Undermind: Nine Stories

by Edward M Wolfe

  Crimes against people that aren’t severe enough to warrant death result in exile to a desert island populated by like-minded people who have forsaken civility, or those who voluntarily chose exile over a free living center.

  When they are taken to the island, they bring nothing but the clothes they are wearing. They are given a flintstone and a roll of twine. They can never return - no matter how penitent they are or how much they say they’ve changed, or found God, or whatever.

  It’s hard to argue with their reasoning about how badly we did overall on the subject of crime and criminals. The Guardians often use parables or similes or whatever you call them, because they say we’re obviously too stupid to understand simple things that other races less evolved than our own have no problem grasping. Like sentencing murderers to prison and then letting them go. The Prime Guardian, who is like a president or something asked, “If a deadly snake slithering around in a preschool bit and killed a child, would you box it up for a month as punishment, and then release it to prey upon the children once again?”

  Obviously we wouldn’t. We’d protect our children from known dangers. Why then, they asked, do you box up your murderous psychopaths and other predators for a time, and then release them once again to prey upon the innocent?

  What can we possibly answer – that we require child predators to voluntarily report their presence to the local authorities whenever they move so we’ll know who to suspect when a child disappears? Sometimes I think we are as stupid as the Guardians say we are.

  They have only shown us a small amount of their technology, and that little bit makes our most advanced developments look like Legos. But I do think we should get some credit for how far we got on our own with technology in just a short time. A hundred years ago, many people didn’t even have electricity. And just before the Guardians came, we were all walking around with miniature computers that also functioned as telecommunication devices. That’s something, isn’t it?

  In the official talks between heads of various nations and the Guardians shortly after they arrived here, leaders of developed countries tried pointing out our technological prowess in response to the Guardians saying that we were uncivilized. It’s not like we were cavemen before they got here.

  The politicians admitted that there was work that needed to be done in many areas, but, they argued; look at how well we’re doing on the positive side of things. Every day billions of people have good food and shelter; we have hot and cold water in safe and comfortable homes.

  Most people have access to education, they pointed out, and the majority of people are law-abiding citizens who have recourse through legal systems where they can safely confront those who are not law-abiding, and justice is obtained. Legal representation is provided for them if they can’t afford their own. We have gone to the moon and back, and sent probes to nearby planets, and have the technology to send high-definition images through space hundreds of thousands of miles back to earth.

  Wireless technology has come so far, they argued, the entire world is interconnected and in communication and sharing knowledge. In the field of medicine, we’ve made many advances in just the last ten years and are close to miraculous breakthroughs.

  The Guardians listened patiently as the chief earth representative tried to build a case for earth sovereignty. But the Guardians, even with their unnatural patience had heard all that they could stand before the Secretary General of the U.N. had even finished reading the first page of his prepared speech.

  “Enough!” spat the Prime Guardian. “When the food you eat has any nutrition remaining, it is incidental and rarely by design. The water you drink is either extracted from your own waste products, or when fresh, is deliberately poisoned in treatment facilities. The education you provide is ridiculously lacking in substance and efficiency. After twelve years of what you call education, many of your people cannot even write in their own language.”

  “And why you spend twelve years “teaching” the same subject matter over and over while omitting anything useful is a mystery even we can’t figure out. And it’s a criminal waste of time. Your system of “justice” is a façade and is not concerned with justice at all. Your space travel is akin to a child first learning to walk and then progressing to the point where he can jump. Your computerized technology is the only arena in which you’ve shown any promise, but this accomplishment was only possible due to greed on one hand, and the desire to be continuously entertained on the other.”

  “Nearly everything you do is for profit and amusement. All of your accomplishments mean nothing in the face of all that you have failed at. How well is a family when the father is blind to one child randomly stabbing the other children while yet another child is starving to death, and another is being drowned by its mother, and another is eating itself to death while yet another one purposely poisons itself with drugs? But you point to the roof of the house and say, ‘But look at our satellite dish – we’re getting great reception on our television.’”

  “Enough. You’ve tried and failed. Being that we are responsible for you, we must take responsibility for your failure and correct your ways. If a father teaches his children how to survive and prosper and then takes his leave, then returns much later to find that his children have become dangerously incompetent adults in need of restraint, feeding, education and supervision, does he allow them to justify how and why they should be allowed to continue on a path of self-destruction?”

  At that point, the Talks became the Listening. Representatives from the Earth were no longer allowed to give any input. The Guardians haven’t explained yet how they’re responsible for us. So I don’t know what they meant by that, but they’re going to be re-opening the colleges soon and that’s when they say we’ll learn everything we need to know. We’ll learn our true history, our relationship to the Guardians, real science and physics, biology and nutrition, and we’ll even be learning their language, and, they say, our own language. Education will be mandatory for just about everyone and it will take less than one year.

