Microstory 2498: Conjunction 11

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These are vactrain hubs, and there are twelve of them. They’re evenly spaced all over the planet, according to an icosahedron model. While the world is obviously a sphere, an icosahedron shape can be overlaid on it in order to minimize the number of Conjunctions needed. It would be utterly impractical to have a vacuum tube that went from one dome to every single other. While there’s technically space for that, it would require far too much management and maintenance. So many of such tunnels would not be used very much, or at all. How many people are going from, say, Ancient Egypt to Prairiedome? It certainly wouldn’t be an impossibility, but that tube would likely be sitting vacant most of the time. Layovers have been a staple for our civilization for centuries, but this system is a lot better than its predecessors. First off, while the tubes themselves are limited, the trips are often exquisitely planned. Because each dome does have a direct line to each of the twelve conjunctions. As you would expect, a dome will have twelve stations, and you go to the one that leads to your destination. Currently, most trains leave about an average of every thirty minutes, but that fluctuates, and will continue to change, because it’s based on demand. If literally no one is going from Conjunction 6 to Conjunction 4, then it’s not even going to bother leaving. It will just sit there until someone signs up prior to the next cycle. I probably don’t need to tell you all this, because there is already sufficient literature on how to travel around the world, but I’ve always loved transportation, so while I’m finding lots of enjoyment from the other domes, I tend to focus more on the logistics than most visitors do.

So let’s talk about how it works once you’re in the Conjunction. As I said, each dome has a direct route to every single one. That’s important. I read up on the history, and the original plans called for multiple layovers, where you travel to your nearest hub, then the hub nearest your destination, and finally your final destination. That would be so bad, but I’m sure most people are glad that they ended up building up the infrastructure much more than that. The Conjunctions are so well-designed, and there is so much redundancy. If you are in a train car with visitors who are going through the same Conjunction, but different final destinations, your car will stop, and have you get off. At that point, you will just about immediately step into a private multi-directional elevator pod. It can only fit eleven people, but if you have luggage, obviously fewer. If you’re in a party of one, you can have a pod to yourself, and if you’re in a party of 22, you’re gonna have to split up. That’s just fine, they have enough to accommodate everyone who can fit in any given train car over only a few moments. Your pod will take you to your next station, where a second train will come for you to deliver you to the right dome. You might still be alone, but the builders thought of this. Not all vactrain cars are the same size. That’s why you tell the system where you’re going, so they can prepare the right one for you, to save the larger ones for more popular domes, even if the popularity shifts hour by hour. It’s such a robust system, I’m so impressed. There are so many things going on in the background, but you don’t have to worry about that. You just get on, get off, pod over, get on, and get off again. Despite there being more than three times as many stations worldwide than there have ever been airports on Earth, travel has never been simpler. And your trip will never take longer than three and a half hours from anywhere else. And that’s assuming you stop for coffee.

