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| The Happiness Act. (comments/advice will be appreciated/handjobbed) by Montage 02/20/2005, 2:02am PST | ||||
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| The Happiness Act
A Grim and Serious Forewarning of Future Unhappinesses In the year 2049, everybody was miserable. Cancer had been cured. The speed of light had been broken. The sun had exploded, but scientists, working quickly, replaced it with a bigger, brighter, better sun that they claimed would never ever explode again. It shone a radiant blue, but still the people were very miserable. Menial labour was all but a memory. The only janitors in existence had wheels. The only waitresses had surnames like ‘4000’ or ‘Deluxe’. People everywhere had easy access to clean floors, perfect coffee, and flawlessly designed traffic systems. But though the sun set bluer than an electric fence, the people were still, forever, totally and utterly miserable. All the time. AIDS had been cured. The negative side effects of heroin - removed. Pets with programmable life spans were a common and cheap convenience, and through sheer coincidence alone, continental drift had reunited Pangaea. Europeans spent their lunch breaks in Pakistan. Australians rode tandem bicycles to Egypt. The sun rose and fell with all but a 0.000000194% chance of implosion, and the common cold had finally been fixed - not cured, but fixed - and its primary symptoms now included orgasms. Yet somehow, the world remained disastrously unchanged. Hordes of statistics-counting robots furrowed their metal brows, appalled, as people tossed themselves persistently from the rooves of their hovering skyscrapers each week. Death, of course, had been cured - but the medical bills were astronomical. Hordes of sociologists, and also robot sociologists, nervously nibbled the ends of their hoverpencils to the nib. Over and over, their thoughts echoed the same question: why were happy people so miserable? No-one, it seemed, had an answer. Edgar Ergenbradht didn’t. Of all the potential candidates for having an answer, he was probably at the bottom of the list. And so he remained clueless, for Edgar, like everybody else, was hopelessly miserable. His job at the Department of Departments was vague and unfulfilling. His wife had left him for three different men, all clones of himself, and he had foolishly purchased an infinite parrot. It squawked, constantly, and as the salesman had promised in his pitch, it would never die. Ever. Edgar spent his free time jumping off rooftops. But as time passed, the queues became unendurable, and he soon found himself at home in the evenings. Alone. In front of the television. Dropping ten dollar bills between the couch cushions, trying desperately to act surprised when he found them again. His life was miserable. His world was miserable. And people, he realised, are not supposed to be miserable. There had to be happiness in the world. Somewhere. Anywhere. And then he saw it. The perfect, flawless, ingenious solution to it all. He was in the shower at the time. Shouting at the taps to turn themselves off - which they did, quickly - he ran naked, pale and sweating into his bedroom to get dressed. In his brownest, best pants and his brownest, best shirt, he took the first hovertrain he could into work. There, before the Board of Departments, his idea was told. The departmental heads were stunned. Most of them had never even seen Edgar Ergenbradht before, let alone heard that he existed. Worse, he had interrupted their lunch break, and, agreeing on the overall terribleness of Edgar’s idea, they had him dragged outside and shot. From then on, things only got worse. The Happiness Crisis - as it had come to be known - seemed only to profit the robotics industry, whose engineers worked triple shifts in multiple time dimensions to produce ever more statistics machines. Medical science cured cancer, again, but nothing came of it. Jesus was cloned for the eleventh time, and promised also for the eleventh time that he would not be killed again. The robotics industry continued pointlessly to thrive. Then, on a grey winter’s day lit azure by an irradiated sun, The Happiness Crisis finally broke. Accountants learned to love their jobs again. People began to enjoy sexual intercourse. Israel drew up plans to remove its giant, hanging anvil from the Gaza strip, but almost as quickly as happiness creeped back into the world, it vanished again. Statistics graphs were drawn, both pie and bar. But again, nothing was solved. The Department of Departments changed its name. Now, known only as THE DEPARTMENT, it pledged full commitment to resolving The Happiness Crisis, which it soon renamed ‘The Crisis’. All existing statistics robots were fired, scrapheaped, or sold to obscure adult fetish groups. THE DEPARTMENT invested every one of its trillions of dollars into a secret research project moon base. A media entourage followed. Speculations grew, and conspiracy theories regarding THE DEPARTMENT’s plans blossomed into dense novels sold only at airports. The people and their infinite pets waited. Billionaires and billionaire eccentrics invested their unhappy dollars into the new initiative. Oblivious to its nature, and encouraged by THE DEPARTMENT’s catchy marketing slogan: We’re Always Watching You, they fed untold resources into its bank accounts. THE DEPARTMENT welcomed its allies. When competitors emerged, they were crushed, quickly and literally, with hoverhelicopter payloads of hundred dollar bills. And when Galatron, the first digital consciousness to hold a chair at the United Nations, attempted to solve The Crisis with its own private funds, it vanished - reappearing months later as the first in a new line of sophisticated vending machines. After that, THE DEPARTMENT stood unopposed, although from time to time it hired small, boring extremist groups to stage anti- DEPARTMENT rallies, then mowed them down with rubber bullets and tanks. On December 20th 2099, the sun rose earlier than usual. With the last of its funds, THE DEPARTMENT had arranged for an extra three hours to be added to the day of The Announcement, and subtracted from a day of lesser importance. All eleven thousand channels - even the channels with their own channels - simulcast the moments leading up to 12:00 EST, when the HEAD DEPARTMENTEER had promised to finally, at last, reveal all. The commercial break preceding his announcement was sold decades in advance. Coca-Cola won the bid at a price of Germany, and half of France. And when it was over, The Announcement came. In ten minutes and fifty-eight seconds, the revelation that was to change the world for the better moved from gelatinous abstraction to firm and concrete reality. In ten minutes and fifty-nine seconds, the world was changed. The Happiness Act was born. Edgar Ergenbradht had been wrong all along. Humans, declared the HEAD DEPARTMENTEER, had never truly needed happiness. Centuries of progress had made it redundant. And centuries had progressed without it. Crowds roared. Jets broke sound barriers. Hordes of hoverjournalists stared as four enormous, red and gold banners unfurled their four enormous words for the future: Happiness. An Affordable Luxury Press conferences revealed the details. Brochures revealed the specifics with animated hoverholograms, showing how even the middlest-class households could budget happiness into their weekly expenses. Patented neurotechnology would do the rest. Once-off happiness vouchers, assured the advertisements, would be a thoughtful choice for birthdays, weddings, and - until one particularly offensive commercial was banned - funerals. THE DEPARTMENT gave out free samples on the day before The Happiness Inauguration. It was winter again, and for twenty-one hours, the world knew what it was to be happy, and content, and perfectly at ease with just about everything. It worked. On the 31st of December 2099, nobody was miserable. |
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The Happiness Act. (comments/advice will be appreciated/handjobbed) by 02/20/2005, 2:02am PST  Zseni, just stop by 02/20/2005, 7:00am PST Re: Zseni, just stop by 02/20/2005, 11:01am PST Having seen "The Scream" makes someone a pseudo-intellectual? by 02/20/2005, 11:35am PST Not to mention that there is several of them. NT by 02/20/2005, 2:40pm PST Muntz's Scream you monkeys. NT by 02/20/2005, 4:05pm PST OH YEAH. by 02/20/2005, 4:34pm PST Goddamn, you're illiterate. NT by 02/20/2005, 5:04pm PST I liked it better when you didn't think you were a regular by 02/20/2005, 11:43am PST This computer doesn't take coins. by 02/24/2005, 7:04am PST Why would someone pretend to be me to reply with that? by 02/21/2005, 2:11pm PST |
