What’s the worst that could happen?

Want to know how far I’ll go for a cheap joke?

One of the boards I hang out on has a game each week where you get to write up a little something in response to the topic of the week. Last week the “assignment” was to come up with a “what’s the worst that could happen” for a specified scenario. My scenario was “Public schools reverted to teaching the Odyssey – in original greek”. I’m going to show you what I wrote, and then I’m going to totally annotate the piece–going deep into “you don’t want to know how the sausage is made” territory. Hopefully you can just read it without the notes and get the joke…

On the board, this wasn’t annotated, but here I want to explain where the details of the gag came from. (For the record, I’m not a writer, so don’t expect something good–I’m just hoping you’ll find some of it clever.) The point here is really to illustrate just how far I will go for a gag. You should be shaking your head…

This is also an excuse to test out my snazzy footnote technology ((Which is just a plugin from here)).

“Know, O PrinceYes, I lifted this opening from Howard, or more specifically from the current Conan comics, the ways of the people–how at the beginning they can be all we could desire; but it is the end that is to be thought of. Act in careful accordance with this fact.” This opening paragraph is a lift from a Chinese text.

Perhaps those ones in the Metal AgesYeah, I should have been able to come up with a better expression, but I wanted something that would capture the idea of technology as hard science, as opposed to the softer sciences–I guess this leaves the door open for biotech, though, which I didn’t mean to do should have been given the benefit of Uncle’s Vizir’s wisdom. Surely had their power continued, things would have been different on the arrival of the HanumenWhen I decided to use space monkeys, I knew I would need a name for them. I wanted something that would summon up both the idea of an Age of Gods–a la Odyssey–and something that would give that sense of multicultural mixture that I was building with Chinese sacred texts, words like vizir, etc. So I did a little Google for ‘Monkey God’ and found the Indian god Hanuman. That pretty much made the “Hanumen” idea obvious. And, it opened the door to some other stuff later.. Had they managed to keep the world intact that long… perhaps there was no shining pathI chose this particular expression for two reasons, both down to Sendero Luminoso–first to bring in a South American note to my future multi-culture, and second to invoke that sense of guerilla resistance coupled with a kind of reactionary revolution. I like the notion that what the future society remembers of the Shining Path has been coloured by filtering through a lot of history that has different biases than ours. for mankind, on any route.

The Vizir tells me over and over again, of the failings of the Metal Age, of it’s power without wisdom, and how problems were not solved, but rather rendered obsolete in the rush towards every greater power and greater problems. And yet my mind wanders to them, time and again, and to thoughts of how things could have been.

Sometimes I even stumble in a recitation, or elide a syllableHere is where I start building the notion of a class that is responsible for oral transmission of history and culture, but without the folk tradition of alteration & change–something with a memory like Herbert’s mentats, but without the reasoning & analysis–just the memory. I guess that makes them anti-mentats in a sense.. Mostly this goes unnoticed by my charges, but the Vizir always notices. His rage is justified, as these mistakes can not be allowed.

I know that, even on this night, even on the very eve of my bhakticharyaThe Hanuman entry in Wikipedia tells me that he is tightly linked to two important concepts: Brahmacharya and Bhakti. I figured I could pull out a bit of each (historical drift again) and build up a composite term that would mean something like “leading a life of devotion” or “the path of supplication before the divine”. Already I’m making subtle jokes about submission to the gods–it’s a sex joke if you have a dirty mind., it is my responsibility to keep The Flame of What Has Been SpokenAdding captials brings gravitas, don’t you know, and the history of What Is LostThe downfall of oral history, of course, is that things get lost.. It is the responsibility of all of my kind–the EleutheroiSo now we’re adding Greek to our multicultural mix. We really had to, since the premise includes Odyssey in the original Greek. Eleutheroi means “men of leisure”, which is saying something about the aristocratic class–we know this guy is a noble, since the Vizir works for his uncle–but also is a commentary on the notion that culture is the province of the people who have free time. It’s also the root that Wells used to come up with his ‘Eloi’, which gets us the notion of a class that doesn’t understand the very technolog that keeps them alive. are the arkAnd this phrasing captures the notion of a “sacred” trust between this class and a broader people of all that remains.

So, even as I sit, surrounded by my charges, and slowly and clearly speak the words of one of the Lost TalesHere I am loving the idea that there are some things that are still passed on by rote, even though the language might be lost. I especially like the idea that these guys are repeating They Odyssey in Greek, but they have no idea…, falling as ever into the gentle rhythm–not watching to see their mouths follow along as they take the Lost Tale into their keepingSee, rote memorization of meaningless syllables!–my mind drifts once again to the Metal Age and the legends of the IngeniuersEngineers as mythical creatures of legend–maybe that’s a little self-serving..

