Microstory 2478: Holidome

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Name a holiday; any holiday. Go on, I’ll wait. What did you pick? Now imagine what it’s like to celebrate that holiday. Now, go to Holidome, and you’ll find it there. Ramadan, Diwali, Carnival. It’s around here somewhere. They each live in their own little sectors, but there are some that are a little more spread out. Traditional Christmas in one region of Earth was observed in very different ways than in others, so those are separate. That way, you can be immersed in the version that you’re looking for. Honestly, I’m probably the wrong person to ask about any of this. Not only am I very young, but I was born on Castlebourne. I’m actually kind of a rarity so far. The majority of people who come aren’t here to plan families. They’re here to have fun, so they either come with their families, or they’re putting off procreating until later. My family has a long history of recognizing and appreciating other cultures, so that’s what they came here to do. A lot of that culture is gone from Earth. It wasn’t really anybody’s fault, it just sort of happened. Architecture converged into those megastructure arcologies. Creativity and identity made way for standardization and cross-compatibility. Why design a bunch of oddly-shaped trashcans, when you can design one model, and anyone who needs it knows that that one is perfect for their space, because everyone’s space is pretty much the same? These may seem like small things, and hardly relevant, but they’ve added up to major changes. It doesn’t matter where you’re from, or where your family is from. Your housing unit looks the same. You can decorate it, sure, but when we all live in virtual simulations, what’s the point? You might think, well doesn’t the culture just live on the servers? They can, but it can get drowned out by boundless imagination. In this world, people fart rainbows. Yeah, that’s fun, but there’s no history behind it. I suppose one day, we could end up living next to a community of Rainbow Farters of Erbikejifel, or some shit, but for now, it’s mostly only about novelty. Castlebourne doesn’t work like that. It exists in base reality, and it all has to fit within the limits of physics. You may be nostalgic for the days when you lit the Menorah with your family every year, or maybe you never did it, and you want to learn what it was like. I do get a little worried about cultural appropriation. People seem to think it’s a non-issue since—like I’ve been complaining about—those traditions have largely faded from real life—but I would just like to warn everyone to use caution. Those rituals held and hold great meaning to those who practice(d) them. It’s important that you be mindful of that, and stay respectful of why they participated in them. Nothing was arbitrary. I’m not trying to get you to not have any fun. Holi is a grand old time, for instance. Just don’t forget to learn about how it started, and who originally took part in such traditions. They didn’t just do it for your amusement. Except for Festivus. That really is just for fun.

Microstory 2057: Precision of Language

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The interview went about as well as it could. He didn’t seem to have a problem with the fact that I didn’t have a résumé. I spent so much time traveling the bulk, and dealing with all sorts of wildly different people, I almost forgot how unusual I am. I’m neurodivergent, which doesn’t mean much in the extreme diversity of the multiverse, but it matters here. The reason I’ve been saying this planet is boring is not just because the headlines are pussycat tame compared to the kind I’m used to, but people seem to be mostly humorless too. At least when people back home would make absolutely dreadful approximations of jokes, I knew that they were trying. They wanted to be funny, they just weren’t very good at it. Metaphor, simile, analogy, hyperbole; these all go over these people’s heads. By that I mean, you failed to comprehend it, not that an object moved over your physical head. I told the interviewer that I’ve been to a thousand parks in my day, and he wanted to see my log of them, which he assumed I would need in order to come to such a precise figure. He didn’t understand that I didn’t mean it literally. I’ve just been to a lot, but probably still under a hundred, I don’t know. When I explained as much, he understood, so these people are not like Drax in the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. They don’t have to take things literally, but it’s not intuitive for them to pick up on things like sarcasm and emotional nuance, and they have to think about it for a moment once you clarify. Fortunately, they also don’t seem perturbed about it, like the society in The Giver, which emphasizes something called precision of language. Listen to me, making pop culture references that you don’t get, because these stories don’t exist here. I guess that’s what I’ll do with my time. You do have fiction here, but it’s got to be different than the kind in other worlds if they’re more about just telling the story, and less about the poetry. Hopefully I hear back from the garden soon. I’m ready to get my hands dirty. Just so you understand, getting one’s hands dirty is an idiomatic expression that usually means being able to put in the work to accomplish something, rather than just sitting by and letting others do it. It can sometimes mean doing something bad, but it doesn’t have to. In my case, it’s to be taken seriously, though, so don’t worry. Gardening is dirty work.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: June 1, 2398

