SOFIA KNOCKED ON RICK’S door.

“Come in,” he beckoned.

She opened then quickly closed the door before the dogs could rush in and disrupt things.

“Just wanted to give you a status update on the inquiry. That I can tell, my resolve not to have this local person come out to visit is working. I plugged-in the kitchen monitor unit and set the fan beside it. The fan is buzzing away happily and noisily as we speak. No word back from the snoopy bastards.”

Rick smiled. “I noticed the dogs barking more. Though that door is thick and soundproof, it’s not like an audiologist’s booth. I can still hear six dogs blasting away, but just barely. It might even be more the vibration of their noise through the ground, rather than the barks themselves.”

Sofia chuckled. The sound of barking dogs never bothered her as it did Rick. She well might have worked in a kennel all her life, though kennels were in short supply after the Debacle. The same agent that killed so many humans had a similar effect on others in the animal kingdom, particularly mammals.

“I’m sure those bastards are hearing a good dose of noise on the other end as the AIs try to decipher just what the hell is going on. They must think I’m the dog version of a ‘cat lady,’ living wretchedly in a home doused in urine and feces.”

“Ooh,” Rick shuttered. “I appreciate that you have to manage them while I can’t.”

“No problem.”

“Then is there a new issue?” he inquired, watching her expressions.

“Not really.” She paused to pick up an autographed baseball on his desk.

“Careful, please!” he requested. “No smudges on the names.”

“You know you can’t take this with you when you go.”

Rick smiled. “If heaven is as your old Catholic teachings describe, then I’ll be able to play ball with these Brooklyn Dodgers and other great and not-so-great players in history. You’ll not get me off that field except to eat whatever they feed you there.”

“Never gave much thought to what people eat in heaven. I’m sure it’s not gruel.”

Rick dropped his chin and stared up at her as she stood near the door. “Still, you look concerned.”

She sat on her usual chair, adjacent to the door. It was ten feet from Rick’s desk to allow for the dogs to surround her as she spoke with him. “Um, it’s a bit concerning. I sent them the email back that I had plugged in the intercom speaker.”

“And?”

“The response thanked me, but they also asked about the gardens business and how it was going.”

“And? Not the full story?”

“I’ll get there. It implied they might want to send out a person to review the gardens and surroundings. I’m not sure if this is tied into the earlier inquiry on the intercom or a separate issue. You know, it’s not an unusual request. They’re only trying to assess if the business is on the up-and-up and all of our financial transactions are visible to them.”

“Yeah, I know. Remember that visit you had four years ago? We thought they’d found us out. And it was only their concern that barter was happening on the reservation to a much greater degree than anywhere else, and they needed to tamp that down or get their unfair share of taxes and skim.”

Sofia stood, signaling she needed to get back to the dogs barking outside the door. “Yep. And no tamping has occurred, not that I can see. Our Navajo friends continue to openly defy this autocratic control by the oligarchs and our laughable relic of a constitutional democracy. I don’t blame them for their courage. They’ve lived through external imposition on their lives for the last five hundred years. This is just the latest version of a government screwing them out of something.”

“Still, it’s odd that the same source hassling you about the intercom is now suggesting a look at the business. Did you reply?”

“No. The note didn’t ask for a reply. I’d take it more as a heads-up. If I made any move to suggest they should not visit, their AI would pick it up instantly and we’d have a swarm of nasty bees heading our way.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “The best approach is no response. If I had my health monitor attached, you’d see a ten-point rise in my blood pressure on this news.”

Sofia placed her hand on the doorknob. “Your face already indicated it was twenty. I can’t tell you to hurry, but I smell unpleasantness in the air, wafting this way.”

“And your intuition is always right, my dear. I promise not to ramble too much. Everything will be truncated and done in proper haste. It’s more important to get the message out there than to make it pretty and interesting, or even pretty interesting. I know that.” He winked at her before she shut the door.