Microstory 2429: Capital

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This is the Capital City of Castlebourne. It doesn’t have any other name besides that, which is unusual, since they seem to have an appreciation for word puns in their other names. I suppose they just wanted to be real serious here, which is probably a good thing. Where I’m from in the Goldilocks Corridor, our planet didn’t have a capital. It was just a village where we made soap. That’s really it. Several years back, we were visited by the resistance to the Exin Empire. They wanted to know if any of us were willing to join the movement, and fight alongside them. We didn’t understand why we would even consider that, because for the most part, the empire left us alone. They asked us for soap, we gave them the soap, and they left. They never abused us, or attacked us, or anything. The resistance started educating us, though. They taught us about the other worlds, which were being forced to do other things to serve the Emperor. They showed us images of these other places, involving big machines that could produce their own wares in a fraction of the time. We were stunned. Some of us didn’t believe it. Some of us still don’t, and presumably still live on our home planet. We were making soap by hand. It was hard work, and the only reason we didn’t complain before was because we literally didn’t know that there was any better way. We were intentionally kept in the dark. Well, anyway, no, none of us joined the resistance. We were soap makers, we didn’t know how to fight! But then a few years later, another new ship showed up, and promised to take us somewhere where we wouldn’t have to make soap anymore. We asked them what work we would be doing, and they kind of laughed. No work, they said; we wouldn’t have to work at all. This was another concept that we didn’t have any frame of reference for. You work, it’s what you do. Not even the war-fighting people said anything about a life where we wouldn’t have to work. After some further education, most of us agreed to go with these other people. We flew away, and landed on Castlebourne. They didn’t lie to us, we don’t have to work. It’s taken some adjusting, but we’ve gotten used to just being alive and happy. I still wanna work, though. It still feels like the right thing to do. So I came to Capital to see how I could contribute to the governing body of our new society. I don’t have much experience, but they were all so welcoming to me. I’ve not been assigned anything yet, but they’re working on finding a place. I’m sure it’s difficult since I don’t have any skills. As for the dome itself, it’s gorgeous. Our village was dull and lifeless. I didn’t realize how much of a struggle it was for us just to survive. In contrast, this place has trees and other plant life. Tall buildings with hundreds of people work to make the world a better place for us refugees. For whatever reason, we were allowed to know how to read, but not everyone here had that luxury, yet the government is helping, and they’re doing it in style. I can’t wait to get my new job, and get to come to this beautiful dome every single day for the rest of my life.

Microstory 1803: Life Can’t Be Engineered

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I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I went to school for engineering. I didn’t even know what kind of engineering I was interested in. I figured it was better to at least have some kind of direction, rather than spending two years undeclared, and then having to rush to graduate on time. I ended up choosing civil engineering, and ultimately earned an architectural degree to go along with it. A lot of people do it the other way around, but like I said, I hadn’t been thinking that far ahead. I started out at a firm where the work wasn’t very exciting. We constructed a lot of facilities that were basically carbon copies of buildings that already existed. Sure, there were some modifications necessary for every new project, due to certain constraints, like geography, but for the most part, I didn’t find the work challenging or glamorous. A friend from college called me up, and said that he was starting a business on his own. It was going to be small in every sense of the word. We were going to build these newish things called tiny homes. They were meant to be as small as possible while including all the necessary amenities that a homeowner would expect to encounter in a normal-sized house or apartment. Space was key, and understanding how to work within the restrictions of a smaller space was paramount. I was looking for a challenge, and I found it. I had so much fun, engineering household objects to not be simply smaller, but more efficient. My job has proved that humans need less space to live comfortably than some may believe, as long as they have the right tools. I designed some of those tools. I had to continue my education since not all of this was civil engineering, but it wasn’t too hard, and I enjoyed every second of it.

One of my proudest accomplishments was a stackable washer/dryer that included a sink. It took up a lot less room than you might have assumed, and it even won me an industry award. The whole washer came out like a drawer, it was so cool, if I do say so myself. There were a few other minor contributions, like the actual mechanism for a bed that receded into the floor, and other collaborative efforts. I even literally built my own house using the skills I used for my job. I was proud of myself for that too, obviously, but the laundry sink was my baby, at least at the time. I hadn’t thought much about starting a family. I wasn’t against it, but every morning, when I woke up, I thought about my workday, and didn’t realize how much time I had let pass until a stranger called me a cat lady. I think he was just being a jerk, because he shouldn’t have known that I was an old maid, but something clicked in me that night, and I decided that I did want a family. Back then, there weren’t any dating apps, or even online matchmaking services at all. All I could do was keep going to bars, hoping to meet someone nice. Occasionally, a friend would set me up with someone, but it never worked out. After all that searching, and all that failure, I discovered that my future was right under my nose. It was like a romcom when I suddenly started to see my business partner as something more. We both loved what we did for a living, we had a great shorthand with each other, and the attraction had always been there. We both agreed we would have one child, I guess to keep in line with our shared minimalist approach to life. That didn’t quite work out. Our first two children were twins, and our third was an accident. We loved them so much, we decided to have just one more. The fourth and fifth were also twins, but it was long before that when we outgrew our tiny home. We were forced to upgrade. It was worth it.

