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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, chapter 2.
00:06 Science fiction was kind of a forgotten genre, but David had still studied it as
00:13 a young man in the same way some young men study Latin or come up with their
00:17 own languages. Science fiction writers had been so spectacularly wrong, with one
00:25 exception, that it had become a thoroughly discredited genre, akin to the
00:29 rantings of "end of the world" prophets who supply a specific date, then lose
00:35 followers and credibility as that date comes and goes. 500 years later, who
00:41 remembers the false prophets? The fear of technology, so rampant in late 20th
00:48 century and early 21st century science fiction, had been cruelly revealed as an
00:53 elaborate psychological projection, a distraction from the real issues that
00:59 faced mankind. The cliches and reuse of metaphor was endless. Mankind invented
01:07 robots or computers designed to serve the species, which ended up dominating
01:12 them and destroying the planet. Mankind fought desperate battles against
01:17 endless waves of these slaves turned into masters, and sometimes they won, and
01:23 sometimes they lost, but the stories proved so spectacularly wrongheaded that
01:30 they were now generally viewed as about as believable as lurid tales of demonic
01:34 possession causing epilepsy. Science fiction was a species of supernatural
01:43 projection, coming from an incredibly primitive mental mindset, dressed up in
01:48 flashing lights and beeps, which helped distract mankind from the true dangers
01:54 that almost took it down. Science fiction served power, not truth or prediction or
02:05 avoidance, as it tragically turned out.
02:10 David was thinking of the science fiction of his youth because he was now
02:15 living it in middle age. One of his butt cheeks had turned numb so he shifted in
02:23 his chair, glancing at the bright orange clock number as it floated above the bed.
02:27 It had now been one hour since the injection and he could begin to see eye
02:36 movements under the paper-thin ancient eyelids. The oldest living human being
02:45 he thought. His own father had lived to be almost 150, but had declined to upload
02:52 his mind, saying that he had lived a full long life and did not feel any need to
02:56 squirt his consciousness into a supplementary flesh suit. This was not an
03:02 uncommon decision, but it was sad of course. David loved his father beyond
03:08 measure, and love was in no shortage in the world, but he sometimes wondered if
03:13 he would have loved his father as much if the old man had clung to life. "Nobody
03:20 stays on a train at the end of the line," his father had murmured, his eyes widening
03:26 as the dark embraced him. He did not believe in an afterlife, either for his
03:33 own body or in a flesh suit. "It would not be me," he had also said, "and there were
03:41 great, significant, deep, and philosophical questions about how well an upload truly
03:47 replicated the original person. Centuries ago people would clone their dogs, but
03:53 notice subtle differences between the original and the copy." "It's a round peg
04:01 in a square hole," his father had murmured. "Maybe if we had done it when I was
04:06 younger it would be less jarring, but I can't imagine at my age waking up in a
04:11 young body. My brain will be old, my limbs will be young. It's a crazy mismatch. I
04:17 wouldn't be the same person. I'm a hundred and forty-five years old. I spent
04:22 the last twenty years being very delicate in my movements. It would be too
04:27 strange to wake up at the strength and flexibility of a gymnast, but the
04:31 terminal caution of an ancient brain. No one gives a jetpack to a half-blind man."
04:39 It was kind of true. David's uncle had uploaded himself to a twenty-year-old
04:45 flesh suit, but still had an old man's habits. He ate gingerly, ran in a stilted,
04:51 staggering manner, pondered too long, refused to turn his head too far, and
04:56 still massaged his knees every time he sat down. It was always recommended that
05:01 people upload before they got too old, but everyone liked to hang on to their
05:06 own body and history for as long as possible. And who do you love as an old
05:15 man in a young body? The kind of procedure David was witnessing now had
05:23 long been abandoned. Most illnesses had been conquered, except old age, which had
05:28 only been extended. It was hard to imagine that some future world would be
05:33 better than the world of the present, so almost no one wanted to send themselves
05:37 through an icy tunnel of time half a millennium forward. There had been much
05:46 debate about waking up the old man in the bed. That was another reason that
05:53 ancient science fiction had been floating around David's mind. The cliché
05:56 of bringing the monster to life. What's the old man in the bed monster? Ah, it was
06:07 all so long ago. What should we think about current morals versus past
06:13 beliefs? During the ancient days of slavery, how should we judge thinkers
06:18 like Aristotle who justified the practice? Can ancient tyrannies be judged
06:23 by modern standards? Can believers in a primitive religion be damned for child
06:28 sacrifice or ritual rape?
