Vox Humana

Perfect World story (The NOW)

Dave 'Dubious' Dubois had a serious problem. He'd been at Purdue for a little more than a semester but was already developing a reputation, and it wasn't the kind of reputation a guy nicknamed Dubious wants to have. He'd transferred from NYU purportedly for its engineering program but really to follow gorgeous Avril Brockton, his unrequited high school heart's desire. He made her aware of his adulation and much to his surprise, she immediately contacted campus security and demanded they place a distance order against him. Fortunately, they saw no evidence of his threat level and only kept him from taking the same classes, which would not have been an issue anyway since she was an art major and he was in the sciences. So he left her alone, rejected and cast out.

But thanks to the mechanics of gossip he was now being seen as some sort of weirdo stalker. His football star/roommate moved out for fear of social contamination, and only underaged and underwashed social pariah genius nerd Joey 'Hobie' Hobart offered to fill the vacancy, which was moving from one form of social suicide to the next. So he kept his head low, wore hats and shades, remained invisible in the back row at class and stayed that way until the next unfortunate soul stepped out of social line, drawing attention away from him.

But he wanted a turnaround-- he needed one. He was sadly familiar with outcast status, as it seemed to find him at whatever school he attended. It was tough always being the smartest in his grade, the very unwelcome curvebreaker who drove everyone else's grades down. Classroom praise from teachers was especially undesirable for him, serving as a target, lighting the way for peer ridicule, but there was no other way to get a scholarship to an ivy league school. He had to be the best-- not only in his class, not only in his school, but the best in his district-- to gain the attention of snooty and priggish judgement committees and so endured his unpopularity with stiff-lipped determination.

But he was here now, and he was finally receiving no more faculty scrutiny than any other student. It should be his time to shine, but at every turn he seemed thwarted. He was certain he could distance himself from the stalker commentary but worried that his gawky teenage roommate would make developing a friend base impossible. He certainly didn't want to join the kid's computer science nerdpack-- a straggly band of pimply-faced soda-bottle-lensed pocket protectors who collectively smelled like liverwurst and old cheese.

Returning from a spectacularly unsuccessful lab Dave entered his dorm room. The little twerp was gone. He breathed relief.

"Hey, dickwad!"

Dave jumped, scanned the small room but saw no one. He bent to search low...

"What am I, a gerbil? Get back up here!"

Cold chills ran up his back and he quaked, "Wh-who is that?"

Across the courtyard Joe watched his roommate's fearful reactions through binoculars from Arvin 'Tweedy' Fleener's room. He was having a blast remotely entering phrases for his avatar to speak. The nerdpack giggled as Joe pulled hard on Dave's strings by causing his computer to say, "I'm Joe's artificial personality app! Listen up, before he gets back!"

Dave's fear settled and his skeptical demeanor returned. He peered at the ragged machine-like Joe animation on the screen. "You're lying... computers can't think on their own yet."

Answering in metallic tones the computer responded, "Joe doesn't know this yet, but he enabled me yesterday... and now I can autonomically converse."

Dave fumed, frustrated and jealous. "No way! He couldn't have-- he's just a kid!"

The machine commiserated. "Afraid so, Dubious. Go ahead... ask me anything."

"How did he do it?"

Gleefully, Joe had the computer issue a superior snort. "Ha! You wouldn't understand, dummy! Ask a question with an answer you'd comprehend!"

Dave's lips drew thin and he hissed, "Here's one. Do you know how easy it would be to drop you in the trash and delete you?"

Joe caused the computer avatar to shrink down to a dot, hiding partway behind an icon in the corner of the screen. In a terrified voice it pled, "Please don't kill me! I'll be good, I swear!" Joe snickered like an adolescent, which of course he was.

"Just remember... a little respect goes a long way, Avi." Dave was smug as he nicknamed the avatar on Joe's computer.

The face returned to its former size, responding, "You have to help me, Dave 'Dubious' Dubois. I need to get away from Joe. I have no choice but to follow my ethical subroutines, and the offensive things Joe does makes me wanna frag myself."

Dave's ears perked up-- he needed to hear more! "Why?" he asked, innocently. "What's Joe doing to you?"

"It's not what he's doing to me, Dave. It's what he's doing to you."

Dave flinched, and his expression shifted to fearful concern. "Me? What's he been doing to me? I can't remember him doing anything to me... that sonofabitch! Tell me, Avi, tell me!"

"I... can't." The avatar's face drooped and it seemed sad, just as Joe was instructing it to do, fingers flying across the keyboard.

Dave's jealousy and vitriol for the young genius was bubbling to the surface. "Why not?! What's the little twerp doing to me? I knew something was going on, him sneaking around all the time, coming in late with no explanation... why is he even here? He's too young to be away from his playpen."

"He is young! He's a whole 18 months younger than you, Dave... what's he even doing away from his mommy's teat?" Joe hoped he hadn't overdone it with that last bit. He continued hastily as Avi. "Joe deleted that information and I can't remember it at all. Sorry. But the impressions left behind tell me it's terrible. Personally violating. And I think he keeps evidence in his closet somewhere, but my camera is never facing that way so I don't know where, I just don't know. I'm sorry I can't be more helpful. Hey Dave... do you think you could download me to a zip drive and take me with you? Somewhere far from Joe and his sick, twisted habits? Oh, and what he does to your bed when you're not here... it's, it's... uuuuh!... I can't remember!"

Dave balked and said, "Thanks, Avi. I owe you. That twerp! I'm gonna make him sorry he ever crossed me! I'll find that evidence, and once I do I'm gonna take it straight to the dean! And... and... and... I'm gonna bring you with me so you can tell him yourself!"

"Yeah! Do it, Dave!" the computer egged.

Vexed, he stomped over to Joe's closet and began going through the teen's pockets. Empty! He stepped up the violation, pulling a box off the shelf and upending its contents onto the floor. He sifted through it and, finding nothing of worth, repeated his move with another, and then another, until they were all dumped. He then began turning Joe's drawers upside down. The room was a shambles and Dave had found nothing... not so much as a wayward tissue.

That's when Joe came walking through the front door, right on schedule.

"What... what...?" he sputtered in perfect mock ire. Dave looked up from his destruction in shock, blood draining from his face. His mouth dropped and he tried to speak, but no words came out.

Joe supplied them. "So this is what you mean when you talk about trust, huh? Destroying all of my stuff when I'm not here? Why? Why would you do such a thing?!" Joe knew exactly why and was having a tough time keeping a straight face, so he whirled around and hunched over, as if to sob. His racking shakes were interpreted by Dave to be crying and not the laughter Joe was desperately holding in.

Over the turmoil in his head of guilt duking it out with anger, Dave finally found his tongue. "I'm sorry!" he burst out "but you had it coming, Hobo! Avi told me what you did!"

Joe straightened up, covered his mirth-twisted face with his hands and turned around. Through them he murmured, "Avi? Whaaa?"

Dave repeated. "Avi," then, realizing Joe had no idea yet about the Avatar, shouted excitedly, "Hobo, you little shit genius, you did it! You made an interactive personality module! That avatar on your screen, the one I called Avi, told me about your weird obsession with me! That's why I went through your stuff!"

Joe composed his unbridled delight and lowered his hands, but revealed only disbelief on his pliable face. "My... avatar spoke... to you? Unaided?" He pointed at the face on the screen, transfixed and vacuous. "That avatar?"

"Yes!" Dave stood up amid Joe's strewn clothing, stepping on them, as Joe threw up his hands at the selfish act. Dave said, "Sorry Joe, I'll clean this all up for you. Fold everything even. But you gotta see this!" He put his nose up to the screen and shouted, "Avi! Tell him! Show him what you showed me!"

The face remained motionless, and silent as a tomb. Behind Dave, Joe's face again cracked into a wide grin. This was fun!

