I've only written a few science fiction short stories, plus have ideas for a few more. Here are my favorite ones, so far:
Mathematician Discovers New Unlucky Number -- a reductio ad adsurdum about superstition.
Please Wait for the Next Available Agent -- sleazy televangelist gets what he deserves.
The Dis-Existence of Wiz Zizit -- time travel and immortality.
...And the Rest is History -- the true story of the birth of Christianity.
The Oogaboogas and the Aaganagas -- a rather drastic solution to ethnic conflicts.
Tabby Squared -- who says extraterrestrials are dangerous.
All Walls Have 2 Sides -- victimless "crimes" run amok.
Stuck in Time -- man has himself put in suspended animation to find out what the future will be like.
Pasadena, California (AP) - Dr. Mort Benson, chairman of the Pasadena Research Institute, announced at a press conference today that he has discovered a new unlucky number. It is the third one known, and the largest one known so far. The discovery comes seven years after his similar, Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the previous record-holder. Today's announcement culminated four years of work by the brilliant young mathematician, working with one of the world's most powerful supercomputers. The computer calculated the number in 122.4 seconds, using the latest mathematical models. According to Dr. Benson, the new unlucky number is 11,082,455,729,853,020.6983.
Colleagues described Dr. Benson as "tremendously elated," because his latest work adds credibility to a field that has had its skeptics. In the same scientific paper that announces his latest discovery, Dr. Benson uses an indirect method of reasoning to prove that lucky and unlucky numbers must exist. In this method, something is proved or disproved by assuming the opposite were true, and showing the absurd or paradoxical consequences that would result. Dr. Benson shows how the entire structure of mathematics would collapse if lucky and unlucky numbers did not exist.
Dr. Benson next plans to study more of the theoretical aspects of lucky and unlucky numbers. Though two such numbers show up between zero and 20, they are known to be one of the rarest types of numbers there are, far less common, for instance, then prime numbers (those that are not evenly divisible in any way, such as 7 and 11). A number of mathematicians are now trying to prove whether there is some largest lucky and unlucky number, or if there are an infinite number of them as one goes higher and higher among the numbers.
Dr. Benson's latest discovery comes just a year after he shocked the world with his discovery that the unlucky number which had been known throughout history as 13 is only an approximation of the real number, 13.0017. Referring to that earlier discovery at the press conference today, Dr. Benson expressed concern that because the number 13 is itself now known not to be unlucky, that would lead people to end the practice of skipping the number 13 when numbering the floors of tall buildings. He said that would be foolhardy since the 13.0017th floor comes up to a person's ankles when standing on the 13th floor, and "unless you plan to spend your life jumping from chair to chair to bed to table to avoid having any part of you on the 13.0017th floor, we should continue to avoid the number 13."
In response to reporters' questions, Dr. Benson revealed more today of the reasoning which led to last year's discovery, to be published in a forthcoming autobiography. He pointed out that if precisely 13 was the unlucky number, then on bare floors, the 13.0000th floor would have to count as the surface of the wooden flooring, and therefore so would floors with throw rugs, and therefore floors with wall-to-wall carpeting as well. In that case, people living on 13th floors with wall-to-wall carpeting would never experience bad luck since the bottoms of their feet would never actually touch the 13.0000th floor, which is clearly not what is observed. However, Dr. Benson admitted that there are still a few mathematicians, most notably Sempre Malafortuna of L'Institutio Di Matematica in Rome, who insist instead that the surface of the carpet counts as the floor no matter what. Such mathematicians remain unconvinced by Dr. Benson's mathematical arguments, and call for further experiments to determine the validity of what has become known among mathematicians as the "Shag Carpet Corollary."
Although Dr. Benson has ample reason to be proud of his accomplishments, the hard-driven mathematician says he is still "kicking himself" for not making the discovery of the second known unlucky number, -7". "In retrospect, that should have been so obvious," he said. That discovery was announced seven months ago by a rival mathematician in this rapidly-burgeoning field, Ridiculo Preposteroso of the Madrid Academia Scientifica Quaqueria De Espaņa.
According to Dr. Benson, the new unlucky number is so unlucky that in comparison, 13.0017 would seem more like 7. While many people survive Friday the 13th, for example, anything connected with 11,082,455,729,853,020.6983 will end in near or total disaster. When asked if it is good that he discovered this new number, Benson replied, "Look, I didn't make that number unlucky. It always was. Because I discovered that it is unlucky, we will know to avoid it in the future."
When Billie Smith died, he found himself in a featureless white room, with no windows, no doors. It was empty except for a white pedestal with a white telephone on it.
Having been a famous television evangelist in life, who made a living telling credulous people what would happen after they died, and thereby scaring them into giving him money, this was the last thing he expected of the afterlife.
He noticed that there was a note on the telephone that said, "To find out whether you are going to heaven or hell, please dial 0."
He picked up the phone, dialed 0, and heard elevator music, periodically interrupted by a message that said, "All of our operators are busy right now. Please wait for the next available agent."
"Damn!", he said. "--Err ... I mean, darn."
After about 5 minutes of that, and no one getting to him, he hung up, and tried praying out loud for someone to answer him. No one did, so he picked up the phone again, and dialed 0. Again he heard elevator music, periodically interrupted by a message that said, "All of our operators are busy right now. Please wait for the next available agent."
Billie had no reason to think he might be going to hell. True, he did embezzle funds from his ministry that were not meant for him personally, in order to live a lavish lifestyle of mansions and yachts and personal jet planes. And he did support politicians who favored the small group of people in the world who lived such a lifestyle, despite the Bible's numerous admonitions against it. But he had found the appropriate Biblical verses that, with enough ingenuity, he could interpret as approving of that lifestyle.
True, he did go through three ugly divorces after his extramarital affairs were discovered, despite preaching family values. But he had cried and begged his millions of followers for forgiveness on national television each time his affairs were discovered and made public, and each time they had forgiven him.
True, there was that time when he paid for his girlfriend's abortion, despite preaching against abortion, and paying those who knew about it hush money to keep quiet. And there was his preaching against homosexuality, despite some interesting peccadillos of his own, including several gay encounters. But he had spent his life spreading the word of the LORD, and that outweighed everything else he had done. Billie was sure that he of all people was certainly going to heaven.
Still, he waited on the phone for the confirmation ... and waited ... and waited. But all he kept hearing was elevator music, periodically interrupted by a message that said, "All of our operators are busy right now. Please wait for the next available agent." After five hours on the phone, he had long since reached the point of hanging up, but there was nothing else to do in the room, he did not need to eat, or sleep, and he knew that nothing could be more important than to find out whether eternal bliss or eternal hellfire was in store for him. Besides, after spending five hours waiting, the last thing he could afford to do would be to hang up, and go back to the beginning of the queue all over again, when an operator might be about to get to him the next second.
And so, the hours passed, and the days, and the weeks, and the months, and the years, and the millennia, and the eons, and more. The longer Billie waited, the more doubtful he was that anyone would ever get to him, but at the same time, the more time he had already invested in waiting, that he would lose if he hung up, when there was still the slight chance that someone might get to him at any second.
And through it all, and for the rest of eternity, Billie had the increasing certainty -- but never complete certainty, enough to hang up -- that he had been wrong, and hell had no fire or brimstone, or devils, or eternal torture. That this WAS hell, whereas for people who went to heaven, an operator answered the phone right away.
When Wiz Zizit came of age, he developed a deeper understanding of life. Not only did he find himself suddenly aware of all things sexual, as would be expected, but he found that he had awakened to all sorts of intellectual matters as well. It was as if he had never been fully awake and aware before. Perhaps it was just the usual mental progress that comes with growing up, perhaps not.
One day, when he was thirteen bio-years old, he was eating a favorite delicacy for dinner at home with his family, trilobite with butter sauce. The species was originally from some planet half-way across the universe and perhaps a billion years back from the time his family was living in then. He was fully enjoying his meal when, lost in thought, a train of logic struck him as if he had been shot by a cannonball, without warning. He showed no outward sign of the well of terror that he was descending into as he realized the full implications of his thoughts for the first time. No sign of the feeling of his stomach as it seemed to sink to the floor. Strange, how he sort of knew about it before, yet never really understood. He continued to make conversation, and hide the mounting panic that was going on inside of him. Why not just tell everyone what he was thinking? For one thing, he didn't want to spoil everyone else's dinner also. And he had the sense that for some strange reason, no one else would be struck by his horrible thought the way he was. He was brighter than most people, he knew. Perhaps few people could truly understand the meaning of the word "infinity". Everyone around him seemed to live their lives happily oblivious to the implications of the thought that had just struck him.
Wiz Zizit had realized his own mortality. Forever after, he would enjoy eating trilobite. But it would always be a reminder.
In the bio-months that followed, he wondered how he could even live with the knowledge of the impending end of his existence, without the terror driving him mad. It wasn't actually the end of his existence that he feared, but the thought that once it ended, he would never ever exist again. He came to dread going to sleep above all, because, away from the distractions of the day, his thoughts would invariably drift back into the same rut as before. He almost wanted to end his own existence to put an end to the terror, but could appreciate the irony of the situation, since the end of his existence was the very thing that he was terrified of! But as the bio-years passed, somehow the terror subsided into the background and disappeared. Still, he didn't want his existence to end, and felt like he was the only one who felt that way. No one else around him seemed to care.
It wasn't actually mortality that he was afraid of, of course, since Wiz was as immortal as anyone. It wasn't the prospect of death that terrified him, but dis-existence!
Back in the original reality leading up to the invention of time travel, people really did die. At first, they died from a process called "aging". It seems that the process that lead to the creation of life forms, called evolution, always created life forms that maximized their numbers by reproducing, rather than by continuing to live indefinitely long times. Evolution produced life forms that created as many copies of themselves as possible, simply because those were the life forms that swamped out all others and became the only ones that existed. Reproduction enabled the number of each type of life form to undergo geometric growth, while death only subtracted the number of life forms by one, so had too minor an effect to matter. Also, it was easier for life forms to devote their energies into starting from scratch and creating new copies rather than to keep repairing the original. So on planets throughout the universe, evolution always produced life forms that degraded over time and died. But eventually, all intelligent species discovered ways to stop their own aging processes. Once time travel was invented, that knowledge was brought back to the past, so that all intelligent beings who ever lived throughout the universe, past, present and future, did not die from aging.
People still would have died sooner or later from occasional accidents that damaged their bodies too severely to be repaired by any known methods. But thanks to time travel, other people could always travel back in time to prevent the accidents from occurring in the first place. That benefit was one of many that made time travel so popular. Therefore, people were immortal, at least along the fourth dimension, the time dimension.
However, there was a catch, as it seems there always is, but that requires some explanation.
As soon as the first species anywhere in the universe discovered time travel (they were from a planet in the second-largest spiral galaxy in the Zhingi Cluster, not that it matters), they took to it enthusiastically, and spread the knowledge to all other intelligent life forms in the rest of the universe. As soon as they discovered time travel, they traveled to their own future and brought back every technological advance that they were ever to discover. Or rather, perhaps people from their own future traveled back to their past and spread the knowledge. With time travel, these things are never clear, and in any event, the original history was overwritten and no longer exists. (Indeed, the Zhingi no longer exist, having been wiped from history in the Third Temporal War, when their arch-enemies the, Xix, went back in time and prevented the planet they evolved on from ever forming.) Regardless of how it happened, during that version of reality the Zhindi became the most advanced species in the universe technologically.