06:32 David took a deep breath, noting that the orange numbers over the bed were
06:38 beginning to ripple as the old man's breathing began to increase. Morality is
06:47 a kind of technology, we are always told, and the problem of morality had only
06:51 been solved in a general social sense over the past few hundred years. Could we
06:56 judge a 15th century doctor for failing to prescribe penicillin when it was not
07:00 going to be invented for another 400 years? Asking most people to reinvent
07:06 morality beyond the habits and prejudices of the present is like
07:10 asking them to reinvent physics. A few geniuses might be able to do it, but you
07:16 might as well ask the masses to fly unaided. Is he a monster? Even more
07:27 basically, why are we waking him up? David had opposed the idea. It would be too
07:35 cruel to bring a man back to life so at odds with the present. How could he
07:39 possibly fit in? In the past, he was the king of the world. In the present,
07:45 billions will view him as a mere monster, a relic from a brutal time who helped
07:50 lead the world to near extinction through the cataclysms. And the man in
08:00 the bed had raised the Sun who set fire to the world. It was actually the
08:08 historians who won the day. Most of history is interpretation. We cannot
08:15 directly access the minds of anyone in the past. If we wake him, we can upload
08:19 him and put him back to sleep if we want, and then we can access his mind at our
08:24 leisure and truly understand how much he was responsible, what he understood about
08:28 the morality of his time, what his dreams were, how much he lied, what he truly
08:34 believed. All of this can be unraveled, and more things we haven't even imagined.
08:39 It would be a crime against the humanities to leave such a treasure
08:43 chest of a mind frozen for all time. Every judgment we make about the past is
08:49 based on incomplete information. This is the only brain that survives from that
08:54 time. It is our only chance to understand that world. It's not just about
08:59 understanding the past. It's about ensuring that the past never returns,
09:04 that we never go through the cataclysms again.
09:09 David appreciated the moral sensitivity of the present as much as anyone. He
09:16 lived in a world so perfect that it was inconceivable to people in the past,
09:21 especially the science fiction writers who generally projected their own
09:25 terrible childhoods and totally rational fears of authority onto monsters and
09:30 robots and rogue computers. But moral sensitivity, when pushed to extremes,
09:38 becomes intellectual paralysis. A few textbooks had survived the catastrophes
09:48 of the old world, and they regularly castigated and snarled at the evils of
09:52 historical figures. Should not the leaders of those days be held to the
09:56 same standard they inflicted on others?
10:00 No. The ancient man in the bed had to be woken and examined in order to create a
10:10 clear and unambiguous window into the world that was. The world whose ferocious
10:18 path almost led to the end of humanity and life itself.
10:24 Ten thousand. The figure flew into David's mind like a lost arrow. It took
10:34 him a moment to remember the reference his body helped him out by providing a
10:38 sudden chill. Ten thousand. That was the number of people left alive at the
10:45 greatest depth of the last Ice Age. Yeah, I think it's pretty important to figure
10:53 out the kind of thinking that led to the near decimation of our species. There
10:58 was always a great and rational fear that when people get to safety, they
11:02 forget all the bad habits that led them to danger in the first place. It is true
11:08 that the power vacuum theory has turned out to be utterly false. We tore down
11:13 unjust authority, and no other unjust authority has risen to take its place.
