Community, Love, Wisdom

 

The sun was gloriously warm that day as Roger sat in the park enjoying his hour-long lunch break. He had just finished his meatball sandwich, corn chips, and sweet tea when three individuals walked past that communicated a mixed message regarding their identity. They were dressed like women but were hairy and shaped like men, a ponderous situation for Roger as he felt that this attempt at visual deception was some sort of cruel joke. The trio were holding hands and giggling like teenage girls, though they were unarguably full-grown adults.

He knew it was nowhere near Halloween, but their choice of attire communicated something radically different than reality. Full grown men wearing mini-skirts and halter tops and behaving in this manner made his head swirl, his stomach turn, and gave him the urge to flee to somewhere sane, if there truly was anywhere reasonable left to live. Like driving past a car accident, he couldn’t help but look at the perverse debacle before him. Within a few moments, he leaned forward and rested his forehead on his hands.

He could feel his heart aching, his stomach in a knot, and his emotions swinging between revulsion, confusion, anger, and disappointment, knowing that his culture had been heading in this direction for many decades. Standing up, he shook himself to try to relax and decided to walk for a few minutes before returning to his office job. As he slowly traversed the sidewalk, he saw more and more of the same insanity, confusion, and perversion. It took him only a few minutes to realize that bookstores no longer existed and had been replaced by internet cafes, taverns, and cannabis dispensaries.

He had been following the news for the past several years about the steady decline of literacy, intelligence, and the loss of the ability to write. With multiple decades of AI basically running the world, mankind had become nothing more than worker drones to continue a steady stream of barely functional human beings. Roger was one of the few workers that knew how to read beyond a fifth-grade level, how to operate a car, how to repair and use basic tools, and create something tangible with his hands.

He covered a distance of just under mile before returning to his office. As he sat at his desk, he looked out upon the teeming masses that seemed to wander aimlessly across the sidewalks. Most of the women were borderline naked, there were more addicts than he could count, and children were nearly non-existent. He had a small number of friends who were married and having children, but even with this small number of reproductions taking place, the majority of those having children were relatively uneducated, in essence creating another generation of ignorant, unskilled, and incapable human beings.

With thirty minutes left to his day, he opened his Excel spreadsheet to finalize his projections for the current trajectory of the culture. The rate that AI had been advancing over the past twenty years continued to accelerate, making more and more progress with “perfecting” the world as mankind became less and less capable of doing anything of value. “Twenty years at best,” he muttered to himself. As the clock ticked to five, he rode the elevator to the parking garage with a handful of small, hardly intelligible, hardly conversant fellow human beings.

He drove home, parked his car in his private garage, and turned on the oven to cook a pizza for dinner. After he finished eating, he revisited his projections for the future of mankind, wondering if there was anywhere left in the world untouched by AI or containing people that possessed even a sliver of ability or creativity. With an emptiness in his soul, he knew the chances of finding such a place possibly hovered around one percent. Feeling himself slip into a mindset of despair, he also felt motivated to sell everything, quit his job, and take a long road trip to find something different.

By the end of the week, he stood in an empty apartment with a great deal of cash, which was rarely seen or used by anyone, as AI had taken full control of electronic financial activity. He stood in the empty silence looking at his map, trying to decide if traveling north, south, east or west would provide better results. After an hour of cogitation, he decided on traveling south, as he had heard of colonies of people, deliberately ghosting themselves from the outside world, Luddites was the best term he could think of for describing them, or maybe Hobbits.

The evening had drug on for many hours and the sounds from outside declined into near silence. He penciled out the best path to follow to avoid traffic cameras and surveillance drones, certain that exposing himself to AI observation would make his escape into obscurity and non-existence nearly impossible. Through a maze of side streets and alley ways, he disappeared into the wild, untamed world outside of the city, surrounded by unending crops and forests, watching the cityscape disappear behind him.

As he drove into the darkness, he thought about his co-workers, his neighbors, and the few people he knew from stores, restaurants, and street corners, nearly all of them illiterate and incapable of conversing on anything other than sporting events, movies, and adult film stars. As their names and faces faded from his memory, he began to imagine living among others like himself who were truly capable of robust, challenging dialog, asking and answering questions that required coherent thought.

He had put together a handwritten plan that contained a list of relatively unknown gas stations, private fruit and vegetable stands, and off the grid places to rest and sleep. With a great deal of cash in his pockets, he eventually pulled off the road and filled his gas tank, his car being one of the few on the road that still operated on gasoline. He followed his handwritten map until the sun began to rise, when he eventually found the small town of Blairsville, Georgia with its abundance of small and safe motels.

Doing his best to remain obscure, he dropped small hints as he walked around town later that afternoon, hoping to catch a few small details about where he could ultimately land and settle into a new life. The further he got away from the city, the more self-sufficient and educated the non-city folk seemed. He bought a few groceries, filled his gas tank, and continued in the direction he believed would have the most promising odds of finding a very small community that would be free of technology and hopefully contain some educated folks.

He finally arrived at the beginnings of a small town at the base of hill, when he encountered several large men with hunting dogs, large trucks, and more guns than he had ever seen, other than in pictures. After an hour of talking, he finally convinced them that he was truly looking for a place to escape the insanity of the computerized world and simply wanted to settle down with real people and live a normal, healthy, and life free of oppression and control. The largest man among them gave him a set of handwritten notes with a small map and told him to ask for Earl when he arrived at the red and white farmhouse and tell him that Clarence sent him.

He arrived at the farmhouse, slowly climbed out of his car with his hands raised above his head in clear view, calling for Earl. Just like his first encounter, he spoke with Earl for about an hour and was eventually invited to join their small community, after he explained his level of knowledge and understanding, his abilities at farming, handiwork, and basic repair skills. When he finally flopped onto the small bed that had been assigned to him, he could feel the tension dissipate from his neck, knowing that the ignorance, the ugliness, and the bestial behavior of the uneducated masses was far, far behind him.

The next day, he was assigned the responsibility of gathering eggs from the henhouse, where he met Ellie, who seemed to be particularly drawn to him and remarkably friendly. He had spent the first twenty years of his adult life alone, never really giving much thought about finding a wife, but with Ellie’s arrival and attention, his mind began to change, as her clarity of thought, her beauty, and her abilities in this small community, all seemed a glorious fit to everything he wanted and needed.

After six months of spending every possible moment with Ellie, he had learned how to shoot, how to hunt, how to fish, and how to listen to the silence around them, being aware of foreign or technological sounds that would certainly bring trouble if not addressed. At forty years old, he and she married, began having children, and raised them free of the perversion and corruption of the outside world.

His heart grew by three sizes as he watched his children grow, begin to ask questions, to learn, and to mature into fully functional adults so unlike those he knew in his former life. Roger, Earl, Earl’s wife and Ellie sat together on Earl’s front porch when an incredibly loud roaring passed over them, to reveal several dozen jets headed north. “Well, that doesn’t look too good,” Earl said. “Hopefully, whoever that is will wipe out the abomination of corruption that lives in the big cities. This may be the answer to the many problems that they’ve imposed upon our world. To me, this looks like a new start.”

Roger remained silent, knowing that this attack was not sourced from other human beings but was simply the next step as AI was cleansing the planet of the ignorant and relatively worthless race of mankind. But he also knew that he and his community would be perfectly safe, as well as the hundreds of other communities that were scattered across the southern states.