* * *

Rick continued recording his narrative. “I note in other places how this planet we live upon is very large, relative to a human’s own physical size. We were not a fleet-footed species, and nothing about our nature allowed us to travel long distances quickly like a winged bird. Throughout our history, as a result, we have been closed and clannish, coalescing around our proximate locations and commonalities.”

“In the distant past, that typically meant you’d interact with people in your same physical geography and likely related to you genetically. In fact, geography had much to do with the development of our languages and culture. I don’t need to repeat that for you, as it will be apparent from the historical information I’m coupling with these recordings.”

“This physical separation of groups amplified an innate desire to be around people with the same religion and belief systems, similar occupations, same language or dialect, and critically, the same or similar appearance. It’s a vestige of survival instincts, no doubt. Like any cautious animal, humans of one group were fearful of other groups who had substantial differences.”

“You’d think these cautious behaviors might have dissipated as our more recent forms of communications came into play – from print to radio to television to the Internet. You’d think because we were able to now share information about all peoples, we’d get along better. But the effect was, unfortunately, the opposite.”

“In a world where so much information was being blasted at people, hyper-accelerated by the advent of digital communications, we became much more insular. The AIs fed a constant stream of content that confirmed a person’s own biases and also narrowed their social groupings. This piling-on of one’s belief constructs served to further amplify the fears and other negatives inherent in those constructs, effectively hardening people further into their systems and making them less accepting of anyone who didn’t believe as they did.”

“In the span of a few decades, we changed from being a race that coalesced based on geography to one that cowered together, in a virtual sense, based on human or AI-designed fears and misinformation. Simultaneously, our minds were being commercialized and commoditized, and our personal preferences and biases were whored by social media.”

“We became social media’s prostitutes, in other words. I plan to highlight this effect of our digital age in greater detail, but I can’t lose the brief, important point on this dynamic of civilization.”

“We once lived in small groups. Reproduced rather quickly. Were nominally mobile. Belief systems spread slowly, and there was time to ponder the rightness or wrongness of the next belief that expanded our psyches. It’s a big planet, and ideas traveled slow, but I shouldn’t imply that we were ever in a great period of humanity’s acceptance of others not like them.”

“Indeed, we were never even close. Ignorance was always widespread; the common human condition. Slothfulness, anger, angst, blame and victim behavior. I can review our deadly sins at another time, but we had no effective means to train people how to handle their psyches and manage their natural tendencies toward negativity.”

“Hell, we didn’t even recognize the need to do that. We developed no global mandate to ensure self-actualization in as many humans as possible, again, not even seeing this as valuable. Religion might have done some of that, but it clearly failed given grotesque exclusivities borne in religious entitlement and dogma.”

“As technologies arrived that allowed us to communicate more swiftly, our little cave-sharer or village farmer mentalities became overwhelmed. Good intentions were flattened and scattered by the next deluge of bias-confirming information and attention-getting scandal. Ancient, positive lessons on how to treat each other well to advance species longevity were subjugated and suppressed by this continuous shotgun blast of stories pelleting our gray matter at all waking hours.”

“We are the products of a few unfortunate circumstances in space, time, and evolution. Big planet. Short lives and fast turnover of humans. Crappy memories. Easily distracted. Disconnectedness between us. An abominable lack of foresightedness and planning. Fear-driven.”

“It’s a long list, whereas with our positive attributes, the list is rather tight, and the attributes only display in short sprints. Courage, love, fearlessness, patience, giving, selflessness. Those appear and disappear in any one human’s timeline like shooting stars in a night sky.”

“Then we have the latter stage variations on humanity, an envisioned transhuman or posthuman future. A new hope was there. A bright light of possibilities. Hybrids with instant access to facts and a very expansive view on history. But that hope, too, was shattered in multiple ways as I’ll explain later.”

“I know, I know. I’m ‘Debbie Downer’ today. That’s a saying from my father that you may find nowhere else. I intentionally pointed out the negatives, but there are positives. There are ways to extricate yourselves from the same maladies that we are facing.”