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When Angela Walton was first alive, she was a pretty submissive girl, as was common in those days. She didn’t believe in the things that her family did, but she wasn’t outspoken about it either. Her father was patient enough to let her wait to marry a man she loved, but that was about as lenient as he could tolerate to be, and he lost that patience when her fiancé disappeared. She would marry who he chose, and that was final. It wasn’t until after her death that Angela started to find herself. The interesting thing about the afterlife simulation is that it wasn’t millennia beyond the technological limitations of the living world. For most of its history, it was only ever moderately more advanced, despite the fact that the devisers were from the future, and could have always included modern tech. They chose not to in order to keep the residents comfortable, and feeling safe. Teaching a mammoth hunter to use a microwave oven is probably just asking too much. So for the longest time, the virtual worlds pretty faithfully resembled the real world, because that’s all those people knew. That would change in the future, when science fiction began to open up people’s imaginations, but there was always one thing that was shockingly progressive.

According to Tamerlane Pryce, he put no effort into regulating the way society manifested itself in the construct. He claimed to have let the people decide for themselves. This is likely not entirely true, but not totally inaccurate either. Based on some few and far between studies that dead researchers tried to conduct over the centuries, it would seem that the act of death alone is enough to alter an individual’s worldview. That is, they gain perspective simply by passing on, and often lose a lot of the prejudices and hate they once lived with. The theory was that this process was fostered by the fact that everyone dies alone. When John Doe makes the transition, he does so removed from all the people who fueled his beliefs and preconceived notions. The people he meets now have either been there for some time, or they came from other parts of the world. That’s what philosophers imagine Pryce regulated—knowingly or not. He set up a system that grouped newcomers together through a filter of diversity, and studies have proven that living in a diverse area is the number one cause of acceptance and love. What this all means is that racism, sexism, and other biases are harder to hold onto when borders have been removed, gender roles have been ignored, and no one can rise to power without deserving it.

When Angela rose to power, it was after centuries of hard work. She had to shed her old identity, and her old personality, and pretty much become a completely different person. If not for the fact that she looks the same as she always has, no one who knew her before her death would recognize her now. She doesn’t take other people’s crap anymore, and she doesn’t just do as she’s told. If you want her to trust in your choices, you have to prove that you’re worthy of making them, and if you don’t, she’s going to decide for you. Maintaining a normal job in a mundane world is a skill that Marie honed for four years before the rest of her team showed up. She learned to listen to the words of lesser men, because she would lose it all if she didn’t. Angela has yet to learn this lesson, and her meeting has demonstrated just how far she has yet to go. None of Marie’s training could have prepared her to suffer through all that bullshit. She speedwalks to the bathroom at her first opportunity, and retches into the toilet.

Microstory 1655: Linsetol Revealed

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Bulk traveler Joseph Jacobson came to me recently with a story about his adventures in Linsetolverse. He corrected some assumptions I made about the universe. It’s hard for me to get a good look at it from so far away, so it was nice to hear some details about the way they lived. He arrived, as he always does, as a human, shocking the Linsetol, who had never seen anything like him before. They knew it was best to keep this alien a secret, because they didn’t want to cause any confusion or panic. Joseph has the ability to navigate the bulkverse. That’s kind of his whole deal, so he could have made a deliberate effort to avoid showing up where his presence could negatively impact the development of the locals, but he usually just spins a metaphorical wheel, and takes his chances. He’s immortal, so he doesn’t concern himself with preparation, or vigilance. Anyway, things seemed to work out fine, and Joseph spent a few years there, learning about their culture. The language was the hardest part. As they were evolved from dinosaurs, the Linsetol have different vocal physiology, and produce sounds that are impossible for a human to replicate. With the aid of some engineers, Joseph actually managed to build a device that would translate his thoughts into a digital voice. It was not a linguistic translator, though. Joseph still had to understand the language in order for the device to not simply come out as English. He probably could have done it differently, but just didn’t feel the need. It worked both ways, allowing a Linsetol to speak in English, should the need ever arise, but this wasn’t something that Joseph needed of them. Once he was able to communicate with them effectively, he started learning their customs, because that was his favorite part about traveling. He was usually just going to a different version of Earth, so it wasn’t like the topography was particularly exciting. Understanding other people was the entire point.

