Microstory 642: A Fool Made Intelligent

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Decades ago on Earth, there came about a film media adaptation of book called The Wizard of Oz. It’s about a young girl who ends up in another world, where she meets an eclectic group of people and creatures. Her new friends each have their own problems, and they find themselves working together to those respective ends. A humanoid feline needs courage, a robot needs an organic heart, and...uh, some guy made out of straw needs a brain. Though we in Fostea have our own art to produce and distribute, we do like to keep up on what’s going on in other systems. For defense tactics purposes, mostly. We sometimes even develop our own franchises based on the ones created somewhere else. Lactea is famous for this with their Hitch franchise, which seems never-ending, and is just as a banal as its Earthan progenitor. Even with this overwhelming amount of entertainment, from all corners of the universe, The Wizard of Oz has ended up being a man named Keir Banister’s favorite movie of all time. In fact, he does very little with his life unrelated to the canon. He cosplays the character’s costumes every day, apparently cycling through them in a complex and orderly manner. At one point, he asked his parents to transition his body into that of a humanoid feline. He chose to stop midway through the procedures, remaining in a hybrid form for a couple years before switching back to a standard human form. His parents incidentally got him into the film when he was a child, not knowing that it would basically become his entire life. They were just trying to give him some joy since he was born with neurological problems that prevented him from contributing to the economy on his own, and could not be helped by modern neuropharmacology. Wizard of Oz paraphernalia were his proverbial security blankets, providing comfort in the face of unintelligence. That all stopped as soon as the godlike being, Aurora Meeker finished her gray doorway message to the galaxy. Banister was suddenly one of the most intelligent human beings in the galaxy. He was knowledgeable, eloquent, and sophisticated. He immediately started explaining extremely complicated things about how the universe works, then soon moving on to making previously only theoretical claims about science and progress. It was like they switched him out with an entirely different person who looked exactly like him. It was clear that Keir Banister was helping Lightseers fulfill the forty-second taikon.