A-Void

to find the ducks approaching? The ducks are alone.
I look to the Villages along the perimeter and at the riverfronts, but there is no human movement there either. Farther, each Village’s Circus appears empty, and beyond, no utility vehicles move about the massive cylinders that transform trash, funneled through the underground litter grid, to produce fresh materials and energy.
My fingertips melt along the railing and tears I have never experienced, from my innermost self, flood me. Soon, I am paralyzed on the banquette floor like a bird with broken limbs. My beard is soaked. A ringing begins in my ears and grows more surreal with the crimson tinting my vision. Yet, I can hear my breathing as never before.
Awakening, I’m lying in a short pool of sweat. “Jasmine, where are you? Where is everyone?”
Has it always been just me? Maybe I am in purgatory. I wonder how long I have been here. Am I supposed to find something that transforms me?
Rolling to my side, I am again able to kneel and face the metropolis. I must go there to see what has happened.
A zigzagging stairway leads me down to cobblestone enclaving the security checkpoint where the wooden gates led. I kneel and touch the grass—it’s real—and from there, look up at the blotched maples, serpentine oaks, and tame eucalyptuses. I have not seen so many real trees since I was a child.
I hear swings squeaking nearby. Behind them, the water sparkles gold as a family of ducks rallies in. The falcon-bird lingers in the sky above me, and for a moment, I can hear the Earth turning.
After yielding at the post cautioning “Anti-stress Law 5: Gardening and construction noise prohibited before 8:30 AM,” I continue over a decorated moon bridge, under which, against the gentle current, a small turtle surfaces briefly between unopened water lilies and descends again.
I step onto the playground. When Isabella was younger, she loved pouring hot sand over her head and, later, would laugh as we turned her upside down to dip her hair in bathwater. I reach down to feel the sand and then turn at the thump of a Clydesdale horse carrying an empty carriage over the walking path.
Arriving at the main arcade into New Jamestown, I walk through a hulking archway hemmed by water and crowned by a pouncing elephantine lion with wings extending from its shoulders. A forepaw grips the cornice, its entablature inscribed with “Welcome pioneers. Create meaning.”
A bronze-and-red orb approaches me and I notice one like it is broken on the ground farther away. On its marquee, the hovering orb displays, “Do you have any questions? I am here to help you!”
“Where is everyone?”
“Sorry, I do not understand.”
I continue down the arcade under strings of globe lights, admiring the ornamented vertices of the buildings, which stretch over the colored glass of rotundas. I look up into the windows but do not find anyone.
No one exits the underground subway station wells and no music plays from the bandstands at the gates. No steam rises from the underground. I pass Grand Market, where trolleys rest at their station. I look through the framed windows and see the tomato medleys, sourdoughs, pound cakes, sweet lemons, salty meats, and dull cheeses diseased and dying.
Wind caresses my beard and brings to my attention papers shuffling from a distant street. I follow their path to the Benchmarker’s Clock Tower. Inside, a centerpiece vitrine displays The Zeitgeist. I open its case and can’t believe what I see: I’m holding the original.
The Zeitgeist
by
Armand Vander
Subject I
The Immortality Fantasy
Our own death is indeed quite unimaginable, and whenever we make the attempt to imagine it we … really survive as spectators.… [A]t bottom nobody believes in his own death, or to put the same thing in a different way, in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.1 2
We must first exist before we gain any ability to give meaning to our own existence.3 Beyond the faith we create in it, afterlife has no certainty, and placing all bets on it is “philosophical suicide,” because doing so undermines the experience we have here, our will to strive passionately to make that experience wonderful and lengthy.4
Extremism is arrogance. Beyond the walls of New Jamestown, the Violent Humans are asleep, dreaming they are immortals. Such fantasy life threatens the ultimate goal of self-preservation, self-defense. Avoiding the very real threat of our own extinction, their lifestyles are extreme. Survival is about adaption.
The Violent Humans spare no behaviors in their quest for self-enhancement, from subconsciously preferring the letters of their own names to plastic surgery. For most, success is their doing, whereas they blame failures on others or on their circumstances; for others, the opposite is true. They pay more attention to information that supports their own views than information that disputes it.5 6 7
In so doing, they force their fantasies on the exhaustive history of the Universe. Amazing discoveries of extinct Homo species barely make the news headlines, even when it is likely that at least one such cousin lived among us until the 1800s before existing no longer.8 In such grandiosity, most Violent Humans are unaware that our species may not have arisen if not for an extraterrestrial body colliding with Earth. Its plume exterminated the dinosaurs and allowed for this speciation.9
Subject II
Accelerating Environmental Change
Look in the mirror, and don’t be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival.10
Those who adapt to environmental changes survive. To adapt, we must possess more variety than does our environment. Thus, the Law of Requisite Variety states, “[O]nly variety … can destroy variety.”11 12
What happens, however, when the environment changes too fast for us to adapt? At what critical mass does more information cease to bring more power, instead becoming information overload?
Technology is the process whereby we create variety. Our primitive ancestors developed stone and wooden tools; later generations developed medicines to prolong life, telephones to spread information speedily, and automobiles to travel long distances with ease.