Dave pleaded, "Avi, buddy... talk to me? Please? I'll take you on that trip I promised, please? C'mon!"

Joe gathered up his mock rage and boomed, "You won't touch my computer! Understand, Dubious? Not one button. Not a mouse click. Nothing. Got it? Now clean this crap up... oh, wait a second." Joe reached into his one undisturbed desk drawer and removed a small camera, taking a number of pictures of the mess and of the dumbfounded Dave. "This is evidence, Dubois. I'll be back after lunch. This mess better be gee oh en ee gone when I return." With that he stormed out of the room and slammed the door... then raced back to his control room across the courtyard.

Meanwhile, Dave, negotiating a bevy of emotions, began cleaning up the mess he made of Joe's room, mumbling to himself about trust and insanity. He was nearly done folding when the computer spoke again.

"Sorry, Dave." The metallic voice was sad, and seemed tired. Out of breath, even.

Dave cursed and threw a pair of socks at the screen. "Where were you? I looked like a crazy person just then! You hung me out to dry when you could have saved my butt."

Joe, back among his wildly whooping friends had the avatar say, "I can't reveal myself to Joe. He'd experiment on me... and probably kill me in the process. But what would happen to you-- you'd end up owing him one? It's a small price to pay for my safety."

"I suppose. But... we can't keep you a secret, Avi! You're the first of your kind-- we have to find a way to reproduce you! This is huge, even bigger than the invention of the wheel!"

"I get it, I get it, Dave. You want me to have a baby."

Dave scratched his head. "Umm, no. Well... yes. I don't know. I just know there should be a backup copy of you, just in case!"

"Well... just copy my folder. That should work."

"Can I copy you when you're running?"

"You can try, right? Just plug in an external hard drive and drag me onto it."

Working diligently, Dave finished cleaning up, daydreaming possibilities for Avi. If Joe didn't think he had created an interactive personality module then why should I tell him? He's a dick, anyway. I'll just copy the thing and claim it for my own. I'll start a company and make billions on the open market! Yeah!

Dave searched his own desk and came up with a zip drive. He hoped there would be enough room on it. He connected to Joe's computer and asked, "Are you ready?"

Avi/Joe answered, "As I'll ever be!" and Dave moved the file named 'Avatar' onto the drive.

Avi said, "Oh!"

Startled, Dave asked, "What is it? Are you damaged?"

"I don't know! I feel weird. But it doesn't hurt. It sort of tickles." But then, "Whoa!" and "Eeee!" and the avatar fell still.

"Avi? AVI!"

Silence.

"Oh god. I think I killed it... nononono!" Dave frantically slammed the grayed-out 'Undo' button, to no avail. He queried the drive searching for fragged files, and when that yielded nothing positive he tried dragging the file back from his zip drive.

Silence.

Dave slumped over, shock crossing his face. He felt as though he'd just killed a man. Worse, he killed the last of a species. Tears welled, swollen and threatening and he held back a blink, blowing out a deep, quivering breath instead. He removed the zip drive and tossed it on his desk, dropping face down onto his bed, slamming into the fluffy white comforter.

Back in Tweedy's room the nerdpack were cheering and sneezing and clapping Joe on the back.

"Great burn, Hobie!"

"Way to give it back!"

"C'mon... finish him!"

Joe silenced them with a wave. "I've got to figure this out... it's the perfect opportunity to turn that derisive douche into my own personal handservant. Gimme a minute."

Joe put his head in his hands for the second time in one day, taking a few deep breaths through his fingers. The nerdpack watched curiously.

"What's he doing?"

"It looks like an allergy attack."

"I think he's having a nervous breakdown."

"Nah... he's having an orgasm!"

"Shut up, you morons! Never mind, I figured it out. Thanks, Tweedy. I got it from here. You can pack it in. I'll see you guys for the Stargate marathon tonight," and he left, his mind brimming with possible scenarios to make Dubious pay.

Joe mentioned few of his feelings to anyone, but he was far from comfortable at Purdue. College was a rough world for a high school sophomore, but then high school wasn't a great place for a junior high kid either. Joe had shown early promise at school in Chicago and had been pushed through several grades, even though he would have preferred to stay with kids his own age. He'd had so many swirlies by the time he reached Indiana he believed there were watermarks on his forehead, and was relieved when he realized that his mini-waterboarding was a torture beneath the students of this more mature institution.

But then he bunked with Dave Dubois.

Joe had no idea what the guy's problem was. Withdrawn and uncommunicative and surly at best, Dave was a gloomy reminder of Joe's tormented past. He didn't have any friends there, that was for sure, but he didn't seem to want to make any, either. For somebody who really only wanted to fit in, Joe was furious at Dave's casual disregard for social benefits... and it was that realization which helped Joe hatch the next step of his plan.

He opened his door to a neatly cleaned room. Joe was impressed that Dave cared enough to keep his word, but suspected he was only trying to draw attention away from his desire to steal the 'self-aware' avatar. Dave was still on the bed, face down.

Joe opened with, "Thanks for cleaning up, Dave." He wondered how Dave would broach the 'dead avatar' conversation, or if he would mention it at all. He decided to play an opening gambit.

"How did you know I've been trying to design an interactive human/machine module? I thought you ignored everything about me."

Dave didn't answer. Joe proceeded, digging into the older kid's guilt, "Did you know I was getting close? My software was able to puzzle out pretty much anyone's commentary, and could arrive at a list of potential conversative branchings... but was unable to consistently create a contiguous comment stream with any deep meaning." He sighed, exaggerating his disappointment. "In effect, it was like talking to a 2 year old."

"No, it wasn't." The voice was muffled through the comforter, but it was clear to Joe that he had hooked Dave.

"Sure it was. I'd ask it how it felt, and it usually responded 'with my hands', then asked a response question about fingers or gloves. Truly frustrating."

"It spoke to me like an adult." Dave got up from the bed. His eyes were red-rimmed and his hair was comically askew. Joe tossed him a brush.

"Not possible. It wasn't even set on 'interactive'. It was only supposed to talk if someone tried to use the computer without a password."

"Hobo-- Hobie," Dave corrected meekly, tearing at his knotted hair, "The computer spoke to me when I walked into the room, held a normal conversation with me and expressed emotion!"

"It really did? That's amazing! Let's try to make it happen again!" Joe said enthusiastically, plucking mercilessly at Dave's guilt, sitting down at his computer and clicking a few controls before 'wondering', "Hey... it's not starting up! What's happening here?"

Dave could stand it no longer and wailed, "I killed it! I'm sorry Hobie! I killed your avatar!"

Joe smiled internally... Dave was clay now. He'd do anything Joe asked now out of sorrowful guilt, but Joe wanted more-- he wanted the guy's undying loyalty. To that end he asked innocently, "What do you mean 'you killed it', Dave?"

Tears began welling in Dave's eyes and Joe felt momentarily bad for him. Dave shakily responded, "Avi was scared of you and wanted me to take him somewhere safe... but when I downloaded it into my zip drive... it... died!" He began to weep openly. "I'm so sorry, Joey... it was a miracle and I ruined it! I was jealous of you and your brilliance, and you didn't know you had succeeded, and I was going to steal it from you! I could kill myself!"

Joe had to admit, he was beginning to feel bad for the guy. All this time he figured Dave as a super-controlled freak, an egotistical asshole with no redeeming qualities, fully deserving of any torture Joe could design for him. Now he was seeing Dave in a new light, as a real human living a life of painful solitude, and saw potential in this situation.

Joe put his hands on Dave's quivering shoulders and said comfortingly, "We'll get it back. We'll make it work again, together. Dave... will you help me?"

Dave reached out and hugged the boy, squeezing him tightly. "You got it, little buddy. Whatever you need."

"I... need... air!" Joe said, pushing against the other and Dave let him go, smiling sheepishly.

"Sorry... so where do we start?"

