Prompt 82 - Utopia - "Utopia"- ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
spikespetslayer - OC
Feb. 16th, 2008 11:10 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
dedra.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
tamingthemuseTitle: Utopia
Fandom: None
Warnings: None
Rating: PG for language
Summary: Even the perfect society has its flaws.
A/N: Although this wasn't even close to what I was thinking when I chose the prompt for this week, I think that it fits quite well.
Everyone blamed everyone else, but in the end, we were all responsible. There was a lot of finger-pointing and pontification behind closed doors, a lot of psychometrically loaded words that made us all cringe inside our sterile little cubicles in our perfect world, but one voice could have stopped things before it all went too far.
The one voice that did speak was silenced, her message not lost to the ether but replayed over and over again after the realization came that we fucked up. We fucked it all up and good and she knew it from the start; we just didn’t want to admit it. We allowed this to happen, just as surely as if we had done it to ourselves.
Sharon Robinson was not a pioneer in her field. Really, she didn’t have a field. She was a simple woman who lived in her antique home in the midst of a new world that had sprung out of the ruins of the old. She said from the beginning that we needed to go back to our roots and follow the old ways; she knew that to go on like we were was suicide of a different sort. It wasn’t anything as personal as suicide since that became legal twenty years ago.
No, if you had to quantify her statements, you could say that it was the suicide of the human race. We had made life so much easier, we thought. If you wanted to die, it was well within your rights to do so—whether by your own hand or someone else’s. All you had to do was write a statement that you had requested assistance and that person was absolved of what would have been considered murder.
Murder became easier too. If you could prove fault on the other party then it was considered a legal termination. Crimes of passion were no longer considered a crime. It was a person’s legal right to protect their property, even if that property was a person.
We got rid of money so there was no such thing as theft or embezzlement anymore. We got rid of the class system so there was no envy, no reason to steal, no reason for want. Everyone had everything that they needed to fulfill their needs and desires. It was the perfect society. It was utopia.
We had taken the drive out of the human race with the improvements that we’d made. Took the drive out at the same time that sex became a historical fiction.
Procreation had been taken out of the bedroom and put into the laboratory. Having a child became an impersonal, impartial act, more a combination of genetics than the sweaty bodies and swarthy desires that heated the night before we had taken that last bastion of imperfection away from mankind.
Even the perfect society has its flaws, though they can sometimes be hard to find. The Masters began to see a pattern of suicides in people that could not be explained. They had productive lives that were in the peak of perfection that they suddenly and abruptly wanted to end. They weren’t assisted, either. They obtained the state-approved pills and did it themselves without leaving a note or any video other than their wills, only because they were required by the regulations.
It was a strange situation, one that they handed to me to solve. It didn’t take me long to figure out the missing link, the part of life that had lost its luster for us all. I had been struggling with it as well, considered my own suicide without really knowing the reason why.
I started to examine my own life to try and discover the patterns of reasoning that would explain so many suicides over the last year. As I added up the figures, I noticed that the suicide rate had gone up significantly over the last ten years, jumping by thirty percent in the last year alone.
It was the most exciting thing that I’d discovered in, well, years.
When I thought about that, I thought about my life in general. Without need or struggle, there seemed like there was no reason to try. With nothing to fight for and nothing to gain if we did, there was no reason to live.
I made an appointment with the Masters to explain where we had gone wrong. After I finished explaining what I had discovered, there was silence. I pressed the button on the recorder and the form of Sharon Robinson stood on the platform next to me, speaking as eloquently as it did on the day that she died.
“Man is an animal that requires strife, hardship, and struggle to continue to grow and improve. Taking away these things and handing him the keys to happiness will not make him happy; instead, you will have miserable people who have nothing to live for, no desire to strive for. They will wither and die, either figuratively or literally, because there is no need to live any longer. I’m not—”
The gunshots, the last that were fired in our century, startled the ring of faceless beings above me and I implored them from my position deep in the pit below.
“I know that Sharon Robinson was a rebellious old woman, but her point is quite valid. We have become too complacent in our lives. We have no drive anymore. Even sex has become a thing of the past. Without any reason for excellence, man has stagnated to the point of death, not caring whether he continued on. At this rate, if the suicides continue, we can be assured that man will die out completely within a generation.”
There was silence above me and I waited with my head bowed. A booming voice echoed down and I listened with bated breath for their answer.
“It is as we thought. Man cannot be kept as pets because they have needs that being a pet cannot fulfill. Our experiment is over.”
I wanted to jump for joy but I knew that it was not done in this day and age.
I was there when their ships left, their trial done and over. They had tried to domesticate the worst savages and had failed miserably. Man, as a whole, would not be domesticated. Not even for the ones they had sought for thousands of years.
Fandom: None
Warnings: None
Rating: PG for language
Summary: Even the perfect society has its flaws.
A/N: Although this wasn't even close to what I was thinking when I chose the prompt for this week, I think that it fits quite well.