11:18 But that is only because we have fixed not only the childhood of our species,
11:23 but the childhood of us as individuals. It turned out that power arose from
11:31 powerlessness. The lust for control arose from a lack of control, and we have
11:37 prevented that wound from forming in the first place. David leaned forward in his
11:47 chair as the numbers above the bed increased and rippled. The old man half
11:52 snorted, but David held his hand over the ancient face, preventing the breath from
11:58 tripping the alarm. David leaned over the bed, watching the grimaces drift over
12:07 the old face like a sped-up view of clouds over a still lake. The crow's feet
12:13 tangled in on themselves as a sudden squint crushed the eyes. "Welcome back, old
12:22 man. You paid a massive price to live this long. When you wake up to the world
12:29 that is, I believe you will wish you had never gone to sleep, or had slept forever."
12:37 Because we are angry, and we are right to be so. We are angry that you decimated
12:44 our ancestors and came within a hair's breadth of ending us all. We are angry at
12:50 how painful the lesson was to tear ourselves free of the world that you
12:54 made, the world that served you and people like you at our expense. The
13:00 hypocrisy and brutality of the world of self-serving lies inflicted on the
13:04 helpless young and captive populations. Wake up, you bastard. The day of reckoning
13:11 is upon you. The old man's eyes opened.
13:30 Chapter 3. Because she had once been surprised by monsters, she now spent her
13:38 entire life surprising monsters in return. To be frank, there wasn't a whole
13:44 lot for her to do, but what she did, which was important, she did because of the
13:50 boys on the mountain. But that was years in the future. Her mother was a hiker, and
13:59 her father was a grumbler. He so loved her company that he would drag himself
14:03 along on her endless walks, talking about his theories and his love of history. She
14:11 secretly guessed that her father's talking had turned into a kind of
14:14 pleasant background noise for her mother, like crickets or distant thunder. Her
14:24 name was Alice, and she had once had a sister named Ruth. Ruth had fallen from a
14:31 high hay bale, had broken her neck, and died immediately. Her parents had gone
14:37 through a long, dark period of grieving, emerging only when her father's dark
14:43 sense of humor pronounced the family to be totally ruthless. It was a dangerous
14:52 joke, but sometimes a flash of bitter humor in the face of the dark gods of
14:58 brutal circumstances can be more of an exorcism than a provocation. They had
15:08 tried to have another child, but Alice's mother was in her 40s, and although
15:11 lifespans had been extended enormously, no technology had been found to
15:16 rejuvenate a woman's eggs. There were almost no babies available for adoption,
15:22 so they had contented themselves with their single remaining daughter, and
15:25 through a prodigious effort of will, they refrained from overprotecting her. They
15:32 let her wander in the world of her own accord at a relatively early age. Her
15:40 mother loved to walk, but her father loved to move, as in houses, locations,
15:48 entire environments. "The world is a dish of endless experiments. Who knows what we
15:55 will like the best?" her father would say before turning on the Living Globe and
15:59 finger-pinching and chatting with various communities. "Ha ha ha, look here, they're
16:04 trying communal living again in what used to be India. You'd think they'd have
16:08 learned from the last few thousand times, but hope springs eternal in the foolish
16:12 heart. Good luck to them." "Here in New Thailand, they're trying collective
16:18 parenting, which they have no excuse for. It's just a lazy way of saying, 'I don't
16:22 want to kiss more people.'" He turned to his daughter. "What is the problem with
16:26 collective parenting?" Alice already knew the answer. It was amazing how often her
16:32 father forgot previous conversations. "Because, Dad, we always tend to invest
16:37 more in our own children, and if we don't know who our children are or don't care,
16:40 those children tend to be uncared for. And what has been the most bitter and
16:45 hard-won lesson of the last few hundred years?" Alice sighed. "Oh, it's all about
16:50 the children. That's right. Everything." He spun the globe again, creating a minor
16:57 tsunami on the perfect digital ocean. "And here, in one of the few remaining states,
17:03 we have the Platonists, with their polygamy and children who sometimes end
17:07 up marrying each other. They never come here. Their kids have a really tough time
17:11 getting health insurance. Do you know that there's even a place in Malaysia
17:14 with voluntary slavery?" She shook her head, leaning forward with interest. "Finally, a
17:19 new story!" "Oh, yes, pretty wild. Of course, no dispute resolution organization would
17:24 ever enforce slavery. That was always and forever a government program. But if you
17:28 want to voluntarily sign over your liberty, live for another person, and not
17:31 get paid, that's free will. That's still fine." "I really do like the fact that
17:35 people still experiment, despite the fact that we absolutely know what works
17:40 best. And I really do love documenting what's going on. Where should we try next?"
