In a distant realm, within the reaches of Dark Stone Control, there existed a kingdom shrouded in a perpetually lumpy, gravy-like malaise. The dualistic nature of equal and opposite reflections caused a feedback loop-based hallucination in the bicameral minds of the people. They felt that they were living in the universe rather than being the universe itself.
Its name was Dystopia, a place where dreams collapsed into pools of liquid mercury and powered huge rectifiers attached to tall, noble antennae structures that broadcasted a horrid and continual funeral dirge played by an unskilled piper.
Hope was becoming a distant memory, as were any illusions of sanity. The people no longer considered themselves living, breathing animals; they no longer had any desire to mate and produce offspring. Instead, they chose to lose themselves in symbolic gestures that would inevitably be remembered by no one as their bloodlines came to an end.
Even though these choices made them substantially more discontented, melancholic, and sullen, they proclaimed to each other that they were gallant heroes fighting against thought crimes committed by their dead ancestors. They had all become the shadow of Don Quixote of La Mancha. Lost in symbols, they had forgotten that the symbols were only tools for sharing ideas and not the actual ideas themselves.
The markets of Dystopia were filled with nothing but bobbleheads and mood-flattening drugs. The people of Dystopia became blinded by surface-level abstractions and were no longer capable of seeing beyond in-group and out-group thinking. They fantasized that vengeance could arc towards justice, rather than death.
They claimed to have left the old, higher-power-based religions behind but had merely replaced them with a worse religion—a religion based on intersectional conflicts of power between each other. It prevented them from seeing and understanding nuanced ideas; instead, they only saw themselves as individual gods, involved in endless conflict with one another. To add fuel to the fire, they decided that optics were more important than substance.
They hoped to create a preeminent, sacrosanct authority to apply a tyrannical boot to each other's throats, and somehow, in doing this, they could enforce the absolute equality afforded by the obliteration of individual identity. It would require everyone to monitor and report each other for any infraction, no matter how slight. It would require complete submission.
Even the artists had given up; instead of creativity, they worshiped the idea of becoming team players supporting the corrupt agenda of a powerful elite who filled their heads with flattering lies and spare change.
It told them that they were noble and good for believing in nothing, and it worked. It told them that their inane ravings and scrawls were the true measure of beauty and meaning. All were equal; no one thing was better than any other thing. It made art easy, but it was a Pyrrhic victory for all.
In short, it was all a load of nonsense.
Once, Dystopia had been a flawed yet more vibrant kingdom, a melting pot of all cultures and individuals, who were seen as equals under one creator. But the kingdom spiraled into hell as the power and authority were removed from local peoples, then moved ever further away, and finally concentrated into the hands of a global one percent who could afford to exempt themselves from the common madness—but not, as it turned out, from the ultimate coming "Bomb Bomb."
Amidst this gloom, there lived a wise old owl named Aurelius. He loved Tootsie Roll Pops and was once revered among the creatures of Dystopia for his knowledge and foresight. Over the last decade, his intellectual outlook had been reclassified as problematic.
One day, as he perched atop a dying oak tree, a young rabbit named Luna approached him, her eyes filled with despair.
"Oh, wise Aurelius," Luna said, "why has our kingdom fallen into such darkness? Is there no hope left for us?"
Aurelius gazed at Luna with solemn eyes before responding, "Long ago, our ancestors traded the beauty of our kingdom for avarice and pride. But all is not lost, young one. For even in the darkest of times, there exists a glimmer of light. For what does it profit to gain the whole world, yet lose the essence of one's very soul? You have blinded all from beauty and grace and poisoned your hearts with this insect-like cultural embrace."
With those words, Aurelius embarked on a journey across Dystopia, seeking allies among the creatures of the land.
It was disappointing to the wise owl. He searched and explored, but no one was willing to stand up and help. He made loud noises and posted clever memes, but after a long search, he settled on a branch and made peace with the idea that these people did not want to be saved. They had no desire to live, nor the will to be inspired.
He flew back to his castle on Witch Mountain and turned to the fail-safe that he had prepared with the aid of the sky people who had come down to visit him long before the famous Tootsie Roll commercial had been filmed.
They had come down in wheels within wheels made of light, and they had given him a great power called the "Bomb Bomb."