  They said we had progressed, “only in the physical.” When something was profitable, we financed, researched, developed, manufactured, marketed and sold it until everyone had two. We would move the earth to make a dollar. But if something was beneficial for improving the state of mankind, it would go largely unknown because there is no profit in improving a mind or a soul. The Prime Guardian said we were so proud of our technology, but what of our philosophy and religion? When was the last advancement made in either of those fields? They said great teachers had tried to give us some basic hints about how to make minor but important improvements to ourselves several times in our history but we never took to heart the things they said. Instead we deliberately distorted their teachings and used them to justify wars and enslavement, and we even figured out ways to exploit their teachings to make a profit, of course.

  They said our society is like our schools. We worship all the wrong people. If a student in a school is intelligent and excels at intellectual accomplishments, he is lucky to make it through the day without being assaulted. We’re proud of our technology, but they said we treat the very people who invent it like outcasts. But, they pointed out, if another student runs quickly with a ball and frequently accomplishes a meaningless task like evading opposition to cross a white line while carrying a ball or depositing a ball through an elevated metal hoop, we lift him up on a pedestal and offer him wealth and adoration. Inventors are outcast. Athletes are heroes.

  Likewise, we ignore the greatest minds in the world who could have led us to becoming better people. In fact, many times, we kill them and then make a great show of our grief over losing them while never taking to heart the things they said or wrote which could have improved us all.

  They acknowledge that they can’t change our minds or our values, but they can and will change our systems and the information we will at least have exposure to. What we do with it, they say is up to us, more or less. We’re still not fre
e, and we still have rules, but they say we’ll get our freedoms back later, after we’ve been properly educated. During the time of education, we have very limited forms of entertainment. Movies, television and professional sports are temporarily suspended.

  Morally, they say we have the intelligence to do the right things, but that we never do because we always put greed and personal gain first. Actually, they say that a very small percentage of the population is truly abhorrent, but all the rest of us are culpable for going along with evil every step of the way.

  They gave us Hitler and the Nazis as an example for what all of us are like. Of course we disagreed. All sane people recognize the Nazis as being evil and we took offense at being told we were no better than them. But once again, they proved it. “How is it,” they asked, “that one man, no more able than any other, but being more narcissistic, greedy and with an insatiable appetite for power over others is able to control and subjugate millions of free people who do not like him and do not wish to be under his power?”

  “One such man can kill millions of his fellow citizens and no one can stop him? Your Hitler was not the first to do this and he was not the last, nor even the worst. What kind of people tolerate genocide of their brethren? The only one among you willing to dispose of an evil dictator is the evil dictator in waiting – the one who wishes to take his place and wield his power himself. No others.”

  It is kinda crazy if you think about it – that one person could dominate millions of people. But they definitely put an end to dictatorships. In fact, all of the political leaders around the world were removed from office. They say we’ll be allowed to elect delegates later so we can have a semblance of self-rule, but the delegates will only have the authority to make decisions regarding non-essential matters. I can’t wait to see how the elections are going to work because the only thing they’ve told us so far is that anyone wishing to hold office will be disqualified from being a candidate based on his desire to hold office.

  One thing I’m surprised they haven’t changed much is religion. Aside from forbidding Scientology and Islam as being particularly egregious, they’ve pretty much left religion alone. They warned that there would be no tolerance of violent crimes committed in the belief that they are required by scriptures or religious duty. They don’t hide their derision, but so far they let people continue to worship however they please with the exception that there shall be no religious order or scripture that violates natural law or incites such violation. Natural law is what they call the obvious right and wrong that they claim every child knows. Kinda like the Ten Commandments. Basic rules like not killing people or stealing. You can almost see how pathetic we must look to them if you think about it from their perspective – we’ve had the basic rules of civility for thousands of years and still hadn’t mastered them.

  It’s been five years since they came and changed everything. And because they changed so much of how we lived before, people have changed a lot too.

  All of the improvements they’ve introduced have kind of snowballed. It’s like the opposite of a dwindling spiral, but I don’t know what you’d call such a thing. An ascending spiral? Without crime, people feel more at ease now. It’s nearly 100 percent safe to go outside. There’s no fear – at least no fear of being raped, robbed, beaten, or killed. Some people fear the sickness they felt during the riot, but I don’t think anyone will try that again. With no crime and with people feeling more at ease, they’re nicer to each other and their minds are freed up to think about positive things.

  No one goes hungry any more, and with everyone working, people feel a sense of contribution to the new world we’re living in. The Guardians say, whether we know it or not, accomplishment is the key to happiness and self-esteem. Think of the difference between being a homeless bum, sitting in front of a convenience store, begging people for money and cashing a welfare check once a month, or being a part of making your town a better place because you helped paint the buildings or planted the fruit trees or landscaped the parks, or helped eradicate the pollution, or whatever. The squalor is gone, and you were part of the improvement project. I’ve never been homeless, but I can see how that might change a person.