17:44 Her mother scowled, arguing with the coffee maker. "I'm not entirely sure why
17:49 it remains our job to document every idiotic experiment that some height-bound
17:52 tribals get into." "Because," he sighed, "it's all beginning to converge, you know.
17:59 You can see that. You have access to the same globe that I do." He put the
18:04 heels of his hands together, then spread his fingers apart to form a V. It really
18:09 is the end of history, or of wildly disparate cultures, I guess, in the same
18:13 way that the old internet was the end of the Pony Express or the Telegraph or
18:16 whatever they were using before that. I really should know that, and I can't
18:20 remember at the moment. We're all coming together, everyone, all over the world. The
18:25 simplicity and purity and liberty is spreading like someone dumped a can of
18:29 baked beans on the hot pan of the universe. He spread his hands. "Are you
18:35 hungry?" his wife asked mildly. "You never make those kinds of analogies when
18:40 you're full." "I could eat," he replied, a little stingily, his daughter thought.
18:46 "It all sounds like he is making a concession to what she wants, rather than
18:50 just admitting that he is hungry."
18:55 Alice learned with her parents. They were both chatty and usually took pleasure in
19:00 discussing what they were doing. Her father explained how he helped enforce
19:04 the laws and resolve disputes, going over all his contracts, complexities, and
19:08 resolutions. Alice's mother was an expert in child development and spent half her
19:14 days creating presentations on peaceful parenting – the idea that children
19:17 should be raised without punishments – and transmitting them to the few
19:20 societies that still survived by abusing children. When it came to answers, her
19:28 mother was more efficient. Her father kept going back in time for his
19:33 explanations, to the point where everything he tried to get her to
19:35 understand ended up with lightning creating life in a primordial soup. One
19:43 morning, Alice's mother gestured at some geese flying in a V formation past the
19:48 window outside. "What is the same between us and animals? Daddy says we are animals."
19:56 Her mother sighed. She stopped doing her hand gestures in the cloudy brain of the
20:01 cooking bot, turned around, and smiled. "We haven't spent as much time around
20:06 animals as I would have liked, but you know how your father loves to travel, so
20:10 this will take a minute or two, but it's really important so dinner can wait."
20:14 Alice ducked her head slightly. "Where's dad?" Her mother grinned. "Not close enough to
20:20 interrupt and extend this explanation to infinity, if that's what you mean." Alice
20:24 stared at her mother. "I have no idea what you were talking about." She laughed. "Quite
20:30 right. You are a human being, of course, who's had little experience with animals,
20:35 so you might think of a human being as like a super animal, or an animal with a
20:40 bigger brain, or more language, or less hair, or whatever, but that's not really
20:44 the case." Alice frowned. "Animals have brains and language and hair. It's just a
20:51 difference of more or less, not a difference of degree, not of kind. Is
20:55 that what you mean?" She shrugged. "Yeah, I think so." The cooking bot drifted over.
21:00 "Meal instructions are incomplete. Continue." "Delay dinner 30 minutes." "You bet!"
21:06 Alice's dad had set the bot to colloquial, which mildly annoyed everyone
21:10 except him, and the bot of course. Alice's mom sat heavily on the plump gray couch,
21:17 which promptly informed her that her body fat composition had increased 0.6%
21:22 should the cooking bot be informed. Blushing slightly, she muttered a
21:26 comment about her husband trolling her with the furniture settings. "Switch body
21:31 calibration to male pattern baldness," she murmured before turning back to her
21:35 daughter. "Honey..." She paused. "It's strange, like when you have to explain a word you
21:44 know very well but don't know how to define it. Sorry, maybe we should get your
21:49 father." "No!" said Alice. "Perhaps a shade too quickly. You do it, mom." She sighed.