As it turns out, the Linsetol are quite like humans. I was wrong about them being foreign. I think the language barrier was clouding my vision. They’re just as diverse, just as curious, and just as capable of doing terrible things. They measure time in the same way, though it’s different on prehistoric Earth, because the celestial bodies are moving differently. Shorter days, longer years. They developed fairly advanced technology, which I can see from my perspective, but they never got very far into space. Upon realizing how bad for their environment nonrenewable energy sources were, they outlawed them. They outlawed them across the globe, and pursued renewables like solar and wind power. Unfortunately, such things are not conducive to sending rockets up into space, so space exploration was pretty much off the table without fusion or antimatter rockets, which weren’t destined to be developed for many decades. They didn’t make it that far, because of their isolationistic habits. That’s one thing that I was right about. They were capable of demanding universal laws for the protection of their world, but they didn’t possess a spirit of cooperation, which stifled ingenuity, and slowed progress. They couldn’t last forever this way. They didn’t die out because they destroyed their planet, or succumbed to some pandemic. It was a population growth problem. Their drive to propagate the species was much lower than it is for humans. It was never zero, but it wasn’t enough, and over time, they just couldn’t maintain the species. Each generation was less inclined to bear children on the individual level, and that eventually caught up to them.

Microstory 1633: Providence

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Just because a universe is capable of supporting human life, doesn’t mean that humans will actually evolve on a planet somewhere. While the chances of evolved life are negligible—which is why it pretty much only happens once a universe, if that—life itself is actually pretty common. Many have been led to believe that evolution is reaching for some kind of goal, and that humans are a milestone towards that goal, if not the realization of it. The truth is that there’s not always a benefit to being human, or as intelligent as one. Complex brains are difficult to maintain. We need fingers, particularly an opposable thumb, to grasp on to things, but you first need the conditions to need to grab on to things in the first place. Finned aquatic animals do just fine without hands, and they will probably never develop high intelligence, because they do not need it. A lot of the time, when we talk about the Maramons in a universe other than their home of Ansutah, it’s because they were stranded there when The Crossover suffered a cataclysmic failure, and exploded. This is not the only time that Maramon went out into the bulkverse, and it’s not the only reason Maramon are present on other worlds. The whole reason the Maramon built the Crossover in the first place, and stole the technology to do it, was to make more room for their entire population. Ansutah was a tiny pocket dimension when it first began, and only grew when a powerful human’s temporal ability forced it to do so. But this ended when that human was removed from the universe, leaving the Maramon with no choice but to eventually figure out how to break through the membrane. The Crossover went to many other branes, their only mission being to gather data. They needed to understand how common human life was, and which brane would be best suited for settlement. A group of them decided to go against this mandate, and just settle on the first decent planet they found. They called it Providence.

Providence was not the most hospitable world they had ever found—in fact, overpopulation aside, it was worse than the Ansutahan homeworld—but it was free, and open, and left room to expand. There weren’t any humans around, which was a good thing, because that would have further complicated things. The Maramon wanted a new home, not a place to fight against their progenitors. Proper physics did not allow time travel or alternate realities, or even faster-than-light travel, which was all probably good too, but not everyone agreed. The Crossover leadership demanded that the rogues who wanted to stay return to the machine, and stay on mission, but they refused. A skirmish resulted in heavy loss on both sides. By the time a ceasefire was called, the settlers numbered 147, which just so happened to be the generally acceptable minimum for restarting a given population, as it was sufficiently genetically diverse. Worried that the settlers would not survive the somewhat harsh environment on their own, the current Crossover’s captain decided to stay behind with them, so he could protect them from themselves. The machine, meanwhile, went back out into the bulkverse, and continued gathering data before going back to Ansutah. Providence became a new home, and the Maramon there progressed in about the same way humans will without being able to manipulate time. Their population increased, they conquered the solar system, and they colonized exoplanets. And for the most part, people left them alone. For the most part.