  So now we’re all healthy, safe, living in beautiful cities and are soon to be extremely well educated like never before. Everyone has health care, a job, transportation of some form or another. The air is clean, the water has never tasted better – and that’s right out of the tap. Fish and wildlife are flourishing. People are happier and the new children seem like a completely different breed.

  The Guardians insist they have done no genetic modifications to account for the changes in children who were born after their arrival. They say that happy, healthy children are normal – we’re just not used to it. Now that people actually have to talk to their kids and develop relationships with them, maybe it’s true that they haven’t had their DNA altered. Apparently they just needed parents to be parents and not leave them to be raised by the TV, other messed up kids at school, and/or strangers at daycare while they fought their way up the corporate ladder or broke their backs every day to increase the wealth of billionaires.

  Happy people living in a beautiful world. Who could complain, right? I suspect that when we get TV and sports back, they won’t be as popular as they were before. Although our formal education hasn’t started yet, we’ve been given informal lessons via radio, and people are actually tuning in. At first, it was only out of curiosity, but then people started talking about the lessons with their families and friends and neighbors. And nothing they’re teaching us is any kind of wacked-out alien philosophy either. It’s mainly things we either already knew, or should have known, but we just didn’t pay attention to what was important.

  Now that people are actually having conversations that the Guardians say are more than just mindless babble for the sake of babbling and avoiding silence, it seems like people are becoming smarter in a way. They’re thinking about who they are and why they do what they do, and apparently they’re becoming better people. The P.G. said we’re taking baby steps toward real progress and advancement, but unlike our advances in technology and greedy exploitation of everything on earth - this is something we can truly be proud of.

  With the world rapidly transforming into a kind of utopia that few people ever thought would be possible, there’s still a sad undercurrent running through the invisible lines that connect us all. We’re not morose exactly, but every once in a while, you feel it briefly, or you see it on someone’s face when they’re deep in thought. No one really talks about it though. Despite the advanced aliens who are the smartest people on the planet telling us that we should be proud of ourselves, we’re still not entirely happy.

  There’s not really any problems left to be fixed that aren’t already well underway – not even in ourselves. But it’s our past that we can’t escape. Now that we are living examples of how wonderful life is and always could have been, we can’t understand how and why we were so messed up before. It didn’t even require the superior intelligence of the Guardians to implement all of the solutions that they did. As they pointed out, a child could have thought of them. But a child didn’t nor did an adult. Not anyone we ever listened to anyway.

  And that’s what I think makes us sad at times. We could have changed our world at any time with no more intelligence than we already had. But we didn’t. We had to be ordered to do all of the things that needed to be done. We were like a bunch of drug-addicts in need of intervention. Like mentally-ill people who hadn’t been taking our meds. We became so universally insane, that insanity became the new normal.

  It didn’t have to be that way, and no matter how much we claim that we did the best we could, we all know we could have done better. A lot better. All along, we were capable of turning our beautiful planet into an incredible place to live, and loving ourselves and our families and our neighbors and taking our minds to new heights that could’ve gone far beyond the mundane levels we were fixated on.r />
  But we were always focused on our personal desires. We wanted to have whatever we wanted, and we wanted it now. So we all ran around in mindless, meaningless circles, as if we were in a cotton-candy eating contest where the grand prize was getting kicked in the face. We were oblivious to everything around us that no truly sane person would ever tolerate. And we needed someone else to tell us to stop it.

  For the most part, people are happy with the way everything is changed; they’re just not happy about how it was done. I’ve heard that an underground resistance is forming to take back our freedom. I don’t think it’s at all possible to fight the Guardians, and I’m fairly sure that any effort to do so is doomed to failure. But I understand the reasoning for a rebel movement.

  No one objects now to the way things are. We just want to prove that we can continue doing well on our own, without supervision. We need to prove to them and to ourselves that we’re a better people now. That’s something that might even be worth fighting for, even if we don’t have a chance of winning.

  ###

  The Storyteller

  The storyteller awoke before dawn. He opened his eyes and saw just a little less black than when he was looking at the back of his eyelids before he had opened them. Off in the distance was the fire. He saw the orange glow peripherally and did not turn to look at it directly. It occurred to him that it would be good to look over there and confirm that the firekeeper was still awake, but he wanted to utilize the darkness and the not-quite-awake state of mind that he awoke in.

  He used this time to practice the art of perception. What could he sense right now without his eyes? He smelled the musty, tangy odor of the animal skin he used as a blanket. Of course he could smell the fire. It almost went unnoticed because it was always there and it was usually only noticeable upon re-entry from outside. But he could smell it now because he was focusing his mind on everything he could possibly smell.