21:55 "Well, I suppose it has to do with all these bots and machines and computers
22:01 that surround us and keep us alive, really. Keep us fed and sheltered and
22:04 healthy. You know, for most of human history, people did all the brute labor
22:09 themselves. You know how we go hiking in these remote areas with nothing but
22:12 trees and mountains and, if your father has his way, half-impossible swamps?" Alice
22:18 nodded. "Well, think of the very olden days before all of this. People, to be
22:25 accurate, usually men. Well, almost always men. I have to include a couple of women
22:29 because I'm sure it was possible, though I can't think of any..." "Mom!" "Yes, sorry."
22:32 "Well, imagine having to clear an acre of that land by hand." Alice's eyes were
22:39 wide. "By hand? Yeah, I know it's a little odd. We don't really use that phrase
22:44 anymore. It's kind of ancient by now. But you need to know where we came from as a
22:48 culture. I mean, okay, you would have a metal blade tied to a long stick called
22:55 an axe, and you would have to chop the trees down with that and find some way
23:01 to dig up all the roots. Honestly, I have no idea how that was done. And then you
23:04 would have to chop up all the wood into long, flat sticks. No idea what they were
23:09 called. And then tie them together into some kind of hut or cabin. Then you would
23:15 have to cut a hole in the roof for the smoke to get out because it would be
23:19 cold, of course, and you would need to have a fire. And then you would have to
23:23 plant all the seeds by hand and find some way to keep all the birds from
23:26 eating your crops and deal with the insects. Oh, it was quite mad. Worse than
23:31 an animal existence in some ways, because at least animals don't have to clear all
23:34 the land of trees and roots that go down like forever. Anyway, it was unbelievably
23:40 hard to get food and shelter, and people worked all day and kept animals. And
23:46 there wasn't a single computer or robot or bot, which meant that most human
23:51 beings had to be like machines. And do you know how your father in particular
23:57 loves taking apart these machines and figuring out how they work and
24:00 imagining that he can program them to make them better? Well, that was kind of
24:04 how it was for most of human history. Almost all of it. People had to be kind
24:11 of taken apart and put back together so they could be more easily owned and
24:14 controlled in the same way that we own and control our machines. But machines
24:18 aren't bothered by being servants and don't want to be free. They don't even
24:21 know what that means. They don't think or dream. But human beings don't like being
24:28 servants or slaves. So there was always this tension between the rulers and the
24:35 citizens. Animals don't enslave each other. For most of human history, most
24:42 people were treated as if they were livestock. And that's how we started. Like
24:48 animals without slaves. And then we had slaves for tens of thousands of years.
24:53 And then we became like the animals again and gave up enslaving each other,
24:57 which is what your dad meant when he said we are animals. Gosh, this is turning
25:02 into quite the history lesson. Does this make any sense to you at all?
25:07 Alice cocked her head, meaning both yes and no. Not the livestock stuff so much. I
25:14 get that it was tough to clear the land, you said. I can't really imagine not
25:19 having any machines. Having to do all of that yourself by hand? Yeah, that's... I
25:24 can't imagine. But what is the difference between a servant and a
25:29 slave? And what were those words? Rulers and what citizens? No idea what that
25:35 means. Alice's mother pursed her lips. "Cookie, I would like a coffee, please."
