The End

Published on February 2017 | Categories: Documents | Downloads: 65 | Comments: 0 | Views: 276
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The year was 2075 C.E. One hundred years had passed since the end of “peak oil” was officially announced. As was their wont, Homo Sapiens—also known by the oxymoronic inverse-portmanteau-type word “mankind” (“human” and “kindness”)—had pointedly ignored the dire warning and went about its merry way warring and killing and unconservationally consuming oil. Of course, trouble was now the unavoidable consequence. Specifically, how—while suffering from energy deprivation—to manufacture the technology needed to pull themselves back from the edge of the abyss of species extinction, into which they had sent so many lesser ones before them and were now themselves inexorably slipping. The secretary at B.O. (the short form of the name of the meganational corporation called “Big Oil”) talked on the phone to a friend. “Can’t say ‘I told you so’ even,” she sniffed, apparently unsuccessfully trying to rid herself of the cloying scent of collected crude stashed somewhere in the headquarters where she worked. Stockpiling nowadays not only applied to weapons, but to secret caches of first-stage oil by everybody in case they were suddenly in need of an oil fix and there was nothing else handy. Said her friend, “Why not? Everybody else does.” They were talking about the countries that had embraced the strategy of leaving their oil reserves undeveloped to protect native biodiversity, only to be recently ransacked by unscrupulous big businesses lusting after crude. It was not unusual that both her and her friend were privileged (by comparison with the wretched rest) to work for oil concerns: these were the only companies employing people at any sort of living wage nowadays. All others had fallen victim to globalization with its concomitant race-to-the-bottom remunerations. Examples of some of the errors that mankind made when oil conservation plans were first implemented were to not follow through with ridding itself of the self-destructive economic scheme called neoliberalism—with its inherent greed-based, necessary inequalities—and to replace it with one more fair, such as social democracy, or even one of the barter-based systems (ones in which everybody’s time was valued as exactly equal). As well, a world government not somehow linked to a monetary system was not established, leaving the resultant vacuum to be filled by profit-driven, power-seeking corporations. Also, the legal influences of corporations were not limited as obviously should have been done at that time. Environmental agreements were blatantly flouted, then ignored entirely. The meat-grinder, killing machines a.k.a. wars were not stopped, neither was peacekeeping given top priority. Arms dealing continued unabated, while arms treaties fell by the wayside. Human rights conventions continued to be ignored. Dissident uprisings were at first ignored, then outright suppressed, with the resistance either imprisoned or outright slaughtered en masse. The root cause of these was that democracy either was allowed to be corrupted, or was overruled entirely. It was the “golden” age of mankind: “them that has the gold, rule.” Plutocracy had become the order of the day, aided and emboldened by unchecked corporate depravities. “Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”— Abraham Lincoln. Then the dream died. The nightmare known as neoliberalism enabled the ascendency of the old gubernational vice of plutocracy, with its defining characteristic of love of money. There was no shortage of worshippers flocking to kneel at this golden idol. Instead of the “state withering away” as Marx predicted if his ideology were followed, the people withered away, until nearly all became economic survivors at worst, or economic

serfs at best. The remainder were the 0.01 per cent, the superrich, the only ones left able to weather the economic storm they had created. Their plans didn’t stop there. “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” went the famous maxim. Certainly money equated to power, at that point. Netski had become a reality sometime ago. Nobody was quite sure of when it was established—in fact, nobody (except for the Controllers) was quite sure of anything anymore, because of Netski. Netski was a system of supercomputers orbiting the Earth, blanketing the Earth in a thought-censorship energy field. Whenever a thought surfaced in a human mind that was contrary to the rule of the immortal, plutocratic oligarchy (the Controllers), it was erased— immediately wiped out, blanked with no remaining trace. How this evolved first came about in the days when telephone conversations were monitored for keywords, such as “bomb” and “terrorism” and so on. When machines were developed that could read minds (an easy step, actually: merely a matter of picking up the brainwave patterns matching thoughts representing language; with the endless possibilities of nanotechnology combined with the powerful capabilities of artificial intelligences based in supercomputers, the realization of this idea was inevitable), it was only a matter of time before Netski came about. That’s why there was such a mad rush for oil at end 20 century/beginning 21 century. All supersemiconductors couldn’t be constructed without it. All that was certain was that the only thoughts which were allowed to develop at present were surface eddies, harmless gossip, effluvial, flotsam, jetsam, and the like. The Controllers— the ones who had gained and retained power over all Earthly things—had cochlear implants which not only made them immune to Netski, but also allowed them to overhear conversations at great distances (if they so chose), plus communicate with each other merely by thinking of the connecting link. They and their coterie of service humans who were allowed to exist (why mince words: slaves) did an immortal/mortal dance of death on the stage known as Earth, which was supposed to go on until the Controllers tired of their manmade eternity, permanently. In preparation, they had—in the early days—gathered up all the nuclear devices leftover from the bad old days of nation-to-nation conflict and carefully placed them at the centre of the Earth, intending to replicate, in some diminished sense, a faint echo of the Big Bang when the day to sign off arrived. In the early days of Netski, it had worked alongside the orbiting high-intensity lasers. For some time afterwards, people even harbouring the slightest thoughts of resisting the fullfledged technology-based totalitarianism which set in like gangrenous corruption on a festering wound were simply vaporized. Eventually that was no longer necessary. Mortal serfs were bred as needed, in accelerated growth chambers, until they were “hatched” at about age 20. Then they were speed-inculcated with the knowledge of the task they were supposed to perform. They were usually given language and a cursory ability to think (because zombies aren’t punctual). This is what happens when democratic populations take the privilege of voting for granted. However, now the controllers had a real problem on their hands. There was an incredible shortage of creative, inventive minds because of the 50 or so years culling the crowds to prevent any sort of backlash. And this quality could not be bred. The gene pool of the Controllers was too small to be able to select the necessary ones from their stock. What was left in the data

banks did not meet the necessary criteria. In other words, the Controllers had prematurely painted themselves into a corner called “species extinction.” The only way out of this mess would have been to shrug off their technological yoke and meld mankind together again, allowing the forces of human creation to heal the damaged human identity. But the Controllers were oblivious to the obvious, and they didn’t want to relinquish power. Thus, the problem described at the beginning: slipping into the abyss of extinction. In the end, who could blame humans anyway? Their habits of 2,000,000 years of unthinking nonstop wars, strifes, conflicts, rapes, capital punishments, which included any— any—means of self-destruction they could indulge in had left them no out from their ecological deadend. That is to say, it wasn’t their fault, finally. Oh no, not them. Perhaps secretly, they hoped some alien race would save them. And who could fault their faithlessness, either? While capable scientists still existed, the Controllers had tried to pull their irons out of the fire. They had experimented with putting human minds into supercomputers. But the realm of supercomputers containing minds was closed. There, something indefinable was missing from the equation: a soul, possibly? Who knew for sure? All that was known was that the idea could not be implemented, no matter how advanced the technology, no matter how much energy was invested in solving the problem. I am the writer of this story. I had an ending in mind, but for some reason I forgot what
 

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