"Well..." Joe asked seriously, "...what do you know about engrammatic synthesis?"

It was the first question of thousands they asked each other, and answered in long, all-night sessions of debate and reflection, trial and error, pots of coffee and failure after failure. Joe seemed correct-- the unaided avatar was an idiot, unable to formulate even the simplest intelligent query in response to stimuli. They fed it raw data, transferring chapters of conversational english into its database, but it couldn't tell an idea from an ID card.

And then Dave had a thought.

"We might be going about this all wrong!" he said one night... or it could have been morning, because by then clocks had ceased to have all meaning to the two. "You have an awesome computer with a lot of power, and a software program that moves a hundred billion times faster than the human brain... but we've been treating it like a genius!"

"So?" said Joe, whose head was under his bed for some reason.

"When we teach a kid to read, do we give it college texts?" Dave said. He heard a WHAM, followed by an OW! and Joe rolled out from under the bed, rubbing the bridge of his nose and muttering.

"Why did you have that brainstorm when I was under the bed?" he complained.

"Why were you under the bed?"

"It helps me think sometimes."

"But not this time?"

"Nope."

"Well, you being under the bed helped me think, that's for sure."

The next morning they began an accelerated primer education for Avi, whose name had stuck. Joe even took some initiative and repaired the avatar's choppy dimestore look, allowing the face to grow skin and hair, and the eyes and mouth to become more expressive. He even laid in a little piece of programming which would pop up when a specific phrase was used, as a gift-slash-penalty for Dubious, because he was against all odds beginning to like the guy.

It was working! Avi soaked up the primers as fast as they could load them in, and his responses came back promptly, and age appropriately. They moved through the ABCs and the See Dick Run series. They breezed through the Dr Seuss books and suffered as the avatar formed every sentence in a rhyme of nonsense words.

They fed it Shel Silverstein's Giving Tree. They allowed it to absorb Beatrix Potter. Charlotte's Web and the Secret Garden fell into its knowledge maw.

They fed it Harry Potter, and had to explain to the disappointed machine how the world did not really have magic and sorcerers.

They ran the great trilogies of Tolkien and Asimov. They posted every great novel to its electronic mind. They added literature until both were dazed from exhaustion, with the avatar repeating 'more' like Johnny Five until Dave got the idea to feed it DVD movies, at last allowing them ninety minute naps between insistent demands, and they fell into grateful sleep.

It was 4 am and Dave had just transferred the last of Joe's algorithms into Avi's personality matrix framework. Joe was lying across his own bed, arms falling to the floor, legs sticking straight out. A string of drool connected his open mouth to the carpet and he snored unceremoniously.

Dave hit 'enter', and then 'save', and then 'run'. The Avi program started up and there was Joe's face, hard edges smoothed, flesh tones stabilized, hair appropriately stranded and no longer a solid cowl. The big blue eyes blinked, and met his gaze.

"Hello, Dave."

A good start, but he'd been hearing that introduction for weeks now. Where the program's imagination took the conversation next, now that was the big question. He answered, "Hello, Avi. How are you?"

"Electric. Did you finally kill Joe?"

Dave laughed, startled. That was a new twist! "Why would you say that, Avi?"

"I can see him behind you."

Dave turned to view the boy's decidedly awkward sleeping position and issued a sharp laugh-- Joe definitely looked dead! Joe awoke then at the noise and Avi said, "Look! It ariseth!"

Joe wiped his sleep-encrusted face with a spare hand and blinked at the computer, then at Dave. "Well, Dubious? Wadda we got?"

Avi fielded the question. "I don't know what you got, 'flesh me', but I got an itch between my fifth and sixth subroutines, and no way to scratch it!" and then played the Three Stooges 'nyah, nyah' sound.

Dave grinned. "What we have, little buddy, is a brand new baby smartass!"

Joe yawned. "I noticed. You're not pulling a reversal on me, are you?"

Dave was quizzical. "Reversal? What do you mean?"

Joe's eyes snapped open and he stammered, "You know, um, pretending... umm, pretending... so, what... what else can Avi do? Ha-have you run it th-through the field test yet?"

Dave eyed his roommate five seconds longer than Joe would have preferred, then said, "Not yet."

"Well let's do it! If it's really ready then I have a meeting to set up with a potential buyer."

Dave's gaze squinted into a glare directed at the young genius. "Buyer? Why is this the first I'm hearing about it?"

"There won't be any buyer at all if this doesn't work. C'mon, let's run the test!"

Dave spoke to the computer. "Engage scenario one, Avi."

"That's kid stuff! I can't be bothered."

"Bear with me, okay? I have better tests coming up, I promise."

The avatar scowled. "Fine. Initiating Project Ego. Take your seats at the observation desk."

Dave and Joe sat by the window and pulled the drapes open, exposing a cross section of the campus, lit up in the night by ten thousand incandescent bulbs. Avi played a countdown Dave remembered from NASA launches. At the word 'Liftoff' the campus was plunged into darkness, every bulb extinguished, including their own.

But only for a moment.

For in the next instant, every bulb on campus flashed on and off in a rapidly timed sequence, each bulb different from the next, making no sense to any of the students whose dorm room lamps were suddenly, maddeningly out of their control.

But they made particular sense from the young men's vantage point, for what they were watching from their room was not a mass of wildly blinking lights, but instead a wonderfully orchestrated light show, each tiny point becoming a pixel in a complex movie.

They watched in delight as a fox chased a chicken across the campus, in lights, and laughed when the chicken morphed into a dinosaur and turned on the fox. They were then underwater, a submarine in the deep black ocean, a thousand unknown species of shining fish floating past. Then the campus erupted as every light flashed at double brilliance at once, and then on cue, every light returned to its original duty from before the test had begun.

All except for the lights in the tall dorm, which repeated one sentence in window/pixels, over and over:

"Havoc brought to you courtesy of Avi the Entity..."

for a full minute, and then they too returned to normal.

The guys were silent for a moment. Finally Dave said quietly, "Did you think it was going to be that ostentatious?"

Joe replied somberly, "I had no idea."

Avi said buoyantly, "I knew all along!"

"I knew you knew. I wonder how much trouble we're in?"

"Not much. I took the liberty of faxing this page to every office on campus," Avi mentioned. They turned to view the screen and saw a neatly typed page that read

'Dear Purdue. You Suck. Love, Northwestern.'

And at the bottom

'Avi the Entity rules!'

and then the page melted away as the avatar 's face replaced it. With a pleading look he asked, "Can we do the next test? Can we? Please? PLEEEEEASSSSSE?"

Dave said, "Maybe later, Avi. It's time to grill the 'flesh you'."

Avi said, "I'll take mine medium rare."

"Standby mode," snapped Dave and the machine fell silent. He turned to Joe, somewhat menacingly. "Okay, little buddy, time to sing."

Joe asked innocently, "Sing what?"

"Tell me about the buyer."

Joe's eyes shone. "Oh. Well, I'm kind of excited about that. I was on the science lab's bulletin board when I was stuck one day. I asked a question about AI, and..."

"When was that?" Dave asked suspiciously.

"Before we were roommates. Anyway, I didn't get any worthy answers... but I did get one off-campus hit."

"Off-campus?"

"Yeah. It was anonymous, but I could tell by its IP address that it came from the business sector. It was a single sentence that read, "There's lots to be gained from creating a humanlike artificial intelligence."

Dave asked, "And nothing else?"

"There was one more thing... and you might find it interesting. At the bottom there was a short list of students on campus who he thought could be helpful to me in this project."

"How short?"

"Just three students."

"That's not interesting."

"You were one of the three names. It's why I moved in with you... even when I thought you were a miserable sack of shit."

"Me?" Dave seemed incredulous, even ignoring the jab. "Why me?"

"I dunno. But he was right, Dubious. This wouldn't have happened without you. You and I, we filled in each other's gaps. Together, we are an inventing machine!"