I know the words of these legends too, and they are legends in a tongue not lostOK, so let’s make it explicit that the Lost Tales are lost because they are in a lost tongue., but their essences escape me just as much as those of the Lost Tales. Oh, I have some idea of what it must have been like in the days when the rulers of the world held TeknosA little more Greek never hurt. in their hands and shaped the world with arcane formulas…like a differential equation to measure beam deflection., but only a glimmering. Thing are so different now, and this world is more than once removed from theirs. Their strange world, before the Hanumen; before the Felix CulpaCatholics will know this one. “Felix Culpa” is Latin for “happy fault”, but is more often translated as “The Fortunate Fall”, and is a biblical reference to Adam and Eve’s fall and the loss of the Garden of Eden. It was a fortunate fall because of the good that will come from it (i.e. Christ’s Second Coming, etc.) I’m using it here to refer to the turning away from technology–the Eloi will see this as a positive thing, while recognizing that something is lost; that there was a fall. Using the Latinate name pulls in more multi-culture, suggests a kind of ivory tower learning, and finally invokes the notion that this thing is thought about in a religous context..

Before my father took his own path to devotionThis would be that bhakticharya that I made up earlier., he spoke to me of the Fall. Not as one of our class to another, not in the ceremony of preserving words, but as father to son, speaking the words of his own thoughtsI was quite pleased with the notion that people in this class conversing with each other would be a rare enough thing that he has to call it out.. His words scared me–the notion that the Fall was note the fault of the Metal Agers, but a consequence of their passingHmmm. So maybe it didn’t start as a turning away from the hard sciences. Maybe it was that we just didn’t have enough Morlocks to keep the society going, and we made a virtue of necessity.. He spoke at length of man’s tendency to finally recognize when the course life drifted (or did he say “piloted”–nuance is not supposed to fade for one of my class, but memory is soft for me around the image of my father) very far from the true, and to correct this by going just as far wrong but in some other directionThis might actually be the point–not to oversteer as a way to try to get out of a skid..

At the time I didn’t really understand what he was saying. Partly I was too young, and too saddened by his impending journey (oh, let us call it “surrender”A hint that this path of devotion deal is not really all that you might think from the name. and pay the price–nuance is so important to one of my classWords and sublte distinctions are, of course, important to a people who literally live to preserve culture. And this is our first hint that not only is he always thinking about other eras, but that he is positively bitter about the way things are.), and partly I just had not yet take custody of the histories he alluded to.

Now I carry them with me, and like my father, I begin to suspect that the end of the Metal Age was not caused by the Fall so much as marked by it. That there was not a crisis among those who spoke to machines“I speak to machines with the voice of humanity“, but rather a turning away. Our Aesthetic AgeProps to Alex Wilson for this term was born on the fruiting body of the Metal Age, and perhaps was not a cultural correction so much as an overcorrection… Surely the warrior and the teknosianYeah, this was a lift from Leela and her tesh-nisians were too strong in their age, but perhaps the trickster and the poetYes, this is the Odyssey again. Putting Ulysses as the ideal, and respecting the poets who write and maintain these tales. had too much weight in the age that followed. Perhaps the Harumen would not now rule (oh damn the price, let us say instead “husband”, for my class has ever loved games with wordsOK, I was proud of this too, the wordplay of “husband” as in the manager of a bunch of animals, and “husband” as in the marital role–again the sex double entendre.) us all.

Still, at least we now hold the truth amongst us, and pass it from man to man. There is no way to change or hide the truth, when it is carried in the minds of manyIrony here, since passing things from person to person, really opens the door for any link in the chain to alter things, consciously or not. But also a slap at Fox News.. There is no way for the untruths of a bearer of imperium to spread without correctionAnother slap at Fox News.. We hold the tales of what has been, and the stories that the Makers craft. We keep the Lost Tales that someday may be found.

I say “we”, but of course my time as a keeper is nearly done. Soon the Simian GuardJust to reinforce the monkey thing for people who aren’t familiar with Haruman will come for me, and take me to the sky ships of the Harumen, and after a time my devotion will be proved and I will remember no more.

Perhaps it is meet that my memory spends its last attention on the Fall, and the price we ultimately paid for seeking a proper beginning without adequate eye on the possible ends.And we bring it all back home with the notion of the price, making it more obvious that this is a “worst case” scenario.

Annoyingly Detailed Annotations:

The basic notion – before I had seen my specific scenario, I had already decided that I was going to run with a “the worst thing that could happen is the world ending and then getting kidnapped and forced into sexual servitude by space monkeys” joke. When I saw what my topic was, I decided to build a science fiction scenario where the current trend away from advanced education in the hard sciences & engineering was coupled with a resurgence in the interest in the classics & the arts. In this future, this leads to a society that could no longer manipulate it’s own technology, and was proud of this turning away from the coldly rational. Of course this also left them defenseless when the space monkeys come!

And now, the footnotes: