- HIGH HIGH
- Tales of Suburban Cyberpunk
- By Stefan "Twoflower" Gagne (First four episodes copyrighted)

- Episode 0 : Welcome to the Suburbs

     Mankind was picturing a rather bleak, meaningless future,
where death happened every day in the grimy streets of the
thousand mile long cityscape.  A place where gangs fought for
drug turf, where the streets themselves were alive with danger,
excitement and intrigue.  Technology would used for illegal
purposes and weapons would practically be given away whenever you
purchased a 32oz soft drink at 7-11.

     Then mankind realized it didn't LIKE that vision and decided
to go in a completely different direction.  Urban life, frankly,
was no cup of tea unless you liked arsenic in your tea, a spiked
handle, and a saucer made of plastic explosive.  Certainly not a
place you could, say, raise 2.5 kids and a dog.

     Okay, mankind figured, a 'sprawl' design would be okay, but
certainly not URBAN sprawl, where you need to worry about crime
and dirt and taxi cabs.  A few tweaks to the concept, and it'd
work nicely...

     Thus was born the suburbs.

     A massive green-white-grey stretch of land, coating the
entire eastern seaboard with identical housing.  A maze of twisty
little streets, all alike.  The air is clean, the water is pure,
the citizens are happy.  Your kids can be raised safe and secure
while you handle the dog-eat-dog business world of the cities. 
Utopia achieved, as long as you have enough money to move there.

     However, like any contract with Satan, there are drawbacks.

     The children are indeed safe... perhaps too safe, safe to
the point of naivety.  They're contaminated with the suburban
virus, the plague that keeps them confined in the pressurized,
sanitized, homogenized burbclave.  Stray too far from the pruned
hedges and aluminum housing and the real world eats you alive,
leaving nothing but your bones and your 2,000 credit orthodontial
work.

     Generation after generation of suburbanites grow up in this
safety-approved hellzone, bred on security and happiness.  They
are soft, dull creatures with brains that only need to handle the
rigors of drone work and football and Sunday barbecue.  They
grumble about the government, they grumble about taxes, they
grumble about how boring life is, but make no moves to change
their day to day life.  They can't live without the oxygen text
the burb provides.

     Occasionally a suburbanite will stray into the few cities
for reasons OTHER than the standard briefcase-and-tie corporate
busybody work.  Perhaps they're looking for a little more out of
life, a more tasty piece of the pie, a bold new lifestyle.  Maybe
they just want to drink to excess, dance badly and collapse in an
alley somewhere.

     The city won't have that.  The city doesn't want or need the
parasites that have formed around it, and is more than willing to
scare off these blobby little ticks.  So the burb residents
typically catch a glance of the locals and flee, back to the warm
den of planned housing, wondering why they had ever left.
     If this system was allowed to continue unaffected, humanity
would be in for serious trouble.  Perhaps alien invaders would
show up and enslave the race.  (Unlikely; if for no other reason,
the aliens have too many close government ties to Terra as a
result of complicated, binding treaties signed while key
ambassadors were drunk out of their skulls.  These things
happen.)  Maybe they'd all die out from terminal boredom.  Maybe
the city dwellers would decide to take back their land once and
for all.

     However, the burbs have a superior sub-race.  Mutated cells,
designed to rise above the call of duty.  Ones that have the
brains, the luck, the moxie to remain sane in a world that
encourages insanely boring existences.  The few that break out of
the mold of conformity and get away with acting silly in a
silliness prohibitive zone.

     They work and play (although mostly work) inside the massive
blue/grey structure that dominates the horizon from this
particular viewpoint.  It's the one with the wire fence; the ONLY
wire fence for fifty miles around, ugly in its steel chain-link
bounds, tacky by suburban standards.  It resembles a cross
between a university and a forced labor camp.

     And over the main gate hangs the blue-grey plastic sign,
welcoming you to the Oppenheimer School of Higher Order Thinking
and Mental Development.  Institution of higher education and even
higher educational fees.  Guaranteed increase in IQ or your money
back.

     Known to the students as High High.