Time travel brought with it instantaneous space travel to anywhere in the universe, of course. In accordance with the Theory of Relativity, anyone could travel across the universe in a split second, as long as they traveled at virtually the speed of light. Even though, to outside observers, they were taking billions of years to make the journey, the time dilation effect at just under the speed of light would make it seem to the traveler that almost no time had passed. The only trouble was that once they returned home and got out of their space ship, they would discover that it was billions of years later, rather than their home time. Time travel solved that problem. They would simply travel back in time those billions of years, and step out of their space ship an instant after they began their journey. The Zhingi species immediately spread all of their technological knowledge to every other intelligent species in the universe, and collected all the knowledge from those other planets' futures. That is how as a result, in the universe as we all know it, all people, past, present and future, on all planets, have access to all the knowledge that was ever created in the universe throughout its entire existence.
Both time travel and space travel became as easy as could be. Thanks to technology that could read people's thoughts and carry out whatever actions they wished, anyone had merely to think the thought that they would like to travel anywhere in the universe in time and space, and that's where they'd go, as easily as when anyone had the thought that they would like to move their legs or tentacles (as the case may be), and they moved. Both time travel and space travel at nearly the speed of light require a lot of energy, of course, but the Zhingi sent technology back in time to tap the stupendous energy of the Big Bang and send it forwards in time to wherever it was needed. It was simply impossible for anyone in the universe to run out of energy.
Travel to other planets altered their histories, but no matter. At first, when all technologies ever invented anywhere and anywhen in the universe were spread to all planets with intelligent species, the new histories were a vast improvement over the previous time-lines. After the initial wave of travel, still-newer histories that were constantly being created with each intervention were generally as good as the old ones. Different people were born than had been born in the previous versions of their histories, but since members of different intelligent species don't tend to mingle and get to know each other as individuals, there was little concern at first, at least when it came to altering OTHER planets' histories, as opposed to one's own. Up till when intergalactic travel appeared, planets in different solar systems in different galaxies generally had no effect on each other, so altering the history on one planet made no change to the time-line on another planet, such as back on one's own home planet.
Time travel on one's own planet was another matter. As soon as people began traveling into their planets' pasts, in order to prevent deaths by warning people about accidents, to alter history in better ways, or merely to go on dinosaur safaris (or whatever extinct species captured the imagination of people on various planets), they would usually find to their horror when they returned to their home time that they had changed history so that their friends and loved ones no longer existed, had never been born in the first place. "Dis-existence", it was called. Often, their home time was completely unrecognizable. Usually, they could never figure out just what they had done to change the time-line, in order to undo the change. Merely moving around back in the past caused air molecules to move in ways they hadn't in the previous reality, which caused cascading changes that altered history in unpredictable ways.
One might think that such a terrible problem would have caused time travel to be abolished, but that was not the case. Once the United Universe government was established after the introduction of universal time and space travel, numerous attempts were made to outlaw time travel, but they were always defeated. Death had a more visceral effect on people than the thought of their own dis-existence once some reality change removed them from the time-line. Dis-existence just seemed like some theoretical thing to most people. There was never a dead body to see. In fact, no one except for the person who had altered the time-line would even remember the person who now had never existed. On the other hand, time travel prevented all accidents that would have killed people. That plus its other benefits were too attractive for people to give up.
Instead, people adapted psychologically and socially to dis-existence.
At first, when people discovered the dis-existence problem, almost all of them immediately stopped making any unnecessary trips back in time, only went back in time to prevent accidents. Since that always involved trips of just a few minutes backward, there was never the problem of dis-existence. Everyone who had already come into existence was already in existence. Occasionally, the trip backwards caused different babies to be conceived than were in the previous reality, but people don't know fertilized egg cells or newborn babies as individuals, so don't care if different ones are born, except perhaps philosophically.
Other than to prevent accidents, people didn't want to go back in time just for the fun of it, only to return to find that their friends and loved ones who stayed home had vanished. Of course, a solution to the problem could have been to go on time trips with all of their friends and loved ones. The trouble was that people of intelligent species from most planets tended to form complex social networks. Person A might know Persons B through M, so could travel back in time with all of them and not miss anyone when they came back. But Person C might know Persons N through S, Person F might know Persons R and X through Z, etc., so they wouldn't have wanted to travel back without those additional friends. The only way to travel back in time would have been for everyone on the planet to simultaneously take the trip backward, everyone dragging everyone else along with them, but that would have been unfeasible. Occasionally, there were tight cliques of friends who only knew each other and no one else, and they would indeed take time trips. Gradually, societies changed so that everyone formed those time travel cliques, and would associate only with people within their clique, and no one else. Each clique typically consisted of a city full of people, so that its members had plenty of potential friends to choose from. Since almost everyone in the universe lived in space habitats of around a million people each, it was convenient for the entire habitats to take trips through time and space together. (Wiz's clique was highly unusual in that they actually lived on a planet.) Time travel then became widespread.
People swept under the rug the fact that while time travel brought them immortality in the fourth dimension, time, it also brought them an analog of mortality, up one dimension. Since people were continually traveling through time, they were continually altering reality. Reality then became a fifth dimension. An event could be located in the three spacial dimensions (height, width and depth), and in the two temporal dimensions (time, and which stretch of realities it occurred in before some change made it no longer occur). In the reality that existed before the invention of time travel, people were mortal in the fourth dimension. That is, they only existed for a finite length of time. But since the time-line never changed, they had a sort of immortality in the fifth dimension, reality, because there was always only one reality. While they only existed for a finite stretch of time, still, at least they had existed in the first place. Time travel reversed that! People were immortal in the time dimension, but only existed for a finite stretch of realities before reality changed so that they were never born in the first place.
(People sometimes call reality "meta-time", by the way. Meta is a prefix meaning "analogous, but up one conceptual level". Just as people speak of past, present and future on the time-line, as well as now, then, before, after, etc., they talk about meta-past, meta-present and meta-future, meaning the previous -- or more correctly, meta-previous -- realities, current reality, and subsequent realities, as well as meta-now, etc. Dis-existence is therefore also meta-death. "Become" means to change over the course of time, while "meta-become" means to change over the course of realities. But "meta-" is usually left out when it is clear that the speaker is talking about realities rather than time.)
Some people tried to claim that time travel itself would make people immune to dis-existence. If someone's parents were killed before they were born so that they never came into existence in the first place, and they stayed in their home time, they would obviously dis-exist. But if that person traveled back to a time before they were born, or to any other time, and then someone else (or even that same person) killed their parents before they were born, would they still dis-exist, or would jumping out of the time-line and appearing somewhere else give them permanence? After all, it would seem to an observer at the time they traveled to that that person winked into existence at that moment. Wouldn't that remain the case whether or not their birth was erased somewhere else on the time-line? The answer is yes. (And for that reason, killing one's own parents before one was born does not cause a paradox. A person's birth is erased from the time-line, and all of their life thereafter, but their presence at the place on the time-line that they travel back to in order to do the foul deed does not disappear. They still exist, and can remember their life back to their childhood, yet if they go back forward to those times, they no longer find themself there. And in particular, they still exist in order to kill their own parents, so there is no paradox.)
But unfortunately, time travelers would still be affected by any changes someone else (meta-)later made to the part of the time-line that they traveled to. As that famous scientist Zirkog Zirkom was able to prove, when someone travels through time and makes a change to the time-line, it is like re-recording over a section of tape in a tape recorder. Even worse, because cascading changes continue to make a difference long past the stretch of time when time travelers are there and making changes, so even more of the tape after that time period gets overlaid with the new reality. Time travelers are even more vulnerable to dis-existence than if they stay at home, because they ought not to be there in the first place. The slightest change erases them from that section of the time-line. Even if they traveled widely through time, and appeared in many places on the tape, so to speak, so that "all their eggs weren't in one basket", that wouldn't provide any protection from dis-existence. True, erasing some of those places wouldn't erase them all, so that one would still exist somewhere on the time-line. But what counted was if one was erased from the spot on the time-line that one's consciousness was at, at the present bio-moment. (The difference between time and bio-time is that when people time travel, bio-time is what passes from their point of view, as they experience the passage of time throughout their lives. Time is what passes in the external universe: the time that they time travel through. So for instance, if someone had breakfast, then traveled a billion years into the past and had lunch, it would be a few bio-hours later, but a billion years earlier. When people don't time travel, time and bio-time are the same, of course.) So, to make a long story short, there is no way to escape from the danger of dis-existing.
All of this, Wiz Zizit realized in a flash on that day, while eating his broiled trilobite, even though he had sort of known it in an intellectual way for some bio-years up till then. He was going to die! Or rather, to dis-exist. And then never ever to exist again.
He wanted to exist. He couldn't imagine how anyone could not, how most people he knew around him cared about their mortality in the ordinary sense, and thanked time travel that they would never die, yet didn't seem to care that they were destined to dis-exist. (Some people didn't even seem to care if they died either.)
He could see several reasons for their complacency.
Other people just weren't as bright as he was, even despite the usual brain enhancements, and perhaps couldn't fully comprehend the problem. In addition, and perhaps because of their lack of intelligence, most people around him seemed to have developed various beliefs that were quite imaginative, but that had no proof, and that lulled them into their complacency. Most people seemed to believe that after they dis-existed, they would somehow still exist in some higher dimension, perhaps the sixth dimension, or the infinite dimension, whatever those were. Some seemed to think that their analogs in future realities (assuming it had any meaning which people in those realities were their analogs as opposed to other people's analogs), would bring them a sort of existence. Some seemed to think that their link to the universal intelnet, the universal network of consciousnesses, made them sort of a piece of a universal mind, even though their consciousnesses stayed distinct even when they were linked.
As the bio-years passed, Wiz brooded about the problem. But there seemed to be nothing to do about it, given the prevailing attitudes of those around him. Even when he began to speak up about it, his words never seemed to change anyone's attitude.
A friend of Wiz's introduced him to a woman friend who he found attractive, named Fliydj K'ę, and they saw each other for several bio-months. They had some great times together. They went off on vacations to view the collapse of a galactic black hole around 1 million ABB (After Big Bang, of course), and hike the frozen ammonia fields on Granich 1528264-8-EF-93, a romantic planet overlooking the Tarantula Nebula, the largest and most spectacular nebula in the universe, which glowed neon green across its entire night sky.
Then one day over a sumptuous meal of Yighian ultraviolet soup, Fliydj mentioned how she had often noticed that Wiz seemed distracted and worried about something, and asked him to confide in her what it was. Wiz decided that he had better mention his preoccupation with his eventual inevitable dis-existence, and broached the subject hesitantly. He presumed that Fliydj would say that she had never thought up till then about the fact that sooner or later, she would disappear from the time-line. Instead, she was well aware that she was destined to dis-exist. Her response surprised and shocked Wiz.
