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Fiction

What is Freedom?

Vincent Kavaloski modernises Plato’s allegory of the Cave.

Once, in a faraway land, there was Cave World Corporation. A dank and cheerless building, vast and cavernous, its open-plan halls housed hundreds of workers who sat in individual booths chained to flickering silver screens upon which endless dots and lines formed moving pictures of great fascination. The figures on the screens moved according to the commands of distant Programmers. But the watchers knew nothing of the Programmers: they knew only the enticing, bright-lit screens. Having seen nothing else, the people believed the electronic figures and shapes and graphs they were seeing were Reality; and they believed that they were free.

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