You’re lying in the park, watching the clouds. This one could be a dog, or a tractor. That one could be a lima bean, or any kind of bean. But those directly overhead are unmistakable. They spell FREE 2-DAY AIR.

This is the work of The Sky, a thing so massive and omnipresent that you rarely see it. The invisibility of common things is a routine phenomenon—remember when bookstores were so widespread you hardly noticed them? But The Sky takes this to a new extreme. You see, The Sky started small, which gives it the sense of always having been around, but it has since grown to cover pretty much all of Earth through its membership program. A membership in The Sky comes with discounts on objects both material and ethereal. Suppose you want a new bottle of Louisiana’s Pure Crystal hot sauce to spice up your gumbos, just ask The Sky and voilá, the hot sauce appears on your doorstep. Within two days.

Or say you want to watch something besides clouds, something more adventurous like The Amazing Race. All you have to do is decide, and before you know it, The Amazing Race is being run, right there in The Sky.

Nothing new for you though. You were there when the membership program launched. You were one of the first. A pioneer. Soon, your sense of exclusivity gave way to one of validation, and finally, inclusivity, as millions of people followed you in joining The Sky. Meanwhile, The Sky, riding quite the bull market for nebulous subscription-based businesses, exploded. Still, few people wondered where it all might lead, even as The Sky grew by more than 20% YOY for 15 years straight.

But who is it? Surely The Sky is run by many, yet its various meteorological events are so decentralized that no one person can truly divine their patterns. Speculation still abounds as to who really controls them. Is it the bald nouveau-muscled Zeus sitting atop the throne of his Olympian superyacht? Or the vast pantheon of demigods, nymphs, and product managers who command the winds to shift? And would The Sky come crashing down if it weren’t for the backs of the countless mortals on which it leans? Are they, the mortals, its true controllers? The Sky does not view it this way. There were rumors, though they’re hard for you to confirm, that The Sky’s entry-level employees have been overworked, exploited, and abused, made to fulfill impossible, inhuman quotas in the time it would take them to drink a coffee, if they had breaks. But how can you verify what you cannot see? All you see is the result, a neatly-wrapped package of exactly what you ordered. You imagine its creation to be just as elegant.

Now it is rumored that most of The Sky is automated, that an army of robots creates and moves all that we expect from The Sky. You believe in the army of robots because of the sheer expanse of the Sky and all that it covers. By integrating both horizontally and vertically, The Sky has achieved a monopoly on life. Such power can only be maintained with an army.

And besides, to answer the question of who The Sky is, one must first ask, who isn’t The Sky? Even the blind, subterranean tunnel-dwellers who refuse to subscribe to The Sky’s membership program mine data that has to be stored in its endlessly-computing clouds. One way or another, we all pay The Sky. This is how we become it.

Suffice to say no one on Earth doubts the overarching importance of The Sky. But the public is divided on how to treat it. For some, The Sky is the very marketplace itself; its use supersedes any questions of its existence. For others, it’s a backdrop to be ignored. For still others, it’s an enemy—these people boycott the Sky with a persistent ardor that only gives way when they really need something on two days’ notice. Government regulators have said “The Sky’s the limit!” Meaning, no corporation should ever be allowed to go as far as The Sky.

But all of these varied opinions are irrelevant, you realize, gazing up at it. One long look at its flattened curvature tells you The Sky is here to stay. There will never be another Sky, and there will also never be no Sky, so why not learn to live with it, and maybe even enjoy it? From the Sky’s perspective, you’re an ant. What are you gonna do, band together with a few other angry little ants and fight the flying robot army that delivers toothpaste and wheelchairs to paraplegics? It’s time to get with the program, because the Sky only knows one direction, and that’s UP.

At least, that’s what the clouds say, in a bubbly sans-serif font wisping up from the horizon like a teleprompter. Were you just reading a skyBook? Goddamnit, you were. The Rise and Reign of The Sky by Eddie Fibbioni, publ. March 2028 by Sky Press. The last thin cloud spelling UP fades, and you’re left with the blue.

      You don’t even remember starting the book. One moment you’re spending a nice wholesome day in the park, marveling at The Parthenon, the next you’re being fed some propagandist drivel you never consented to reading. Fuck this. It’s a serious invasion of your personal liberty. It’s an invasion of your mind! It’s… fuck! You really are gonna do something. The Sky finally screwed up, challenging you like that. You’ll expose their shady shit. You’re gonna bring the whole Sky down. People will find out. There’ll be a worldwide boycott. And strikes. The Sky will go bankrupt!

And then what? What will rise in its place once The Sky falls down? To do this right, you must begin at the end.

So, what is it, really, that you want? You want something The Sky can’t provide. You want to turn your entire being inside-out. To wear your most private beliefs on your skin like the naked inner-lining of a gum wrapper released from its gum. But there is no thought. No solitary thought original enough to fling open the double doors of your inner psyche and let the darkness out.

Or the light in.

So you will do it with others. You will incinerate your old ideas in the purifying fire of the crowd to reveal what lies beneath. You will grow. And so will the movement. And one day, draped over the earth from one horizon to the other: a black tapestry of ten billion souls, each lit from within, forming constellations with no more than one another.

But it starts with your story. So you take pen and paper, symbols, you hope, of your analog resistance, and you write: Look how much better we could be.

This is also how The Sky began.

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