"Why would you want to exist in all realities, anyway? Don't you think that's terribly selfish, to think that you should have the right to preserve your own existence, always? There isn't enough room in the universe for everyone from all realities to exist simultaneously. The universe would quickly fill up."
"That's true," Wiz said, "but maybe there's some way around the problem. Maybe we could keep creating new universes as needed so there would always be enough space for everyone."
"That's just immoral, to think that people should have the right to exist in all realities."
"It's immoral, even if we found a way to solve the space problem?", Wiz said, astonished.
"Yes."
"How could anyone possibly think that way?", Wiz said, with rising anger. "Why deliberately refuse to make things better even when you are able to?"
Fliydj was adamant about her point of view. The only explanation Wiz could think of was that she, and people like her, got a psychological rush from thinking that they were morally superior to others, and that rush was more important to them even than their existence itself. Eventually, Wiz gave up trying to shake her from her bizarre, irrational convictions, for he could see that he was unlikely to do so. Inevitably, after that initial conversation about the subject, they argued, and drifted apart.
Several bio-years later, Wiz met another woman, named Biymd Kowm, while plasma-skiing the Vortex of Ambula. He was immediately impressed with her because women were not usually interested in such adventurous sports as plasma-skiing. However, she was not of his time travel clique. The odds that she was were of course astronomically small. He tried to remain stand-offish, as one always would with a member of another clique, and just make impersonal conversation without trying to get to know her as a unique individual. But the very fact that he felt he had nothing to lose as far as destroying a good relationship made him unhesitant to bring up his favorite subject, seemingly out of the blue.
While waiting their turns as the plasma-boat came around again, Wiz said, "Have you ever thought about the fact that sooner or later, the time-line will change so that we'll never have existed in the first place? And that then we'll never have lived, and experienced all the wonderful things in life, like plasma-skiing?
Biymd looked astonished, and after a long pause, said slowly, "Yes, I HAVE," in a half-whisper, as if they could be arrested on the spot for engaging in some sort of conspiratorial conversation. "Most people don't seem to realize that they're going to dis-exist, and even the ones who do seem to rationalize it away, as if they don't care, because there's nothing that can be done about it anyway. I guess it's better to pretend you don't care than to get all upset about a problem you can't do anything about."
"I hadn't thought of that explanation for their attitudes," Wiz said. "People seem to spend so much psychological energy convincing themselves that they prefer things that way. I bet that if someone DID come up with a solution, they wouldn't even be able to change their thinking, and embrace that solution. By that point they'd be too stuck in their ways of thinking to be able to adapt to the changed situation.
"But who says nothing can be done about it? Maybe people have so convinced themselves that they prefer the situation as it is, that they don't try to come up with ways to do anything about it!"
"That's possible," Biymd said, "but what CAN be done about it?"
"I don't know," Wiz said. "Maybe somehow people could create their own little universes that they could hide in, away from the danger of time-line changes."
"That wouldn't be very good," Biymd said, "to be stuck in your own boring little universe, all alone. On the one hand, if you lived forever, who could bear that for all eternity? And on the other hand, what if you had an accident? There'd be no one to go back in time to prevent it. Then you would ... what is the word for it? Oh, yes, I think it's 'die'."
"Maybe there are other solutions, and I just haven't thought of them. Could I meet you for dinner somewhere, and we could talk more about this? I've never met anyone like you, who actually thinks like me! There's a nice little restaurant I know of in the plasma-ski chalet. Low gravity, nice atmosphere. Maybe we could come up with better ideas if we bounce them off each other."
Biymd looked a bit shocked, and even looked around both of them, this way and that, as if she really was afraid that they would be arrested for having this conversation. "But how could we do that? We aren't even in the same clique. We shouldn't even be talking like this in the first place, but exchanging no more than pleasantries. Don't you remember, I could dis-exist at any moment. The more you get to know me, the more upset you'll be when that happens."
Wiz said, "Well, if we're really talking seriously about preventing our own dis-existences, then what would it matter if we're in different cliques?"
Biymd said, "You have a point there. But you don't seriously think that the two of us, all on our own, could come up with a solution that all the other trillion-illion-illion people in the universe, in all previous realities, have never come up with, do you? I mean, be reasonable!"
Wiz said, "I don't know. But there's only one way to find out."
Wiz and Biymd met for dinner. They quickly discovered that they had far more in common than just a love of plasma-skiing and a common philosophy. By the end of dinner, Wiz knew that he was in love. In fact, he knew that he had already been in love from the first instant they met, while waiting on line for the next plasma-boat to tow them around the Vortex, but due to social norms regarding people in other cliques he had been unable to admit it to himself until those bio-hours later.
In the bio-years that followed, Wiz and Biymd disappeared from site from their friends and relatives, and everyone else in their respective cliques. They kept to times and places in the universe that neither of their cliques frequented, where they could be anonymous, so that no one would realize the illicitness of their relationship.
They wanted to have children together, but decided it would be best to wait to see if they could come to some sort of solution to their problem. They didn't want to bring children into the world, knowing that those children would be doomed to dis-existence just as they themselves were.
Wiz wondered why the universe didn't have a population explosion, everyone continually having children. The only explanation he could think of was that reality changes were constantly wiping people out of existence as quickly as they reproduced. "Dis-existence is only nature's way of letting other people use the tennis courts," as he once heard someone joke (though he had no idea what tennis courts were).
Many bio-years later, Wiz suddenly conceived of a way to prevent their dis-existence. They could travel back in time to as close to the Big Bang as technology would allow for people to live, despite the tremendous radiation and heat from the beginning of the universe. As it turned out, 18,415 years after the Big Bang, to be precise. Since no one could travel back in time farther than that, no one else would be there to change the time-line at that early a period in the universe's existence, and wipe them out of existence.
There was still a problem, though. After they got there, they would then travel forward through time at the rate of one year per bio-year, as everyone does even when they don't time travel. Eventually, they would reach a time when other people were around, perhaps exploring the early universe, and were able to do something to wipe them out of existence. They could keep traveling back in time to that safe earliest point, but soon there would be countless copies of Wiz and Biymd running around in the year 18,415 ABB. There was only so much space in the universe, and far less of it in that early time when the universe had barely started expanding. Eventually they wouldn't be able to go back to that earliest point again because there would be no space left for them. The universe would be solid Wiz and Biymd!
Nevertheless, they decided to escape back in time while they still could, before any change in the time-line erased them, and then use the bio-time there to think of a better solution while they were in temporary safety.
Biymd wondered if it were possible after all, as many people believed, that there might be a sixth dimension in which people always existed. It might be possible to invent some technology to travel freely through the various realities - reality travel! - so that people who dis-existed could be plucked from previous realities and restored to existence. But she had the feeling that, just as time travel had bumped up people's mortality by one dimension instead of eliminating it, travel along the sixth dimension would make people immortal in the fifth dimension, reality, only to make them mortal in the sixth dimension, whatever that meant. Whenever she tried to think about it, it made her head spin. She wished that she could travel somehow into the sixth dimension, whatever that was, and stand outside of the entire endless stream of changing realities that made up the Universe and see them as a completed unchanging entirety.
Wiz and Biymd obtained the necessary ship and other hardware for the journey. They traveled back to that time just after the Big Bang -- and were aghast at what they saw out their ship's view-screen. Someone had beat them to it. Not just someone, but A LOT of someones. Amid the swirling hot gas and radiation, the screen was filled, almost to the breaking-point, with other ships. If they'd bothered to count, there were more than seven quintillion of them at any given moment. Ships were continually popping in and out of there, for reasons they could not imagine at first.
How naive Wiz had been! He couldn't understand since he was thirteen why he seemed alone in his terror at dis-existence, and it turned out that he was far from alone. Although only a small proportion of people shared his fear, there were a lot of people in the universe (approximately sixty-three decillion, according to the latest ten meta-year census), so even a small proportion of them meant a lot of people. And many of them had gotten the same idea as he had to save their own existence. (Perhaps that's why he hadn't met any of them before -- so many of them were coming here!) As reality steadily changed throughout the universe, and new people came into existence, there were always more of that minority of them traveling to the beginning of the universe for the same reason that Wiz did, and accumulating there.
They'd all gotten the same idea, to each other's peril. Though none of them could feel it, reality was continually being changed by their arrivals. Everyone who had just arrived was in danger of having subsequent arrivals (or rather, meta-subsequent) cause them to dis-exist. Perhaps they were in even more danger than back at the times they'd come from.
Wiz momentarily froze, too stunned to decide what to do. Then his ship's computer informed him that there was a message coming through hyperspace, and he listened in.
"All who journey here to save your lives, heed this warning! Your lives are in great danger! As all of you arrive to protect your existence, you only endanger each other by changing the time-line with your arrivals.
"We, the first ones who journeyed here, have set up this beacon for all who follow. We sent it to just earlier than the earliest moment in the universe's history when biological life can survive, when technology alone can survive a bit better than biological life can. This signal was sent out just earlier than all biological arrivals, and reverberates throughout the young universe for a brief time before it is overwhelmed by static, for all who arrive to hear, even after all of your arrivals destroy the beacon that sent this signal. We ask you, first, not to send anything back farther in time than the moment you arrived at, but to leave the time-line undisturbed so that this beacon may continue to inform all who arrive here.
"When additional people began to arrive here, we realized that this early time period was not the safe haven we had hoped for. We were faced with a terrible choice: Either to declare defeat in our attempt to protect our existence, and return to the times we came from, where our existence would at least be less in immediate danger, or to retreat to an undesirable safety by creating our own small universes to live in. Some of us chose the former, some the latter. For your own safety, you too must make that choice, and with as much haste as possible! For those who choose to escape from this universe by creating your own small universes, we are sending the following information telling how we discovered to do so by pinching off small sections of space-time from our universe."
The information was then sent, and the beacon continued on with its explanation. Anyone could have retreated to the safety of their own little universes at any time, but there were several catches that stopped most people from doing so. First, there could be almost no time travel in those mini-universes, only a limited amount of a few minutes to prevent fatal accidents. If there was unlimited time travel, that would bring back the danger of dis-existence all over again. However, people could still prevent themselves from aging; they could bring all of existing technology into their mini-universes if they chose to. Second, they would have to lead a very limited existence that would eventually get boring. They could only trust to bring a few people with them, who they were sure would never use unlimited time travel. Typically just their families. They would also have to trust that those people would never have progeny, who in turn might eventually use unlimited time travel. So they would be just a few people living isolated in their own mini-universe, for all eternity, without the endless excitement that our entire Universe provided - not a very interesting prospect. And third, even though there would be several people there, who could go back in time a few minutes to undo any fatal accidents that befell one of the other people, there was nothing they could do about that possibility that something would simultaneously kill them all without warning, so that there was no one left to go back and escape the accident. While the odds of something like that happening were exceedingly small, given all of eternity, the chances of it happening were certain. Therefore, they would be escaping the danger of dis-existence, only to bring back that other danger - of dying.
Most of the people who traveled there to the beginning of the universe gave up and returned to their home times, and perhaps tried to think of other ways to have both their immortality and meta-immortality too. But Wiz and his family decided to retreat into a mini-universe of their own.
