Since its earliest days, much of science fiction has perceived technology as a symbol of human avarice. Frankensteins and Nautiluses were once projected as rude interventions into the ambience of the cosmos. However, so much spellbound by the machine that the man now is, the humans themselves are today seen as the troublemakers in the digitized orderly environment of the structured machinehood of The Matrix, Surrogates, and so on. This paper analyzes how, in the present age of simulation and artificial intelligence, the human consciousness is not structured mechanically (like that in the days of Metropolis) and gets manipulated digitally (as in "there is no spoon" of The Matrix). The paper also suggests that the manipulated digital sequences on the screen in the much-fancied "role-play" video game Final Fantasy VII create an alternative identity to the player, which is so real and consequential that it makes one believe that "the self-replicating nanites" (that colonizes the human brain cells) of The Gamer, or "the simulated reality" manipulated by "the sentinel machines" of The Matrix, are the images of the possible real-life consequences of the new age digital culture.

Plato, the essential idealist, insisted that what we call `real' can be known and understood only in the context of a `transcendental real.' For him, that which is fully real is fixed, permanent, and unchanging. Hence he identified the `real' with the ideal realm of being, as opposed to the physical world of becoming. This preeminence given to the ideal form and his antagonistic interpretation of the role of art in a Republic clearly inform one of the supremacy of the transcendental real and the incompetence of art in imitating it. This further demonstrates how precisely Plato establishes, on an ethical ground, the structure of an ideal political society called the Republic. This ideal political society later inspired a variety of forms of Utopia in different parts of the world. In contrast to the moral decadences and disunity, his idealistic, `fixed, permanent, unchanging, and ethical' Utopia stands for tolerance, harmony, and prosperity.

Science fiction, over the years, has time and again successfully reinstated this Plotanian dream of the ideal utopian state. In installing the seamless society within the structures of the machines and devices, in creating a cosmos where crime and corruption are unheard of, in fashioning citizens who would never defy or revolt against the state, science fictions have engineered the perfect commonwealth called Utopia.

Still in its early stages, works like Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887 (1888), E M Forster's short story "The Machine Stops" (1909), H G Well's Modern Utopia (1905) and Things to Come (1936), Fritz Langs' famous movie Metropolis (1927), and many other science fiction and sci-fi movies illustrate this vision of the utopia. However, in all these science fictions, beneath the social ideals and gleaming technologies, the potential for a repressive apparatus of the state runs as a parallel theme. At one point of time, the very idea of utopia in these works becomes apparent only as varying forms of dystopia. Fritz Lang's (1927) Metropolis, for example, shows in the beginning segment, a perfect systematized land of merrymaking full of wealth and order, resembling a utopia. Only later do we learn about the existence of the workers who are kept completely oblivious of the society's elite class. The ruler's son Freder learns that the workers live in terrible conditions in the underground and falls in love with a revolutionary and earns the wrath of his father. When a robot incites the workers to revolt, the city's ruler destroys much of the workers' underground city by flooding it with water.

American Literature Journal, New Age Digital Aesthetics, Matrix and Final Fantasy VII, Artificial Intelligence, Human Brain Cells, Scientific Inventions, Matrix Trilogy Movies, PlayStation Network, Human Community, Matrix Revolutions, Symbolic Connotations, Cinematic Element, Programmed Repertoires, Mechanical Devices.