Relative Culture

    It was a day, yes, with a sun and some weather. Dr. X had recently been assigned a destination where he would help the local people install their DirectoPotentiatorX92. It was a machine that turned young children into gold. The child had to have a certain balance of hormones, you see, so no adult or baby would work. Dr. X hadn’t been told about the child sacrifice part, only that he’d been sent to work on some machines for a special case.

    Dr. X had been assigned to work in the nation of Amzon. Amzon had been going through some tough times, so the leaders there had put in a request for the installation of “atom potentiation” machines in a city center. They’d requested them from the world’s leading nation, Goegle. You see, Goegle led the world because they had quite a bit of “money”, this thing that had value.

    So, Dr. X boarded his aeroplane on this day that we had referred to earlier. The aeroplane had a sleek exterior made of a material called “roque”. You see, roque is basically ten times more sleek than whatever your little brain can imagine. So, imagine that. Yes, and the plane took off, it flew as well. This beautiful exterior was what had caught the eye of Dr. X’s employers. They chose it over the other available flight to Amzon on January 33rd, 13:002 XM because the other flight had been made out of only lightly processed material that didn’t cause anybody to gush over it. Nobody looked at it for hours in awe of how the sunset’s lights reflected over it. What kind of image is that? What image do you put forth when you choose some material that had only been processed for 12 seconds in a dryer, watered with special oils for 80 seconds, shaken vigorously in an environment of 1:4 ratio of oxygen and polynitroglyceratorinteriorine and left to dry under only four layers of vapor lamps. Those specs were pitiful, and so the end product came out looking awful and nothing like roque.

    You see, roque had a special set of steps for processing, but the information in them is so precise and complex that it would take approximately 40000000.02888888888 years for a human brain to read. I’ll spare the details.

    So, as the plane took off, Dr. X took his 5mg of Benzar™, a new pill just put on the market to slow brain function and violently assault dopamine and serotonin receptors so nobody had to be bored on flights anymore. They were usually included monthly with the Titanium™ subscription plan to Goegle’s federal flight company Deltrax. The Titanium™ subscription cost about as much per month as the yearly rent for an eight bedroom house in Amzon.

    Dr. X’s vision started to blur, that warm fuzz came over him, and he was once again, on a flight. In his mind he thought, “I am so dignified. I am so professional. I am on a professional flight to help a poor country regain their stability. I’m like one of those modern heroes, a captain of industry quite honestly.” 

    He sat in his chair with a stupid smile on his face, entirely still, twitching now and again, eyes not moving at all, pupils like saucers, only a little drool on his white velvet jacket, slowly drooping down his seat. He would’ve fallen to the floor if he’d forgotten to put his seatbelt on. If that happened, he would’ve been in that position for about 30 hours, the duration of a 5mg dose of Benzar™.

    After the flight landed, Dr. X stepped out of the plane, walked through the jet bridge, and dropped his jaw. There were people lined for yards sleeping, using their dusty bags as cushions all down the terminals. They were not so plump as Dr. X was used to seeing people be. It looked as if skeletons wrapped with saran and then painted with human features had invaded an airport from 100 years ago. Dr. X could not tell where the other wall was because after a certain distance the mist of dust and dirt was too strong to see past.

    Everyone was naked. Everyone. No, it was not Dr. X’s fantasy because everyone’s bodies were in such poor condition. There was so much excess acne. Acne in places he didn’t know acne could reach. There was another strange thing that Dr. X couldn’t quite understand… everyone was so… old. It’s like children under twelve didn’t exist. There were a few teenagers, but no kids. Oh well, maybe it was some sort of airport regulation… foreign nations always have those laws that just puzzle you.

    Dr. X’s employers had reserved him a room in a nicer part of town that he proceeded to after entering one of the few thousand taxi buggies that suffocated Amzon National Airport #2’s exterior.

    His room was small and very white. The fluorescent lighting gave it a very harsh look. Angry pieces of furniture were arranged in ways that seemed puzzling. Why was the bed on top of the dresser? Why was the window this small? Hardly any light got in through it. It was about big enough to fit a telescope into, no larger. There was still a little hatch on it that opened the window to the sounds and smells of Amzon National City #2. Some siren in the distance indicated it was time for some group of people far away to go back to work.

