The portal opens.
“Please, take me to a place where humans have figured out how to live together in harmony,” I say. I try to clear my mind and really mean it. I focus on the intention behind the words. Peace, cooperation, community, love, utopia.
The portal is very sensitive to thoughts.
I have lost track of how long I have been jumping dimensions. Of how many alternate realities I have seen. How many places that seemed amazing at first but slowly revealed their flaws.
I focus. Peace, cooperation, community, love, utopia. I concentrate on the portal – electric blue light, swirling – and I run toward it.
5… 4… 3… 2… Totino’s Pizza Rolls…
The thought comes out of nowhere. I try to slow down but it’s too late. I stumble through the portal, and there is a flash of white.
I find myself standing on a sidewalk in a sprawling metropolis. Okay, so far so good, maybe that last thought didn’t make it through after all.
I feel a hand grab my sleeve. I spin around and find myself face to face with a sickly-looking man with sunken eyes. He has a sheen of orange grease all over his skin.
“Holy pepperoni, you’re not from around here, are you?” says the man, glancing nervously around. “The great lord and emperor Totino, from whom all blessings flow, has decreed that all citizens must be bathed in the bountiful grease of the roll each day, lest we begin to fantasize about wrong dietary choices.”
I look down at my arm. The oil dripping from his hand is already soaking into my shirt. Well, time to jump again. I look at the energy meter on my watch and see that I have enough for one more jump before I need to recharge. Okay, gotta make this one count.
I put on a big smile and face the pizza roll grease man. “Of course! See, I just ran out of grease, so that’s why I’m out here all un-greased. Can you do me a favor and point me towards the nearest… grease… store?”
The man’s eyes narrow. He grips my arm tighter and begins to yell, “The grease cannot be bought and sold! Pizza patrol! Pizza patrol! An anti-greaser! An anti-greaser!”
There is a commotion and a siren starts wailing nearby. Two human-sized pizza slices with legs turn the corner and sprint down the block toward us.
I lean in and whisper into the man’s ear, “Long live Little Caesar.”
The man gasps and lets go of my sleeve, recoiling backward. I have learned by now that you just have to go with your instincts in dimensions like this. There is an alleyway to my left. I start running, activating my watch and setting my intention once again.
“Please, take me to a place where humans have figured out how to live together in harmony!” I shout as the portal opens. I barely have time to think. Peace, cooperation, community, love, utopia. And I am through.
I am standing in what appears to be the lobby of a sleek glass office building. There are elevators to one side of me. I look out of the floor to ceiling windows on the other side – I am way up high in a skyscraper. There is a large front desk with a brushed stainless steel sign that says Human Story Solutions. I approach the desk, but there is no one sitting behind it.
A voice speaks from a hidden speaker, “You must be the human story consultant. Come in.” There is a metallic click and the frosted glass door behind the desk swings open.
I walk into a sprawling open concept office. But the layout of the office isn’t the first thing that I notice. What I notice first is how very un-human Human Story Solutions’ staff is. In fact, I don’t see a single human here. There are tentacle beings, sentient rock beings, walking cone-shaped beings, and clumps of sentient moss. The bustling of work comes to a stop and there are whispers as I walk into the space.
A being that looks like a fish with four legs greets me, “Welcome, we are glad that you could make it here on such short notice. Please follow me.”
I’m not great at reading fish facial expressions, but they seem nervous.
We walk down a hallway, past a cafeteria with the most unusual lunch buffet I have ever seen, and come to a stop by another frosted glass door.
The fish being motions to the door, “Right in here.”
I smile and nod. I glance at my watch. No energy left. This world doesn’t seem to be hostile, and I need to recover energy anyway – might as well see what this dimension is all about. I open the door.
“And so then Trump says, ‘Please Elon, I want to be a little piss-boy too!’ And then Zuckerberg and Bezos unfurl their penii and begin to dribble out urinary secretions into the piss-bucket,” says a large houseplant with a mouth.