“You’ll hear me talk again and again around this topic of education, of focused and purposeful teachings. It would have been possible to teach the few positive ethics, norms, standards of behavior to greatly enhance survival of the species, if we had established them for humanity in the first place.”

“And some of us did such teaching, but it always was exclusive to the believers, the clans, the groupings of similar individuals, those who perceived they had a special entitlement because of their belief systems. Never have I found such teachings were generically human species focused, for the good of all on the planet.”

“That just wasn’t in our nature. No, our innate sense of entitlement made each of us want to be special and unique within small groupings of people who possessed the same belief systems. It wasn’t in our nature to ‘do unto others.’ I hope it’s in yours.”

“We had no agreed upon plan for managing ourselves as a species. You might think it’s impossible to attain such a thing in any sentient society, particularly one as fractionalized and disparate as ours. But I think not.”

“I believe people can agree on a few very simple tenets, rules, and ethical constructs. There are so few. In fact, some are encoded into the old U.S. Constitution, the poor thing, as it chokes on its last gasps of air in the bastardized nation-states that followed the dissolution of that once-great nation.”

“Some rules and norms exist therein that transcend human differences; rules we could have gotten everybody to agree upon. The same goes for holy books and other teachings. If I count them, I’d say there are no more than a dozen common tenets. Surely we might have gotten everyone to agree on twelve tenets.”

“You treat people well, irrespective of who they are in any aspect, including the varint classes. You accommodate new forms of humanity – also later, where I’ll discuss the severe oppression of transhumans, meaning the “non-special’ transhumans. You give everybody equal voice, equal rights, and equal power in government, regardless of who they are. You do your best to treat all fairly and give them equal opportunities. You resolve differences congenially. You train each person, again regardless of who they are, to achieve, or at least be on a path, to self-actualization. You treat Mother Earth well, as if it was your own parent, since it is in many ways.”

“There; that’s six or so of the dozen. But now my mind moves to a different thought as clear as the cloudless night sky in Northern Arizona. I’m just starting these diatribes, and this topic keeps rummaging around in the back of my mind, so I’ll try to spit it out here.”

“Imagine a species on the cusp of greatness. It was all within our grasp, there for the taking, for the using. We had uncovered most secrets of physics and quantum physics. We discovered how to stop and even reverse our aging processes. We were resolving problems of illness and frailty. Our technology had advanced such that we had the capacity to feed and educate everybody. We had an open door and credible communications systems to befriend each other, despite our different backgrounds and belief systems. Nothing prevented us from treating each other fairly or training people to be self-actualized, open to change and growth.”

“We might have had a world where every human and hybrid or posthuman was given the chance and tools to be happy, self-controlled, self-managed. We had ethical learnings, norms, and values. We had the ability to extend what it means to be human into new dimensions of thought and existence.”

“Everything was at our fingertips. You’ll hear me repeat this message because it’s so important. We had but to pursue a few disciplined paths, and easy paths at that.”

“The door was open, but we weren’t seeking a door. We were so slothful, so full of ourselves and our specific entitled thoughts, that we assumed a door was not required, that we’d muddle through as a species and come out okay.”

“Engorged with an unending sense of entitlement in myriad forms, we were perennially looking for advantage – for ourselves, our immediate families, and those like us. Consumed by fear and entitlement, we were seeking cover and protection through unequal wealth and possessions.”

“Even if we had received a self-evident message about how to act to extend the species into perpetuity, whether from a messiah or tablet of God or advanced civilization, we would not have taken it to heart, I’m afraid. Each of us were far too self-absorbed to listen to any voice of reason and compassion, particularly if the voice prompted us to exert effort or move beyond our comfortable belief constructs.”

“Instead, humanity fucked up. In our zeal to out-possess each other, we ran headlong past the cliff and are now too far over the precipice to prevent a tragic conclusion for our species."