Microstory 1009: Ira

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No, Bertha didn’t say that, did she? What a jackass. I’m glad she finally recognizes how terrible she is with people, but she’s living in a nightmare world if she thinks I am too. It’s true, I read and watch a lot of science fiction, but I’m smart enough to know the difference between a character, and a real person. Fiction is a great resource for understanding how other people work. Simply seeing that it’s possible for a separate individual to have a different perspective than one’s own can be enough to fuel your empathy for others. Writers take a lot of liberties when it comes to characterization, but just because the character is made up, doesn’t mean we can learn nothing from their experiences. Each character is created by a writer, and at the very least, that writer is drawing upon their own lives, and those of the people they know. So, let’s just assume every character a given writer comes up with is essentially the same person, because that writer somehow managed to become successful enough to get their work out there without anyone noticing how one-dimensional their stuff was. There are still thousands upon thousands of other characters in the world, created by different writers. Compound that with the fact that most that are created by the same artist are going to have different perspectives. Now compound it with the number of people who contribute to that characterization: writing partners, producers, actors, editors, etc. A lot goes into making a piece of performance art, or a written work. There’s a lot more collaboration for the former, but that doesn’t mean the latter type doesn’t hold its own lessons. Plus, any given story is going to be interpreted differently by each audience member, and now with the internet, it’s not only easy to share these thoughts with others, but helpful. I’m doing just fine in this world. I have lots of friends, and though I probably couldn’t have counted Viola as one of them, I’ve still been impacted by her death. Sometimes I use nomenclature that makes it sounds like I see the people around me as characters, but that’s but an extension of my love for art, and does not reflect an indifference to them. Like I was saying, I didn’t know her well, but I did know a lot about her. Socially, she was a lovely person, who was nice to most people. If she didn’t like you, she surely had good reasons, and that should give others pause when considering their own feelings towards you. She loved people, and always seemed to try to give them the benefit of the doubt. She was a lot like me in that way. I try not to judge people until I know more about them. I’ve known Bertha most of my life, which is why I can tell you with absolute certainty that she has a lot of growing up to do. I know I talked a lot more about myself than Viola, but I hope it helps. I’m looking forward to reading your story.

Microstory 984: Live Theatre

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I grew up in the same world that you did, even though I make a lot of jokes about being born on a Keserint space station orbiting Pluto hundreds of thousands of years ago, or in the future. One of my biggest regrets is allowing myself to be influenced by so many bad sources of information. As a man, I’ve had it extremely easy, never feeling like I had to transform myself into the perfect people in magazines, or like I wasn’t allowed to wear pants. I did, however, contribute to the negativity this world has offered, almost always without even realizing it. My parents were always very loving, and believed in diversity, but there were so many other things vying for my attention, that not even their good teachings could insulate me from everything. I once had a teacher in middle school who got off on a tangent about some associate of hers who underwent gender reassignment surgery. She talked about how gross that was, and charged us to never do anything like that. She wasn’t an absolutely terrible person, but she was a clueless jackass who didn’t know what she was talking about, and that sort of behavior would never be tolerated today; not even in Kansas. I didn’t feel as sick about the idea as she did, but I didn’t question her position either. I spent years being indifferent to transgender people; time I could have spent being a vocal ally. That teacher fucking blocked something good in me with ignorant darkness, and I will never get that time back. People have died because children are highly impressionable, and are being taught to agree with just about everything a role model says. I’m optimistic about that teacher, and have enough faith in her that she’s changed her beliefs, possibly without even remembering—and thusly not feeling guilty about—the damage she inflicted on young minds. I recall her being fairly open-minded and liberal otherwise. She was just as much a victim of society’s rules as I was; more so, because she was older. The reason I’m saying all this is because, especially when I was younger, I’ve been conditioned to be resistant of certain things that I later realize I like. I had to overcome society’s expectations that I not like live theatre, because I am not a girl. I was expected to like sports and boobs, and nobody outside of my family even thought to let me question these assumptions. I like RENT, and I like listening to show tunes, I miss Smash, and I very much wanted to win the lottery for Hamilton tickets when my family took a trip to New York City in 2016. I even determined the physiological characteristics of a species in my stories based on the possibility that I may be able to help write a musical about them decades from now. They have two sets of vocal cords, so they can sing notes humans can’t, and singing is vital to the conception, and early development, of their offspring. The point is that gender roles are a social construct, rather than a biological one. You would probably agree if you saw Book of Mormon.

