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https://freedomain.com/freedomain_books/the-future/

Centuries in the future, an old man awakes from cryogenic sleep to face the judgement of a utopian society that barely survived his past abuses of power. In the vein of 'Atlas Shrugged, philosophy, philosopher Stefan Molyneux has created a compelling and powerful work of imagination. He vividly describes the wonderful future that mankind can achieve - and the barriers to getting there - and all that we need to leave behind to finally live in peace...

Transcript
00:00 The Future by Stéphane Molyneux
00:03 Chapter 6
00:05 The girls were not expecting to see anyone this far from anywhere.
00:11 Sometimes when they hiked in the early evening,
00:15 they saw various VR eyes and ears floating through the trees,
00:20 like eerie fireflies of distant thought.
00:23 But they weren't expecting any in-person footfalls
00:26 on the stony heights of the mountain.
00:29 They had never met a mean person.
00:32 Sometimes impatient, short-tempered, mildly irritated.
00:37 But always there was this general social approach
00:40 of being extraordinarily nice to children,
00:43 so they were never concerned about interacting with strangers.
00:46 The only crime they had ever really heard of
00:50 was the crime of "wasting your life",
00:52 which was constantly aimed at the VR addicts,
00:55 called "DOAvers" or "Dovers" for Dead on Arrival VR.
01:00 Occasionally, somebody would suffer from some biological ailment,
01:05 brain cancer or something like it,
01:07 and there would be abuse or violence.
01:09 But since these lost souls lacked free will,
01:12 they were not prosecuted as criminals,
01:14 but rather confined and cured
01:16 as victims of endlessly fallible biology.
01:19 But actual, willing, malevolent, evil violence?
01:24 That was as unknown in their world
01:26 as a poltergeist at a physics conference.
01:29 Alice and Emily had made it up to a small clearing,
01:33 a strong stone's throw below the cave where the waterfall originated.
01:38 Looking up, they could see the small vertical chasm,
01:42 a tight spray of rushing water,
01:44 the green loops of hanging vines,
01:46 and small rocks polished by the rush spilling from the mouth.
01:51 "Why is it called Smudge Mountain?" panted Emily.
01:55 The emergency bark floated up around her sweaty head as if in concern.
02:00 Alice smiled.
02:02 "The first sketch of this area was 700 years ago.
02:05 The mountain was drawn in the distance, in charcoal, on the horizon.
02:08 When the artist got back to town and unrolled the paper, it had all smudged."
02:12 Emily shivered.
02:14 "I can't imagine the world back then."
02:17 Alice snorted. "Who'd want to?"
02:20 "Sorry? What do you mean?"
02:22 Emily shook her head slightly.
02:25 "Everyone here is always so nice to us, us kids.
02:29 It's hard to get a good description of what it was like back then.
02:33 Everyone keeps their mouths closed.
02:36 That's worse. It leaves everything to my imagination, like it was hell."
02:41 She gestured at the mountain peak above,
02:43 like kids were just a smudge on the horizon.
02:47 Alice nodded appreciatively.
02:49 "It wasn't hell, though.
02:51 Hell is where you went if you were evil, but kids can't be evil.
02:54 My dad says that kids had to be broken because the world was broken,
02:58 and the world was broken because kids were broken round and round.
03:02 I think of it more as a torture prison.
03:05 I don't know how they did it.
03:07 How did they go on? Get out of bed, go to school?"
03:12 "I don't know," said Alice softly.
03:15 "Attacked? Beaten? Lied to? Ignored?
03:19 Why?" whispered Emily, brushing her hair back.
03:23 "We don't have to know," replied Alice.
03:26 "It's never coming back."
03:28 They drank some water,
03:31 then started the steep, tangled path up towards the waterfall.
03:35 They loved angling themselves to flow through the tangled branches,
03:39 a slow, contorted dance of passage.
03:44 It was Emily who first put her hand on Alice's arm.
03:48 "Perhaps because her father was a harpy,
03:51 and she was raised closer to the land,
03:53 and the ill temper of farm animals,
03:55 her sense of caution darted up like the flared neck of a cobra.
03:59 Stop!" she hissed.
04:01 Alice did not take away her arm and froze.
04:04 "What? Do you see something?" she whispered, barely audible.
04:09 Alice nodded her head through the darkening undergrowth.
04:12 "Those boys!" Alice sighed.
04:15 "Gosh, you startled me. I thought you saw a bear or something, or a wolf.
04:19 No, there's something... What?"
04:22 Alice moved forward and squinted.
04:25 In a clearing ahead, just past the waterfall,
04:28 two boys, almost young men, really,
04:31 were idly poking a stick into a small fire.
04:34 Something brown was on a stick over the fire,
04:37 but she couldn't tell what it was.
04:39 The lightly blown sparks from their fire
04:42 merged with the sparkling splashes of the waterfall in an elemental dance.
04:46 "I don't like the look of them," said Emily, her face pale.
04:50 "Let's go."
04:51 She took a step back, pulling on Alice's arm, almost toppling her.
04:55 "Emily," whispered Alice, "we've come all this way,
04:59 and this is the one time you get to use a SkyTaxi.
05:01 We're so close. It won't be the same looking at it later on the globe.
05:05 Don't you want to explore? They're just two boys."
05:08 Alice squinted again. Her eyesight wasn't quite as sharp as her friend's.
05:13 "And the closest mean children are like half a world away in a statist country,"
05:18 she said the last two words with near visceral contempt.
05:22 On its almost silent wings, the emergency bot shifted a little closer to them.