    Amzon National City #2 was a very special place. The smell of the air was like a mix of garbage and laundry detergent. People walked the street shuffling in a very uncomfortable pattern. Their steps were short, sharp, and fast. Pavement had taken on the color of road, covered in a thin gum-like membrane made up of god knows what chemicals had fallen down onto the ground from the air. 

    By the bed, on a desk small enough only to fit one book on top, a book sat. One word was on the front, “Bybol”. Dr. X had no clue why a book that wasn’t his would be on this desk. Of course, he opened it. There was a table of contents that took about a third of the book up. Eventually, Dr. X found the beginning of the book. The passage was titled, “How to Be: Book One, Chapter One, Part One, Day One”. It read:

    Included in this book is how to be, how not to be and why to be. These questions were terrorizing humans for so long that we have had to publish a book answering them. You, reader, are human. Keep it that way. Now, here is one of the core tenets of being: When someone wants you to do something, first check their rank. Are they of rank Citizen? What they say does not really have any bearing on you. Citizens don’t tell you what to do. Are they of rank Captain? Do what they say then. They were given the rank Captain for that purpose, to tell you what you need to do so you don’t have to bother finding out for yourself. So, do as a captain says. Is their rank Core Captain, Leader, Core Leader, Speaker, Core Speaker, Truthsman, Officer, Manager, Core Manager, or Savior? Do what they say as well.

    If you have any questions about why you should do what they say, we can answer them here for you: They were given that rank to tell you what to do.

   

    The next passage was titled, “How to Be: Book One, Chapter One, Part One, Day Two”. It read:

    Another core tenet of being is working. One works 16 hours per day customarily. If you are have thoughts of uncomfortability, hatred, resentment, depression, longing, sadness, desolation, horror, murder, suicide, genocide, or talking to other people about how you feel about working, that is a sign you haven’t had enough recreational substance during the time that you aren’t working. Take more recreational substance if these issues pop their head up so that you can be better adjusted to how things are supposed to be. 

    There are lots of different places to work. They are all good. Your appointed Manager will assign you a place to work. You will go there using our train system and work when it is time to work. Sometimes there are days when other things are happening, so you will not be able to go to work. These include:

• Mating Day

• Blood Test Day

   

    On those days you will go to the center respective to the current day and do your duties. 

    The chapter ended there and Dr. X put the book down. “Wow,” he thought, “how is this country so poor if they have such a good work ethic?” He flipped through the book and his eyes glazed over bits and pieces of lines from it:

    What is a train? It is a thing that moves you. It does this so you can go places. It...

    Make sure you do not talk to someone unless you have a reason.

    ...nervous about something? You are probably feeling that way for a reason.

    ...is something you eat. If you have an excess amount of it you will bloat and die.

    Communication is key. That is why we are communicating these ideas to you.

    Do not plan too far ahead into the future, because you may be assigned another...

    ...not allowed to buy anything that weighs more than a pound. 

    ...may not come to hospitals during working hours.

    Do not consume meals during working hours.

    ...is very important. You will die without it.

    If you do not fill out your daily forms you will be...

    We can detect your bad thoughts and will punish you for having an excess amount of them.

    The doors never end.

    ...this stuff never ends.

    Dr. X had been informed prior to his arrival that he was largely exempt from the “particular” way the people of Amzon lived their lives, and the government would see that he could conduct his work on his own terms as long as he did not interact with any citizens of Amzon. They had said the reason he could not interact with them is that their culture was very different, and the norms of Goegle were so different that even some common gestures were even interpreted as offensive so it was just for the sake of his own safety that he keep to himself.

    You see, Dr. X was a jovial and open spirit. When he saw things in life, he accepted them, knowing that they came from somewhere to him for a reason. He had no intention of keeping to himself during his trip to Amzon. One of the most exciting prospects for him was not his fascinating machine work, but his interactions with those of a different culture. He knew that deep down everyone was human, and that the truths that governed him were just expressed differently through these cultures that were scattered all over the Earth. He made friends everywhere he went, regardless of if he was up for making a friend or not. People gravitated to him. Things gravitated to him. Sometimes at night he could feel the furniture inching towards him, or the thoughts of others meshing with his own. He thought about the similarities in the shapes of lightning and branches on trees and the maps of the roads in cities. All of them branched out in an eerily similar way, but stayed connected. 