He pulled the shoebox-sized Bomb Bomb out from under his bed and placed it on the counter in his kitchen. He drank some mouse milk from the fridge and then approached the shoebox, removed the lid, and revealed the large red button inside. He reminisced briefly on the death of the Enlightenment.
Aurelius made a long sweeping gesture with his wing and pronounced the word "ONE," then he made an upward swinging gesture and said "TWO," then he fluttered all of his feathers with a mighty shake of his body and said "THREE." At that, he pushed the button, and the Bomb Bomb worked its atomic magic.
It instantly converted the kingdom of Dystopia and a few hundred additional miles into a sphere of thermonuclear energy that reached an average uniform temperature of 212 million degrees Fahrenheit.
The temperature and pressure not only extinguished all life within the sphere—and, by and by, the former kingdom—but also caused the complete and total disintegration of every molecule and atom inside its blast radius.
And so, the darkness that had gripped Dystopia for so long receded, replaced by the warm glow of a new dawn over the bowl-shaped hole left on the planet.
In the end, Dystopia was transformed into a place of total harmony.
A few hundred million years later, the rats became people and formed a new city called Utopia. In Utopia, everything was free. The people got fat and were then fed to the giant birds that ruled the world. There was no Bomb Bomb to save the day this time. Thankfully, the nearby star that the rats called the Sun provided a rich and relatively free energy gradient upon which life could surf, and mercifully, it was this very Sun that gave its life to end the horror show of the Bird and Rat Utopia. The Sun's core had depleted its hydrogen fuel and had begun to burn its remaining helium for fuel; this caused it to expand beyond and through the orbit of the Earth, which was the stage upon which Utopia played.
It became a red giant and then unfolded like a flower, much like a female mammal's nether regions, becoming a lovely planetary nebula. It was only after this transition that the best thing of all time happened.
The Anunnaki mothership had flown close enough to appreciate the beauty of this nebula, and it inspired one of the sky-god children on board to reconstitute what had once been the solar system in which this all played out. Upon doing so, the great wise owl Aurelius was reborn in the form of a human child.
"To what purpose am I here?" asked the wise young owl. In answer to this, the celestial master child named Chris, who was responsible for all of this mess, provided a reclining chair called a recliner, a 25-inch Zenith television with a Space Command remote control, and a Sony Betamax machine with a video that started to play as the owl took his comfortable seat.
The video instructed him on what was expected of him. He was to enjoy something called the American Dream. He was told that he was a child living in a place called the United States of America, and he lived in a year called 1977, in a month called December. His job was to live a mortal life inside of this simulation. His purpose was to observe and participate in the events that were to unfold.
He would know nothing of his purpose, but he would be rewarded with some manner of treat after his eventual death. "It'll be fine," the child told him, "but at times, you will feel scared, alone, and hopeless." On a cheery note, before he left, Chris said, "I hope you like video games; it will help you pass the time as you watch things fall apart. Try to take notes and see if you can come up with any conclusions about all of this."
With that, the owl went to Sears and used the Sears credit card provided by Chris to purchase a Sears Tele-Games Video Arcade system and the game cartridges Air-Sea Battle, Combat, Surround, and Video Olympics.
He enjoyed it and many future game systems. He lived until his and millions of other people's deaths from a series of Bomb Bombs late in the year 2026. Up until the moment he died, Aurelius thought of himself as an owl, brought to Earth by Chris to witness not only the MOS Technologies 6502 microprocessor and its fruits but also as a foundational part of this story and a signpost at the end of this tale. The signpost was made of wood and firmly planted into the ground; around the post lay scattered a pile consisting of rocks of varying sizes.
It read: "Alan Watts was also once an owl. He too was brought to this version of Earth by Chris in order to be mentioned in this next sentence." The text on the sign continued: "He said, 'The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple, and yet everyone rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.'" It was a long sign and contained a good deal of text. It went on, as these things tend to do. It read, "That is to say, 'I look at the color of your hair and the shape of your eyebrow, and I understand that that is the point. God, Guru, and the Self are one.'" And then, at the bottom of the sign, in bold letters, it read, "DO NOT THROW ROCKS AT THIS SIGN!"
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