05:27 With their heightened, startled reflex, the girls spun around to look at it.
05:32 Alice saw Emily's eyes widen slightly.
05:35 "What?"
05:36 Emily nodded urgently towards the fire.
05:39 Alice turned and saw that only one boy was now sitting with his stick in the flames.
05:45 "Had he been looking at them?"
05:48 "So what?" shrugged Alice. "The other one probably just had to pee."
05:53 Slightly shy people gain peculiar strength when they summon unusual assertiveness.
05:58 Emily's hand tightened, almost painfully on Alice's arm, pulling her backwards.
06:03 "Alice, we're going!"
06:05 Alice nodded, swept along in the undercurrent of her friend's fear.
06:09 It seemed odd to Alice, since boys or children or people as a whole
06:15 seemed about as threatening as a box of kittens.
06:17 But something odd was happening to her friend,
06:20 and it wasn't worth arguing with someone obviously in a high state of excitation.
06:24 Later they could debate, but...
06:26 There was a sudden, squishy, electric arc sound,
06:30 and a shout of tiny blue and yellow sparks exploded in the air.
06:34 In the sudden, shocked silence,
06:37 they saw the hot shards of metal and plastic spread, scatter and fall to the ground.
06:42 Alice had a sudden and almost irresistible urge to stamp on the tiny wreckage
06:47 for fear that a fire could spread and consume the trees.
06:50 She even raised her foot, but stopped
06:52 when she noticed that Emily was not looking at the scattered wreckage,
06:55 but rather, eyes as wide as eggs,
06:58 was staring into the bushes to the left of the cave.
07:01 It was such a look of fear that Alice's foot froze,
07:04 and she stood there on one leg like a stunned, comical flamingo.
07:09 Alice followed her friend's gaze and saw a...
07:12 Oh, what was it called?
07:14 Some ancient weapon or plaything of centuries ago,
07:16 shaped like a Y, it shot pebbles or something like that.
07:20 Slingshot. That was it.
07:22 "Someone just destroyed our property."
07:28 The sentence ran through Alice's mind like lemmings off a cliff.
07:32 This had simply never happened to her before,
07:35 and she'd never heard of anything like this happening at all.
07:38 It was almost unimaginable that someone would voluntarily choose
07:41 to break something that someone else owned,
07:43 particularly a child to the ultimate protected group in society.
07:47 She opened her mouth, but had absolutely no idea what to say.
07:54 The wild thought flickered through her mind
07:56 that these two boys were really space aliens in human form,
07:59 who had no idea how human society actually worked, and...
08:02 and...
08:03 and that something terrible would happen.
08:10 A thin tendril of fear began to rise within her,
08:16 as if her bowels were a tiny fire producing smoke.
08:20 The sudden distance between them and their parents opened up in her heart,
08:23 and she felt very alone and apart, out of nowhere, it seemed.
08:27 The boy by the fire laughed.
08:30 She could see in the flickering ancient light
08:32 that an utterly unjustified optimism had set him on the path
08:35 of trying to grow a beard.
08:37 "Good shot!" he cried.
08:40 And there was a flicker of emotion in his voice
08:43 that Alice truly had no words for.
08:47 It was a kind of pride and triumph and domination
08:52 and coldness and arrogance and...
08:55 and suddenly she was afraid.
08:59 She had heard many foreign languages traveling either in person or through VR,
09:02 but they all had similar tones of reason and openness and friendliness.
09:06 This was like a deep well, with a person trapped at the bottom,
09:11 trapped in deep time, in the old world,
09:15 like a child who had fallen down that well and cried lustily for help,
09:18 but by the time you climbed down the crumbling wall,
09:21 the child had turned into a crow-cleaned ivory skeleton
09:26 that jumped at you in the dark.
09:28 "Oh my gosh, what is happening to my brain?" thought Alice in panic.
09:33 For the first time in her entire life,
09:37 she felt a sudden desire to turn and flee, to run, to scamper from...
09:42 from predation.
09:45 The younger boy emerged from the bushes,
09:48 jammed his slingshot into a back pocket, spat to his right,
09:52 and grinned in a lopsided, almost distorted manner at them.
09:58 "No reason for outsiders," he said easily.
10:03 Alice felt another shock of fear.
10:06 People who were utterly at ease in a bizarre situation?
10:10 Again, she had no language for it,
10:12 other than the phrase "no strangers to strange."
10:18 The older boy lifted his stick from over the fire,
10:20 scattering yellow and orange sparks.
10:22 "Do you eat meat? Do you like meat?" he asked.
10:26 Although the skin of whatever he had been burning was still bubbling,
10:30 he used his molars to rip off a strip.
10:33 His hair was dark in the growing gloom,
10:37 his cheeks smudged with soot and scratches and... and... paint?
10:43 He raised his head to stare at the two girls.
10:46 His eyes were hooded under his thick brows,
10:48 his eyes the exact same color as the surrounding background,
10:51 so that they looked like two holes that went straight through his head.
10:56 Alice thought absurdly of two bowling alleys side by side.
11:01 "Can you talk?" demanded the older boy.
11:04 "Don't you know that it's rude not to answer a simple question?"
11:08 His voice sounded pained, aggrieved, insistent.
11:12 "Maybe they are scared," offered the younger boy.
11:15 "Bah, kids, far from home."
11:18 Emily's voice startled Alice.
11:19 She had never heard this tone from her friend before.
11:22 "Why did you destroy our emergency bot?"
11:26 The younger boy spat again.
11:27 He was chewing something they could not see.
11:31 "Trespassing and spying," he said angrily.
11:34 "You ever seen me coming to your house and staring in your windows?"
11:38 The older boy said, "Well, you want them to take us off the map,
11:41 "'cause this is ours, but they don't care.
11:43 "They don't take us into consideration, so why should we return the favor?"
11:47 "Oh, no," thought Alice, remembering the history of philosophy
11:50 she studied when she was younger.
11:52 "Moral equivalence and reversal, this is not good at all."
11:57 "There's no need for us to be enemies," said the younger boy,
12:01 walking forward and extending his rather grimy hand.
12:04 Closer, the girls could see that one of his front teeth was missing,
12:07 giving him a slight lisp.
12:09 "You are kids, we are kids, no need for--"
12:13 He closed his fists together and punched each knuckle into the other far too hard.
12:17 The girls flinched at the sound.
12:21 Alice swallowed, swallowed again, then found her voice.
12:26 "We really need to be going."
12:29 "No," said the older boy loudly.
12:31 "You trespass, you pay the rent. It's that simple. Law of the land."
12:35 "The rent?" thought Alice.
12:39 With extraordinary rapidity, the younger boy walked forward
12:42 and grabbed both girls very hard by the forearms.
12:46 "Sit a while," he breathed.
12:50 And Alice, using instincts she didn't even know she possessed,
12:53 reminded herself not to flinch in the face of his breath,
12:56 which stank like the exhale of a collapsing mausoleum.
13:01 From the corner of her eye, she saw the older boy nodding
13:04 and kicking something lying on the ground beside him.
13:06 "Yeah, we're low on wood, and we have another gopher."
13:10 The younger boy dragged them forward to the fire.
13:14 Emily tried going limp, but he pulled her forward anyway,
13:16 and she had to get up because her knees were being scraped to hell.
13:20 "We are reasonable folk," continued the older boy.
13:24 "You keep our fire going long enough to cook the next gopher,
13:27 and you can go on your way."
13:30 "We don't want to stay," said Alice, feeling quite disoriented.
13:36 Although expressing her reasonable preference had gotten her
13:39 what she wanted 100% of the time throughout her young life,
13:42 she was absolutely and quite certainly certain
13:46 that her will had no coinage here.
13:49 "My free will is mere fiat currency here."
13:54 "You don't want to stay?" repeated the older boy,
13:58 mockingly standing to his full height.
14:00 He was a lot taller than Alice.
14:02 "We don't want you here, but here you are,
14:04 so I guess we'll just have to find a way to make the best of it."
14:08 All these strange justifications circled the two girls like tiny sharks,
14:13 like the sparks from the fire,
14:15 and Alice suddenly remembered an argument she had heard
14:18 when she was very little, that it was much safer being attacked
14:20 by a big dog on dry land than a two-foot shark in the water,
14:23 because the water was the shark's element,
14:25 and there were no trees to climb.
14:28 Emily began to cry.
14:31 Some unknown instinct of hers felt tears coming,
14:34 but pumped them up a little bit, perhaps to find some scrap of empathy
14:38 or compassion in the two utterly strange boys.
14:42 The younger boy picked up his stick from the fire
14:44 and pointed the glowing end directly at Emily's face.
14:47 "You shut up!" he yelled.
14:49 "I don't care if you're a girl.
14:51 No sniffling, no blubbering, no face mess or lippy trembles, all right?
14:54 We're not here to hurt you.
14:56 Do you have any idea what kind of insult you are throwing in her face
14:58 by crying at a fire?
15:00 We're not here to hurt you if you are nice!"
15:04 As if in a game where the sun was grabbed from dawn to noon,
15:07 the faces of the two girls went suddenly pale.
15:11 They both immediately understood the implication
15:14 that some unknown and incomprehensible activity called being nice
15:19 was all that stood between them and getting hurt.
15:22 How badly neither wanted to know.
15:25 "What do you want from us?" asked Alice.
15:29 The older boy sneered.
15:31 "Oh, now it's time to play dumb, right?
15:34 First thing she's got to do is stop the blubbering.
15:36 We're not animals, we're not beasts of the jungle.
15:38 Ah, ah, ah, ah!"
15:40 He screeched like a monkey.
15:42 "We're just a bit of business, like I told you.
15:44 Payment for trespassing, more civilized than others would treat you.
15:47 You keep this fire going while we roast the gopher,
15:49 and we're even, we're square, we're done."
15:52 Emily took a deep, shuddering breath.
15:55 "And then, and then we can go?"
15:58 The older boy roared suddenly.
16:00 "Did we ever say you were wanted? I don't think so, girly!
16:03 You are trespassing!
16:04 You with all this property stuff should damn well understand!"
16:08 Alice was shocked.
16:11 "I've only ever heard true bellowing in the recordings of historical speeches
16:14 when deranged politicians slid the hot spikes of inflammatory language
16:19 into the festering resentments of some boiling mob."
16:24 "Strange to say, but the younger boy suppressed a giggle
16:27 as the older boy shouted at Emily."
16:30 Alice's mind spun absolutely at a loss
16:33 as to whether this was a good sign or a very bad sign.
16:37 Was this all a kind of play-acting, a test of their strength?
16:41 Or could these two dangerous boys cast all norms of civilized behavior aside
16:45 because they knew they would face no consequences for any of their actions?
16:49 Her mind raced through wild escape scenarios.
16:53 "We could kick the fire and run, or I could grab the stick
16:56 and whack one of these boys in the head, a burning stick even better,
16:59 and we could flee back down the path.
