In the dream the Wise Woman lived in a cafeteria church.

Was I wandering the streets searching for my mother?

The city can’t hide its true nature from me. It looks like Las Vegas but I know the whole thing is a bureaucracy designed to give me grief.

I can’t understand the signage. Someone behind me tells me my yellow ticket has been marked for double inspection.

I run up and down a kitsch replica of an Egyptian pyramid, pathways covered in red velour carpet.

Because I am not a customer I have to go through a maze.

Why doesn’t anyone question the design of this city?

The agora of the land of dreams silently laughs at how all space become the sensation of rushing to catch an airplane.

In this world, like the waking one, the ease of your commute is determined by your class status.

But in the dream your class status is determined by an aggregate of data mined by a ticketing machine that calculates your worth on the spot.

Big Data makes the classification of humans more precise.

But in the dream the human is not privy to the algorithms or the data. Their status is never revealed to them.

All that is revealed to them is the number of inspections they must endure and hoops they must jump through to get on the train-plane.

They are left wondering if the cybernetic government has identified them as a threat, or if the inspections are arbitrary.

THE SMARTCITY @LoneberryWang