Echo Chamber

On the other side of the dark mirror of torture was an echo chamber, barely obscured. We heard distant sounds coming from inside it at regular intervals but noticed them only when those quiet cries of horror suited us. Ours was now a culture in which anything could be bought, including oversized noise-cancelling headphones, which all of us wore for most of the day on a daily basis. Stray rays of sunlight tried to reach our ears through our headphones, but we devised a mechanism, an implant inserted directly into our heads actually, to block it all out. Then we grew a small wildflower garden around the things that most distracted us from ourselves, like a tiny painting that you hang right over the deep and growing cracks in the wall, in order to hide them from view of any visitors. We hated ourselves but told other people we loved ourselves. We smiled our way through it. The light around us continued to fade until what we finally understood about the echo chamber which we gazed at daily whenever we walked past it at street level was that we were all actually already inside of it. The world that we thought surrounded us had been only a hologram.


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