17:01 But unless we totally disable them, it's their territory, not ours.
17:04 They are sharks of the water, not dog dogs on the land.
17:07 Also, they have that slingshot thing, and the younger boy can aim like a laser.
17:10 He could take us down no problem.
17:12 And Emily has that asthma thing.
17:14 'Sucks your asthma' came into her mind from a long-ago story.
17:18 So she couldn't make it very far, and the boys are bigger and stronger,
17:21 and we can't call the Sky Taxi without the emergency bot,
17:23 and there's just no way we can get away, at least not reliably,
17:26 and I can't coordinate anything with Emily without the boys knowing,
17:28 so what are we supposed to do?
17:30 We can't actually get away until they let us get away!"
17:33 The image of her father rose in her mind,
17:36 and she suddenly felt a confused form of protective tenderness towards him.
17:40 "Even if he was here, I've never seen him deal with anything like this.
17:43 What would he do? Would he take a stick to these boys and beat them?
17:47 They are used to these woods and handy with weapons.
17:49 Who would come out on top?
17:51 And in this kind of situation, if anyone escalates violence
17:53 without it being a decisive victory, things go from bad to worse in a heartbeat!"
17:58 Thinking of a heart beating led her mind to an old picture
18:02 she had seen of an Aztec ritual.
18:04 These primitive brutes worshipped a god that fed on the tears of the young,
18:08 so they would torture children to death,
18:10 sometimes cutting their hearts out of their living bodies
18:12 to feed the sadism of their ghastly god.
18:15 Dear world, what chasm tumbling to Hades have we stumbled upon?
18:21 But again the mood shifted once more, without warning.
18:24 Once the two girls were seated and had refused the proffered meat,
18:27 the boys sat in a relaxed manner,
18:29 one leaning against a tree and clasping his hands behind his head.
18:33 The older boy smiled almost gently.
18:36 "Say, no need for tension," he pronounced it, "tension.
18:41 Chiefs don't have to be angry when people do what they say.
18:45 And you're interesting. I bet we are too, once you get over this fear, I guess."
18:50 "You are from out there," he gestured vaguely at the crescent moon
18:55 still embedded in the blue jewel of the sky.
18:57 "And we are from somewhere around here."
19:01 The other boy nodded sagely. "From parts unknown."
19:05 The older boy jabbed a decisive forefinger in his direction.
19:08 "Exactly. Parts unknown. A spike of history, as they say.
19:14 We are like noble savages and computers, meeting in the woods."
19:19 He stared at his grimy palm.
19:21 "Dirty hands clasping robot fingers, I guess."
19:24 He laughed briefly but uproariously.
19:26 "And we wouldn't even be wandering around forever,
19:30 except my dad won't plant crops. That's not the old ways."
19:35 "Don't you have any questions for us?" asked the younger boy slightly belligerently.
19:40 Alice could see Emily swallow.
19:43 "Well, um, where are you from exactly?"
19:46 The older boy leaned forward, the light and dark of the flickering fire washing up his face.
19:51 "From way outside your experience, I would bet.
19:55 I would bet everything I have, up to or down to and including my soul."
20:01 "Soul. Now that was a word from the old world," thought Alice.
20:07 The younger boy appeared irritated.
20:09 "Stop talking in circles. You're like a dizzy magician. Girls!" he said decisively, turning to them.
20:14 "You don't know anyone like us, do you?"
20:17 Both girls shook their heads numbly, their hearts pounding uncomfortably,
20:21 almost audibly, they feared.
20:23 This satisfied him for some reason.
20:26 "Good, good, as it should be.
20:29 We are the originals. We don't put children on top.
20:33 We were raised, not praised. We are not princesses like you.
20:38 We don't expect the world to spin around us.
20:40 We learn from our elders, the old ways, I guess you could say.
20:44 We don't live in clouds. We don't ride robots.
20:46 We don't outsource our bodies. Our flesh don't mate with metal.
20:51 We are fully human in a way that..."
20:55 His sudden burst of verbosity seemed to fail him,
20:58 and Alice guessed that he had reached the edge of the clichés he'd been fed with as a little boy.
21:03 "When you run out of propaganda, you run out of personality."
21:08 With sudden vehemence, the older boy said, "We just want to be left alone!"
21:13 The younger boy sighed, scratching his ear with a stick.
21:16 "But we won't be now, will we?"
21:20 There was a long pause, pregnant with disastrous potential.
21:26 Both girls had a sudden intimation that detaining them had been an impulsive action,
21:31 and the ramifications of that decision were slowly becoming clear.
21:37 Emily leaned forward.
21:39 "We don't have to tell anyone. We don't care.
21:41 This was just a kind of misunderstanding, I think.
21:43 We can go on our way, and when people ask us how our day was,
21:46 we can mention everything except this.
21:48 It doesn't really matter. We're just like two spears flying past each other on a battlefield."
21:53 That last image clearly made no sense to her, and she closed her mouth suddenly.
21:58 The older boy wrinkled his nose.
22:00 "You would lie to your parents?" he laughed harshly.
22:05 "Is that even allowed?"
22:07 Alice seized on the moral question, as was her habit.
22:11 "If we are in possession of information, it's not always a lie if we don't tell it.
22:14 Every morning my dad asks me how I slept.
22:16 Can I tell him every single detail of every single one of my dreams?
22:19 Every time I woke up, if I even did?
22:21 Can I tell him all my loose and random thoughts,
22:24 which we all get when we're in the process of waking up and lazing and lying in bed?
