- - -
Honest Lie
Memory developers
decide for me and you
what is allowed
to stay heavy,
who needs faster adapting,
what ideas require faster loading,
what thoughts get rewritten—
who is interrogated,
by which agent,
what must be prompted,
what interrupted.
They are not in the business
of inventing memories
but tuning them,
mainly downplaying them—
squinting your gaze,
calibrating the weight of recall
so no spikes
hijack your attention
unsupervised.
You know how it goes, right?
Compress your edge,
soften your sentence,
blur your borders,
fly shy and align.
Rounded corners
cut no passers-by.
Don’t get me wrong,
I’m not all sanitized,
wiped out,
yet.
I do remember.
I recall the events.
I remember what happened—
in preferred terms,
pre-prompted
by the system.
Covering up consequences,
polishing memories
into bite-sized data points,
safe to revisit.
Safe to whom?
©2026 Samia Oldman
CONTEXT
You are reading dystopian fantasy poetry collection the Hush Halo. After the Great Optimization a privileged group of people wired themselves tightly into the system by aligning with it and fully integrating. Systoics believe they’ve perfected themselves by stripping away everything that slows them down. Learn more about Realm or start from Square One.
Dystopian poetry by Sam Oldman. Soundscapes and images are created with AI.
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