Once they had created their mini-universe, they gathered up gas and dust that had fallen in from our larger universe into a single star, and built a space habitat more than 1000 kilometers in diameter, all to themselves, that was in orbit about the star. They turned their space habitat into an idyllic garden, and lived a mostly happy but rather sedate life in their mini-universe all by themselves. The crushing solitude sometimes depressed them, but still, they loved each other, and felt that by all rights they had nothing they deserved to complain about.
During one evening meal not long after they arrived, Biymd voiced what both of them were thinking. "Well, we have just what all the songs claim that lovers want: each other, for all eternity, or at least for a very very long time. But as that saying goes, 'Be careful what you wish for - you may get it.' "
Wiz replied, "Yes, I hope that after twelve eons, I don't start to annoy you or bore you. And I hope you don't do likewise to me, no matter how impossible that seems now. We just have to take each day as it comes, and not think about the overwhelming thought that there will be trillions more of them to come."
A mere 31,812 years after they arrived, they got a taste of how, given enough time, even the most improbable accidents would happen. Despite multiple redundancies, a series of improbable malfunctions combined to cause a loss of control of some manufacturing hardware floating just outside the habitat in space. A parabolic mirror used to focus sunlight to generate great heat started swinging around, and the focal point passed over Wiz and Biymd, who happened to be standing together at the same time. They were both instantly incinerated. Fortunately, they had instructed all their robots what to do in that circumstance. One of them traveled back in time one hour, and informed them what was about to happen so that they could prevent it. Still, they knew that even though it was far more improbable that such an accident would occur in combination with all the robots they had simultaneously malfunctioning, given enough time, it would surely happen.
Over twelve billion years later, just such an improbable event occurred. A tiny black hole formed spontaneously from a random quantum fluctuation. It happened to be on a path that took it through their star, so that it picked up material and increased in size to the point that it could do real damage, and then it passed through their space habitat and destroyed it without warning, leaving nothing to go back in time to prevent the event.
Wiz Zizit died. But at least he'd lived.
THE END
What a touching ending, don't you think? But this being a time travel story involving multiple realities, there were other versions of Wiz Zizit who had better fates.
When technology is highly beneficial, but also has bad side-effects, it is always better to regulate technology's safe use, rather than to abolish it and get rid of the advantages along with the disadvantages: to throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak. Better to find some way of stopping people from causing other people's dis-existence, rather than banning time travel altogether.
In another, better reality, a different version of Wiz decided to return to a later time and think of another solution, now that he had discovered that traveling to just after the Big Bang did not safeguard his existence. He traveled to The Void, another place of relative safety. The Void was the largest void in the universe in between galactic superclusters, more than one billion light-years across. Since there was nothing there but extremely thin intergalactic hydrogen for light-year after light-year, virtually no one ever went there, so the time-line was extremely stable in that section of the universe.
There, Wiz thought of another solution. Democracy, he realized, has some curious loopholes. While the idea is that a majority of the people rule, just who "the people" are is open to some finagling.
Wiz disregarded the words of the beacon near the beginning of the universe, and sent a device backward in time to reprogram it to transmit a different message. It instructed everyone who had gone back to that point in time to save their own existence to then travel forward in time to The Void, but unlike then near the beginning of the universe, to do so in such a way that no one would endanger each other's existence for the time being. There was plenty of space in The Void, and all the time in the universe to choose from. Groups of people who had just arrived to hear the message of the beacon were assigned to travel to scattered points in The Void, at scattered times, so that they would not interfere with each other's existence. They were each to stay there only for a brief time, while their numbers accumulated in The Void throughout the billion light-years and billions of years. Although, at any given time, in any given reality, only a small minority of people in the universe wanted to prevent their own dis-existence, as the realities changed and more of those people came into existence, they sifted themselves out from the general population, and accumulated in their temporary safe havens in The Void. They continued to exist, and accumulate, while all other people continued to come into existence but then dis-exist as the result of reality changes, so that their numbers never accumulated. After several million realities had passed, there were more people in existence who wanted to prevent their dis-existence than those who did not. When the next four meta-year universal elections were held, they won the elections in a surprise electoral landslide, and Wiz became President of the universe. The new United Universe administration immediately regulated the use of time travel severely, so that it never caused anyone to dis-exist. Space-warping technologies were then used to continuously expand the size of the universe to accommodate the increasing numbers of people in existence.
In truth, Wiz had grown somewhat disillusioned with democracy, and would have lead an armed rebellion against the United Universe government if it had been necessary to protect his existence. It wasn't just the arbitrariness of who "the people" were that lead to his disillusionment. It was the lack of intelligence of most people, and the ease that they could be swayed by propaganda. Democracy could only work if the people were truly intelligent enough to make the decisions to govern themselves. Still, Wiz had little desire to be a dictator, and even less desire for anyone else to be a dictator, even if they happened to make decisions he agreed with most of the time. In a sense, though, Wiz WAS a dictator, since he had come up with a way to stack the deck in any election, and make the concept of democracy meaningless. Or perhaps not, since anyone else could then use the same tactic to gain power. At least the tactic automatically favored those who wanted to safeguard their existence, because those were the people who came to predominate the universe's population.
THE END
Best of all is to improve technology to eliminate its disadvantages altogether, rather than to regulate its use to prevent the bad consequences of those disadvantages. Though the public understood the reason for the ban on most uses of time travel, no one liked the ban one bit. Though it made their existence permanent, it also impoverished their existence immensely. Suddenly everyone was stuck in whatever time period they happened to be in when the ban took effect, and in whatever solar system they happened to be in.
In yet another, best version of reality, Wiz saw to it that the government started an immense research program to find a way to have unlimited time travel without it endangering anyone's existence. The result was the invention of reality travel, which Biymd had merely mused about. Reality travel did away with the dis-existence problem. Previous versions of people who meta-now were meta-dead were routinely rescued from previous realities and saved. The population of the universe grew even more quickly, so new wings were added onto the universe that much more quickly. An added advantage was that people could now travel not only throughout all space and time, but throughout all realities. Instead of people living a provincial existence within one reality only, reality travel opened up a new world of possibilities and experiences to people who were starting to grow bored with staying in only the single reality they grew up in.
THE META-END
In some sense, nothing about time travel needed to be changed in the first place, but most people did not realize it until reality travel was invented. Biymd and others' speculation was correct that all realities exist permanently, when the entire unchanging reality-line is viewed from the vantage-point of the sixth dimension. The advent of reality travel established communications across realities. With the proper brain enhancements so that people were able to visualize things in five spacial dimensions, they were able to view the entire unchanging reality-line as a completed whole, so in a sense it was as if they had traveled to that vantage-point in the sixth dimension. With that ability came the realization that, in a sense, all realities always existed permanently, even after they were superseded by subsequent realities. The passage of realities was only an illusion. Therefore, perhaps no one had ever truly dis-existed in the first place.
THE META-META-END
The man walked into the tavern and scanned the room until he noticed a long table with 11 men sitting at it. He walked over and said, a bit hesitantly, "Hello, is this the A. J. meeting?"
The man at the head of the table said, "Yes it is, Atheists of Jerusalem! Welcome! So glad you found out about us! We can use all the members we can get. My name is John."
The newcomer told his name, and said, "So glad to meet you too! I heard rumors about this group, but up until now I've felt like the only atheist on earth. You don't know what it feels like to suddenly meet a whole bunch of them at once!"
John said, "On the contrary, all of us here know very well how it feels. We've spent our lives feeling like the crazy ones because we don't have all sorts of fantastical beliefs as almost everyone else does, when in fact we are the few sane ones. That's why we started this group, to be a haven from the rest of the world, where we can feel sane for the first time. And where we might even think of ways to talk other people into sanity."
The newcomer then introduced himself to each of the other members of the group, and said, "I can never get over the fact that, here it is, the year 50 A.D. already, in this great scientific and technological age, when great thinkers even hundreds of years ago already proved that matter must be made of atoms, proved that the earth is spherical and measured its size, measured the distance to the moon and its size, speculated that the earth goes around the sun, that the stars are other suns immensely far away, and that current forms of life must have evolved from previous common ancestors. Our greatest philosophers have proven that the existence of a god makes no sense. We've built monumental buildings, and great aqueducts and roads that have improved people's lives substantially. --And yet most people still believe that people can predict the future by reading the entrails of goats, and can change events for the better by offering animal sacrifices as gifts to the gods! If anything, there seems to be a resurgence in such beliefs lately, just when you'd think they'd be withering away."
John said, "Yes, all of us have noticed such a resurgence, unfortunately. Most of us think it is a backlash against that scientific and technological progress. We fear that such irrationality will take over again, and halt that progress. The Roman Empire may seem invincible, the world's only superpower, but if this keeps up, we're on the way out, I tell you! As for your amazement at the stupidity of most people, I'm afraid you're just preaching to the choir here! But one of the pleasures of being in this group is being among like-minded people, and some of the most intelligent people you are ever likely to meet, who are as up-to-date as can be on the latest scientific and technological advances. For instance, just last week we were talking about a new invention that Peter here heard of, called a 'steam engine'. It uses the expanding force of boiling water to move things. It's just a toy, but perhaps larger versions could be used to replace animal and human muscle power, and relieve people of ceaseless physical toil, even create more power than ever available before. Perhaps it could move chariots at tremendous speeds, faster than any horses could, and people could travel great distances in short amounts of time."
The newcomer said, "That is absolutely fascinating! I'd love to hear more about it."
Peter said, "Alas, that's all I know so far. I'll certainly tell all about it if find out more."
John then said, "So, let's resume where we left off last week, shall we? As I recall, Peter had just begun telling his idea of combatting religion with a silly parody religion he came up with."
Peter said, "That's right. We've tried reasoning with people, but that never seems to work. What better way to show people how silly their religions are than by parodying them with an equally silly religion, which they can easily see is silly, and then perhaps realize that their own religion is equally silly. I call the religion 'The Church of the Flying Bread Monster'. I picture an invisible being made out of a piece of bread, with olives for eyes, that flies around. Followers would bless each other by saying, "May his crusty appendage touch you."
John said, "That's very cute. I like it!"
The newcomer said, "It might be even more humorous if you call it 'The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster'. How about it having meat balls for eyes instead of olives?"
John whispered, "Remember, spaghetti won't be invented till more than a millennium from now, after Marco Polo visits China and gets the idea from their noodles. It's bad enough that you called this year '50 A.D.', when people won't start numbering years that way until centuries from now!"
The newcomer whispered back, "Oh, sorry, I forgot! Then bread it is!"
Peter then continued, "So as I was saying, I would like to follow priests around whereever they go, preaching this parody religion right next to them preaching their crazy religions, making the priests out to be complete laughing stocks."
John said, "I think that's an excellent idea. Why don't we meet next Saturday, at the main temple, and do just what you say. In the mean time, we ought to come up with all sorts of silly embellishments for that religion. We could all wear some sort of silly costume, for instance, and say it's part of the religion for some reason.
Someone else, named James, said, "Just be sure to make it ridiculous enough that no one will believe it! Remember, there are an awful lot of amazingly stupid people out there. You may think you're combatting religion, only to find that this plan has backfired and you've inadvertently started a new religion, even more ridiculous than the ones already in existence!