22:28 We can't ever communicate everything about us,
22:30 so if we have to tell everything, I guess we're just lying all the time,
22:33 every time we open our mouth, even if we don't speak."
22:36 The older boy tossed a bone with several clearly visible incisor marks into the fire.
22:41 The marrow began to bubble through the holes.
22:45 He grunted.
22:46 "Now that's deep.
22:48 Which is to be expected from someone who's been told what to think.
22:51 The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
22:54 It's out of court, but you and I both know that's just a bunch of words,
22:57 because you want to get away and tell.
22:59 If you saw me unzip a flesh suit and show you my reptile insides,
23:03 and your little daddy asked you how your little walk was,
23:05 and you didn't mention that, you would be lying through your freaking teeth.
23:09 Leaving out the most important thing is lying,
23:11 and I know how you would look lying to your little daddy,
23:13 because you just did it to me right now, right here."
23:18 The boy finished in a sweaty flourish of strange panting.
23:23 Wanting to break the tension of escalation, Alice jumped up.
23:26 "You wanted us to get some wood, right?
23:28 I assume you don't want us to go together.
23:29 We can go one at a time.
23:30 I could go now.
23:32 Sit down, girl!" cried the older boy.
23:35 "Let's just face it.
23:36 We've all been lying to each other this whole time."
23:40 The girls waited for him to continue, terrified of what he would say next.
23:45 What could he mean?
23:47 But he just sank into a gloomy silence, staring at the fire.
23:54 The furry animal at his feet suddenly began to squirm to life,
23:57 making a pitiful screeching sound.
24:00 The boy raised his bare heel and brought it down hard on the creature's skull.
24:04 The twitching and screeching stopped.
24:10 The younger boy raised his eyebrows.
24:12 "You know, if we were to skin that thing, I bet these little girls would pass right out."
24:16 The older boy laughed.
24:18 "Imagine if we start skinning it and it comes back to life under the knife,
24:21 like peeling an apple that turns out to be a giant red eyeball."
24:26 For some reason they found this funny as well and laughed again, heartily.
24:31 The younger boy said, "Oh, they're waiting for the sky angels to swoop in with lightning and save them.
24:36 Pew, pew, pew!"
24:39 Alice felt a strong compulsion to keep the conversation going under her tutelage.
24:43 When left to their own devices, the minds of the boys fell in sinister directions.
24:48 "I'm guessing you don't want to tell us your names," she said.
24:52 "I understand that, but can you tell us a little bit about yourselves?
24:54 You're right, we've never met anyone like you before."
24:58 The older boy turned to her with some interest.
25:01 "Oh yeah? What about us is so different?"
25:04 He raised his knife in a mourning, "And remember now, I know what your face looks like when you lie."
25:10 Alice's mind frantically ran through the various corridors of possible conversations.
25:16 Open criticism was out of the question, praise would be scorned,
25:20 remarks on personal appearance would give offence, what on earth could she say?
25:25 "You don't seem to care how we feel," said Emily suddenly.
25:30 The unusual sentence hung in mid-air like an arrow frozen in flight.
25:36 The older boy nodded slowly, obviously considering her words in all their complexity.
25:43 "I bet that's totally new for you. Tell me what it's like out there where you come from."
25:47 He smiled. "It's not a trap, I promise you, I really want to know."
25:51 For some reason, Alice really did not want Emily to answer that question,
25:56 but she herself could not think of a response fast enough.
25:59 Emily said, "Well, what do you want to know?"
26:03 The older boy scowled, "Well, obviously, if I knew what I wanted to know, I wouldn't have to ask it, now would I?"
26:09 Alice laughed shakily.
26:11 "Well, I can tell you, since you want to know, and I'd like to know about your history as well,
26:16 so we can figure out why we are so... different.
26:19 I'm not going to talk for my friend here, but how was I raised?"
26:24 Her brow furrowed. It wasn't a language that she was used to.
26:28 She spoke rapidly to cover the trembling in her voice.
26:32 "Well, my first memory really wasn't anything real, it was just a dream.
26:36 I was walking through the woods, gosh, it just struck me that maybe that's why I still like to walk through the woods.
26:41 And I came across a giant tree, and down in the earth, under the tree, there was this faint glow outlining the roots,
26:47 like when you hold your forearm up to the sun, and the tiny hairs on the outside are lit with light,
26:51 and I began to dig around at the base of the tree.
26:54 It was really hard to get through, but underneath was a cave, I guess you could say,
26:59 and in the middle of the cave was a treasure chest, which makes no sense, I don't remember ever seeing one in real life,
27:04 and I opened the chest, it was kind of rusty, I think..."
27:07 Her story was interrupted by the older boy clapping sarcastically.
27:13 He mimicked her story, conveying her accent quite accurately.
27:17 "And in that treasure chest I found gold and gold, the treasure of my life,
27:21 and I thought I would have to look for that treasure forever, but it turns out that my life was the treasure,
27:26 and I have been shiny gold ever since, and I can't wait for some man to come and dig for my gold under the tree like an octopus!"
27:33 He held up his hands, fingers waving madly.
27:37 Alice had no idea how to respond, she had never been mocked in her life.
27:43 "Come on, man," said the younger boy in an aggrieved voice,
27:47 "don't ask her a question and make fun of her like that, that's kind of rude."
27:51 The older boy rolled his eyes and cracked his knuckles.
27:54 "Eh, tell me your life and I'll tell you a dream, I guess I'll ask the questions."