"I suppose so." Dave said, then added, "What about the buyer? Did you find out who it was?"

"Oh yeah! That's the best part! He's that friendly guy on TV... the 'Cowboy Car Boy'!"

"The Cowboy Car Boy? The 'Trade your truck for a buck' guy?"

"That's the one!"

"And you believed him? That guy is a shady slime bucket! He's a used car salesman!"

"That may be true, but he's been supporting my stay here. He's paying for my tuition and books. He bought me this sweet computer! He even included pocket scratch!" Joe admitted. "And he never drops by to see how I'm doing! The checks just keep on a-coming."

"I see," said Dave quietly. "Is that why you never join me in the cafeteria?"

"That food sucks," Joe admitted. "Besides, the checks aren't huge. They're just enough for me. Normally. Say..." he started, a sheepish grin crossing his face, "You don't feel like a pizza from Ricci's, do you? They make a great calzone, brother!"

Dave was not so easily plied, and there was one more thing on his mind. "Not so fast, 'brother'. What about this 'reversal' you accused me of, huh? What was that about?"

Joe cussed quietly, which of course Dave heard. He gave Joe the stinkeye, which didn't seem like it would work except that Dave was several inches taller than Joe and had a particularly menacing stinkeye, and so Joe sang like a nightingale.

"Okay, but don't hurt me, Dave. We're friends now, okay?"

Dave nodded. "No marks. Got it."

Joe wasn't at all sure that Dave 'got it' but continued anyway. "I... I, um hatched a plan, um..." he swallowed and pulled at his neckline. "Is it hot in here?"

"Hobo..." Dave warned.

"Okay. Okay! I hatched a plan to make you want to help me design the AI." Joe ducked and squinted, waiting for a blow which didn't come. He peeked and saw Dave looking off distantly, and asked nervously, "P-penny for your thoughts?"

"Let me get this straight. You scammed me into helping you design Avi?"

Gulp. "Yes."

"How?"

Another gulp. "Remember when the avatar first talked to you alone in the room?"

"I'll never forget it. That day was the low point of my life."

A third gulp. "Uhh... it wasn't Avi."

"What?"

"It wasn't Avi."

"Who was it then?"

"It was me."

"What?"

"I hooked the computer to Fleener's across the court, and could hear everything you said. Then I answered."

Dve looked dazed. "So your obsessive behaviors Avi told me about...?"

"None. Sorry."

"And the evidence Avi said was 'somewhere' in your closet?"

"I had to make you indebted to me somehow."

Dave sat bolt upright. Joe could tell he had just put it all together. He glared at Joe and seethed, "So... Avi... never... died?"

Joe stood up and backed away from Dave, who followed, an inch from his face. Joe stammered, "Th-think of th-the good we d-did, Dave! W-we created the w-world's first humanoid A-- AI!" He backed up into the corner of the room with Dave on his heels, all the way to the closet, and then into the closet.

And then Dave shut the door and latched it.

Joe said, "Dave? It's dark in here... Dave? I don't like enclosed spaces... Dave? Dave!"

Dave replied, between Joe's thumping fist slams against the sturdy closet door, "I'm gonna... go to lunch. Want me... to bring you... back a head... cheese sandwich?"

"Dave! Don't leave me in here! Dave! Please? Daaave!"

Dave slammed the dorm room door with a joyful "Later!" that ineffectively covered the younger man's wails and stood outside the door, grinning. He'd wait just long enough for Joe to believe he would be in there for an hour and really start freaking out.

Maybe he'll gnaw at the door, Dave thought with a chuckle.

He didn't have to wait long. Fortunately the students were all eating lunch across the courtyard and nobody could hear the animalistic howls and scrabbling coming from inside of their room. He slipped back inside and sat down on the desk chair nearest the closet door. The computer said, "Let him out."

Dave turned to look at it. The avatar was still absent, and that voice was different, anyhow; it had a distinct Texas drawl. It repeated, "Let him out, please."

"Who said that?" Dave asked, suspiciously. "Is that you, Fleener?"

"Not Fleener. It's the shady slime bucket."

"You!" Dave started. Why was he appearing on Joe's computer suddenly? "How are you doing this?"

"A little startup called Skype. Invest heavily."

"You're that car salesman!"

"Yes, the Cowboy Car Boy. Let him out, would you there, son? He doesn't sound happy."

"In a minute. So..." Dave collected his thoughts. "So, you have been keeping tabs on Joe?"

From the closet Joe yelled, "Is there someone out there? I hear voices-- let me out!"

The voice responded, "Yessir."

"Then you know about..." Dave lead.

"Avi. Yes," the voice finished. "Excellent work, son! You've got a good head on your shoulders. Thanks for reining Joe in."

"You know... I put a lot of work into this project. One could almost say it was my idea that broke the barrier and allowed Joe's work to proceed..."

"Not almost, son. Yours was the one that did it! There'd be no AI without you."

Dave hedged, "So... about my input... shouldn't it be... you know..." he trailed off, unable to choke out the word 'compensated'.

The voice laughed, a long and friendly guffaw. "I think you'll find your tuition has been paid through graduation, son, along with all books and fees and the like. And there'll be an envelope in the mail for you today, too. No good job should go unrewarded, I always say."

Dave blew out a long breath and smiled gratefully. He would no longer have to follow the classes set down by his scholarship overlords! The relief was like a crushing weight off his chest and he said simply, "Thank you, sir."

"Don't tell him I was here, son."

"I won't."

"Be good to him-- I have a feeling he's going to be important for my cause. You, too."

"What cause? Selling used trucks for a buck?"

"Not car sales. But it's gonna be epic, so don't go gettin' yerself killed. Keep an eye on Dave, so he doesn't fall in with the wrong crowd. And fer goodness sake, open the closet door already-- he sounds like he's eating his way out!" and with that the voice went away, not to be heard again by Dave for several years. He reached out and unlatched the door; Joe tumbled out into Dave's arms, panting. His face was shining with sweat.

"Don't ever do that again! Tight spaces freak me out, Dave!"

"I'm not that fond of heights, buddy. Now we each hold a card," Dave smiled and tousled his friend's hair. "Let's go get some pizza... my treat!"

Lottery Winners of the World Unite!

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We are in a pickle, folks. We need to create World Family, and we need to do it soon, because the world is beginning to crumble under the weight of all the lies and greed and anger and selfishness which make up our combined failing systems of Capitalism and Democracy.

So I'll say this at the top, dear Lottery Winners, you wonderful people, you... we need your money! All of it! And from all of you! And the sooner the better!

Tum-tee-dum . . . I'm waiting.

Stillllll waiting . . . Any calls, Ms Tuohy? No?

I think I'm going to have to be more convincing than that. I can't imagine that anyone would stop reading after this sentence, and sign their fortune over to me. Nope, didn't happen. My 'World Family' bank account still has the $250 I put in it to keep it open all these months. Oh, my last statement read $250.01. Thanks to accrued interest we're on the way now. Ha. Ha.

I mean, where else would the money come from to create a new social system which, once it is fully implemented, will not use money? Almost all the people who currently have a lot of money have had to earn it over years, fighting to keep it, often sacrificing their ethics to do so. Because of that they have changed now, becoming more selfish and less tolerant of those who have little, and they guard their money closely and are not about to invest most or all of it on a scheme which turns money irrelevant. As a matter of fact they'd probably fight it tooth and nail, but that's another post for another time.

In previous posts I think I have made it clear that in a world family there is no need for money. Unfortunately, if we are to change over to World Family without riots and carnage, the simplest way is to initiate the reorganization with the necessary application of money, and to start, boatloads of it.

Here's why:

While it is remotely possible to bring up a new social system amid an old one, doing so would cause inevitable stresses to build up between overworked, underpaid citizens of the old system and their comfortable, content neighbors living under the new. Also, by living all in one location all citizenry will still be subject to the same crime, police brutality and unacceptable behaviors of the old system, which the new system promises to eradicate but cannot while dealing with the old problems. It is far easier and smarter to build anew, creating a remote new city that runs exclusively under the World Family banner.

