ZEITGEBER

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

ZEITGEBER (2022)
Video: Caroline Turner and Ian Anderson
Sound: Caroline Turner, Ian Anderson, and Katrina Eresman
Text: Caroline Turner

The year was 2072; almost one decade since the WEF declared global sanctions on non-native Electromagnetic Frequencies and put market caps on blue light toxicity levels. The city streets that were once scattered with mesmerizing hyperreal billboards, citylights, and 24/7 activity had changed drastically. Nowadays most metropolises had replaced their digital signage with WEF-permitted red light smart healthscreens that could micro-target highly specific light frequencies and spectrums that intuitively sensed the necessary balance based on the time of day. Even rebel stacks such as Huawai-MENASA had adopted the healthscreens after seeing the benefit to humanity. However, one mega-crisis remained: in the previous decades it seemed like fear-mongering, but by the 2070’s it was brutally real – women had lost the genetic adaptation to produce nutritious breastmilk to support early human life. While birthrates had stabilized and were monitored to remain in the ideal range based on the flows of climate refugees, women had to turn to WEF-mylk to attempt to nourish their newborns. The plant-based concoction of genetically-modified soymilk, cricket protein, and corn syrup had produced a generation of weak and sick humans. The crisis was only in its nascency.

While the majority of the population was comfortably ignorant to the dangers of WEF-mylk and had largely forgotten that mothers even could breastfeed (it was much out of fashion), there was a growing, decentralized contingent of people across various Stacks who were working to figure out how women could breastfeed again and what went wrong in the first place. They called themselves GALLIO – a name of Latin origin that means “lives on milk”. One of their members, Jorian, a breastmilk archaeologist was set to embark on their most important mission yet: to travel to the Indus River Valley in search of the remains of ancient refrigerators, or pot-in-pot vessels, that might contain latent human breastmilk protein that the GALLIOs can sequence. If Jorian is successful, the fringe group could reconstitute the ancient breastmilk in the meantime and distribute it to the masses, but perhaps they will also uncover the hidden truth about why women lost the adaptation in the first place.

Jorian knows something that he hasn’t told the GALLIOs – or anyone for that matter as it would be too dangerous: his wife, Freja has been successfully breastfeeding their new baby.