Anthea Soual

Readers,

Today I saw the City's executor, a man who is only rarely encountered, and who is generally witnessed from a distance, excepting of course those charged with the responsibility of managing the various ministries.

My own experience came via teleosphere (one is a shared by each floor, though these models lack the precision and distal clarity of our own models in the desert), and as I have known this technology only from my experience living in the desert, the experience was stunted, half-formed. The subaural and subvisual clarity was weak and intermittent, even with a meditative focus, and there was, for all my training and focal development, a distinct lack of separation between adherents. In this sense I was lucky to find myself alone in receiving the day's news, but interference from nearby spheres and other adherents even blocks away was a strong distraction.

There is a great argument now whether to deploy the policstat to the Outer City. While much of the depressingly polarized population has been vacuumed away by the nullfilms, those who remain are agitated, irate, and apparently, arming themselves. Even we who have grown up in the Outer Township have a certain awareness of the happenings in the City Autopia, most astutely of the Outer City, as the Inner City remains difficult for even the more adept prophetics to penetrate, despite a developed mindseie. (It is here that I must remark at the lack of the Philosophical Body within the City, even among the academics. It remains unknown, even in theory. Further, there is no emergent consciousness of the Eie, and therefore I must restrict my use of the ritual intonations to which we are generally accustomed. I find myself troublingly verbose, as conscious intention is something not easily granted to formal architectures, even those as amorphous as the contemporary tongue.)

The position of executor is one of arbitrary duration. Executors are selected by a group in order to carry out a plan which is generally unknown to them. An executor is a keystone in an arch which is foreign to their origins, and thus the succession of executors follows no known pattern, and historically, executors bear no likeness to one another from era to era. One executor was selected to expand from the Inner City to the outer section, modernizing ruins of the capital city of the former american continent known commonly as Las Vegas. This was perhaps approximately two hundred years ago, but as it came before the cataclysm we have no way of knowing. Hard records were mostly vaporized in the volcanic aftermath, and digital records were corrupted by the erratic and intense shift in magnetic fields. In any case, he, though nameless, is known anecdotally, not through the identity of his person, but rather through the association of his person with the events that characterized his rule.

Thus this character is known as the Great Expansion, or the First Reclamation. The former term is preferred by the standardized knowledge of the Inner City's inhabitant, whereas the second term is considered a vulgarization invented by the Outer City's inhabitants. Clearly there is truth to be had in either view.

Anthea Soual is young enough to be known by his own name, and there is great speculation about his purpose in office, though such topics are not politely allowed into conversation. It is one of the few exceptions to the attitude of irreverence and poignant irrelevance of the Outer City; the Inner City need not even discuss, for reasons which I hope will become clear to you all over time, just as the form and function of the Inner City is slowly becoming clear to me.

With luck I shall require fewer words next time.

Adabeie