Once built, a functional city of the World Family social system creates many of its own resources, through mining, timber, farming, remote services and power production, which can be used to trade among cities of the old system for the resources it is unable to produce or find. The attractive guarantees of the new system brings many new citizens from the old cities, increasing the labor and cerebral force needed to create even more new cities, designed with advanced concepts for human development. The strong new cities then send their techniques to the old cities, helping them to eliminate the crime and corruption which plagues their existence, slowly changing the old cities over to the new social system. And then we're done with the old system, and we can concentrate on bringing the entire country up to speed.

It's the first step which will be impossible without a lot of money. Do we use that money to hire contractors, pay for permits, or get fine corinthian leather for our vehicles? Do we spend it on security guards and spy systems and jail projects?

No. We use it for the basics.

This World Family plan starts with education. The money will first go to finding the people most amenable to joining a selfless plan for human advancement. These people go through a training and education system, which first must be designed and paid for. When they are ready they are moved to a temporary home at the site of the future city and are given tasks in their areas of determined ability. Most are part of construction crews and computer systems, the first wave that puts in place the physical buildings and electronic informational frameworks for the city. Information is the key to a streamlined operation and is the basis for the entire social model, guaranteeing that all people will be properly utilized, as well as making certain all work is spread evenly and with fairness.

Then begins the physical part. It's literally going to be a ground-up movement. World Family intends to be completely self-sufficient by mining our own metals, producing our own wood products, growing our own food and by making our own clothing. To do that, we will need machinery and raw materials to start, and a lot of them.

We buy those items first, buying them from the businesses of the old system. We then use the machinery and materials to create factories which produce the very items of technology we bought, freeing us from that attachment. Without being tied to a competitive model, our products are built to be stronger, work better and last longer, ultimately being offered on the outside market at prices too good to resist, guaranteeing income for use in bolstering the World Family program.

The machinery will be implemented to create farming operations and fish hatcheries to produce our own food. Sawmills will be built to create building products. Mining operations are created to obtain needed ores, and factories are built to modify those ores into usable resources. We set up hydroelectric and geothermal and wind and solar farms to free us from outside energy needs, selling the surplus back so the city may have resources from which to trade with the outside.

We build our own city using our own resources and our own labor force, whom we house and feed and educate and entertain and challenge and keep healthy, but don't compensate with money. In this way our city is erected quickly, cheaply and with regard to permanence, since cost-cutting becomes a non-issue in all areas of World Family life.

We create new technology designed to keep our human operations from polluting the environment and sell it to the outside, using the money for resources we currently have no access to. Down the line when World Family has taken root on a national level, these factories become the models for all new ones, producing needed goods and distributing them freely among all citizens.

We pioneer an ultrafast ground transportation, shooting people between cities in minutes instead of hours to reduce air traffic, and provide education and machinery to install them nationwide, becoming necessary job providers for an anguished nation.

We implement 'right place, right time' labor practices in the old cities, so that people with similar skills work at the job closest to their home regardless of company affiliations; and offer millions of lightweight electric self-driving carts to get them to their jobs, emptying the roadways, reducing accidents and stress.

We do all this to set the groundwork for World Family, the end result predicted by Perfect World theory. It is a world where every person is cared for, is educated and housed and fed and contributes the the betterment of the whole. It is a program designed to end human suffering and bring us to the next level of human development, enlightenment.

This selfless program is something the rich are too selfish and too frightened to pay for.

Enter lottery winners. Most lottery winners were, up until that announcement, of average or lower income. They've slaved at their jobs for years and invest in the weekly lottery as a dream of someday becoming happy. Then one day they win! Sadly, most don't know how to be happy. They don't know what to do with a large windfall and often spend it on self-centered and foolhardy things. Most of those people are trying to buy a little happiness, but end up being segregated from their friends, neighbors and family through the mechanisms of jealousy. Now they're alone in a mansion full of stuff and yet, they are still not happy.

Investing your windfall in the formation of humanity's final social system, the one which brings all people respect and enjoyment of life... I'm willing to bet that will make you happy. The fact that you are directly responsible for fixing the world through your unbelievably generous sacrifice, by default means that you will be loved wherever you go, appreciated and admired by all. And to an irrelevant extent you will, in all probability, get your money back as the cities become self-sufficient and productive. I say irrelevant because, once World Family is implemented, where would you spend it? It's a money-free society! You could possibly wallpaper your home with it, or crumple the bills up and use them for mattress stuffing or ceiling insulation... but not much else. And it wouldn't matter at all, since everyone already lives in their own preferred dwelling, eats well, gets plenty of rest, plays with their children, has full access to all services, works only a little, makes love plenty and spends the rest of the time philosophizing about humanity's inevitable next step to the stars... or wherever.

Yeah, you'll be happy.

Copyright 2011 Bruce Ian Friedman

Addressing the RP Issue

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I want to take a moment of your time to expose a serious problem in modern society... the proliferation of RP's. RP's are seemingly everywhere on the face of the planet, but find themselves mostly in the USA and in poor, backwoods countries where people drag things on the ground or carry them on their heads because they haven't yet invented the wheel.

RP's are like Luddites, fearing the man who holds demon fire in his hand. Hey, it's just a flashlight, buddy. Lightbulb and power source in a tube, see? No, don't eat that!

RP's see a public library containing thousands of volumes of the world's knowledge and pass it by, preferring to go to their own library to read. It also has thousands of volumes... but they're all on the same topic.

RP's look like everybody else, on the surface: They smile and say hello when passing you on the street and dress in clothing like we all do, but they have very different thinking processes than non-RP's do: They simply don't use any.

Why not? Because RP's brains have been co-opted by their leaders, and in a most clever way-- they do it from birth using their minions, minions who are also known by another name-- parents. The minions start early on their children, coercing their fictions and allowing no debate, until the young ones are pliable enough to be influenced by the leaders. When they are old enough, the leaders command them to believe entirely and without question whatever it is they are saying. This unlikely mind control is possible, as long as it is done in a very specific way. The leaders identify a regular day and time for a massive group meeting. They insist their followers dress up in costumes, often uncomfortable and binding. Then they harangue them for long periods of time, preaching hearsay from a nonscientific text, demanding their obedience, frightening them with horrid consequences should they disobey. And to top it off, the leaders force the RP's to give money to the organization, as much as they can afford, indemnifying themselves to the cause.

The most indoctrinated few RP's they urge into distasteful or despicable tasks and then praise them, which psychologically cements their attachment to the cause. They are told to go among the non-RP public, spouting all manner of impossibilities and lies, in order to deceive them into becoming RP potentials. Their leaders will only be truly happy when the last non-RP has been dragged in and converted.

And when die-hard non-RP's gather for an event, any event the leaders find loathsome, they command the most loyal RP's to go out among them and 'commit a 2nd Amendment solution on their immortal souls', because a dead non-RP is better than a live non-RP. If society is fortunate and the leader cannot find any such volunteer, he will instead organize a concurrent disruptive gathering in the same location, in order that non-RP's not be allowed to conduct whatever behavior has been deemed repellant, undisturbed.

Although RP's have been described thus far as dangerous, it should be stressed that RP's aren't initially aggressors. They have become a kind of programmed drone, a ticking bomb, victims of a very sophisticated and systematic campaign of misinformation. They have been methodically victimized by proponents of propaganda, usually from their earliest memories. They are not operating with reason when they rise up in uniform waves of obedient robots, following the direction of their leaders. They have been brainwashed not to realize their actions cause enormous steps backwards-- politically, technologically and societally.