Microstory 1642: Infinity Drive

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I think it’s about time I talk about the universe where bulkverse travel originated. Right now, I won’t say a whole lot about how they first ventured out into the bulk, but I’ll give an overview of the universe itself, and why they felt the impulse to explore beyond their borders. The humans of this universe originated on multiple planets simultaneously, and destroyed them all. Every global civilization did so much damage to the environment that they had to leave, and settle on new worlds, except for one of them, which didn’t survive their apocalypse. This was how the survivors found each other. They all had faster-than-light travel, but two of them independently invented something they would later call an infinity drive. It allowed them to jump anywhere in the universe instantaneously. It wasn’t technically instantaneous, but with a little bit of time travel, it felt that way, and it resulted in that. In order to travel from one universe to another, one must be able to pierce the membranes that hold them together. These membranes are semipermeable, like cellular membranes, so microscopic tears open up all the time, which is what allows bulk energy to leak through. That’s not the hard part, though. The hard part is navigation, which is why bulk travel is so rare. The precursor to this technology is the infinity drive, which pierces the universe’s membrane about halfway, allowing a vessel to slip in between the layers of that membrane, and slide wherever the crew wants to go. Even here, time operates as a spatial dimension, rather than a temporal dimension, which is what makes it feel instantaneous. Travelers can go wherever they want to, and arrive whenever they want to, even in the past—though both cultures decided long before the technology was viable that time travel was irrational, and dangerous. They only used it to explore, map, and seek out others in present-day.

In order to find the best new world to call home, those with the infinity drives dispatched probe factory ships all over their galaxy, and a little beyond. They dropped their probes in key locations, which automatically went around, and started generating a map of the universe. These probes detected the other wanderers and settlers, which served to bring everyone together under one umbrella, as a megacivilization. They pooled their knowledge, and unanimously agreed to do things better than their ancestors did. They found more efficient ways to live, which protected planets, and the wildlife upon them. They focused heavily on gathering as much information about the universe as they could, while making little impact on it. They sent more probes, now even further out in the universe, but encountered no other lifeforms. Everyone was here, and everyone was either human, or descended from humans. They were disappointed and bored because of this. How could they be so alone? Why were humans the only intelligent species, and how was it even possible that they evolved separately on multiple planets? This is what drove them to expand the scope of the infinity drive, and explore other universes. They sent one more batch of probes, this time completely through the membrane, and into the outer bulk. Powered by bulk energy, and designed to last forever, they were essentially aimless; just floating through the bulk, collecting whatever data they could find, and sending it back home. It took millennia to synthesize this data, so a real and usable map could be drawn from it. Once they were ready, the crew of a ship with an upgraded infinity drive called The Besananta took off. They didn’t get far.