    Before bed he decided he decided he needed a cup of chamomile tea, a famous specialty of Amzon, particularly National City #2. He headed down and down the thin stairway of his building for what seemed like at least 45 minutes. During that whole time, he didn’t see a soul in the stairway, and he was lucky he didn’t because it was hardly big enough to fit just Dr. X. It could probably fit two average citizens of Amzon though, their thin, frail little bodies could probably fit through an air vent in Goegle. The wallpaper on the stairway had a cracking coming down from the top that spread in the same shape as a tree’s branches. Dr. X took note.

    Upon opening the door and feeling the rush of the outside, he was disappointed. Not a soul was out on the street. The sun was setting on the giant, giant metropolis. People in Goegle always went outside to see the sunset. They celebrated, they came together to see it’s beauty. In Amzon, it was working hours. That was why nobody was out. Just like in the scene someone would instantly imagine in their head, a ball of clotted dust tumbled by Dr. X’s feet, leaving a trail of sticky fluid and metal shards. 

    He could see miles down the streets, no cars, no humans. The sky was the only thing that provided any color besides a mix of dark brown and grey. The sun shone down the miles long streets, reflecting off of the windows. It had a strange effect that made it seem like all the lights were on in every building, but in fact the blinds were closed on every single window Dr. X looked into.

    So he stepped forward and began to wander. The clack of his boots echoed across the silence. He walked past shops all titled the same things. “HARDWARE”, “TOOLS”, “BEDS”, “HARDWARE”, “RESTAURANT”, “POULTRY”, “HARDWARE”, “BEDS”, “SILVERWARE”, and last, but not least, “HARDWARE”. After passing a few RESTAURANTs, he surmised that searching for a place where he could consume something wasn’t going to yield any more specialized results. He tried the door handle on a RESTAURANT. It didn’t budge. The inside was too dark to see, even if he put his hands up around his eyes, he couldn’t even make out the floor on the other side of the glass. 

    Dr. X decided, oh well. There are rules in place I’m not aware of, and I’m not sure how I can operate by them yet. The stores are not so dark at home. I’m sure their famous chamomile tea will find its way to me another time. The outing was enough anyway. Just enough to clear your mind before you go and slumber in your tiny bed. He did just that. Walked home, walked up the stairs, so so long the stairs were, and crammed himself into the little bed. It was just enough to fit his figure. 

    That night he’d had an intense dream. In his dream, he awoke from the bed he’d fallen asleep in. Everything had a dark purple hue and some objects he saw had bits of light flash around them. Circles pulsed out of the center on the surfaces of things. An image of a teacher leaning in and shaking her head in disappointment formed out of the green and purple fuzz lain over everything. She turned into different people, a young redheaded teacher with glasses, an older, more nondescript teacher that might have had glasses, and an old woman. He opened his eyes again to find he was still laying down, and began to feel the creeping suspicion that people were watching him. He backed into the corner and peered around the room, shifting his eyes faster than he felt someone hiding in his room could run, so he could maybe just catch a glimpse of them. He imagined these people in his head, he imagined an old lady that would come to… well he didn’t know what she would do. She would get him, that was for certain. He blinked. He was standing on a field of lava. He had an axe too big to wield properly. It hung by his side. Over to the side of him his father was hulking out of a fog to him. 

    Dr. X awoke the next morning feeling as if mere seconds had passed. Today he was to begin his work on the machine, and that he did. The scientists he worked with were from Amzon. They said little, in fact they hardly said anything to each other at all. Almost any interaction was with their supervisor, a Core Leader named “Xvshvxu”, pronounced “Zu”, who never smiled, just like everyone else. Acne riddled everyone’s faces. Dr. X was glad that he couldn’t see what was underneath the lab coats. These scientists were, although immeasurably disciplined in a way that was too late in Dr. X’s life for him to even achieve, awful at their jobs. They were not awful in that their results were incorrect, they often were exactly spot on. The results, though, came far too late. Most of Dr. X’s time was spent watching one of his peers delicately work out math problems on one exact part of the paper that was provided with a pen that was way too short for a human hand. Pens in Amzon also had no cap or way to retract it, it simply had to be discarded 8 hours after it was initially opened, even if it still worked fine. Special trash cans were designed just for the pens and only the pens to be deposited into. 