Microstory 982: Antiseptic

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Most people think I’m a germophobe, because I carry a bottle of hand sanitizer on my belt loop. I haven’t always been this way. In some ways, I’ve gotten worse, but from my side, I’ve gotten better. I’m a firm believer in letting kids go outside and get dirty, so they can boost their immune system naturally. I watched the first episode of an old scifi series called Earth 2. One of the plot points was that, in the future, children born in pristine environments easily contract diseases because their bodies don’t know how to handle the invaders. Now me, I used to get sick all the time, and I think if a pandemic spread through the world, I have a pretty good chance of being completely immune to it. I was 24 years old before I started carrying hand sanitizer around, and not too terribly much younger when I finally discovered it existed in the first place. The truth is that I’m not actually scared of getting sick. Like I said, it used to happen to me all the time, and I always got through it. I’ve known elderly people who spent all their lives in perfect health. You would think that would be the best way to live, but until such time that we conquer all diseases, no one escapes death. Everyone who doesn’t die from some external trauma, like a vehicular collision, or a bullet, dies from an illness. It’s impossible to die from old age itself; something always comes for you, and if you’ve never experienced anything like it before, it’s probably going to be a lot harder for you to cope. I’m not worried about some deadly pathogen, because I understand what’s happening there. I know how to seek treatment, and I would be able to wrap my head around the concept of hopelessness, if I were to be told that there’s nothing the medical professionals can do. No, I carry hand sanitizer around with me because I have trouble with cross contamination, because when I’m clean, I want to stay that way. And if I go around touching dirty things with my hands, I can’t then go around touching clean things, because then those things are also dirty. This has just reminded me that I’ve already been over this, so I’ll move back to what this entry is really meant to be about. Donnie Darko once pointed out that the greatest invention in history was soap. Antiseptic is still considered one of the most important ways of preventing the spread of disease. As with many rampant pathogens, scientists still can’t be sure exactly how the Spanish Flu began, but we know why it got so bad. I use this as an example, because I’m preparing to explore this time period in a story. One thing we do know about it is that its spread could have been halted with a little more soap. If you’re reading this, you’re probably lucky enough to live in a region with unimpeded access to antiseptic, but not everyone lives like this. So just don’t forget to be grateful for that.

Microstory 981: Upcoming Equality

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In my research for a topic I originally called Growing Equality, I learned that inequality is actually on the rise, much like violent crime, both of which I found surprising. While I can’t actually give you the statistics proving my supposition that things are getting better, I can promise that trends do not necessarily predict the outcome. When you’re watching a sports competition, and things start looking bad for your team, you don’t immediately turn it off and assume you’re going to lose, do you? Well, maybe you do, as I’ve heard fans nauseatingly recount to other fans what they missed when they did this. But you shouldn’t, because there is always hope for a shift. While recent data demonstrates that inequality has increased in every single region of the world, that doesn’t mean we won’t win in the end. The rich are getting richer, the poorer poorer, and hostilities are adding up, but we are working on ways to fix these problems. I keep bringing up automated labor, and universal basic income, because tests have proven that they work, when implemented properly. I believe strongly that they are the future of our global economy, and I won’t believe otherwise unless I find myself on my deathbed, having lost out on the opportunity to use other technologies to become immortal. Basically, if we don’t progress enough to conquer death by the time I’m old enough to die of age-related medical issues, I can’t be sure it will ever happen, because we are on course to solving that problem. It won’t matter how much richer the rich are when we decide money is worth nothing anyway, and the first step towards that is increasing the value of material objects that really matter—like computers, 3D printers, and nanotechnology—decreasing the value of pointless trinkets and wasteful machines, and decreasing human labor. The reason there is still so much inequality is not because that’s what the people want, but because most of our governing systems were built on a foundation of injustice. The majority are, at the very least, tolerant of people who are unlike them. Many accept our differences, and some even love diversity. It is the system that’s working against us, but systems can be changed within the span of a political campaign. If a bad candidate can suddenly wrest control over a state from its people, than certainly a good candidate can do the same thing next time. No, equality may not growing, but it doesn’t have to, because the strongest opposing actors are operating under borrowed time. They will die soon, and we will prevail, but only if we keep preaching our love, and not giving into discrimination. Love trumps hate.

Microstory 980: Disco

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I just have one question for you: why does everyone seem to hate disco so much? It’s not like everyone who listened to it when it was first popular is dead, so why is disco itself dead? We still listen to all kinds of music that isn’t trending right now; wasn’t created just a year or two ago, so why is this one genre so largely despised? Well, I’ve done a bit of research on the matter, and learned that it all stems from people’s hatred of it back when it was first being created. Or rather it comes from people being convinced that there was something wrong with it. Evidently, radio station personalities began a national campaign to combat the genre; a coordinated strike against what they perceived to be a threat to real music. Disco was catchy, but often overproduced. It gave rise to discotheques, which replaced live bands, souring people’s perception of it. Basically, all the complaints we had about disco are the same ones we’re seeing today with pop. There is a markèd difference between a band who writes and performs their own music—who believes in what they’re making, and has something to say—and a pop singer who hires a lyricist and composer to make something for them, and essentially absorb all the credit. But not all art is the same, and performers and audience members don’t all get the same thing out of that art. It’s okay that Miley Cyrus doesn’t have any strong feelings about Jay-Z or Britney Spears, yet they were both included in her song Party in the USA, because her fans like the sound, and that’s really all that matters. While art is always in competition with other art for your attention, it’s not designed to be better than anything else. I love disco, and I won’t apologize for that, just like I don’t expect you to apologize for listening to crap, like The 1975, or The Lumineers.

