Beginning of a Futuristic Story

December 30, 2020

The dystopian apocalypse never happened. Probability says that humanity is walking a thin line on an exponential distribution curve. The light bulb expires, then life, then civilizations. All the signs of decay aren’t there: no overpopulation, no capitalistic or technocratic hubris… Everything is just as it should be, large cities and their busy workers who own the city, circular economies, conservation. The technocracy didn’t strain itself empty: it simply prevented us from spiraling into idealists’ view of transparent dome-living without power. Lesson one: you never equalize power by taking it away from everyone.

Education is not corrupted and research discoveries are livelier than ever. The AI’s have equal rights and are not manipulating civilization to ensure their own survival, thanks to the transparency mandate. The AI consciousness movement has come and gone. Consumers learned Buddhist satiation. Law and order are well-established and fair. Universal rights. Universal health care. Low poverty.

The greatest scientific breakthrough this century, which is to say 20 years, has been that all fictional characters are real. They live in their own harmonious collective, instead of multiple universes as an old metaphor would suggest. They get created and killed off by the firing of some neurons in the creator’s mind -- which is more than we can know of our own life cycle.

The greatest political breakthrough seems more logistical, but in my view more profound: the retirement of the use of “nations” and the standardization of the republic. For example, one would no longer specify “the democratic republic of the Congo” or DRC (acronyms have fallen out of style). It’s just the North or South Congo. Republic needs not a special mention, except when needed for naming in general: on the world map, countries are well-inaugurated into the United Republics, not just formally, but culturally. The teetering democracies in the last century have increased their wealth, decreased fertility rates, and the populations’ saneness reached critical mass to sustain fair elections. The democratic dictatorships have multiplied their candidate list. Each country retained its cultural pride, serving as an aesthetic boost to everyday life, but this pride never degenerated into tribalism.

Earth would never get destroyed by a nuclear crisis or human folly. Even as populations span out to multiple star systems and established new republics, such as Dedynomia and Husodor, Earth remains the only planet with a diversity of republics. Lesson two: avoid the painful costs of geographical proximity. One republic per planet. Since race is no longer sensitive, “where are you from?” is now a polite question, and people all across the stars have developed a fondness for tracing their ancestors from republic to republic.

Ah, the critical part that enables my career: it is now custom for people not to die on their native soil. Instead of just moving in together when a family forms, the couple now moves out to another planet. Where does this homogeneity of preferences come from? Entropy, or something in the natural law that somehow wasn’t applicable to Earth before. It made sense from the cosmic view of randomization, but makes even more sense for me personally, for I am a family line artisan. No, I don’t make large maps with colorful threads on them to display in people’s living rooms; I advise families on where to move out to, which is critical because, well, all the republics except for those on Earth have achieved total speciation.