[Cabal Reconnaissance Update #001]
I have made it behind enemy lines. I am no luddite but I might as well be a curmudgeonly dinosaur here and feel woefully ill-equipped for my mission. Even so, I will do my best to gather intel.

Upon entry, I was subject to an automated census and background check which interrogated me on my aspirations, skillset and karmic burdens. I performed a number of arbitrary tasks to prove that I wasn't a Thinking Machine. For easier identification at a glance based on predicted prospective contributions to this neo-society, I was then assigned a number of "roles" and labels like I were but cuts of beef. I have been earmarked.

The threshold melts away and I am transported into a sprawling ecumenopolis. Every seam in the city's wide-screen façades draws the gaze plummeting a thousand storeys downward to forgotten street levels choked with performative friendliness. It is a bubblegum pink Walled City of Kowloon. I'm confronted with a paradox of chaos and order — walls of noise orthogonal to sterile corridors. The amount of attempted compartmentalisation is staggering. I am confronted with a myriad nestled categories and subcategories like layers of a festering onion. All the self-serving mingling and vapid conversation reeks of something sickly sweet like a cocktail of high fructose corn syrup and sycophancy.

I see names written in special technicolour gradients vying for attention. They apparently signify some kind of elite donor caste status with patronages somehow associated with the chemical element of nitrogen. They have access to additional societal rights and are exempt from sumptuary laws which leave the rest of us street level serfs only slightly less colourful. But, even with all their peacocking, they hold no real power and are not the ones in charge.

The ruling class have given themselves whimsical epithets and badges to make their hegemony more palatable. One of these techno-brahmins directly responded to the public announcement of my arrival — no doubt in an attempt to demonstrate his largesse and astuteness, as well as investments in surveillance technologies. I didn't respond to the response. I felt like I had just been raped under fluorescent lights.

I will try to find pockets of more productive discussion tomorrow and learn more about the enemy's movements. For now, I will rest and continue backlogging my wuxia web serial.