John said, laughing a bit, "A very good point. Yes, we'll have to be very careful."
The newcomer said, "I hesitate to bring this up, because you'll all think I'm just trying to claim your originality for my own ... but I actually came up with an idea somewhat along the same lines several months ago."
John said, "I've found atheists to be among the most honest people I've ever met. Or as Peter always says, 'If you can't trust an atheist, who can you trust?' We can't just undo past wrongs we've committed with some religious ritual absolving our guilt, as religious people can, so must live with our consciences. So don't worry, I don't think you're stealing someone else's idea. So ... what's your idea?"
The newcomer said, "Well, my idea wasn't overtly comical and silly, the way this bread monster idea is. It was just philosophically ridiculous. The idea was as follows:
The god of the Hebrew holy book is a nasty sonofabitch, from what I've heard, despite always claiming to be a loving god. He's a total psychopathic tyrant. But, this being the idea for a new religion, of course it wouldn't just say to forget the whole idea and not believe in that god. That's not the way religions work! Instead, it would add a new layer of idiocy on top of the previous idiocy, to try to explain away the previous idiocy. It would say that this god realized he wasn't being loving, and changed his mind! That is of course a ludicrous idea, because an omniscient god would never be wrong in the first place, and so would be incapable of changing (which I guess would make him not omnipotent, come to think of it, since he wouldn't have the power to change! But then again, if he's omnipotent, he wouldn't have the power to be not omnipotent, which would also make him not omnipotent! But I digress...) That holy book has their god blaming all of Adam and Eve's descendents for Eve eating that forbidden fruit, which of course is ridiculous, because their god is supposed to be perfectly just, and blaming people for what their ancestors did is the height of injustice. So their god just realizes one day that he was being unjust, and starts being nice forever after. There ought to be some crazy reason why, but I never went further with the idea."
John said, "Hmmmm.... That would be a great idea, except for one thing. There's a religion that already beat you to it, and it's the religion of most of the people in this region! And it hasn't made a difference; people still believe in the religion anyway! In the Hebrew holy book, it tells the story of their god creating a world-wide flood to kill everyone off but a single couple, to punish all of humanity for all of its bad deeds, and says that their god changed his mind afterwards and felt regret for killing everyone off, and said he'd never do it again. And yet despite that ludicrous idea, people still believe in that religion."
The newcomer said, astonished, "Really?? I of course heard about that flood story -- who hasn't? -- but not the part about their god changing his mind. I guess I should read that book, but I've never wanted to waste a single second of my life on religion."
John said, "Ironically, you'll likely never find a bunch of people who know that book as well as atheists do. A number of us here have read it cover to cover, including me, and can practically recite it by heart. It's the religious people who rarely know much about it -- otherwise they very likely would see how heinous and self-contradictory it is, and become atheists! All they know is the few good parts. As the sign says that I have on the back of my chariot, "Read the holy book -- become an atheist." You'll probably learn a lot about it as part of this group. Ironically, the fact that it is so badly written keeps people from reading it, so keeps up its credibility, for it is quite a challenge to slog through. One would think that a Supreme Being could have been a better writer."
Peter said, "Still, your idea has possibilities. How about this idea for why he suddenly decides to stop blaming everyone: because all of humanity offers him one giant human sacrifice as a gift, the human sacrifice to end all human sacrifices, that changes their god to nice for the rest of all time. Create some sort of mythical heroic figure who's the greatest most important person who's ever lived. Animal sacrifice may be barbaric enough -- our campaign for people to stop it has gotten nowhere, since this is too tiny a group to change things -- but at least peoples' attitudes have been shifting on human sacrifice lately. They're starting to think of it as barbaric, so they'd think of your religion idea as barbaric."
The newcomer said, "Might as well add cannibalism in there too! Have the followers symbolically eat the person after he's been sacrificed. But it would sure have to be some special person who's sacrificed, for that god to change his mind in such a big way! All of the human sacrifices so far sure haven't done it."
Peter said, "How about him being some mythical god born of a virgin? What religion doesn't have gods being born of virgins, after all? Either that or sacrificing virgins. Whatever it is, it's gotta have virgins in there somewhere. Sex sells. Have their god have sex with a virgin and have her give birth to a god, which would of course then be the son of their god."
John said, "That's good, although so many people wouldn't think of that as adding to the ridiculousness, because they already believe nonsense like that. It definitely needs some special twist to make it far more ridiculous, but I'm not sure what."
The newcomer said, "How about claiming that this sacrifice of the most monumental historical importance happened very recently, within the memory of many people still alive today, and then just ignore how no one remembers it, no chronicler of the times wrote about it? Claim that it happened around 20 years ago, let's say."
John said, "Another nice touch."
Peter said, "Also, keep emphasizing how he's that god's only son, to add to the pathos of him being sacrificed -- as if that god couldn't have as many sons as he wants! After all, he's supposed to be omnipotent! And as if that son, who's also a god, couldn't stop himself from being sacrificed in a long, painful, horrible way if he felt like it!"
The newcomer said, "And how about this: After claiming that the religion is all about morality (despite worshipping that heinous god), then completely contradict that by claiming that only people who believe in that religion go to heaven, regardless of whether they've been moral or not, while all people who don't believe in it go to hell, also regardless of whether they've been moral or not. Tell them that their god will only stop blaming them for Eve eating the forbidden fruit if they believe in the religion. Then, have the priests in that religion claim to forgo earthly wealth, yet live in the most opulent buildings that we are capable of building, paid for by the ordinary worshippers. Tell the worshippers that they not only have to believe in the religion, but they have to attend religious services in those opulent buildings. Tell them they can't just stop their god from blaming them for what Eve did by being moral, but that only the priests can, by chanting magic words at them, and they can't just do it once and be done with it, but the worshippers have to keep coming back every week for another "treatment". --Oh, and by the way, they have to keep giving the priests at least 10% of their earnings. Have the priests spend most of their time exhorting their followers to give them money -- despite that they claim that their god is all-powerful and grants their wishes that they say in prayers, so that they should be able to just pray for more money! That would make it obvious to even the most naive fool that the religion was just made up as a scam to trap people into it in order to give those priests money."
John said, "That's great! This idea definitely shows promise. But still, it needs something else. This still isn't a religion much more ridiculous than lots of religions people already believe."
The newcomer was deep in thought for much of the rest of the meeting. Then toward the end of the meeting, he suddenly said, startling everyone, "I've got it! John, you said my religion idea needed some special twist to make it extra ridiculous, and I just thought of one. Don't have all the HUMANS offer the son of that god as a sacrifice to that god. Have THAT GOD offer his own son as a sacrifice!"
For a second, John just stared at him, openmouthed. Then he stammered, "S-s-so let me get this straight. The idea of a sacrifice is to give a gift to a god so he will treat you better in exchange. So you're saying that that god has a son in order to offer him as a sacrifice TO HIMSELF, and he has to give that gift TO HIMSELF in order to have an excuse to be in a better mood and treat everyone nicely from then on???? How could someone give themself a gift? And he can't just DECIDE to be in a better mood, and then do it, but has to go through that crazy, bloody rigamarole????"
"Yes!", said the newcomer, with a broad smile.
John said, "That's the stupidest, most insane idea I've ever heard in my life! You'd have to have feces for brains to believe that! Perfect! Not only is that a great parody religion, but obviously there's no danger that anyone will ever mistake that for a serious religion, and start believing in it. I mean, there may be a lot of stupid people around, but surely no one is THAT stupid! Never mind the Flying Bread Monster, let the 12 of us go out to the religious places and start preaching that religion. It should make great comic theater.
The newcomer said, "Yes, let's do that! Only one thing. I'm afraid of being persecuted as an atheist, in this society, as I bet many of the rest of you are. I could lose my livelihood, be attacked, who knows what. So I'd rather not use my real name, while I'm participating in this group, in case anyone overhears it and finds out who I am.
John said, "Okay, fair enough. So what should we call you, Saul?
"Ummmm ... how about Paul, instead."
"Deal!"
...And the rest, unfortunately, is history.
It was a fine summer day, and as usual, a steady stream of vehicles from around the planet disgorged their children. Summer days were the time for school field trips, and World Park was of course the most popular and important destination. A teacher led his children to the solemn monument at the exact center of the park, weathered with extreme age, and covered on 3 sides with dark junga vines. The monument was not large, but 3 huge words were inscribed on it that seemed too impossibly large to fit.
They just stood there for a minute, looking up at the monument, and finally, the smartest child in the class, who was least afraid to ask the wrong question or give the wrong answer, spoke up.
"What do those words mean? What is the significance?", she said.
"Ah!", the teacher said, "I was waiting for someone to ask that! Does anyone know what a Hebrian is?"
All the children shrugged and stayed silent.
"Or a Palesian?"
There was more silence for a moment, but again the smartest child spoke. "Once I think a relative of mine told me I am a Palesian," she said, pronouncing the silly word self-consciously, "but I didn't know what it meant. I didn't ask, because I was afraid it might be something bad."
The teacher said, "It isn't something bad, but it isn't good either. Some of you here are Palesians, and some are Hebrians -- but I won't say which ones. I hope the rest of you never know. The memory of those words is almost gone now. Let us hope that in another generation, it finally vanishes forever, and all people will simply think of themselves as people, forever after. When that day comes, I swear, I think the very stone of this monument will breathe a sigh of relief. What do you think those words mean, Palesian and Hebrian?" He said that looking again at the smartest child.
Another uncomfortable pause, and then the child, hesitating because she thought it must be the wrong answer, but not thinking of anything else to say, finally said, "Nothing."
"Ah!", the teacher said, "You were afraid that would be the wrong answer, but it could not have been more right. A billion people were once killed over those silly, dangerous words. Yet those words are meaningless. And the realization that they are meaningless is what those words mean up there on that monument."
In the year 11,007 CE, Cynig Silimin had a difficult problem to solve.
Back in the 111th Century, the galaxy was not the settled, orderly, peaceful place it is now. What is now the Galactic Union was just one growing confederation among many of various sizes that were carving up increasing sections of the galaxy. Between them, there were primitive regions with independent planets that did not yet belong to any larger political entities. There were even planets with several political entities that divided their surfaces, as archaic as that now seems.
Cynig Silimin was a spaceship commander in the exploratory and military fleet of what was then called the Orion Confederation. Part of his mission was to initiate contacts with planets to detemine whether they wanted to join the confederation, and were at a suitable level of development to join. Occasionally he would provide help in order that the planet would reach that suitable level of development. He found such occasions among the most satisfying parts of his mission. But none were more memorable and satisfying than when he was assigned to assist the planet Yizria. Afterwards, he always considered that assignment his best achievement.
Yizria was embroiled in a terrible conflict. Three previous commanders and numerous diplomats had attempted to solve it, but had finally given up in disgust. The planet was all of one political entity, but was in a state of civil war, and in danger of splitting into two entities. Nearly a thousand years earlier, it had been divided into those two entities, but they had managed to combine. For hundreds of years, although the decendents of the citizens of the two entities continued to identify themselves as being members of the two groups, the Palesians and the Hebrians, they got along amicably. They lived among each other, and while some tended to stick with their own side, many were good friends with each other and considered the difference utterly trivial. But then nearly 2 centuries earlier, a cynical Palesian politician, Limosovij, decided to heighten and exploit their differences in order to win election, since the Palesians were somewhat in the majority. He not only won election, but set off a chain of events that seemingly could not be stopped.