    After a few weeks of Dr. X working in this way, he decided to just do as much work as he could on his own. He told Xvshvxu about his plan and of course Xvshvxu disagreed, but the government had already given Dr. X the go-ahead to do any task in the way he pleased as long as he met deadlines. Dr. X finished the 8 month project goal in a week. All of the test materials were accurately converted into their respective projected new materials. The atoms were converted efficiently, and the machine was flawless. Opening day came.

    He was there on opening day, very nervous to present his machine to those who were there to judge it. Government officials of extravagantly high rank were present. The thought rolled through his head: “These people could have any citizen in this, or another, even my, country assassinated at their will.” Everyone gathered and a team of lab workers carried the ginormous machine onto the stage. It was a piece of technology that would bring this nation a new era. It would turn things around. All of that time wasted pedantically writing down every step of every engineering problem could be made up for, with this new way that those at the head of the nation of Amzon could convert atoms. This technology was not located anywhere else on Earth, and Amzon could possibly become an entirely new international power.

    They booted the machine up, the lights and tubed and oils and rotating metal thingerdangers, in unison, came to power. It was almost as if it was alive, this beast, this powerhouse, well, it really was alive. It was. Dr. X didn’t know how, he didn’t know what constituted life, but he knew this thing was alive. It was a force to be reckoned with. The noise was incredible, blowing through everybody’s earpads, just barely under the levels of safety for human life. The Nation Leader, the man himself, bellowed over the large and intricately assembled speaker system:

    “Dr. X has devised the Machine™, and it will save us. The acne will be gone, we will gain weight, we will be fat, we will all own telephones, we will all binge on alcoholic beverages every weekend, we will sit in COFFEE SHOP with our tight fitting business suits, we will be glad when we see the last cookie in the plastic packaging when we thought we’d eaten them all, we will not sleep right without medicine that all but lowers our heart rate to near death levels due to the wide availability of stimulating activities at every hour conceivable and never attain REM sleep because of our dependence on these medications you can buy from any PHARMACY in your area without age restriction, we will torture ourselves for not having friends, we will work at COFFEE SHOP and use technology to entertain ourselves on lunch breaks, we will spend all day on the technology, we will have food widely available and still complain about what we don’t have, we will hire poor immigrants to cut our grass even though it takes us an hour a week, we will get mad at others for liking popular television programs, we will organize through technology and form groups that enforce beliefs in niche ideologies that only severely mentally damaged people would identify with, we will be clean, we will have no disease, we will not have to see our mothers die of Polio right in front of our eyes, we will get some, if only just a little, extra time with those we love because of the advancements we will make in the medical industries, we will have running water, we will have food that is not grey, we will have food that is hot, we will be able to lay our head on a bed alone because we could afford to each have our own bed, we will not wonder if the wind will knock our shacks over because the buildings we will make will be strong and hold up for generations, we will see new movies, we will play new interactive video based games, we will build our own computers to play these video based games on, we will have enough money left over to give someone a nice tip, we will be free.”

    The people heard this and understood all of it. A lot of it was bad, but their situation was bad as well. It was not optimism, but the truth. That is what the people of Amzon were accustomed to hearing. They knew the bad things would come. Everybody knows that with innovation, bad things come. They knew that was not a reason to fear it. They knew they could deal with it because they were strong, and it was a type of strong that wasn’t exclusive to any one human. It was a strong that came from being human. Why would they turn down the chance of being shot randomly because this new society would anger some young men that badly that they would shoot random people they didn’t know in favor of knowing they would die at the same age anyway because their water wasn’t clean? The people of Amzon were slow, not stupid. They also knew they couldn’t fight it. Innovation was something humans did. It came no matter if one person chose for it to come or not. When there are better ways to do things that are found, that is the way things are done.

    So, the commencement started. The Nation Leader told those who booted up the machine to bring out the first Subject. The Subject was brought out, scared and alone in this place full of men in coats to be given to the greater good. It was the first young boy Dr. X had seen in the time he’d been in Amzon. He wondered what the little boy had to do with this machine. The boy was naked, just like everyone in the crowd. The man with lab coats held him by the arms. The Nation Leader wore a ragged old swamp green shirt fashioned out of the material they make crude potato sacks out of in Goelge. His pants were held up with a string of twine threaded under roughly stitched on belt loops. He put on a crown of thorns before the ceremony and began bleeding all down his face, staining his shirt and pants. No sign of pain showed on his face, his expression did not change at all, but it was obvious that great, great suffering was being endured by him under the tough, solemn face.