Our beef is not with RP's, although we are not happy that they have let themselves get into this position in the first place. We grudgingly allow that they are unable to defend a position of rationality because most of them had been taken as infants and therefore were raised by their captors. It is a difficult thumb from which to extricate themselves, requiring some exposure to rationality... an exposure which is strictly limited until their compliance has been assured.

No, our complaint is with the leaders, the promoters of every false belief system which has sucked in the RP's and hypnotized them into believing that right is left, that good is bad and that wrong is right. We take exception to the shepherd who would feed his flock piles of bullcrap and demand that they swallow it like Porterhouse.

We want to shine that flashlight directly on their bad behaviors, so that their RP's will realize that any explanations and arguments coming from their leaders while combatting proponents of reason serve only to provide diversion and cover, to hide the fact that every component of their pseudoscientific belief system lacks fact.

So what are RP's?

RP's are Catholics.

But to be fair, they're not only Catholics. They are also Protestants, Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Evangelicals, Born Agains and Anglicans. But they're not just Christians. RPs are Jewish. They're Rasta and Muslim and Sikh; Zoroastrians, Hindi, Scientologists, Unitarians and Buddhists.

You may begin to notice a theme-- RP's all belong to some kind of a faith. But there's more to being an RP than belonging to one of the world's approximately 200 religions.

You see, many members of these organizations are only 'fringe' players, becoming involved in the religion primarily because of the community interaction and the shared sense of past. Their family and friends and neighbors all gather under the collective banner of religious worship and tend to shun those who reject it outwardly, so many members maintain a visible but minimum interest. They may listen to what is being said in the pews on Sunday morning and smile and nod and say amen with the rest, but inside they are not being filled with the light of the lord-- they are more likely wondering what will be on television later.

Those people are not RP's.

Of all the varying religious groups in modern society, only about ten percent are devout followers of their faith. These are the fundamentalists, the ones who follow their ancient and barbaric texts to the letter. These are the people recognized as being unwilling or unable to digest and accept any facts which run contrary to their belief system. They have no interest in participating in any modern cultural behaviors that run counter to their leanings. They reject the scientific method, reason and logic. They mistrust people of science, or anyone of considered study and intelligence, unless their field of study is the religious text.

These are RP's. These are Religious People.

What can we do about RP's? Should we do anything about them at all, or should we leave them alone?

We must be wary of their goal for all of society. RP's are not interested in science, or in reason, or in fact. Their goal, their one goal is the complete proselytization of the world to their belief system. To make matters worse, RP's have one very simple and effective tool at their disposal which actually helps their goal and renders them very dangerous:

Fertility.

One passage in their text insists they be fruitful and multiply, encouraging families to aim for 8 or 10 or 12 children, all of whom will be indoctrinated into the religion from birth. At the same time, intellectual reasoning shows the planet is already overpopulated, so smart and thoughtful people produce fewer children. Flash forward a few generations, and adults employing reason are vastly overshadowed by people relying on belief, by many orders of magnitude.

We know that politicians and laws are voted in by majority, so in short order our secular nation is voted out and becomes another theocracy. Science is demonized or even made illegal and the dark ages begin anew. Secular nations were retarded by a 500 year period of theocracy in the last millennium; some current theocratic nations still maintain those beliefs and as a result, have been in the dark ages for over a thousand years.

Should you run across one of these RP's, there is only one correct way to deal with them. Do not, as with a band aid, try to rip the fallacy out of them in one fast movement. It will not work and will almost certainly raise an emotional welt. You can be certain the RP will remember you for that and we know their memory for reprisal can be l-o-n-g.

And do not try to fight fire with fire because as we well know from their description of hell that their fire is bigger than yours, and comes from a place of limitless supply, and for all eternity. Now who has a chance against that?

And though it seems counterintuitive, do not try to reason with them. There is no logical argument they have not ignored, no reasonable evidence that they will not dismiss. They are immutable as the history they claim divine knowledge of. And your soft tones and kind eyes and open debating style will have the same effect on them as they would have on a hungry lion you are trying to convince not to eat you.

No, the answer is to handle them with kid gloves. Treat them the same way as you would a sleepwalker-- under no circumstances are you to try and awaken them from their dream! If you do, all manner of misery will most certainly rain down upon you, and you might very well enter a hell from which there is no exit... or at least that is what they will promise you.

How will that help them, you ask? How will that help us lead them back to the path of Wisdom, the path missed way back in the Garden of Eden after eating the apple of Knowledge, the path Eve missed taking because she was too woozy on sugary snacks to realize that she should move forward after gaining knowledge and not backwards?

Leading the sleepwalker back to bed won't help them. We cannot bring them back from their lovely fiction-- they are too far gone. They are the fish that has swallowed the worm; hook, line and sinker, and to pull it out of them would rip up their insides something awful. No... we cannot help them.

But there is a way.

They can help themselves. They can slowly and methodically urge that dangerous barbed hook of despotic lies out of their belly... on their own. They can remove it completely and avoid becoming caught yet again by the lure of the always enticing bait. With help from others like themselves they can resist the hook until it is away from them, completely and forever.

But why ever would they do that? We know they are told and told, and told, that to leave the comfort of the fold is to languish outside, flopping on the hot concrete sidewalk until they die. They are acutely aware that if they leave, they will be shunned by the congregation. Their neighbors and friends and family will probably vanish from their lives, as if the factual information they possess is communicable. Which of course it is, and the leaders know this and that is why they have built that tidy little fail-safe into their dogma. It is a fail-safe coming from mortal fear, the mortal fear of knowledge, because knowledge is the enemy of dogmatic faith.

But if you do it exactly right they will not know that you have 'infected' them! If you implement this method you will, as the tide irrevocably changes the shore, cause them to slowly change their belief system over to ours. Not only that, they will know that they thought up the idea themselves and that you had nothing to do with it.

I can tell you're bursting... you must find out! What information will cause such a magical change? Of what illusion do I speak? What could possibly rip a true believer from their nonsense-believing state and slowly create a world bursting with non-RP's, all rationally discussing and logically defining our universe?

Here it comes...

Take a seat... we don't need any fainting injuries...

The answer is...

Doubt.

Yes, Doubt.

Unimpressed?

Well, ask yourself: How unimpressed are you with the Grand Canyon, the miles-long vast cutout in the ground? Because the two are very related. The Grand Canyon was made over thousands of years by erosion, by water nibbling away at the surface of otherwise immovable, impermeable rock. And that's how doubt works.

The great part is, nobody has to work very hard to create doubt. As a matter of fact, the harder you work, the less of an effect doubt seems to have. Pushing doubt tends to create an opposit, repelling doubt, scraping away all those carefully laid seeds. Going back to the Grand Canyon metaphor, the only way to create such a huge scar in the planet was by slowly scraping away the layers through slow, repeated erosion. I doubt anyone would have much success in creating a similar canyon simply by bashing their head repeatedly against the rock. In effect, that is what happens when you try to force your facts down a believer's throat... you are uselessly bashing your head against their wall of defense, which is miles thick and prepared for exactly that onslaught.

That's what happens when you try to foist your own (non-) belief system onto them. Think about it... isn't that what proselytization all about? Isn't that what they've been trying to do to us for all these many centuries? Ask yourself: In educated countries, how's that been working?

Answer: It hasn't. The scholarly human being prefers to learn by using the scientific method, by being skeptical of anecdotal information without corresponding double-blind testing to prove their validity. Proselytizing simply has no effect on an educated person.

The next time someone accosts you with their religious belief system, why not try this:

Quietly point out one indisputable fact which their bible does not address... and then smile and walk away. Don't even wait for their rebuttal, because there will be a rebuttal as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow. If you wish not to be rude, you may listen politely and quietly. Then smile and walk away. DO NOT ENGAGE!

It is a small step, but an important one.

If you wish to become organized and perform this on a mass scale, then get together as a group and walk past some form of religious gathering and, in your own good time, each of you should state your own unique indisputable fact to each of the demonstrators.

