Chapter the First: Los Angeles Dystopia

Louis A. De Barraicua, a story engineer who studied at the University of Southern California Dornsife School of Narrative Arts, Urban Design & Anthropology. He began noticing the simulation when he began taking notes on repeating patterns as a teenager that suggested that we all might be in a narrative field experiencing reality as characters meant to align with a resonant path in a community.

By following his own path, Louis was led to a cast of characters in Los Angeles that revealed the ultimate truth. LAUSD Schools gets $20 Billion dollars a year, sixty percent of which gets siphoned off to local billionaires, powerful law firms, and a network of vendors who choke out the narratives of the children of Los Angeles through a real narrative of God-infurariating neglect.

Mr. Louis De Barraicua was, by all accounts, a most unusual public school teacher. Possessed of a lively intellect and a turn for storytelling, he had for many years borne the peculiar honour of instructing the youth of Los Angeles—a city both magnificent and mismanaged, a metropolis whose systems groaned under the weight of bureaucracy while its schools, more resembling factories than places of intellectual cultivation, clanged and clattered with inefficiency.

It was in such a city, where the future seemed reserved for the privileged few, that Mr. De Barraicua conceived an idea most novel: that a better narrative might be told—not merely spoken, but lived—and that the citizens of Los Angeles might yet awaken to their parts in a grander, more optimistic drama.

He called this venture OptomystiK, a curious term, no doubt, but one that bespoke his aims: to inspire the imagination while uncovering the truth. And while many a gentleman may write pamphlets or deliver speeches, Mr. De Barraicua undertook something far more ambitious. He invited the public to play, not in idleness, but in the most serious game of all—the re-writing of their city’s future.

Raised amidst the soft landscapes of the American Midwest and later swept through the structured environs of military bases, Mr. De Barraicua spent his formative years between continents, cultures, and contradictions. Spain, with its noble architecture and expressive character, left a vivid mark on his youthful mind; California, particularly Los Angeles, would later become the theatre in which his convictions would be tested.

At the University of Southern California, where the arts and the political sciences enjoyed a most uneasy friendship, he studied film and creative writing, discovering in those disciplines the tools by which the unseen scaffolding of the world might be revealed. It was there he first observed that stories, when properly told, possess not merely the power to entertain—but to instruct, persuade, and reform.

In time, he entered the great institution known as LAUSD. For twenty-three years he laboured in the service of students, only to find, with growing alarm, that those in positions of influence seemed more concerned with contracts and appearances than with virtue or verity. It was at a most particular meeting—a gathering of technological overseers—that he perceived the full design: education, stripped of its dignity, had become a business. And the student? A mere unit of transaction.

Disillusionment, however, did not leave him idle. On the contrary, it roused in him a noble anger, which soon gave way to action. He turned his gifts—observation, language, and above all, imagination—toward the crafting of a new system altogether: one that allowed for participation, transformation, and the development of what he called the heroic self.

Thus was born The Yello Bit Road—a golden pathway toward an “Emerald City” not made of glass and illusion, but of justice, art, and mutual understanding. It was no longer sufficient to hope for reform from the top. No, the time had come to build from within—to organize communities of two hundred, to reawaken civic virtue, and to invite every Angeleno to take up a role in a living story.

Mr. De Barraicua had, in short, become both author and character, teacher and student, a man of vision grounded in experience. And with a political ticket most curiously styled OptomystiX, he aimed, by the year 2026, to offer his city not a promise—but a plot.

A plot in which we are all players.

Follow the Yello Bit Road.

(play) OptomystiK

optomystik.substack.com