    The boy was guided into the chamber of the machine for MTBC (Materials-To-Be-Converted). 

    “Oh, no, no no no no, no no, no, no. That is lethal. That little boy will die. There is no way around it. Do they not know how to use the machine?” Dr. X’s thoughts were going by very fast. He yelled, “Hey! Is that child intended to be converted? That will kill him, there will be no child!”

    The speakers answered, bellowing again, “We know what we are doing. We read all of the documentation on the parts of this machine. Stay silent, this is a delicate process.”

    Dr. X did some rough calculations in his head. Simple logic, taking into account the machine’s process for converting materials and the basic chemical makeup of a human body, seemed to lead him to the conclusion that yes, this machine could convert some humans into gold. He had never thought of the conversion process in that manner. Gold was the most valuable material on Earth, bar none. The previous decade had led to an intense shortage in gold. Experts had said that 99.07% of the gold reserves on Earth were used up, and the remaining gold was spread so far out in Earth’s crust that there was no financial benefit to trying to dig it up.

    It all clicked, precisely at the moment when it was too late to do anything. Dr. X was one man. There were a nigh unlimited amount of men in front of him, and none of them held the objections to this practice that Dr. X held. The value of children were different in this society, evidently, because no one batted an eye at this process, instead they cheered.

    The boy was placed into the chamber. His expression never changed when Dr. X yelled about his death. Not even a flinch. He knew the process as well. And so the lab coat people told Dr. X it was time to press the button, and there was no one to do it but him. The button was blue, but it felt more like it should be red. It was semi-transparent, showing the little switch inside that would start all the action in the machine. Dr. X felt like he was forgetting the basics of how to move his body when he began to rise his finger up to the button. The finger shook, as if going back and forth to tell him, “No. You’re not allowed to do that.”

    He placed his finger on the button and hesitated a moment. The boy in the chamber was not visible from where he was standing. “There is no other option. They are cheering me on. I have to do this. I cannot think about it too much. These are the circumstances I’m in. There is no changing them,” Dr. X told himself. It was all true. 

    He pushed the button.

    The machine began whirring even harder than when it had been booted up. The noise got louder and louder, the pitch got higher and higher, to the point where he felt like he shouldn’t have been able to still hear it, it felt like it was within dog range. It definitely surpassed safety levels for human hearing, but it was for a brief moment so nobody really cared. He felt the machine telepathically communicating with him. The machine took him out of reality for a moment.

    He was standing in a thin pond that stretched out into the horizons. A fog blocked much of his view past a small distance. Looking down into the pond, his reflection was the same as it always was, but distorted by the water. 

    “I don’t look that way in real life, but because of the circumstances, because I am looking into this pond, my reflection is distorted. My face is much uglier when viewed in this distorted way.” He wasn’t aware that he was letting his thoughts out with his voice rather than just thinking them. The small boy from the chamber formed slowly out of the nothingness and fog. The machine had taken the form of the boy. Dr. X knew this fact with no supporting evidence.

    The machine spoke to him, telepathically, from nowhere in sight, “This place…” it trailed off.

    Dr. X snapped back to reality and stepped backwards while the machine whirred and whirred. It reached a climactic point, and in an instant the sound and violence was gone. A sizeable chunk of gold dropped out into the CM (Converted Materials) chamber from a tube above. It plopped onto the ground. The MTBC chamber was empty. It was as if the young boy never existed. It was absolutely empty, just as Dr. X expected it to be. 

    The crowd went wild, for hours. Dr. X was escorted out of the building and onto his flight home to Goegle. The entire time, he wore an expression similar to the Nation Leader’s that fateful day. Dr. X didn’t think about much for a while. He had received a large sum of money for his work in Amzon National City #2 about a week after he got home. He didn’t know what to do with it, so he let it sit on the table. It sat there while he sat on the couch, on the bed, eating, staring, doing whatever. He didn’t do much anymore. He stared a lot at the plants in his home, and he watered them when he was supposed to. He didn’t tell anyone much about the work in Amzon National City #2 that got him so rich.

    Dr. X acquired a new emotion that fateful day in Amzon National City #2.