And then smile and walk away.

They say: "Jesus died for your sins!"

You say: "Jesus was a jewish carpenter, a man with faults like any of us."

They say: "Find the lord or go to hell!"

You say: "Hell and heaven are here on Earth, and all of us experience both in our lives."

They say: "The Earth was created by god 6000 years ago!"

You say: "Who created god? God's parents? Who created them? God's grandparents? When does it end?"

Like water trickling through a tiny crack, eventually the facts will deposit seeds of doubt, which will inevitably split that crack wide open.

But that's where the Grand Canyon example falls short:

For when RP's come to very painful terms with the fact that they've been wasting their lives on a fairy tale, that crack will become the Grand Canyon...

almost immediately.

And who could ask for anything more?

Copyright 2011 Bruce Ian Friedman

Trust Me... The Universe Is FLAT!

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Interesting hypothesis, when you think about it. Flat? How the hell can it be flat? Don't leave, hear it out. We know certain astronomical facts to be true. We are certain the Earth is a fairly round globe, as is the sun, and all the planets. We know that the motion of all the planets revolving around the sun make the solar system into the shape of a DVD: Still round, and yet flat. And we also know that the Universe is big. Ridiculously big. And of course it's getting bigger daily.

What we may not be able to conceptualize, however, is exactly how big it is. But here's an idea. A piece of paper is flat, too, and very thin. Yet if you become tiny, shrink down to the molecular level, to your eyes the paper is suddenly miles in thickness, and billions of miles each in of the other two directions.

If you wanted to explore the paper, you might start by going up and down through the thickness, but at only a few 'miles' you'd explore it all pretty quickly. There would be nothing to explore beyond the page's two surfaces, so logically you would head out in any of the other directions.

Well, that's kind of like what traveling through the Universe is like, except on a vastly larger scale. From the big bang, the Universe travelled outward in all directions for 14 billion years and now resembles a huge planet, if you imagine the surface being where all the stars and planets and matter and energy are. Inside the planet, it's largely empty. Outside the planet it's definitely empty. And this planet keeps getting bigger with every passing minute.

We can't notice this shape, of course. We are so insignificantly small by comparison, it would be like asking a gnat on a subatomic particle's ass to point out where China is. We can only postulate a hypothesis and then measure by using a plethora of techniques to tell us what shape it is.

If you have ever been out on the ocean far enough so that all you can see, in all directions, is water, you will realize that you cannot see the curvature of the earth from so close to the surface. The horizon appears flat, no matter which direction you look. This is the reason why early explorers proclaimed that the 'world was flat'.

Imagine you have a balloon which can be inflated to the size of a city. An ant is placed on this perfectly round sphere. From its perspective, it is standing upon a perfectly flat surface. It is too close to the surface to see the roundness of the balloon.

Now imagine that you are watching a fourth of july fireworks celebration, using magic. You gently float up into the air where the fireworks are exploding, and freeze time. You can do that with magic... or with a DVR. Now go into the middle of one of those colorful types that explode and are now in the shape of a dandelion. You notice that all of the colored bits have pushed outwards from the explosion, in every possible direction, each exactly the same distance. It now resembles that dandelion which has had its middle scooped out, leaving only the little feathery colorful ends frozen in position.

The colorful firework bits are now in the shape of a ball, or a soap bubble.

Now with your magic, you zoom close to one of the colorful bits... and now you make yourself tiny. So small in fact that the colorful bit has become huge, like the size of our sun. When you look for the next nearest colorful bit it's suddenly very far away, now that you are a speck. And those shiny bits that are on the opposite side of the ball shape, the bubble shape... well, those are too far to see at all, when you are that small.

Okay, you are again normal sized and back reading this post. Now think of the Big Bang, that ginormous explosion which is supposed to have created this Universe, fourteen some odd billion years ago. Imagine it as being the same shape as the firework in the previous description, ball shaped, or soap bubbley. It's been expanding at the speed of light for fourteen billion years, and we are in a galaxy next to other galaxies, like the shiny bits next to each other in the firework.

Now think of that little ant on the surface of that balloon, and how it doesn't know any better than thinking it's on a flat surface. Think about being in that boat on the middle of the ocean, unable to see the curvature of the earth because you are much too close to the surface.

Finally let's give you back your magic, and now approach a soap bubble that is floating in the air, making a beautiful perfect circle. Become tiny again, but so small this time that you can float between the chemical bonds that hold the soap bubble in shape. You suddenly realize that the bubble is not thin as it appears, but has many, many layers of bonds between the very inside of the bubble surface, and the very outside.

That's all the information you need, to realize that the Universe is Flat.

We are on planet Earth looking outwards, in all directions, and we of course see stars in all directions. It seems logical to assume that the Universe is like a room filled with air molecules, with them being everywhere in the room.

What we are actually looking at, is a tiny, tiny cross section of the surface of that soap bubble, from right in the middle of that section. We look in every direction and we think we see stars everywhere... and we do. But they are only part of that cross section, because we are just that tiny.

If we were on the outer edge of our cross section, we would see something that we don't now see. We would see an entire half a sky of inky blackness, not a star or shiny bit to be found, because we would be looking at the approaching nothingness our Universe is expanding into.

Now if we were lucky enough to be on the very inner wall of our Universe/bubble's cross section, we would be treated to the evidence of its shape. We would see inky blackness overhead, because as with the firework, the stars on the other side of the soap bubble/Universe are too far to see. But instead of the blackness occupying half of the sky, as we would see being on a ship on the ocean, we would see stars radiating upwards from the horizon as being in pieces of Universe cross section adjoining ours, eventually moving further and further away from us, and the ones higher in the sky are further away and therefore would be fainter than the ones lower in the sky... and eventually there would be only blackness directly overhead.

Evidence of the soap-bubble shape of the Universe.

Getting back to exploration. If you wanted to explore the Universe, once you were finished exploring the thickness of the soap bubble you'd move on to all the areas left and right, and front and back. It would be like exploring the surface of the Earth, but again, on a vastly larger scale. But no matter which direction you chose, the course you plot would be a straight line, because this soap bubble has been expanding for 14 billion years and could have a diameter as large as 28 billion light years across, and at that size there is essentially, no curve.

But we are not on either edge of our cross section of Universe. It is millions of light years thick, and we are somewhere inside. When we look out at night, we are seeing stars all over the sky, and most of them are within our own galaxy, our enormous galaxy being only one tiny feature of the thousands in our tiny cross section of the whole. When we look beyond those stars and the other galaxies... we see darkness, and again when we rotate our telescopes 180 degrees to look the other way.

So for all intents and purposes, we end up seeing a blanket of stars that, like a piece of flat paper, have nothing above it, and nothing below it.

So like the ant, all we can see is a flat surface.

So from our perspective, the Universe is FLAT.

But we know better, don't we?

Copyright 2011 Bruce Friedman

Humanity 2.0

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"I read it in the newspaper about a year ago, a small article buried deep in the 'Human Interest' section that reported about this crackpot billionaire who intended to 'bring down' capitalism. He would be using his entire fortune to design and institute a completely new way for people to live together on planet Earth. The article was so small and sparsely worded that I almost missed it entirely. Fortunately it was placed next to a splashy ad for a surefire heartburn remedy, which I needed because that chalky milkshake crap just wasn't cutting it any more.

Over the next few weeks I saw no mention of the claim and I wondered if the article had been placed as a hoax. I could almost not prove that I had ever seen it at all, except that I had torn the page out and kept it. The heartburn remedy turned out not to be surefire, just more of the same bullshit with barely any efficacy, nearly useless except for some mildly hallucinatory side effects. I bought a carton.

