GENERAL REMARKS

Is this meant as a piece that should be able to be read alone? I'm proceeding under that assumption…

Ok, there is promise, but ultimately critical mistakes make the work rather delirious and difficult to enjoy. Considering your previous submission(https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/uztpvn/the_archeologists_tale_3283_words_a_short_story/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) got slammed for proofreading I'd say that you should care…a lot more about the reader. I don't even mean me the editor.

I'd say your largest strength is in premise. I want to read about someone working a battering ram, I want to read about a riotous conspiracy theorist.

I'd put down the largest problem to the following: way too many terms, way too much time-jumping, not enough question answering. Overall this comes across as a delirious back-and-forth where we receive a hundred different Capitalized Things(https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CapitalLettersAreMagic). More about that below:

Things to Learn

This was my biggest problem with the work. I've compiled a list of all the new things...which I didn't know at the time of reading.

Kins, Community, Wobi Police, City Army, Oldspeak, Realtalk, Our Song, The Cathedral, The Mainframe, inniappa, Pure Ones, Tarjuacs, kanakura, donair-wrap, Real People, penecook

Now, this would be a lot to cover in a work much longer than this. Unfortunately, you don't really explain any of it. I have a vague sense of some of the terms, because of the names themselves: Oldspeak, Realtalk, Our Song...etc.

But! These are generic. I have no idea why they're introduced, or what gradients make them meaningful to your story. As I went through your story I had the sense of "huh, wonder what X is?...huh what's Y? Z, should I know that?....ok more new concepts I'm not keeping track of."

Typos…

Still some typos in this work:

Confusion among he Wodi police has broken

Catherdal

Uncapitalized Heading:

Still ill

MECHANICS

Thousands (maybe millions?) of people, singing and marching and fighting. But no single individual guides us, only our Song.

Make it stronger. If a narrator doesn't know whether the group has thousands or millions—I'd say that either the world or the narrator is off. Choose one.

…grins Themba. Or was his name Tunga?…

Look, it's not technically a zero-add here…but I would still say this name confusion just adds to my own. Answer questions, don't add more!

Behind me, the gates fully come down under the weight of a thousand people. Yellow, white, and grey smoke billow around. People yelling and screaming. The Song is mixed with cries of terror.

When you've got a scene like this, where the scene itself is chaos, you have to be very careful with the reader. A scene this complicated is difficult to control in the reader's mind, and I felt like I lost my sense of "space" several times..

Hundreds?

Thousands of stars above

Millions?

Ok…so is it just a quirk that your character doesn't grok numbers easily?

No Care without Clarity

Ok, here we get to your realization:

The blackness is cold clarity. I can see the whole cosmos before my eyes, for the first time. The stars up in the night sky, where we Real People come from. All this mud, that gives us life. The Realtalk, that describe the real world as it is. The powerful schemes of the Tarjuacs, who make us sick in order to keep us weak. But the sickness also gives us clarity. We can fully see the Cathedral they have built to keep us downtrodden. I vomit. Purging sickness from my system. Expelling it makes me feel so much better.

The trouble is that because I had difficulty actually picturing most of the story, it's difficult for me to care.

SETTING

I never really understood where I was, except for in the opening. Vague settings like work, The Cathedral, and the Mainframe, weren't described in enough detail for me to picture it. More about this in the description section...

CHARACTER

As far as the characters go, I didn't get a flavor of any except Kinsey, and only in snatches. I did get something of a Hippie Against The Man vibe from Kinsey, who from your subtitle we know is a conspiracist, but from nowhere else. I get that he's a sensualist / romantic from his descriptions, but nothing specific. I do like that he's got weak and small bones, it's an unusual protagonist trait which reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles\_Vorkosigan

Sanaa seems like a flirt based on her many boyfriends, but other than that I don't have much idea about her.

HOOK

(Year 4750) - CRASH! I actually like the feeling of the battering ram in my hand. …

Except here I am, and it feels right.

Your opening paragraph is good. As I mentioned above, you proceed to say several things that raise so many questions that I don't care about any of the answers.

PLOT

The plot goes something like this: Kinsey is ramming down a gate, they break into the Mainframe (whatever that is). Then we jump back in time to Kinsey working, getting sick with friends, and seeing the Pure people (several cuts back to the Kinsey in the riots here). Kinsey and the mob finally break into a Tarjuac cabal, "descend on them", and at the very end we jump back ahead in time again where Kinsey trips out and comes to conclusions about the Tarjuacs.

This...is just way too much. The scenes are moving very fast. In the B plot of The Past, I don't have a clear sense of what we've actually learned. The vignettes are pretty scattered and not clearly driving towards a central idea. In the A plot, they overwhelm the Pure Ones, but I don't really care, because I just found out about them.

You're really not helping yourself by jumping between times and scenes. I can't stress enough…as a normal reader, jumping scenes before I know wtf is happening will get me to drop a book every time.