The Path of Return – Confessions from Tara La

Reflection from a Citizen

Everyone runs solo in Tara La. That’s baseline.
Trios are revered. Cuatros even more so. Those are what the old systems once called marriages.
Duos? No. Duos are forbidden. Too volatile. Too… intense. We’ve seen the archives.

I picked up my dots at the fam shop, looped my route around Tsush time.
My colleagues were still mid-cycle — pushing proposals for futures that hadn’t yet opened for bidding.
Here in the desert, business never really stops.
Even while we consume — especially while we consume — we’re evaluating, forecasting, reverse-haggling.
Deal-thought is the undercurrent. It hums beneath the fountains.

When I finish my prescribed hours, I often choose to settle into a dose of ketaminoid breath.
Yes — that ketaminoid.
It’s normalized here. Known. Administered like tea.
Not recreational — not in the way outsiders interpret.
It’s a necessary quieting. A mitigation protocol.

Without it, sensory clarity returns too quickly. The body becomes… exposed.
Some describe it as fear. Others say it’s nostalgia.
We simply prefer to call it disruption.

I found my Cuatro late.
It was structured through family tiering.
I was rarely home. The children always asked about me when I passed through.
They expressed curiosity. Data shows this is normal.

My tertiary partner often raised concerns.
About numbness. About absence. About what the ancestors once called anger.

But surely she understood — it was my absence that preserved the unit.
Had I been present, the balance would’ve destabilized.
Distance is function. Presence introduces sentiment.

We built fountains in our parks —
ritual-coded, deeply inscribed.
Old texts, once sacred, are now mechanically triggered.

We can still read the mechanisms.
But the meaning?
Long eroded.
The code remains — passed forward like a baton no one remembers picking up.

Rabi is the only language that functions now.
At least for business.

In our holoways, we switch to Elli.
Its structure is cleaner — post-English with syntactic Mandarin trace.
Tingling tones. Tapered grammar.
It makes us feel current.
Some describe it as spiritual, but mostly it’s efficient stimulation.

In bathhouses, when companions arrive, they sometimes unplug.
We ask them to.
Not because we care about their “natural voice.”
But because there’s a neurological tickle
in hearing them attempt uncoded resonance.

It gives us something.
Not empathy.
But sensation.
Control, perhaps.

The implants fly blind.
Their linguistic drift is… charming.
The uncertainty in their tone.
The stretch in their vowels.
It makes us feel unstoppable.

Many of us remove our own implants
not to empathize —
but to enjoy the silence.
You can hear more that way.
The grunts of stimulus.
The hum of activation.
It’s cleaner.

Tara La remains the only place on Earth that barricaded itself inward.
We sealed our borders.
Defined our Significants.
The dome holds.

Outsiders don’t understand the context.
They remember our past.
They talk of the wars.
The erasures.
The debts.
They forget we regret — deeply.

That’s why we locked the gates.
To keep their perception out.

Most of us accepted it.
The dome. The rituals. The filtration.

Some dreamt of others arriving.
Of visitors, skyborne.
Of shared rhythm, shared pigment.
But that was long ago.

As an adult, I feel nothing toward that dream.
I observe it as a hologram: pretty, but untextured.

The ketaminoids help.
They shield us from the impulses —
from empathy,
from panic,
from grief.

We no longer feel the world.
We’ve optimized it.
And in that optimization…
we’ve stabilized.

I’m not sure if that counts as peace.
But it’s what we have.

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