reveal to plain sight while satisfactorily smothering the operational existence of electrogravitic craft, faustian technologies and biogenetic projects of prodigious ambition presently producing, under cover of cognitive "night", the demigod plans sown in the mass imagination as mere dream. Amazing to think, then, that with the present if veiled reality of routine Martian junkets (in field propulsion disc—craft at a fractional cost of "official", tincan technology of the diversionary NASA brand), with currently operative surgical, chemical and engineering procedures able to effect a phantasmagoria of programmed possibilities, it was still near—impossible to get the desk down in the lobby to patch in our selected movie according to the easy 3—step instruction on the set. We were finally able to achieve "Total Recall" only by ignoring the key—number codes with which we were told to tune both box and set, random—dialing an arbitrary combination that seemed to satisfy the arcane requirements of getting the tube to come alive—and only a few short minutes after the movie was actually underway so that, missing the credits, we were still able to see Quaid (Hauser) and Melina eye-popping a preview of the unoxygenated Martian surface... Sure enough, as we'd suspected on first seeing that Sunset billboard, it was all basically there—the essential plot of "Alternative III" was grist for the popcultural mill, only this time it could truly be a case of "once too often to the well"...it was possible that this saturation—baptism in the abysmal details was a fateful case of overkill, an instance of such massive quantity changing quality—to some irretrievable degree—that it would finally begin to surface, seep up to the hotel lobby of consciousness from the subconscious levels of stationary "parking" below; the ballyhooed special effects, the high— impact direction of Paul Verhoeven may have unexpectedly joined to spark a combustion beyond the resources of the Controllers to handle—or, alternatively, in keeping with much else that seemed lately to be unaccountably "lax", they were calculating such release upon the trigger of recognition for reasons having to do with a kind of ominous "fullness" relative 105 T-Bird_Vs_The_Flying_saucers.htm specimen might grow any redemptive form of refinement there.