Microstory 1027: Howard

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Have you ever noticed that we write addresses backwards? If I want to send a letter to my friend at 123 Main Street, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, I make it harder for the mail service to deliver by writing it out like that. We should start with the general, and become more specific from there. The first person at the post office only cares about which country it’s going to. They see Spain, they throw it in the Spain bin. They see Canada, they throw it in the Canada bin. Once it gets to Canada, the next person only cares about which Province it goes to, so put that on the next line. Next person after that only cares about the city, and the next which post office, which means it’s only the last one who cares about which specific building, or unit, it’s meant for. I had this dream that we would completely revamp our delivery system, to make it make more sense. Now, I don’t really know how it works. Maybe I was always wrong, and no worker has any problem hunting for the line that matters most to them. Or maybe the entire address is relevant to everyone who sees it. I just thought there was a better way, but Viola helped me get over it. It’s an insane idea to change something that’s been so ingrained in our way of life for centuries, but she never treated me poorly for it. She gently explained to me that the problem with the way we write addresses has less to do with the order, and more to do with the spacing. The system would work just as well top to bottom, if only we separated the geographical regions more clearly. Anyway, this was really just one carefully explained example of these ideas I have in my head that normal people don’t think about. I obsess over small inconveniences and inefficiencies that most people gloss right over. There are better ways we could be doing things, but in the grand scheme of things, that doesn’t matter much. Viola taught me that, but didn’t let on she was doing it. She taught me that life is not so much pointless as it is too complicated. A lot of good has come from humanity’s advances over the last few centuries, but some have made things worse. Why do we have health insurance? It’s an unnecessary step towards healthcare. We came up with these ways of treating maladies and other medical conditions, and then we muddied it up with a bunch of erroneous programs that do nothing but cause mess. I was getting so bogged down with trying to make this life more efficient, that my life itself was inefficient. Viola helped me shed what she called the extra from my life. Minimalism is key. That’s not to say I’m going to go live in a tiny cabin in the middle of nowhere, and drink milk straight from the udder. But I’m also not going to play by all of society’s rules. My life is going to be simple, and fulfilling, and I owe that to Viola’s ageless wisdom.

Microstory 943: Constructive Criticism

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As I told my therapist a couple years ago, I’ve always been a lot better at taking criticism than praise. Accolades always make me uncomfortable, because I don’t know how to respond. Do I say thank you? Okay, I do that, but then they just keep going, I guess because I’ve just validated their insight, and they don’t think they can stop. So, do I say thank you again? I make good use of a thesaurus for writing, because I don’t like repeating myself too much, as you can see with praise and accolades. I tire of affirming their compliments so quickly, and assume they’re secretly resentful of me for not somehow magically absolving them of their continued admiration, and allowing them to move on without throwing me a friggin parade. While I understand that most people need a lot of validation for the things they do, I need very little. I really just need you to tell me that it was right, so I can lock that behavior into my procedural memory, and go on to the next challenge. What I truly thirst for is criticism, but as you may have guessed from the title, only the constructive kind. I don’t like being berated or insulted any more than anyone else, but I do need to hear what I did wrong, so I can correct the behavior, and lock it out of my procedural memory. Because if you say nothing, then I’m liable to do it the same way again. I personally enjoying finding efficiencies, and perfecting a craft, if given the chance, so I won’t necessarily be stuck there, but if I have too little motivation, then I will. One of my favorite lyrics from the band, Muse comes at the end of their song Hoodoo. It goes, I’ve had recurring nightmares // that I was loved for who I am // and missed the opportunity // to be a better man. I think it speaks for itself quite nicely.

The lack of constructive criticism is one of my biggest pet peeves, because I’ve struggled so much with it my whole life. I will be a part of something for an extended period of time, and then at some point after it’s over, I hear all this garbage about how poorly I did. If true, these people had every opportunity to help me before, but they chose not to, for whatever reason. Perhaps they just like complaining about other people, and attacking them. Or maybe they’re so out of touch with reality, that they don’t even recognize the disconnect. Or—and this is the most likely explanation since I’m so introspective, and don’t generally have the confidence to trust my own past actions—they’re just lying about the whole thing. If this is the real truth, maybe they’re upset I didn’t need their help as much as they thought I would, or they don’t like me for some other reason, and feel the need to justify their hostility. Whatever the case, nothing they’ve done has helped whatever it was we were trying to do, now there’s a chance I didn’t help it either, and I certainly can’t grow and learn much from my experiences. Most of my teachers chose deliberately to not use red pens when grading assignments, because of the negative connotation, but I’ve always loved seeing all that red. It illustrates a clear distinction between what I thought was right, and what’s actually right. If I cannot pick on on that difference—be it for a piece of writing, or more abstractly for any other scenario—then nothing gets better. The world is as crappy as it is today, because too many people have been indoctrinated to believe that we have no room for improvement. I don’t believe that, and if you don’t either, then come the next two elections...#votethemout.