25:41 The cooking brought word into action, and Alice was vaguely relieved that her
25:45 father was not around. Otherwise her parents would get into a mild
25:48 disagreement about the appropriateness of being polite to machines. Alice's
25:53 mother hated being interrupted, so she waited until Cookie deposited a coffee
25:57 into her hand. With the words "Does your husband want one?" inscribed on the foam,
26:03 she smiled. Don't quote me on this to some expert, but I think a servant is
26:10 someone who works for you and can't quit, but is still paid. A slave is someone
26:18 you force to work for you and don't pay, at least directly. You give him or her a
26:21 place to live, some food and health care if needed, but you don't pay wages. Why
26:26 wouldn't a slave just run away? Alice's mother put down her coffee cup and
26:31 leaned back into the couch, crossing her legs. Ah, well, because in the past there
26:41 was a small group of individuals who controlled really most of the
26:47 guns, the weapons, the law, the courts, prisons, schools, money, and a whole bunch
26:53 of other stuff that I could remember better when I was younger, and this group
26:57 would catch the slaves and return them back to their owners, and in fact they
27:03 would even force the citizens, the people who lived under the rule of this small
27:08 group but weren't direct slaves, to patrol, to walk around making sure there
27:12 weren't any slaves who had escaped, and catch them and return them if they had,
27:16 and no, they weren't paid either. They were just forced to do this by this group
27:20 of individuals. "What the heck?" murmured Alice in wonder. "That's insane." "Yes, it was,
27:28 but what do you mean by that word?" "How big was this group of individuals who
27:32 were in charge?" Her mother shrugged. "Ah, hard to say. Depends on how you counted
27:38 them. There was a very small group in charge of the money. They were really the
27:43 most important. They could just create whatever cash they wanted out of thin
27:47 air." "What? How could that be allowed? Why didn't the DROs put a stop to it?"
27:51 "Oh, there weren't any dispute resolution organizations back then." "So how did
27:57 people resolve their disputes, their disagreements?" Her mother got up, walked
28:02 into the kitchen, and dropped her coffee cup into the waving dishwasher tentacles.
28:07 "Sadly, not very well, which is why everything had to change. The cataclysms."
28:13 murmured Alice. Her mother shot her a sharp look. "Where did you hear that word?"
28:19 Alice shrugged. "Some kid at the playground. A boy, of course," sighed her
28:24 mother. "He was playing a game he called Cataclysm, where--" Her mother held up a
28:29 hand. "That's nothing you play a game about. Seriously, please don't get
28:33 involved in anything like that. And let me know if you see that boy again. I
28:36 really need to talk to his parents." Seeing the look on her daughter's face,
28:39 she added, "I know it's awkward and maybe a little embarrassing, but it's really
28:44 important to not turn anything like that into a game. That was a pretty
28:48 terrible thing that happened in the world, and it actually went on for quite
28:51 a long time. And we will get to that topic at some point in the future, but
28:55 for right now I want you to enjoy the fruits of all that suffering. And here's
28:58 your father!" She finished with obvious relief.
29:04 When Alice was in her early teens, her family moved to be near the mountains. It
29:10 was pretty easy to change locations. Just program the coordinates into the house
29:13 and off you went. She was drawn to raw nature, the mirror image of her mother
29:21 who preferred every convenience that modernity could provide. The first day
29:26 they settled after one of her father's incomprehensibly short 15-minute naps,
29:31 they all went on a family hike. Her father loved to combine personal jet
29:37 packs with the sky trampolines, which looked impossibly dangerous but was
29:40 actually almost perfectly safe. Airbots would create and dissolve sky
29:46 trampolines that you could bounce forward from. You could move incredibly
29:50 fast when you got good at it, and if you stumbled or missed, your jet pack would
29:53 write you immediately and return you to the waiting trampoline. It was a tiring
29:59 way to travel, so they took a few breaks but covered a good distance before
30:02 starting their hike deep in the woods of the base of Mount Cheshire, so named
30:07 because it had a wide gully that looked like a secret smile. "All right, enough
30:12 technology, let's do it old-school," grunted her sweaty father. The air was
30:19 sweet. The thinning pine trees swayed overhead, and other than the faint