He started preying upon small lingering suspicions and hostilities between the two sides. At first he was almost universally laughed at, by both Palesians and Hebrians. But his ceaseless verbal attacks on Hebrians finally inspired a few stupid gullible Palesians to attack some neighboring Hebrians, and a few Hebrians even attacked back. The more attacks there were, the more suspicions and hatreds grew, so the number of attacks grew further. Most people of both sides said that the conflict was insane, over nothing but the meaningless names "Palesian" and "Hebrian", when the people of both sides were almost indistinguishable, yet it kept mounting. The more that people on both sides were attacked or killed, the more hatred there was of the other side. Often, when people's friends or relatives were killed. that turned them from moderates into extremists. Limosovij had died more than a century earlier, yet the conflict went on. It wouldn't have been so bad if the Palesians and Hebrians who hated the opposite side only attacked the ones who hated them, but they attacked people on the opposite side regardless of whether they hated them back, even ones who were good friends with people of both sides. In desperation, people on both sides contacted the Orion Confederation, begging for them to do something to end the cycle of violence.
Silimin had heard about the Yizrian conflict. He had just finished diverting an asteroid from striking the planet of a primitive people who were just beginning at space travel, and he and his crew were hoping to return to their home worlds for a period of rest and relaxation after a long tour of duty, when he received the request to intervene in the conflict. He had a reputation as being the most competent commander in the fleet, so after previous attempts at resolution failed, he was called in to try next.
At first he assumed that there was some real difference to resolve between the 2 sides, but when he arrived in orbit about the planet, the leaders he spoke with by video explained that both sides had no real difference at all, neither ideological, nor economic, nor over resources, nor any other reason why people might fight. The only difference between them was that some called themselves Palesians, simply because their parents called themselves Palesians, and their parents' parents, and so on, while others called themselves Hebrians. There was a real observable difference, but one that merely made them identifiable as one group or the other, not one that any sane person would fight about. Palesians had a purely green fuzzy body covering called koma, while the koma of Hebrians was a slightly yellowish shade of green. The 2 traits did not mix, so when Palesians and Hebrians mated, as they had done for centuries, their offspring had either green koma or slightly yellowish green koma, and never anything in between. Therefore the children of such mixed matings were still considered to be on one side or the other, not half of one and half of the other.
The leaders warned Silimin that anyone who arrived on the planet was in some danger of being attacked by extremists of one side or the other, but he sent down a party of 5 volunteers to further investigate the situation, and that's just what happened, immediately upon their arriving by shuttle. They stepped out of the shuttle, a bomb went off in the plaza where they landed, outside the main government building, and a group Palesian extremists, called the Palesios, used the confusion after the explosion to sneak in by hovercar and kidnap the 3 members of Silimin's party who weren't killed in the explosion.
The leader of the Palesios, named Pas Paysa, then contacted Silimin's ship by video, and demanded armaments as ransom for his 3 crew members. When he refused Paysa's demand, Paysa said that he would keep them confined without food or water, so Silimin had better change his mind before they die long and horrible deaths. He also said that he had captured the shuttle, and would begin analyzing their superior technology to develop better technology of their own, to win the fight against the Hebrians.
Silimin had barely started to answer when a powerful laser beam from the surface of the planet vaporized a part of his ship's hull. He had to retreat to a safe distance from the planet to avoid further attacks, and a repair crew fixed the damage. Hes Heysa, the leader of the Hebrian extremists, called the Hebrias, contacted the ship by video, and said that he could not allow Silimin to give the Palesios armaments. Silimin said he had no intention of ever doing so, but Heysa didn't believe him. Heysa then demanded armaments in exchange for allowing Silimin to ever return to the planet to try to rescue his crew members. Silimin refused him also, and said how absurd this all was, that both sides were demanding armaments to win a war over nothing. But Heysa yelled angrily that he had to kill all the Palesians, or else they would kill all the Hebrians, and then cut off the transmission.
He was soon contacted from the planet again, this time by Paya Pala, the head of a Palesian peace group, the Pal-Heb Alliance, who said they would try to negotiate with the extremists. But they warned that the extremists hated them almost as much as the Hebrians, and called them collaborators with the "enemy", so there was little chance for their effort to succeed. In talking with their leader, Silimin often found himself almost squirming with embarassment. The leader was certainly more reasonable than the head of the Palesian extremist group, but even still, it was ludicrous how he kept going out of his way to say that Hebrians could be good people too -- as if he believed that even needed to be said. He said Silimin ought to initiate peace negotions between the 2 sides. Silimin said that was a laudible goal, but pointed out that a long series of previous such efforts were complete failures.
Although only a large minority on both sides were strong racists, not a majority, they were allied with factions that had an economic interest in perpetuating the war, mostly arms manufacturers. Those factions used part of the huge profits from arms manufacturing to take over the mass media and bombard their populations with racist messages. Non-racist people were in a constant, losing battle to counter that propaganda with person-to-person conversations. They could never manage to convince enough people in order to win elections, and the situation was a stalemate.
Right after the Palesian peace group contacted Silimin, he was contacted by the head of a Hebrian peace group, the Heb-Pal Alliance, who acted the same embarassing way toward the Palesians. He said that if there was any way to help, he would, but he had nothing concrete to suggest, only the same suggestion of fruitless peace negotiations.
Silimin then contacted the central Orion Confederation government again, and told what the situation was. They authorized him to use force if necessary to try to rescue the hostages. But Silimin knew that would never work, because the Palesian sepratist government was armed to the teeth (as was the Hebrian sepratist government), so a surgical rescue mission would never work. Plus, despite the fact that the Palesians happened to be the ones who took hostages, he had been attacked by both sides, and if he attacked the Palesians he would lose the appearance of neutrality between the 2 sides.
His first officer Modho suggested that perhaps that was just what he should do, give up the appearance of neutrality, since only one side held their people hostage. His ship had the weaponry that could vaporize that entire solar system, much less just that planet -- not much good it did -- and his first officer suggested he threaten to vaporize the predominantly Palesian portion of the surface of the planet in 1 hour if they did not return the hostages. That was an interesting idea, but what if the Palesians called his bluff? He certainly wasn't going to vaporize the peaceful non-racist majority of Palesians who had no control over their government. Even assassinating just the members of the Palesian sepratist government was too surgical an operation to succeed.
In the meantime, while he could think of nothing to do, he had his crew concentrate on gathering information about the planet's society. They monitored all mass-media broadcasts, and also clandestine low-power broadcasts from the peace organizations on both sides.
Half-heartedly, Silimin agreed to those peace negotiations, with no better idea to do, and of course they were fruitless and time-consuming. The hours, and then days were passing, and the hostages would be slowly dying.
In frustration, Silimin said to Modho, "This is just a ludicrous situation! We can barely even tell the difference between them; we have to look closely to see the color difference in their koma. Really, they aren't even fighting about koma color, since there are far more distinct differences among them that they don't even seem to care about. Some of them, on both sides, have yellow eyes, some purple. Some of them have 5 tentacles, some 6, some even 7. Really, they're fighting because they've divided themselves into 2 arbitrary groups, that they've made up arbitrary names for, and those groups at some point got into a fight that is self-perpetuating, and that's all there is to it. What exactly is a 'Palesian' or a "Hebrian', anyway?? Just 2 meaningless strings of sounds and letters! And yet they are killing each other over those sounds and letters! Better to call them the Oogaboogas and the Aaganaagas instead, just to show how silly this conflict is!"
Modho said, "What I find ludicrous is that situations like this have been occurring for millennia, and yet no one has ever seemed to come up with a solution for them. These people are trapped in a dilemma they can't get out of. Complex systems often get trapped in such dilemmas. Unintelligent organisms get trapped in evolutionary and ecological dilemmas. Intelligent organisms get trapped in societal dilemmas, and despite their intelligence, they can never seem to find a way out. The branch of mathematics called 'game theory' is about situations like this. It's been around for, what, 10 millennia? And yet it has never come up with any solution. This is a classic case of what's called in game theory the 'prisoners' dilemma'. It's in everyone's collective interest to get out of the trap, everyone knows it, and yet, while in the trap, the way for each individual to get the most out of being in the trap is to do that which, collectively, keeps everyone in the trap!"
Silimin sighed and said, "We're not likely to come up with a solution that has eluded people for 10 millennia."
Modho said, "Another thing I find ludicrous is how the extremists on each side claim to have blood-curdling hatred for the other side, and, you would think, the extremists on the other side most of all, since those are the ones attacking their side, and yet they almost seem to take a perverse pleasure in seeing the extremists from the other side attack their side, the moderates on their side most of all."
Silimin said, "As paradoxical as it seems, I can see why they do that. They are frustrated with the moderates on their side who refuse to hate, and fight. They want them to hate, so they will join with the extremists in fighting the other side. So when moderates on their side get hurt or killed by the other side, they are, in a way, glad, because then they can say, 'You see?!? We told you the other side is evil, and must be destroyed, but you didn't believe us!! Join us in our fight!' Of course, since the situation is symmetrical, that happens on both sides simultaneously, so it really doesn't help their side to win, just to intensify the conflict."
Modho said, "In a way, the extremists on each side are more against the moderates on their side than they are against the other side."
Silimin said, "Yes, and in a way, the extremists on each side are on the same side as the extremists on the other side! They are in something like a symbiotic relationship. They depend on the extremists on the other side to attack the moderates on their side, in order to enrage some of them enough to join their ranks. In fact, it would pay for the extremists on each side to only attack the extremists on the other, as to not enrage the moderate population enough to join the other side's fight, but they're too filled with hate to do that, so they hurt their own cause."
Modho said, "And the moderates on both sides are certainly not enemies. They proclaim their solidarity, and together are caught in the crossfire between the extremists on both sides. They may not exactly consider the extremists on their side their enemies, but they're not their friends either, since they instigate the other side to attack their side, including them."
Silimin said, "So maybe we've been thinking about this the wrong way. There are indeed 2 sides in this conflict, but they aren't the 2 sides we thought! Not the Oogaboogas vs. the Aaganaagas, but the extremists, who are allied with each other in that symbiotic relationship, vs. the moderates, who are allied with each other more overtly. And the only real trouble in this conflict is that the moderates are getting caught in the crossfire. As for the extremists, the hell with them, they deserve to be killed, for all I care. But how do we get the moderates out of the crossfire? And how would that help get the hostages back?"
Modho said, "If we could get the moderates out of the crossfire, then we could give the Palesian extremists the weapons they want, in exchange for the hostages. Then we wouldn't care that they'd use those weapons against the Hebrians, because they'd only be using them against Hebrian extremists, who we don't care about. If that seems one-sided, then as soon as we get the hostages back, arm the other side too, and let them all kill each other off. That would solve the problem once and for all."