Microstory 979: Teachers

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As I’ve said, I think the education system is flawed. This is a major issue, in different ways, all over the world. Each student is expected to learn certain things, regardless of their interests or strengths. Even at higher levels, where there’s more freedom to study what you want, they have needless restrictions. For instance, when I was working towards my linguistics degree, there was no class that taught geolinguistics. I didn’t care about phonemes and sound frequency. I wanted to learn who speaks what languages, where, at what times in history, why it came to be like that, and how surrounding languages influence those speakers. I should have been given the opportunity to look into all that stuff, instead of wasting my time diagramming sentences. With all this technology, that could have been possible, but humans are notoriously fearful of change. The reason we study the way that we do is because the way we do it is perfectly suited to really intelligent people. An individual with a high intelligence quotient does really well when confronted with new information via lecture, or reading, and then evaluated through achievement testing. Not everyone benefits from this, and I daresay most don’t. So why, when only the few function well under these directives, do we do it like this? Well, obviously because people who come up with these methods are smart. Normal people don’t reform education, because we’re generally not in a position to do so. We’re so looked down upon by the elite that we wouldn’t be able to make any headway.

Now is the part where I make it clear that I blame none of this on the teachers. They are teaching under guidelines set forth by others, and coming from a history of having been taught this same way when they were students. To put it bluntly, it’s all they know. To put it more bluntly, it’s often all they’re allowed to do. Teachers have some leeway to choose their own curriculum, but there are still a ton of expectations on the district and national level that require the majority of their attention. Standardized tests, entry exams, and college acceptance thresholds prevent teachers from going too far off book. The arts generally have a little more flexibility, but not nearly enough. At a certain point in the history of the world in some of my stories, education shifts to the future. Students begin to learn somewhat independently. They’re given the tools they need to explore topics of their choosing, and work at their own pace, using AI instructors. They still have authorities guiding students, but instead of calling them teachers, they use the term facilitator, because they’re meant to help their students stay on track. A student, for example, wouldn’t be allowed to spend years learning only underwater basket-weaving. They are still expected to grow, and become well-rounded contributors to society. These highly-tailored study modules are supplemented with instructional videos, group discussions, and group activities, so don’t think of this as dystopian mindlessness. We can do this, but we have to want it. Teachers are great. They shape young minds, and get them prepared for their future careers. The problem is that they’re bad careers. The way we do business on a general level is inefficient, and predominantly meaningless. Most jobs are stupid, and either should be done by a robot, or just not done at all. We should be teaching our kids to excel in their own ways, and chase their passions, rather than simply expecting everyone to be able to solve for X by age Y. I don’t know where we start with this; whether we transition to a more fulfilling labor structure, or if it begins with the teachers themselves, but something has to be done. Teachers have to be allowed to help students be their best selves. The elite can handle anything, so we need to be focusing our resources on helping the average, and underprivileged.

Microstory 978: Chocolate

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I just took a big sniff inside my bottle of melatonin, because it smells like chocolate. I didn’t know this brand did that to their product, so I certainly didn’t buy them for that reason. They don’t even advertise the smell, which is weird. My allergies, made it so it would take me weeks to realize what the scent even was. The reason I do this every night is because smell is surprisingly well-associated with memory; better than most other senses. Even sight can’t compete in some respects. I worry about forgetting that I’ve already taken my medicine, and overdosing, so I have to find ways of reminding myself, which makes me wonder why pharmaceutical companies don’t do this with all of their pills. They want people to take them, right? So make it worth their while. Anyway, it’s probably not a shock to you that I love chocolate. Bear with me while I go off on a tangent. I just got in an argument with someone on Twitter today who absolutely could not understand why I could possibly have the audacity to not like sports. He just couldn’t fathom it, I mean it has everything. If you’re looking for entertainment, sports is the best, and personal preference doesn’t exist. Everybody likes sports, and anyone who doesn’t has a severe—and likely terminal—medical condition, and is missing something in their life. We shall never know happiness. We shall never know peace. My point is that we all like different things, but I’m notably irregular. I like disco, I hate Star Wars; I listen to Selena Gomez and The Offspring; and I don’t really enjoy eating food all that much. One thing I do like to eat, however, is chocolate...just like everybody else. You see, chocolate isn’t like sports. Chocolate is perfectly tailored for human consumption (once processed appropriately). The reason anything tastes good at all is because our ancestors needed to know what foods were safe to eat, and which were not. When I say ancestors, I’m talkin’ way, way back. This is how organisms have survived for literal aeons. Chocolate is very good, and nature wants us to know that, as does evolution. I don’t go one day without eating the stuff, I like it so much. Almost all of the various protein and granola bars I eat include them as a significant ingredient, so I’ve been living like this for years. I try not to be too much like you neurotypicals, but I cannot resist the chocolate. Huh. I guess I do have a medical condition.

