A Better World (originally written 2016)
“If you were a god, what kind of world would you make?”
It wasn't that the question itself was odd; it was only odd in the good way, like all the other small-talk questions she'd ask us to start conversation. She did that once in a while, usually when she was too tired or too busy to keep us entertained with songs and stories. In fact, that actually would've been a fun one to answer – probably starting with some joke answer like “exactly the same but saw-lute music never existed” or “made entirely of beef jerky” before going into thinking about what everyone's dream worlds would be like.
No, it was the way she said it... I'd never heard that tone of voice coming from her before. It wasn't merely that she was trying to keep herself relatively quiet for the benefit of those sleeping in the cabins below, out of the light of the full moon. It didn't have that excited anticipation that clung to her every word. It didn't have that constant glow of life and joy so intense that I, to be honest, found it annoying at the time (not that I didn't feel guilty about that). It didn't have that... curiosity. For the first time, I felt like she's asked a question she doesn't want an answer to.
“Is... Is something wrong?” I asked. I didn't expect a straight answer. I really didn't expect the answer she gave me; she closed her eyes for a moment, took my hand, and the airship disappeared from around us. In the blink of an eye, I was standing in a desert of gray rock and sand. The sun shone above, but the sky was still black; an enormous orb, blue and white, hung in the air, far larger than the sun, far larger than anything we could see.
“You're not having a seizure or dream, and you won't need to breathe here. Just tell me... What do you think of it?” That anticipation was back in her voice; the joy was not.
“It's...” The whole situation is too bizarre to process, really, but I do my best and look up. I assume she's asking about the orb; looking closer, I see bits of green and brown there as well, arranged in... the shape of a globe... Now certain that this was a dream, I figured I might as well run with it. I gazed upward again, looking at the strange orb I called home. “It's beautiful.”
“Yeah, but what would you change about it if you could? If you could make it anything you wanted, if you could make a second sun or turn ours green, if you could smash it all with a meteor and start anew... what sorts of ideas do you have?”
I shrugged, and only when my shoulders failed to come back down in time did I notice how oddly floaty I felt – differently from most dreams. “I dunno... What do you mean? I guess if I could make the air smell like mint and cinnamon—”
“You'd end up feeling exactly the same, and mint and cinnamon would no longer be used as seasonings because they just taste like air. All I'd be doing is stealing those flavors from you.” Something about that wording bothered me, but I ignored it. “But— I don't mean to discourage you, I just... Go ahead.”
“Well... Maybe I'd get rid of the Ochre Pox? It doesn't seem like that's doing anyone any favors-” “You'd be surprised. When you guys get around to curing it, it'll give you a love of the scientific method that you're going to be very, very thankful for in about ten... dammit, what's the word. Eons? Seconds? I'm pretty sure it's not furlongs this time around.” She sighed. “Look. Forget the specifics, forget where you'd stick the volcano that looks just like your face or whatever. Just... more generally. What would you change?”
I paused for a moment, and considered an answer. “Well... I mean, after ending suffering and conflict, I'd probably j—”
We were somewhere else. My surroundings made no sense to me; an endless sea of white orbs, an inversion of the blackened starry sunlit sky of the lunar surface. I was weightless, and... well, I'm sure I could have moved, but I didn't want to. I was... comfortable. Every sore joint now slid like it had been greased, every cell in my body felt healthier... and then her voice pierced the serenity.
“Do you think this is as pretty?” “I... I don't know. What is this place?”
She looked away from me, and floated toward a particular orb, about ten feet away. “This? This is a perfect world. A world of no struggling, no pointless feuding, no turmoil. No desperation, nor the depths of inspiration or heroism that are only reached with the help of that desperation. No starvation, so nobody needs to concern themselves with farming, or even knowing how to. Or eating. Or sensing. This is a world that has been allowed enough peace to reach the final peaks of technological achievement, at which point no more were possible. The coefficient of friction, the gravity, the speed of light... everything carefully calculated and calibrated in the name of one goal. Maximizing the happiness in this universe.” Having retrieved the orb, she held it in front of me. “Each of these is a city of minds, extracted and patterned into an extremely complex pattern of metal and electricity. All compressed into one. All feeling near-infinite joy, all freed from the burdens of our bodies. Sounds great, doesn't it?”
She paused.
“They're not even dreaming in there.”
“What do you—”
“They're not talking. They're not pondering. They're not playing, dancing, learning, running, hunting, eating... They're not falling in love and eloping from cruel parents, because there's no cruelty and there's no childbirth and everyone's already in love with everyone else. They're not setting out on adventures to explore the unknown, because everything's known. There are no robberies to thwart, no mad kings to overthrow, no disasters to save anyone from. No child will ever grow up here. Nobody will pass away and be a remembered inspiration...”
She scowled. “In some of these worlds, they just delete the oldest minds once in a while. Their families don't even acknowledge it – either the system trims those out, or they're too happy to care. If there's an accident, the system just recreates whatever was destroyed.” She grabbed another of the orbs in her other hand, and held her hands out to her sides. “If we weren't here, this world wouldn't even have movement or heat. As far as I'm concerned...”
She clenched the orbs tightly, and cracks started to form on their surfaces.
“This is a dead world.”
She swung her arms forward, and as the orbs touched, I found myself hovering over a terrible place. The fumes of burning rubber and gunpowder stung my nostrils; I was too high up to see anyone distinctly, but it seemed like a writhing pool of horned humanoids, grasping and mauling at each other, occasionally giving way to one of several spiked ground-crawling machines parting the seas before them as they drove through the crowds. Rivers of molten metal flowed, lined with primitive stone molds to channel it off and make swords and armor from it. There were no corpses – they seemed to burst into an ooze, then leach away to the edges and form into new people. I assume her direct intervention is the only reason I could stomach the sight of it.
“And this is, undeniably, a living one. Just look at all that activity... all those social connections being formed and immediately giving way to betrayal, all the depraved, instinctual clawing for scraps of food, all the sadism of the powerful and the rage of the weak that motivates them to rise up against their oppressors. They'd switch places about four times a day – not that I'm going to let this place exist for that long. I do enjoy watching you mortals do things together, even the occasional war, but...” A mountain-sized red diamond appeared in the sky before driving its spike into the ocean of the damned, and began to pulsate threateningly before she wordlessly took my hand.
We were in the airship again; she grabbed my hand tighter and looked straight into my eyes for only a moment before looking away. “...I guess what I'm asking is, where would you draw the line? Making your world too happy would be the same as killing it... You'd allow a few failures, a few mistakes, a few people being weaker or pettier than they should be. You'd make a world where bad things happen to good people sometimes. You'd let a lot of people die now if it means everyone else will be able to truly live later... Right?” Once again, she looked into my eyes only briefly before rapidly turning her head away.
I didn't even get a chance to answer before I awoke in my bed.