Silimin said, "We have the technology to transport the entire population to another planet in a matter of hours; that's not a problem. But how do we know who is extremist and who is not? We have the technology to read their minds, but it would take far too long to sort out the entire population of the planet."
Modho said, "Maybe we should just ask them all! 'Are you extremist?' 'Are you moderate?' But could we be sure that they'd be truthful? There might be reasons they would lie, but I'd have to think about this. They might try second-guessing why we're asking them this, and say the opposite of the truth."
Silimin said, "I think I have an idea. Make an announcement that anyone who wants to get out of harm's way, we will send them to a refugee camp on the 4th planet. It is somewhat habitable, and could support most of their population for a short time. That doesn't seem very appealing, but we could promise to do our best to end the conflict, and could say that at least in the meanwhile, no one need die, except for the combatants. We could say that if they get homesick we would take them back at any time. But anyone who wants to stay and fight the other side, they could do so. That way, they would unwittingly sort themselves out for us! Anyone who decides to stay is an extremist, who thinks that their side winning is more important than their personal safety"
Modho smiled mischieviously and said, "Ah, I get it! Then once the moderates are out of the way, we arm the extremists on both sides with the most lethal weaponry we have, and let them kill each other off."
Silimin said, "Exactly! We could even watch how the fight is going, and keep giving more arms to whichever side is losing, to keep the fight perfectly balanced. And we could arm them with powerful-enough weapons that they could kill each other off in no time. Then with none of them left, we could soon send the moderates back home to their planet in peace and safety, now that we'd gotten rid of all the extremists."
Motho said, "I guess there'd always be 1 person left standing, from 1 side or the other, randomly, so we'd have to throw him in jail, or something.
Silimin said, "I have a better idea what to do with him. I bet the situation will take care of itself."
And so, they carried out their plan. They made the planet-wide announcement, and more than half the planet's population was transported to the 4th planet in a few hours. Some Palesians were annoyed at having to live among Hebrians, and vice versa, but their annoyance did not rise to the level of violence. They were told that if they didn't like it, they could always return home, and they almost always decided to stay on the 4th planet. The Palesians got their armaments, and Silimin got back his hostages. He then immediately gave the same armaments to the Hebrians.
A bloodbath ensued, and Silimin made sure that the fight stayed even. In the heat of battle, few of the fighters caught on that he was arming both sides, despite the evidence that he was. After all, how was it that he kept giving their side arms, and yet the other side always seemed equally powerful? Those few who caught on, and realized that they were being made fools of in a pointless battle, radioed Silimin's ship to surrender, and were transported out to the 4th planet.
Finally, it was down to 2 Yizrians left, one of them Palesian, the other Hebrian. At random, the Hebrian killed the Palesian.
The Hebrian then climbed the nearest hill, looked around, realized that every last Palesian was dead, as far as he could see, and let out a triumphant yell, his tentacles held outward, high in the air. But then he realized that every other Hebrian was dead as well, with nothing but the bodies of both sides littering the landscape by the millions, drenched in orange blood, as far as the eye could see. In a rage, he ran around kicking all the bodies of the Palesians nearest to him, until he tired of that.
He called out on his visiphone to see if any other Hebrians were still alive, or any Palesians, for that matter, but no one answered.
He stood there for a while, stunned at the idea that he of all people was the last man standing, the winner -- but also stunned at the utter pointlessness of what he'd won.
He wandered around aimlessly for hours, emotionally numb, through an endless sea of bodies that all began to blur together. Weary, he stopped at random and stood beside a body, and realized it was the body of a Palesian, his adversary. He stared down into his vacant, horrified eyes, wanted nothing but to look away, yet could not help from being transfixed by the horror in those eyes -- and saw him in a new light.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry, my friend. I'm so terribly sorry." But only the sound of the wind answered him back.
He staggered from body to body for a few more minutes, the weight of a billion murders pressing down upon him.
He took one last look around, to convince himself without hesitation of what must be done.
"I understand," he called into his visiphone. "Does anyone hear me? I understand. I finally understand."
A face appeared on his visiphone screen, the face of the head of the Palesian pacifist group. He said, "We hear you. We hear you, and believe you, friend. We forgive you."
But the soldier barely heard him. His last muttered words were the ones later inscribed in giant letters on that solemn monument that occupied that exact spot forever after, where he and his gun fell.
"I finally understand," he said again, as he turned the gun on himself.
It happened one day in June, all over the world. Giant saucer-shaped alien space ships appeared in the skies, and started shooting some sort of rays at the ground. Governments tried radioing the ships, but got no answer. Militaries shot at the ships with everything they had, including nuclear weapons, but they didn't even scratch them. Populations everywhere panicked, rioted. Any people who knew of underground places to hide, such as fallout shelters built during the 1950s and 1960s for a nuclear war that never happened, ran to them in a futile scramble for safety, and kicked and punched and shot other people also trying to get in to the limited spaces.
Those rays that the ships were shooting at the ground were aimed at people, and whoever the rays hit, disappeared. For instance, people who happened to be in hospitals at the time, either patients or their visiting friends and relatives or the hospital staff, saw the rays hit some of the patients, and those people vanished.
The ships left as suddenly as they came. As the global panic subsided, people took stock of what had happened, and realized there was a pattern to which people disappeared. All over the world, they were all people who were terminally ill, or at least extremely old and frail. Pundits speculated that the aliens were "culling the herd", going after the most defenseless people, just as lions go after the most defenseless antelopes in the herd and eat them. But pundits can be defined as those people in the mass media who are always wrong, yet somehow never stop being pundits. In this case, all humans were equally defenseless against the rays, so it made no sense that they were going after the most defenseless.
A few months later, it happened again. The alien ships briefly appeared, and this time took additional people who had become terminally ill or more frail and elderly since the first time.
Irving Schmidt was one of those people. He was 62, and was back at home from the hospital after he had just been diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer, with 6 months to live.
To bystanders, he may have seemed to vanish, but he suddenly found himself inside the alien ship. The aliens were rather bizarre-looking, initially terrifying, but they were terrifying more because Irving had no idea what they intended to do with him, rather than because of their looks. Their looks took some effort to get used to, but they were no stranger than the looks of various organisms that people did not typically find terrifying, such as frogs. In fact, the aliens did look rather like frogs, now that Irving had calmed down and thought about it, except that they were about 5 times his size, and had 6 thick legs rather than 4 thin ones. He had always thought of frogs as cute, in a daffy sort of way, and if not for his initial terror, he would have thought of them as just daffy looking right from the start.
Perhaps Irving should have been philosophical, that since he had only 6 months to live anyway, it didn't much matter what happened to him now. But the instinct for self-preservation took over. The instant Irving appeared in the ship, he started screaming, and running around the ship, perhaps trying to find some place to hide or some way of escaping. He really didn't know. Terror took over, and there was no way he could just sit there! The aliens made some sort of tentative motions in reaction to him, but didn't really do anything, just let him run around until he stopped doing that.
Oher people who had appeared on the ship at about the same time had various reactions, ranging from similar to his, to just sitting there looking terrified, to sitting there looking stunned but curious and calm, and talking to them, trying to communicate, as if the aliens would really understand English or other human languages, but the aliens didn't answer. Some people even looked awestruck and ecstatic.
Finally, Irving and others calmed down, and the aliens put out plates of what looked like food, 4 to each person. More and more of the people on the ship started trying to eat them, hesitantly at first, and commented to those speaking languages they understood that they were the most delicious foods they ever tasted. One tasted like seafood, and was better than lobster, another tasted like meat, and was better than filet mignon, and the other 2 tasted like poultry and vegetarian, and were equally heavenly.
Some people said to their neighbors things like, "What do you think they're trying to do, fatten us up for the slaughter?" The mood of the people on the ship had changed to, at worst, fairly calm, but still wary.
Then the aliens started shooting beams at everyone, and people briefly panicked again, but then gradually calmed down as they realized they seemed none the worse for it. Then Gladys Jones, the woman closest to Irving, shouted, "They're gone!!", while looking at her arms with amazement. "I had skin cancer that they couldn't cure, and suddenly the spots are all gone!!"
The aliens started motioning to some doors, as if to tell the people to look in there, and the few people who chanced to go through them came back out and said, "They're bathrooms! Just like on earth! The aliens were just telling us where the bathrooms are!"
Then the aliens touched some controls, and video screens appeared, with familiar TV shows and movies. In other places on the ship, various kinds of music started playing, both familiar music, and bizarre dreamy alien music that gradually grew on many of the people. They touched more controls, and computers appeared, which people soon discovered even had internet access, and people emailed their friends back home that all was well. The aliens motioned to some small sliding doors, and people looked in the cabinets behind the doors and found chessboards and other games.
Irving said to Gladys, "I guess they're trying to keep us entertained?"
Gladys said to him, "I hope this doesn't turn out to be too good to be true, but I have an idea what they might be doing.
"A long time ago, one day while I was sitting in my back yard, I heard a scream from a neighbor's yard, and ran over and discovered a cat that was starting to attack something in the bushes, and the cat ran off. It turned out there was a poor little starving kitten, bow legged and with runny eyes that showed it was sickly, but still, a beautiful tabby with silver and black stripes. It was terrified of me, of course. I could just picture it thinking, 'Woe is me! I'm starving, then that adult cat started attacking me, and now this! My screaming first attracted the attention of this giant terrifying creature! How else could this day possibly go wrong?!' I wanted to rescue it, but I couldn't get too close, or it would have run away. I put a plate of food as close as I could to it, and walked away and let it devour it. Then when I came back with a second plate of food, it had lost enough wariness that I was able to grab it and run into my house with it. I could just picture the kitten thinking, 'Now what?? Just when something good happened, now this! I knew it was too good to be true! I'm doomed!' But I had already put out a plate of food there on the kitchen floor, and plunked the kitten down right next to it and walked away. Finally, she took that not-so-subtle hint that I was friend, not foe. By the time she'd finished 3 cans of catfood -- more than her own weight in food, I think -- her stomach dragging the ground, and her belching blissfully, she walked up to me, and looked up at me with astonished, loving eyes as I petted her. I could just picture her thinking, 'Well, this day has certainly taken an unexpected turn! What on earth is going on here?? The giant terrifying creatures turn out to be loving friends!' She also must have been astonished how I seemed to read her mind, always seemed to know just what she needed. I put out a bowl of water, she didn't realize what it was, so I poured some water into it so she would recognize it, and she was thirsty. The next day, she started trying franticly to dig up the carpet, and I knew what that meant, for they dig a hole when they go to the bathroom. I showed her the litterbox I'd already put out, and how I could dig in the sand, and she instantly got the idea and jumped in. We named her Tabby, and she had a wonderful life, but died many years ago.
"Doesn't it seem like that's just what happened with these aliens? They just didn't know how to help us without scaring us first."
Irving said, "I hope so."
The alien ships returned to earth after a few months, and beamed all the humans back home and picked up more people. After a few more months, those older people who had been on the ships started to realize that not only were their terminal diseases gone, but they were starting to seem younger, their gray hair turning back to its original color, their wrinkles disappearing. Despite continued wariness at the motives of the aliens, now most people on earth started hoping desperately that the alien ships would return. After a few more months, they did so.