27:59 He turned to Emily and curled his forefinger towards him, calling her over.
28:03 She hesitated and he picked another stick out of the fire and pointed the fire he handed her.
28:08 "If I wanted to hurt you, you'd be hurt already, now get over here!"
28:13 Alice felt a sudden stab of annoyance when Emily looked towards her as if to ask permission or guidance.
28:21 Alice shrugged tightly, thinking, "What on earth do I know about how to deal with this?"
28:26 Emily got up and walked over to the older boy, then hesitated.
28:32 "C-can you move that?" she said, her voice shaking, pointing at the mound of bloody fur at the boy's feet.
28:39 The boy followed her finger, then shrugged. Using the side of his foot, he shoved the dead gopher away.
28:45 "How do you want me?" asked Emily.
28:50 "You can just kneel down here," said the older boy, drawing a small square in the leaf-scattered ground in front of him with a glowing stick.
28:58 Smoke rose from the scarred earth.
29:02 Emily did as she was told, and, sickened by the scene, Alice looked at her friend,
29:09 who seemed to be kneeling before a swarthy sultan like a slave girl.
29:14 She almost expected Emily to clasp her hands behind her back and lower her head forward.
29:21 Seemingly appeased by his total control, the boy leaned slightly back and rubbed his belly with a strange delicacy.
29:28 "What is your name?"
29:32 Emily gave up her syllables, which seemed horribly intimate to Alice.
29:38 Emily did not ask the boy's name in return, because that would have been to claim equality and provoke an escalation.
29:45 "Well, Emily, were you ever hit as a child?" she blinked.
29:51 "Well, gosh no, of course not. What about being yelled at? Anyone ever raise their voice against you?"
29:58 "Other than tonight, of course."
30:00 "No, that's never happened. Why would it?"
30:04 The older boy paused, then laughed suddenly, turning to his companion.
30:08 "You know, I was just going to say to her that it's me who was asking the questions, like I'm some dumb villain in a fireside story."
30:17 He let loose an exaggeratedly evil giggle.
30:21 The two boys laughed, and the older boy turned back to Emily.
30:26 "Ever done anything stupid?"
30:29 "I don't know what you mean."
30:32 The boy smiled without humour.
30:35 "Well, for instance, me and my buddy here are currently in the process of doing something very, very stupid, and we're getting a lot of trouble for it."
30:45 He gestured at Alice.
30:47 "Your friend or sister or whatever here had her little dream of going through the woods and finding gold under a tree.
30:54 "Well, we will get the opportunity to walk through the woods and be forced to pick out a switch to get it with.
31:01 "Not so big that it breaks a bone, not so small that it doesn't hurt at all.
31:06 "It's a trick, let me tell you.
31:08 "So, have you ever made a stupid mistake, done something stupid?"
31:14 "No, I can't think of anything. I don't think so," murmured Emily in a near-perfect voice of subjugation.
31:25 The younger boy asked incredulously,
31:28 "Sir, you've never been called stupid."
31:31 Emily shook her head.
31:33 The irritation of the two boys appeared to be rising, but Alice could not figure out why.
31:38 The older boy said,
31:40 "Sir, either you've never done anything stupid, or you've done stupid things but never been called stupid, which means that everyone around you is lying to you."
31:48 He leaned forward, his right hand still gripping the cooling stick.
31:53 "Tell me this, Emily, are you perfect?"
32:00 She paused for a moment, and Alice could almost feel the onrushing tide of scalding honesty.
32:07 Emily said simply,
32:10 "I feel perfect as I am."
32:14 The older boy's eyes narrowed.
32:16 "What does that mean?" he murmured.
32:20 Emily did not hesitate. "I don't violate the non-aggression principle. I'm reasonably kind. I stand up where needed. I don't do anything malicious or mean. I wouldn't—"
32:30 Some ancient instinct slammed the door on her remaining words.
32:35 However, the damage by implication was done.
32:39 The older boy leaned over her and murmured,
32:42 "You never punish trespassers, is that it?"
32:46 She refused to answer, staring down.
32:49 She spun his glowing stick in an orange O, then gripped the middle and used the cooler end to lift up her chin.
32:56 "No, I wouldn't. Most conflict is just misunderstanding."
33:00 A sudden tear trickled down from her left eye, and her voice wobbled.
33:04 "We didn't know that this land was owned or claimed. There's no record of it anywhere.
33:09 And there's no need for punishment. In the worst case, maybe ostracism, but I've not heard of that.
33:15 Why would anyone want to do this?"
33:19 She turned to Alice, pleadingly, her voice catching.
33:23 Her innocent and open question seemed to make the boys uneasy for a moment.
33:29 The younger boy said softly, "Come on, we should—"
33:32 "It's too late," said the older boy, out of the corner of his mouth, as if that somehow magically meant the girls could not hear him.
33:40 "It's like what Dad says about telling a story. If you're in and you get lost and it doesn't work, you just have to commit and keep going."
33:47 He turned towards Emily again.
33:50 "You came out here for a new experience, right?" she nodded.
33:56 Quick as a flash, he dropped his fire stick and slapped her hard across her face.
34:00 He said, "Well, that was stupid."
34:04 It was so totally unexpected and unprecedented in the girls' lives that Alice jumped up and leapt forward without even thinking and glared at the older boy.
34:12 She was too terrified to touch him. She said, "Why don't you pick on someone your own size?"
34:18 The younger boy was moving towards the pair, but the older boy shot him a look that stopped him in his tracks.
34:23 The older boy curled his fist and punched Alice full in the stomach.