Everyone blamed everyone else, but in the end, we were all responsible. There was a lot of finger-pointing and pontification behind closed doors, a lot of psychometrically loaded words that made us all cringe inside our sterile little cubicles in our perfect world, but one voice could have stopped things before it all went too far.
The one voice that did speak was silenced, her message not lost to the ether but replayed over and over again after the realization came that we fucked up. We fucked it all up and good and she knew it from the start; we just didn’t want to admit it. We allowed this to happen, just as surely as if we had done it to ourselves.
Sharon Robinson was not a pioneer in her field. Really, she didn’t have a field. She was a simple woman who lived in her antique home in the midst of a new world that had sprung out of the ruins of the old. She said from the beginning that we needed to go back to our roots and follow the old ways; she knew that to go on like we were was suicide of a different sort. It wasn’t anything as personal as suicide since that became legal twenty years ago.
No, if you had to quantify her statements, you could say that it was the suicide of the human race. We had made life so much easier, we thought. If you wanted to die, it was well within your rights to do so—whether by your own hand or someone else’s. All you had to do was write a statement that you had requested assistance and that person was absolved of what would have been considered murder.
Murder became easier too. If you could prove fault on the other party then it was considered a legal termination. Crimes of passion were no longer considered a crime. It was a person’s legal right to protect their property, even if that property was a person.
We got rid of money so there was no such thing as theft or embezzlement anymore. We got rid of the class system so there was no envy, no reason to steal, no reason for want. Everyone had everything that they needed to fulfill their needs and desires. It was the perfect society. It was utopia.
We had taken the drive out of the human race with the improvements that we’d made. Took the drive out at the same time that sex became a historical fiction.
Procreation had been taken out of the bedroom and put into the laboratory. Having a child became an impersonal, impartial act, more a combination of genetics than the sweaty bodies and swarthy desires that heated the night before we had taken that last bastion of imperfection away from mankind.
Even the perfect society has its flaws, though they can sometimes be hard to find. The Masters began to see a pattern of suicides in people that could not be explained. They had productive lives that were in the peak of perfection that they suddenly and abruptly wanted to end. They weren’t assisted, either. They obtained the state-approved pills and did it themselves without leaving a note or any video other than their wills, only because they were required by the regulations.
It was a strange situation, one that they handed to me to solve. It didn’t take me long to figure out the missing link, the part of life that had lost its luster for us all. I had been struggling with it as well, considered my own suicide without really knowing the reason why.
I started to examine my own life to try and discover the patterns of reasoning that would explain so many suicides over the last year. As I added up the figures, I noticed that the suicide rate had gone up significantly over the last ten years, jumping by thirty percent in the last year alone.
It was the most exciting thing that I’d discovered in, well, years.
When I thought about that, I thought about my life in general. Without need or struggle, there seemed like there was no reason to try. With nothing to fight for and nothing to gain if we did, there was no reason to live.
I made an appointment with the Masters to explain where we had gone wrong. After I finished explaining what I had discovered, there was silence. I pressed the button on the recorder and the form of Sharon Robinson stood on the platform next to me, speaking as eloquently as it did on the day that she died.
“Man is an animal that requires strife, hardship, and struggle to continue to grow and improve. Taking away these things and handing him the keys to happiness will not make him happy; instead, you will have miserable people who have nothing to live for, no desire to strive for. They will wither and die, either figuratively or literally, because there is no need to live any longer. I’m not—”
The gunshots, the last that were fired in our century, startled the ring of faceless beings above me and I implored them from my position deep in the pit below.
“I know that Sharon Robinson was a rebellious old woman, but her point is quite valid. We have become too complacent in our lives. We have no drive anymore. Even sex has become a thing of the past. Without any reason for excellence, man has stagnated to the point of death, not caring whether he continued on. At this rate, if the suicides continue, we can be assured that man will die out completely within a generation.”
There was silence above me and I waited with my head bowed. A booming voice echoed down and I listened with bated breath for their answer.
“It is as we thought. Man cannot be kept as pets because they have needs that being a pet cannot fulfill. Our experiment is over.”
I wanted to jump for joy but I knew that it was not done in this day and age.
I was there when their ships left, their trial done and over. They had tried to domesticate the worst savages and had failed miserably. Man, as a whole, would not be domesticated. Not even for the ones they had sought for thousands of years.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-19 12:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-19 07:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-23 01:29 pm (UTC)She was a simple woman who lived in her antique home in the midst of a new world that had sprung out of the ruins of the old. I love the description here.
They had tried to domesticate the worst savages And in some ways, I believe we really are... because we deceive ourselves about with that nice veneer of civility we call the cerebral cortex.
Excellent job (as usual)!
no subject
Date: 2008-02-23 01:58 pm (UTC)Do you know, you made me cry last week? I never expected the reply that you sent me about your story--It went directly into my *important emails and memories* folder on my email and I will take it out and cherish it for a long, long time.
Steph, you are the best, really--♥
no subject
Date: 2008-02-23 02:56 pm (UTC)