{"version":"1.0","type":"rich","provider_name":"Audius","provider_url":"https://audius.co","title":"The City Of The New Friend by Justin Empire • Audius","description":"The City Of The New Friend\nThe City of the New Friend\n\nImagine a civilisation where every person you meet is a stranger you can know for only one conversation.\n\nYou might share your deepest secrets with them. You might laugh together, fall in love, exchange stories about your lives, or discover that you have more in common than anyone you've ever met. But when the conversation ends, it ends forever.\n\nYou can never speak to that person again.\n\nWelcome to The City of the New Friend.\n\nSet in a breathtaking futuristic civilisation filled with magnificent architecture, ancient traditions, magical technology and a rich cultural heritage, the city appears to be a utopia. Its people are kind, compassionate and deeply connected to their community. There is little poverty, little violence and almost no loneliness—at least, not in the way we understand it.\n\nBut beneath this peaceful society is one extraordinary law:\n\nYou may only have one conversation with another person.\n\nThe people of this civilisation have evolved, both culturally and biologically, around this rule. Their brains possess an extraordinary ability to recognise anyone they have previously spoken to. If they encounter that person again, something instinctive happens: they simply ignore one another.\n\nThere is no second conversation.\n\nNo friendship.\n\nNo lifelong companion.\n\nNo returning to the person you met yesterday.\n\nEven family has disappeared.\n\nChildren are taken from their parents at birth and raised by the state. They grow up without knowing their biological mother or father, learning instead that the entire civilisation is their family. When citizens reach adulthood, they meet other people through carefully regulated encounters.\n\nIf two conversationalists discover during their single conversation that they want to have a child together, they can make an agreement. Their sperm and egg are donated to the government, and a child is created and raised in an artificial chamber.\n\nThe biological parents never meet their child.\n\nOnce a year, however, on the child's birthday, they receive an official report telling them how their son or daughter is progressing.\n\nIt is a civilisation that has sacrificed personal attachment for social stability.\n\nAnd for generations, it has worked.\n\nUntil people from Earth arrive.\n\nA group of mysterious Earth visitors discovers a hidden portal—or porthole—connecting their world with this strange civilisation. At first, the visitors are fascinated by the city.","html":"","width":500,"height":480,"thumbnail_url":"https://audius-creator-2.theblueprint.xyz/content/baeaaaiqsec3bk2nx2q6fhhsncn33wxqva4xi7frtitoah76bup7ziy6a47dye/480x480.jpg","thumbnail_width":480,"thumbnail_height":480,"author_name":"Justin Empire","author_url":"https://audius.co/kissinginlove","cache_age":3600}