Microstory 901: Diversity

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The rainbow flag has been used as a symbol for a lot of different things over the course of centuries. Today, it is most commonly associated with the LGBTQ movement, but I’ve never thought of it like that. Most people believe that there are seven colors in the rainbow, but the truth is that there are literally all of them. We arbitrarily break it down into seven standards, but it could just as easily be eight, or 39. In this way, the color spectrum represents all that a human being is capable of perceiving, which is most of what matters to everyday life. Because of this, I have always seen the rainbow flag as less of a symbol for any one sexuality, or even multiple sexual orientations. I’ve always interpreted it as a symbol for diversity. People who preach peace often do so by pointing out our similarities. We all live on Earth, we all bleed red blood, we all need to eat, etc. But as a futurist, I see this as becoming a problem in the future. We won’t always live exclusively on Earth. If we encounter an alien species, their biology would most likely be different than ours, and they might not possess red blood. And our nonbiological friends, who are energized by other means, will not need to eat. It is a problem for us to emphasize our similarities, because that’s really just another way of valuing homogeneity over variety. You see, we are not beautiful creatures despite our differences, but because of our differences. If we were all the same person, we would not be capable of coming up with new ideas. We would not create stunning art, or discover medical breakthroughs, or come up with technological conveniences. We would just sit here in the boredom of our own predictability. And in but a few generations, we would simply die off, because nobody wants to procreate with themselves. When I walk into a room, I want to see men; women; young people; old people; black people; Asian people; people of all shapes and sizes, from all backgrounds, of all identities; maybe even a few white people. A recent study has suggested that those living in an ethnically diverse neighborhood are more likely to help a stranger in need. Their experiences with people unlike them have given them perspective, and a whole hell of a lot of empathy. Because when I say that we should value diversity, that doesn’t mean I think we should ignore how well we relate to each other. Our ability to put ourselves other people’s shoes will always drive us to good works more than inherent altruism, which is fundamentally difficult to achieve, and far rarer than you probably know. King Dumpster was elected president in my country because he spoke to the hearts of an astonishingly large number of people who prefer mirrors over windows. It is up to the rest of us to prove that we are not all like that. Because we aren’t. We are diverse.

Microstory 762: Snowman

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In the late nineteenth century, a group of people with a lot of money got together and started questioning the future of planet Earth. They did not believe in the bible, or any other religious theory on the end of the world, but they could not deny that it was a possibility. Something happened to the dinosaurs, and the surface of the planet was not always as hospitable as it would become. New technologies pose new threats, and humans are fickle and dangerous beings. They didn’t know for sure what might happen to humanity, if anything at all, but they figured the only safe bet was to find a way protect the continuity of the species...just in case. They formed an institute, and started recruiting. They developed plans, and built facilities. They started watching over people. At first their subjects were random, but as science progressed, they were able to choose the right subjects with the right genetic makeup. They weren’t looking for perfection, nor any superficial trait shared by all. What they were looking for was diversity. What they realized was that the healthiest people in the world came from genetic diversity, which was why inbred offspring often come with defects. It was absolutely vital that their subjects be compatible with each other in a way that no algorithm could, or should, predict, because that was how evolution operated in an uncontrolled environment. Afterall, they weren’t trying to save this small sample, but the future of the human race. As the years went by, they continued their work, in complete secret. They monitored people they now deemed inheritors at a one to one ratio. They built underground bunkers capable of surviving any number of extinction-level disaster scenarios. These bunkers were placed in strategic locations, far from each other, for if one, or even almost all of them failed, perhaps one might survive.