30:25 contrails of stratospheric sky trampolines, the air above was perfectly
30:30 clear. Alice's mother had a bug bot floating around her. Alice and her father
30:36 declined, since his argument was that an immune system needed as much exercise as
30:40 the heart and legs. It was a bit of a self-serving argument, because for some
30:45 reason the bugs always swarmed his wife anyway. Alice suddenly wanted to ask her
30:51 father how many people were left in the world. The word popped into her mind,
30:56 "unbidden," "left." It was a strange word to think of, because her life and the lives
31:02 of everyone she knew were perfectly pleasant and free of trauma, but she
31:07 couldn't help but think of everyone's reaction to the word "cataclysms." There
31:13 was something faintly ominous in the "s" at the end of the word, a time so
31:19 terrible that it had to be plural. One cataclysm couldn't capture it all. The
31:28 family paused at a lookout, panting. They nodded politely towards a small cluster
31:35 of floating VR eyes, most of which nodded back. No mouths or ears appeared, so
31:41 there wasn't really anything to say. Probably some old people who couldn't
31:45 make the climb directly but liked the view. The pine trees stretched as far as
31:52 the eye could see, like a creaking sea of ragged green teepees. Occasional threads
31:58 of smoke rose from the fires of campers. Her father nodded towards the setting
32:06 sun. There used to be lines cut all through the forest, everywhere, so they
32:11 could drive ground cars. It's hard to imagine why anyone would want to carve up all
32:15 this beauty, but I guess that's all they had at the time. These cars were powered
32:20 by dinosaur juice hundreds of millions of years old, like the ancient monsters
32:24 had come back to life, carrying people from place to place, the oldest horses in
32:28 the known universe. The setting sun was drawing out her father's poetic side, but
32:34 Alice didn't mind. There was a distant flare in the deepening blue sky as a
32:42 jetpack saved a stumbling sky jumper. Alice tried not to be annoyed that her
32:48 father had a habit of shading his eyes when examining the horizon, even when the
32:52 light was failing. "I wouldn't give up anything that we have achieved," he
33:00 murmured, "and it would be crazy to even consider it because of the sacrifices. We
33:06 lost so much to be where we are. And maybe we don't have music that is quite
33:12 as good, but we don't have war. And there's almost no crime, no violence. We
33:17 found the cure for that, of course, but the cost." The shadows of the pine trees
33:24 lengthened as the sun went down. The city lights in the crescent of the moon
33:29 glowed faintly. They would have traveled there years ago, or to the sea cities, but
33:34 Alice was scared of deep water, and her mother hated deep space. "What I like the
33:41 most these days," said her mother, "is that there's nothing that is about to end.
33:47 When I read or watch about the old days before," she shivered, "there was always a
33:53 sense that everyone was caught in this giant machinery that was slowly pulling
33:59 everything apart. I can't imagine what it would be like to wake up every day and
34:03 read the news, the latest events, the latest dictates, more restrictions, more
34:08 craziness, more inflation, price changes, knowing that things were just going so
34:14 out of control, that there was really nothing to be done except trying get
34:17 away or wait it out, which thank heaven some people did." Her mother trailed off,
34:24 as parents generally do when the topics get most interesting. They watched for a
34:33 moment in silence as the landscape darkened further. The sunset lit the tops
34:39 of the pine trees, turning them into glowing endless orange cones. Two by two,
34:46 the VRIs winked out. A mouth with a bristly white mustache appeared for a
34:53 moment, and an ancient voice reminded them to watch their step as they walked
34:57 down. Then that vanished as well. As the half Sun appeared to be eaten by the
35:04 distant jagged teeth of the pine trees, a distant festival of sky dancing sketched
35:10 glowing trails like lazy fireworks under the brightening stars. Alice's father
35:18 gestured at the landscape before them, perhaps at the entire world, at least
35:23 that's what it seemed. "Everything we have, we inherited from suffering. The
35:33 cataclysms were the worst thing in human history when we were almost done." He
35:41 turned to Alice, two slivers of sunset embedded on the right side of his pale
35:46 blue eyes. "And when we finally learned that it all starts with you, we got all
35:55 of this beauty and peace." Alice shivered slightly and the Sun disappeared.