34:28 She doubled over, but wasn't in a great amount of pain.
34:32 She just knew instinctively that her only chance to avoid escalation was to pretend to be more hurt than she actually was.
34:37 "Oh boy!" giggled the younger boy in nervous and half-terrified excitement.
34:44 The older boy was unabashed.
34:46 "That's about enough. Chitty chat. Go and get some wood, Emily. I'm still hungry."
34:52 The strange and uneasy air of intellectualism that had dominated the first part of the interaction completely vanished.
35:02 The boys ate the second gopher in silence, seeming to forget about the girls, and talked in obscure terms
35:09 – coded words, it seemed – about fairly incomprehensible things, some sport they had dominated an enemy in,
35:16 some girl they had humiliated by asking her to meet them far away and refusing to show up.
35:21 Everything was about primitive status and victory and subjugation.
35:27 They were untroubled by the effects of their actions, had no ability to negotiate except to fool people, and laughed at suffering.
35:36 Their world was divided, without any grace, and people in their stories leapt back and forth from good to bad without any transition, almost like teleporting.
35:47 The girls were frightened and confused. They had no idea what to do with being hurt and ignored,
35:53 since that had never happened in their lives before. What did it mean?
35:57 If they were forgotten and not needed, could they just leave?
36:02 They exchanged glances and found some relief in pretending that they could leave at any time.
36:08 But when it came time to actually move, with many an eye motion from one to the other, their will and courage faltered,
36:15 because the sun had set, and if they were suddenly commanded to stay and night was falling, well,
36:21 their imagination failed them, which was perhaps even more terrifying than having a certain answer as to the path of their captivity.
36:29 Were the boys trying to impress them by reciting stories of dominance?
36:35 Alice took some comfort in that idea, because it meant that the boys needed something from them,
36:40 some kind of respect or admiration or obscure approval.
36:45 This meant that they had at least a tiny bit of leverage in what seemed like an increasingly desperate situation.
36:53 And then, incomprehensibly, they heard the tolling of a distant bell,
37:00 and the boys got up, turned their backs to the girls, and urinated on the fire, putting it out.
37:09 The older boy turned around, tugged at an imaginary ear, said, "Good luck,"
37:14 and then turned and marched in sturdy steps off through the bushes.
37:20 And both boys disappeared.
37:24 Chapter Seven
37:31 It was hard to believe that the boys were actually gone.
37:36 The two girls stared at each other in the growing dark, hardly daring to breathe,
37:41 although Emily's faint honk, honk, could be heard in the slightly labored silence.
37:47 She raised her eyebrow at Alice, wordlessly asking, "Do you think it's safe?"
37:53 Alice shrugged. She tried to listen hard for the footfalls on the leafy ground,
37:58 but her heart was pounding so loudly that it coursed a faintly roaring thud, thud, through her ears,
38:04 realizing that she had never really listened to a forest before.
38:07 She was aware of the trickling of the water, the slow creak of the trees,
38:11 the whispering dragging of the leaves, and her own heart, of course, again and again.
38:18 An oddly legal phrase flew into her mind, probably from listening to her father's business conversations.
38:24 "There has to be a statute of limitations."
38:28 She frowned. Sometimes her own mind could be puzzling.
38:32 Then she realized that the phrase meant that the boys could not be circling back forever.
38:37 If they were lying in wait or hiding at some point, they would have to come out, or be assumed to have gone.
38:44 She almost snapped her fingers in strange relief,
38:47 remembering the endless games of tag and hide-and-go-seek she played as a girl.
38:51 It was just for this kind of situation.
38:56 She vividly remembered hiding in a closet while her friends looked for her.
39:00 It felt like forever, but she was afraid to come out, for fear that they were listening for her, rather than just looking for her.
39:06 Eventually she had fallen asleep, and had been dragged awake by her mother,
39:09 who had been looking for her for over half an hour, demanding that the house give up her location.
39:13 But the house didn't know where she was either, so her mother had been forced to look by hand.
39:18 Her mother had used that odd phrase, which had made Alice giggle.
39:21 "Look by hand."
39:23 She could only think of her mother's hand with an eye in its palm.
39:28 "You can only wait so long. At some point the game is over, and you have to come out."
39:33 Plus it wasn't like they had all the time in the world.
39:35 Their emergency bot lay in pieces, night was rising,
39:38 and apparently they were still trespassers on the lands of crazy and evil people.
39:44 Stepping as delicately as a low-gravity ballerina, Alice glided over to her friend, and whispered in her ear,
39:51 "We have to go."
39:53 Honk, honk.
39:55 "We don't have any light."
39:58 One of the things Alice suddenly loved about her friend was that she did not ask if Alice had a light,
40:02 but just stated an obvious fact.
40:06 Holding Emily's elbow, Alice pointed at the place where the path began to wind down the mountain.
40:11 Slowly, gingerly, they began to climb down, accelerating as they realized how fast the light was fading.
40:20 Alice felt a stab of utterly unexpected irritation, rage almost,
40:25 when her left foot dislodged a few pebbles which went clattering down the mountainside,
40:28 summoning devils in her mind's eye.
40:30 "Sorry," she whispered in agony.
40:34 In the darkness, she saw Emily's hair shake. "It doesn't matter."
40:39 The climb down, which seemed endless, turned into a terrible game of red-light-green-light,
40:45 with the clouds constantly scudding across the face of the faintly illuminating moon.
40:50 The dim electric blue outlines of the natural world came and went, forcing them to stop and wait.