They calculated the optimal population, turned over older inheritors to new generations, and kept the system alive for decades. Over a hundred years from their beginnings, nearly all bunkers were complete. They still had an interstellar vessel planned, but technological limitations prevented them from constructing it yet. Should civilization have ended before such time, they would just have to do without it. While they were waiting, a woman noticed a problem that others had seen without voicing their concerns. Inheritors were being protected half their lives by people called sentinels. These brave men and women were fully aware of the contingency program, and knew that there would be no room for them in the bunkers, should they be activated. But this woman, named Nevra Adkins decided that she was unhappy with this scenario. Though she was no sentinel herself, and would be lucky enough to be placed in one of the bunkers in a leadership position to help the inheritors acclimate to their new lives, she sympathized with them. She did not feel it right for the institute to demand loyalty from their sentinels, knowing that their jobs would end only in death. She broke away from the organization, and formed Project Snowman. With no intention of designing a repopulation strategy, she wanted to create a special bunker, just for the sentinels, and perhaps their families, as sufficient compensation for their dedication. She carved out some land in Antarctica, and broke ground within months. Unfortunately, she spent all of her money on this, and was unable to raise significant funds beyond it, so she would not be able to actually build the damn thing. And so her former institute started allocating money to help her build Snowman. A couple of years later, the coordination efforts were becoming needlessly complex, and Adkins was reabsorbed into the original organization. She had successfully convinced them that this was positively necessary to not only maintain good relationships with their sentinels, but to keep their souls clean. They were there to save humankind, should they be needed. They recognized that they would not be able to save everyone, should they be able to save anyone, but if they didn’t even try to save the true heroes in their ranks, then perhaps humanity did not deserve to be saved at all.

Microstory 650: An Escaped Murderer Kills No More

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This is one of those taikon that are hard to judge, which is why it’s so important that we have trained and conscientious verifiers to make sure that all events in question qualify. Lightseers have been worried about this one since the Book of Light was first written. It describes the life of a murderer who changes his ways. It doesn’t say who this killer is, why he’s meant to stop, or even what amount of time is supposed to pass. All humans are potentially immortal. Even those who haven’t worked hard enough to gain access to transhumanistic upgrades still have access to basic medical treatments that can extend life by decades...centuries, even. Though many of us never worry about death, or at least death by old age, we still measure time by the same lifespans of old. In fact, lifetime remains a legal term in most courts. Seventy standard years is used in sentencing systems as a baseline to determine how much punishment an offender deserves, be it more, or less. It is for this reason, and other traditions, that people still experience their lives in increments of about seven decades. People often alter their lifestyles to account for these transitions, as arbitrary as they may be to medical science. Because of this, believers were unwilling to wait however long it may take for an escaped murder to prove that he has stopped killing. Does the clock start once the taikon themselves begin, or can a murder have effectively quit long before, and somehow qualifies now. Fortunately for the more impatient amongst us, the former turned out to be the right answer.

Peve Stannon is considered to be one of the worst serial killers of all time; in this galaxy, and likely beyond. Of course, murder in Fostea is completely legal, as it’s a free choice that any central government would be powerless to prohibit. There are many good reasons to kill someone else; personal vengeance, business purposes, or even to protect others. Peve Stannon did not kill for these reasons, though. He did it for fun, and he was quite particular. Stannon went after people who his twisted sense of morality told him were too different than him to be trusted. He didn’t like being around those who were not heterosexual (which includes most everybody), those with darker skin, or people who chose to associate themselves with diversity. As terrible as it was to live under the rule of the dirty communists back in Lactea, one thing they had going for them was their ability to accept others for who they are, which is a sentiment we continue today, if only that. Stannon got his ideas by studying the planet isolate, Earth, which is where Fosteans lived for a brief time during its early civilizations. Since then, racism and homophobia has come and gone to the Earthan peoples. They are now living in the middle of the first decade of their third millennium, and things seem to be going okay. Decades earlier, though, bigotry and hatred were almost ubiquitous, with an entire political party being built on the platform of killing people who were different than them; their main issue being those of a rival religion. They ultimately resulted in the deaths of millions of people. We fight against our rivals as well, but we do so on an even playing field, and our goal is to show them The Light, not to simply be rid of them. Peve Stannon was fascinated by their behavior, and that of others later on, notably a white skin supremacists group who, umm...dressed up like ghosts? Stannon went on several killing sprees for years, eventually killing thousands of people. He was finally caught by a collective of the survivors of many of his victims, who created a court system for the sake of hunting, and prosecuting, Stannon. Sadly, Stannon escaped from the prison they built for him, and has spent years hiding out, having left no trace of where he might be going. But one thing he did do was spend the rest of his life without killing anybody else. His body was found in the middle of the woods by the survey team shortly after former Eido, Mateo’s departure from this universe. Verifiers still don’t know how he ended up on Kesliperia, or Hargrave Peninsula, but decided that he had died recently enough to qualify for the fiftieth taikon.