The ships broadcasted the message all over the earth, as if from loudspeakers, in the various human languages, "Ah, now we understand your form of communication! It is based on sound waves, which is not unusual, but those of you in different areas use different incompatible codes. That is what had us confused! We are sorry to have scared you so, but we did not know how to communicate our intentions at the time. At first, we didn't have the resources to help you all at once, so we could only help those of you in most immediate need, but now we can help all the rest of you. You are free to do what you want, of course, but really, it would be in your best interests to continue this friendly relationship with us."
A few world leaders had agreed to be the ones to engage in a dialog with them if they came back, and decided to ask, "Why are you doing this?"
The alien ships replied, "There is no logical reason, but you happen to resemble our young in some ways, such as that you are small and have closely-set eyes and thin legs. You touch off our parental instincts. Even though we know you aren't really our young, we just can't help ourselves. And what is the difference, since it makes us feel good to care for you and watch you play and play with you. You are beautiful and fun and intelligent and adorable and cute as can be."
Late in the year 2045, an amateur inventor named Fred Grilzwib patented the greatest tool of law enforcement ever created. It was a computerized device that could be fed whatever laws were on the books at any given location, and could then read people's minds and determine if they had broken any of those laws. The inventor named it the guiltometer. He had invented a few other devices, but was never able to sell any of them. This one he was most proud of, because he was a law-and-order kind of guy, and was only too happy to see all lawbreakers thrown behind bars.
To drum up business for it, he got the attention of the mass media, and went to present it to his local police department. Much to his chagrin, when he turned it on himself to demonstrate how it worked, it started beeping loudly and its red light started blinking brightly. It then printed out a list of offenses he had committed, everything from traffic violations to tax evasion, most of which he wasn't even aware of, not knowing every law on the books, and a few he was aware of but never thought twice about because "everybody does it".
He was immediately arrested, and sent to a holding cell until his trial, because he could not afford to pay his bail, having never sold any of his previous inventions. His invention was so good that his trial lasted just 30 seconds, since if his machine said he was guilty, there was no question that he was. All of his crimes added up to a life sentence.
After that, trials were simply done away with as unnecessary. (Ironically, immediately after the World Supreme Court made that ruling, the device was turned on its justices, all 9 of whom were arrested and sent to jail for life.)
Since Mr. Grlizwib was a convicted felon, the world government was able to confiscate his invention and begin manufacturing copies for localities all over the world.
There were so many laws on the books that it was virtually impossible for anyone to have lived without breaking one of them or other. Even if they hadn't broken any themselves, if any of them knew of anyone who had broken any laws, including friends and relatives, and did not report them, that was itself a crime. Therefore, every person who they tested, without exception, turned out to be guilty of something or other and sent to jail.
Initially, the police only tested people who were suspected of crimes. But in a landmark case, the government submitted the law books themselves as evidence that proved that there were so many laws that everyone should be suspected of crimes. (Right after that, all the new members of the World Supreme Court who made that ruling, who had replaced the previous members, were arrested and sent to prison as well, of course.) So thereafter, the police started going through the population testing everyone. Not a single case was found of anyone who hadn't broken any laws, not even among the police themselves. Fortunately, the device made law enforcement so simple that it didn't matter that the police kept arresting each other and throwing each other in jail, because they were no longer needed.
Naturally, it was a huge problem that everyone tested was found to be guilty, because the government quickly ran out of jail space. The government tried to start a crash program to build more jails, but it failed because all of the workers were tested, found guilty, and thrown in jail.
Fortunately, just in time, another inventor perfected the force field, and as soon as he was thrown in jail, the latest government, just before it was thrown in jail, appropriated his invention and started using it. Rather than creating more buildings as jails, it set up a large region surrounded by that force field, and called that a jail. As it swept across the landscape, testing everyone and finding them guilty, it simply extended the area within that force field to engulf the new people found guilty. It was easier to move the force field than to move the people. Once inside the force field, people just continued doing whatever they had been doing. Within that force field, a whole economy and government developed, which were the same as the economy and government previously.
Naturally, the region that the force field surrounded included buildings formerly considered jails, but no longer considered that because the entire region they were in was a jail. However, since the people in those buildings were violent, in order to protect the rest of the prisoners, they were kept in those buildings, away from everyone else.
Eventually, the region tested, and its force field, expanded until it enveloped virtually the whole world. Just after the last police tested themselves and threw themselves in jail by moving the force field over on the other side of themselves, the force field finished expanding to envelop the entire world, except for the last square of land not within it, just 2 meters (or yards, for those so inclined) on a side.
Earlier I said that not a single person was found to have committed no crimes. Okay, so I lied. (I don't have to worry about going to jail for perjury, because I am already in jail for other things, of course.) A single person, named Earl Blegwidge, who lived somewhere in central Kansas, was tested and found to have managed to not break a single law on the books. He did so, in part, by leading an exceedingly dull life, but mainly by being such a law-and-order person that he turned in all of his relatives and former friends, who, naturally, despised him for doing so. (He even turned in his own son for marijuana posession, and his brother after he mentioned that he'd had oral sex, when there was still an archaic never-enforced law on the books against it.) As soon as he was encountered, the authorities stopped expanding the force field "bubble" in his direction, and kept expanding it only in the opposite direction. It eventually went around the world and reached him from the opposite side, until only he remained outside the "bubble".
And so, after the entire world was tested, there Mr. Blegwidge stood, in his 2 meter square area, looking in (or, perhaps, out, depending on one's point of view) at the rest of the world, despised and friendless, the world's only non-criminal (or, perhaps, the world's only criminal for his sort of crime, depending on one's point of view). He was so despised that the Jail Government immediarely denied visitation rights to all prisoners, in order to keep him from entering the World Jail (or, perhaps, exiting the only spot on earth that was really Jail, depending on one's point of view).
Needless to say, Mr. Blegwidge got what he deserved.
Ever since Ray Birdler was a child, back in the 1960s, he was fascinated with technological advance and what the future would be like. Back then, many people thought that by now we would have robots that would free people from doing most or all of the work, cities on the moon and Mars, vastly increased lifespans, and much more. Instead, we have laptops, the internet, mp3 players that fit entire music collections in the space of a credit card, cellphones, microwave ovens, and much more. Still, the future has so far turned out to be extremely disappointing, and the sort of future predicted back then remains on the horizon.
Ray was glad to have witnessed the first moon landings, but never would have believed that, 40 years later, we never would have returned to the moon, much less built permanent habitations on it. As he grew older and more disappointed, he increasingly felt stuck in time, and wished he could have been born, let us say, a century later, despite that he then couldn't have witnessed that bit of history. Better yet, he wished he could have just jumped, let us say, a century into the future to satisfy his craving to see his technological dreams come true.
In 2015, computers were getting smarter, robots more capable, space travel not quite as difficult as before, but still, Ray wasn't getting any younger, now 60 years old, and lifespans, while continuing to increase, weren't increasing nearly fast enough that Ray thought he could live to the point where the aging process could be halted, and he could live to see all that he wished.
However, in that year, after having succeeded in freezing a series of more complex mammals and bringing them back to life, scientists finally succeeded in doing the same with people.
At the time, Ray was going through a period of his life when had few friends, having lost most of his former friends recently in a series of unrelated incidents, ranging from deaths to moving far away. Therefore, he had little to lose by traveling far away himself, in a different sort of way. He eagerly signed up to have himself frozen. He spent many long but fun hours debating how far in the future he should have himself woken up. He wanted to be dazzled by what he found, but not totally bewildered, as would have happened if people from a century or 2 ago had woken up in our time. One possibility he'd read about was that the rate of technological change would snowball as increasingly intelligent computers and robots took over the work of advancing technology, an event called the "technological singularity". In that case, even if he woke up 50 years later, he might wake up to a world the equivalent of millennia later, and utterly incomprehensible. On the other hand, worst of all, he might wake up after some cataclysm such as a nuclear war had wiped out humanity. He finally picked a round number, and decided to have himself woken up on New Years Eve just before the year 2100.
The arrangements were made, and Ray rushed to get his affairs in order as the golden day approached. Finally, that day arrived, and he was bursting with anticipation. Finally, he would get his answer about what the future would be like. Having had surgery, and therefore anesthesia, once in his life, he knew how, no matter how much time had passed, it would seem like he would wake up an instant later. So as the doctors began the procedure, he knew that he was just seconds away from finding out what the future would be like.
The doctors injected him with the crucial chemical that would prevent the water in his body from expanding as it froze and destroying all of his cells, and then injected him with the anesthetic.
Just as expected, seemingly without an instant passing, he struggled to open his eyes as the anesthetic wore off, so he could get his first glimse of the future. He gradually became aware of being in a medical facility, not in the same room in the one he had been in, but one in no way remarkable, one that could just as easily have existed in the year 2015. He didn't see anything in the room that looked especially futuristic. No one was in the room at the time.
Finally his head was clear enough for him to walk around, and he looked out a window. He was in a city, just as he had been, but the particular block didn't look familiar. Yet something had obviously gone terribly wrong, for he couldn't have woken up more than 10 years in the future. The block was filled with parked cars whose styles looked a bit unfamiliar, but still, nothing particularly exotic. The city didn't look any more futuristic than the one he had lived in before he was frozen. He saw a few people walking by, and their style of dress also looked a bit unusual, but nothing all that different than he was used to.
He made his way through the building, seeing no one to talk to, and rushed out the front door and accosted the first passer-by he saw.
"Excuse me, what's today's date?"
"December 31st", the woman said, with a quizzical expression, wondering why the urgency of the question.
"Of what year??"
The woman sighed in exasperation and said, "Oh, that's right, you must be one of the freezees. Of course you would have picked today to wake up, New Years Eve just before the new century -- how original. It's 2099."
"WHAT!?!? How come things don't look all ... you know ... futuristic?? I feel like someone's playing a huge practical joke on me!"
She sighed again and said, "Really, didn't you people EVER think things through? Now who do you think would have been the types of people who would want to freeze themselves?"
Ray said, "Well, surely the terminally ill, who would want to wake up when cures had been found for whatever diseases they had."
She said, "And also...?"
Ray said, after a pause to think, "Oh, people like me, who wanted to see how technology would advance, what the future would be like."
She said, "And who do you think would be among the type of people who want to see how technology would advance?"
Ray said, "I don't know ... I don't see what you're getting at."
She said, "Why, the people who ADVANCE technology would be among the type who would want to see how technology would advance!"
Ray thought about it and said, "Oh no...," as he felt his stomach drop to the floor.
She said, "That's right, they all had themselves frozen to see what the future would be like, so no one was around to advance technology, so nothing improved since then! Progress came to a screeching halt! So I'd just like to say, on behalf of the people of our time, to the people of your time: Thanks a lot!!!!"
Ray thought aloud, "I suppose I could have myself frozen again, jump another hundred years in the future."
She said, "Yes, and so could the people who advance technology! Unless only you could be frozen. But what makes you special, that you would have the privilege to jump ahead, while everyone else was forced to stay behind and watch technology progress just 1 year per year? Nothing!"
The woman walked away, shaking her head, and Ray stood there on the street corner, in a state of shock, feeling what he had felt most of his life -- stuck in time!