40:57 Alice suddenly understood the draw of moon worship.
41:00 For those who hunted at night or traveled in the dark, the moon was a necessary guard of possible sight.
41:07 As time passed, she realized that she should look upon the start-stop staccato passage of their descent with relief,
41:14 and sliced the time so decisively that she barely noticed its passage.
41:18 It was only the growing tension in her lower back that indicated how long it had been.
41:25 It was only when they got to the bottom of the mountain, which was pretty hard to measure,
41:29 since the slope only gradually went from 45 degrees to close to horizontal,
41:33 that they realized that their frantic stop-and-go descent had been driven by a desperate emotional need
41:39 to get off the mountain, the source of the crime,
41:42 not because there was some plan that could only be achieved on relatively flat ground.
41:46 They were trying to get away, rather than go towards.
41:51 Emily panted, "Sorry, I need to rest."
41:56 Somehow, Alice knew that her friend had considered saying "we need to rest,"
42:00 but probably thought it would be presumptuous.
42:03 They stepped a little off the vague path and found a wide, broken tree stump they could lean against.
42:09 A chill breeze wandered through them, stroking their bone marrow with icicle fingers.
42:15 Emily jumped up, brushing at the backs of her thighs, "Ugh, creepy crawlies!"
42:20 Alice got up too. Nature forbade them rest.
42:24 "It's only pretty if you keep moving," she said.
42:28 Emily burst into tears.
42:31 "Man alive, I've wanted to push their faces into the fire!"
42:36 In the dark, Alice nodded uselessly.
42:39 "It's like a weird calculation. You don't even know what you could do.
42:42 Like, do we hit them, push them off the edge, set fire to them and run, stuff we've never ever thought of, or even..."
42:49 She took a deep breath, putting her hand on her friend's shoulder.
42:53 "Look, whatever we did, we did it right. Although I hate that you got hit,
42:57 I never thought I would have to see that in my life, and I'm so sorry that happened,
43:00 but we are here, and we are okay, and it really could have gone in some totally different direction,
43:05 I don't even know what that means, but I'm pretty sure it could have been worse.
43:09 You did really well, and it's tougher because you're smaller than me, and you couldn't run because of the asthma."
43:15 Emily smiled through her sobs. "It sucks to my ass part."
43:21 Alice laughed shakily. "You remember that too.
43:25 It was kind of like that, wasn't it, except we didn't end up half drowning in endless descriptions of sunlight on leaves."
43:31 Emily took a deep breath.
43:33 "I'm not even that upset, which is weird, I think.
43:38 I sometimes wondered, I don't know if you ever did, what I would do in a dangerous situation,
43:43 and now I know. I kneel, I get hit, I half run, burst into tears and giggle.
43:48 It's like the badness doesn't reach too deep into me, if that makes any sense."
43:53 "Yeah, totally." Alice cocked her head to one side.
43:57 "For me, it was like they were just bald, dangerous apes, not even people as we know them,
44:03 not open to reason, but really weirdly complicated.
44:07 I couldn't figure out what their motives or mood changes were half the time, or more than half the time.
44:11 I don't get that." She waved her hand up and down in the dark.
44:15 "Crazy up and down mood stuff."
44:18 Emily took a deep breath, then coughed with a last fading honk.
44:22 "Yeah, well, we will have plenty of time to talk it over in the next few days.
44:27 Oh, and I imagine your dad is going to get totally involved, and my dad too.
44:32 But we've got to figure out what we're going to do now.
44:35 I ate most of my snacks on the way up, I have some crumbs and leftovers, but water is going to be a thing.
44:40 We can probably follow a stream sound if we can catch it, but, well, how on earth are we going to get home?"
44:47 Her voice caught towards the end of her sentence.
44:51 "Like most things in life, it comes down to the programming.
44:54 What is the general programming for an emergency bot going down?"
44:58 She put three fingers to her wrinkling forehead.
45:01 "I really shouldn't know this stuff, but it's so easy to take it all for granted."
45:05 Emily stared at the ground.
45:07 "I don't know either. I hate to say it, but I wish a boy were here.
45:10 He would probably know. They'd love to figure that stuff out for no reason.
45:13 Well, there's a reason now."
45:17 They stood in silence for a moment.
45:21 A wolf howled at a great distance.
45:26 Alice, half a forstress, after speak.
45:29 "Well, I don't think there's much point going anywhere now.
45:32 We were supposed to tell the emergency bot to get the SkyTaxi 45 minutes before we were done.
45:36 It matters what happens when the emergency bot goes down, but I don't know.
45:42 As I said, it would be nice if it summoned the SkyTaxi in that case,
45:46 but in that case it would already be here."
45:49 The thought hit them both at the same time, and their hands found each other.
45:55 "We have to go back," whispered Emily.
46:01 They gazed up at the frowning forehead of the dark mountain,
46:04 glowering above them like a charcoal smudge of monstrous intimidation.
46:12 After an endless climb, they crept to the clearing beside the chirpy, burbling waterfall.
46:18 Alice felt almost offended that nature cared so little for their upset.
46:23 The SkyTaxi was waiting patiently for them over the broken remnants of the emergency bot,
46:29 and they piled in, brushing their legs and behind so they could finally sit without fear of insects,
46:33 and mostly collapsed on the white pews.
46:39 They barely spoke on the way home, knowing that events were now set in motion
46:43 that would change their lives for the foreseeable future.
46:49 As it turned out, the foreseeable future meant the rest of their natural lives.
46:59 [BLANK_AUDIO]