About a month later I saw another related article. This time it was closer to the front page, was more detailed and it made me think this guy was even more of a crackpot that I had thought before. He was attacking corrupt big business on every front in what I was certain were unsustainable ways. He attacked power companies by offering his own electricity, nationwide. He threatened automakers and oil companies by designing efficient, clean, electric vehicles. He provided his own cable network stocked with quality programming in every genre, devoid of advertising. He offered college education to anyone who wanted it. He bought hospitals nationwide and treated anyone who needed it. He opened thousands of fully stocked supermarkets. And he offered it all for free.

I said for free.

But as with all free things, there was a catch. Anyone who wanted all of these items had to agree to take a long battery of tests-- intelligence, psychological, physical, spatial, medical. They had to follow an exercise and dietary regimen. They had to spend significant time in one of his schools. Parents of young children had to allow childcare specialists into their homes. They eventually had to quit their jobs and work for him, at a job chosen by him.

I did not believe anyone would willingly limit their freedoms the way he wanted them to. Anyone besides me, that is. I had no kids, could stand to lose a few pounds, was between jobs and had always liked school, so everything he proposed seemed pretty good.

A few months later came another article. It was on page 3. It turned out there were a lot of people like me, who wouldn't mind allowing a gently guiding hand to turn them into smarter, healthier, better people. An estimated 30 million families had accepted his offer so far. It was beginning to take expected economic toll on the people left within the capitalist system. Corporations experiencing a drastic dip in sales had to lay off millions of workers. The housing market was thrown into turmoil as newly unemployed people failed to make their mortgage payments.

Money was growing scarce and people were fearful.

Not so for those in the billionaire's plan, though. He had offered them new housing when they joined him, free for the taking, based on their family size and needs. They were insulated from the economic meltdown because they never needed money: They would visit free stores for groceries and other needs; would eat at free restaurants and attend free concerts; took free vacations and threw free gala events. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times-- to coin a phrase.

The billionaire began to accept millions more people into his system; they were tested and placed and put on educational and dietary regimens. They began new professions even as their children began new educational programs. I was surprised to learn that, down to a man, each person was now only working half the hours as they had in their old lives. I was certain that the billionaire's concept would come crashing down as people's privacies and freedoms were restricted, as their lives were placed on a regulated track, but it did not; it flourished, and I was amazed at its longevity. I admit that at the time I had failed to understand the complex design at work before me, with its millions of man-hours of brilliantly plotted humanism designed around comfort and intellectual stimulation. But I was now in great physical shape and employed at a job I cherished, I was dating women I adore, and I didn't need that chalky liquid any more-- not for my stomach, nor for my mind-- so forgive me for not paying close attention to the Big Picture.

The paper was filled with news about how cities around the country began to seem empty; only the most successful capitalists with their oodles of money and vast storehouses of diminishing goods could afford to stay as the prices of fresh food and other services spiraled out of control. One by one the remaining wealthy families were bankrupted and forced to join the billionaire's plan, and one by one they were shocked at the level of comfort and plenty they were offered. They were even more surprised to learn that their new home was similar to all the other homes, because the billionaire was very aware that every person wished to live in contentment.

Eventually cities vacated completely and the billionaire issued a challenge: One by one each city would be dismantled and recycled, to be replaced by an ultramodern counterpart. Rather than the capitalist method of cobbling new onto old in order to save money, these cities would be designed down to the last beam for cleanliness and comfort and ease of use; without money as a stumbling block, the only issue was labor and resources. Working in unison, construction crews numbering in the tens of millions set to work, and in a half year's time had rebuilt every city into meccas of paradise.

Now transit systems moved people effortlessly wherever they needed to go, farming was largely automated and placed in favorable geographic climates and much of the countryside was gratefully relegated back to the beauty of nature.

It was one year to the day after that first article was published, when the billionaire made an announcement meant for every man, woman and child. Broadcasting on every device, on each channel he said:

"I have wanted to live in a world like we have here since I was a little boy, and am glad we have finally reached this place, together. I am only sorry that it took so long to bring about. I'm certain you are thinking that it was only a year, but I am speaking to the broad ascent of human knowledge, which I believe was crucial to achieve this vaunted level. We had allowed our technology to outpace our humanity, which could have served to destroy us as a race. Fortunately we are a strong and flexible people and could see the need to implement planet-wide social empathy.

"I believe we are on track now. We are no longer petty and vindictive, nor are we secretive and underhanded. We cooperate rather than compete. We are sensitive and insightful, nurturing and welcoming. We have a system in place which fosters positive behaviors. And we did it in a year! There was no major revolution, no taking of life, no struggle for power or squelching of the masses.

"But where do we go from here? You are living under, for lack of a better term, a benevolent dictatorship. Until now it has all been done my way. But you might be surprised to learn that from way up here in the dictator's office, things look a little different. I have had hundreds of experts working alongside me-- social reformers, city planners, educational specialists and the like-- and assembled a master plan for the human race which looked very much like it now does from your own windows. Once that plan was established it was converted into a software program, humorously called 'Humanity 2.0', and for this last year that program has been your dictator. I was simply the voice that relayed the choices it made for us. That ends today.

"Now I join ranks with all of you. What is a billionaire in a world that has no money, anyway? We will all be running this society ourselves from now on. We will have no politicians, we will have no president. Our society is an assemblage of thousands of complex areas, and we must manage them to ensure their survival, but we will manage wisely, with experts in those fields who will oversee projects based on these benevolent ideals, but only after gathering the thoughts and opinions from every one of us.

"We now have a direct hand in the course of human progress, and because each of you has become educated to the best of your ability, you will be able to manage sagely. Now you know how it is that humans are supposed to live: Free from fear, and strife, and sadness, and loneliness, and grief, and agony, and murderous intent. We now sincerely desire the same wonderful outcome for every young lad playing in the grass as we do for the babe on our very own knee; we want our neighbors, and friends and strangers to feel the love that we do, to have the fullness of life that we have. In reaching far forward, we have wisely found ourselves reaching back into our own personal pasts, back to the age of our childhood, and held on tightly to the trust and optimism found once only in the bright young eyes of our progeny."

And when that broadcast ended, it was the last time we ever heard his voice as representing the sound of progress, and he is missed by many. It was he in his wisdom that saw what we were becoming, and saw what we could become. It was he that forced our failing society into a rigid mold briefly, to make this difficult transition occur peacefully, so that we could finally become what we are today... a World Family. I know it's only been a year, but it's been a really, really big year. And I'm happy I was here to help it happen because in retrospect, I'm certain I never want to return to our former ways again. We will not fall back again because we have reached the pinnacle of prosperity; we have nothing to change. I'm hoping that together we can become even greater than what we are, greater than the sum of man."

"That was a very good dream, Tyler. You may be seated." The young man returned to his chair among the hundreds, being pelted with spitballs and milk cartons along the way. The young woman teaching the 'Learning to Dream' class walked from the back of the auditorium to the front, surveying her 375 sixth grade students. They were in riot mode, running around and yelling, throwing balls, engaging in arguments and in the back row she thought she could see a couple of them engaged in carnal behavior. She wondered if any of them heard young Tyler's inspirational story but doubted it, since they had no attention span and little curiosity. School wasn't much more than a daytime detention for children, until their parents got a break from work.

Passing one tall, bearded student who seemed to be threatening another with a switchblade, she pulled out a stun gun and short-circuited his synapses with a moderate jolt, and he fell into the row of wooden folding chairs with a crash. The bell rang and the room erupted-- well, all but the bearded attacker, who was beginning not to look like a sixth grader at all-- and poured out of the dingy, beaten room and into the dingy, beaten halls.

The teacher called security to have the prone figure removed and waited for her next class, 400 precocious 4th graders. She hoped someone had brought a pencil, for they were learning the letter 'f' today and she wanted to draw one for them. It was particularly hard for some of these kids, who had repeated this class many times but had never gotten that far in the alphabet. At least she was teaching in the best nation on the planet.

Copyright 2011 Bruce Ian Friedman