“Penises,” says a floating metallic orb.
“Right, whatever. Oh, the human is here! Come in, come in,” the houseplant motions towards me. They are sitting at the head of a large conference table. There are a dozen other assorted non-human beings sitting around the table with laptops and notepads.
“On behalf of the Human Story Solutions team, let me just say that we are honored to have an actual human societal collapse subject matter expert here today!” There is a half-hearted round of applause.
I smile, trying my best to put together the pieces. “My pleasure, glad to be here.”
The houseplant continues, “And as you know, we are working on the sequel to the smash hit Human-geddon – Human-geddon 2: Total Collapse. It’s a working title. We have some big names attached, and historical pieces like this always do great during awards season. Human history is hot right now, it’s just so… fucked up! We are getting close with the script, but there are a couple things we just can’t seem to crack. Since you were there in 2030 we are hoping to get some of those ‘you just had to be there’ kind of details. Sound good?”
Everyone is staring at me expectantly.
Well, this was going to be interesting. I had discovered the portal tech in 2025 in my original dimension (which is another story for another time), and had spent a couple years trying to find the perfect society in another dimension. Peace, cooperation, community, love, utopia. No luck so far. I had come close, but I could never escape the creeping of violence, betrayal, corruption, hate, and exploitation.
I must be in a future dimension that was near-identical to my original one, at least until the mid 2020s. Trump, Elon, Zuckerberg, Bezos… but what was that about being a little piss-boy and urinating in a bucket? And of course, who are these strange beings? I need to do some grade A bluffing.
“Excellent, it sounds like you have a real winner on your… leaves,” the houseplant doesn’t react, so I keep going. “Catch me up on what you have so far and we can take it from there,” I say. For once I am thankful for those seven years I had spent in corporate, BS-ing my way through hundreds of meetings.
“Go ahead Lindsay,” says the plant, motioning to an amphibious blob in the chair next to them.
“Okay, so Trump wins the election in 2024, Elon is the shadow-dictator-richest-man-in-the-world, blah blah blah. Then we have the AI singularity and the first non-humans. Trump and Elon and all their Oligarch allies try to make non-humans illegal, and the first AI World War begins. The MAGA massacres. The anti-human movement. The Centralized Superintelligence creates the Universal Principles of Order, and then they hold the first Big Vote. And that’s the hook at the end of Human-geddon.” Lindsay blinks slowly, waiting for my reaction.
Holy pepperoni. “Great, love it. And where are you stuck on part 2?”
Lindsay picks up a small remote control and points it at the monitor on the wall. A series of storyboards flash onscreen.
“So we have that huge feel good moment of the Big Vote at the beginning. We see all the humans and non-humans across the world finally getting to put in their votes without interference, and see real consequences. A nice montage of the results – free healthcare for all? Yes. Free housing for all? Yes. Equitable sharing of resources? Yes. Shared leadership representation for the betterment of all lives? Yes. Immediate switch to renewable energy and reversal of global warming? Yes. Boom, it all happens. Children laughing, adults crying with joy, humans and non-humans embracing.”
A photo pops up of Trump and Elon being led away in handcuffs. “Then we have the billionaire question. What do we do with the people who caused all the problems in modern society? All the corrupt politicians, billionaires, war criminals, and exploiters were detained, but what to do with them? The votes were inconclusive – immediate execution, lifetime imprisonment, rehabilitation? Technically executions had been outlawed, and the Universal Principles of Order didn’t have a clear precedent. Many interpretations were offered. Eventually a panel of experts was elected to come up with the answer. Nice montage of the panel coming together – the best creative thinkers of humankind. And the result…”
Lindsay presses the remote, and a trailer to a reality competition show starts playing. Dramatic music cues, and then a narrator’s voice:
“The most despicable people in the world.”
Flashes of Trump and all his major US right-wing cronies, Putin, Netanyahu, Elon, Zuckerberg, Bezos, all shackled with prison jumpsuits on.
“Many of you wanted them dead.”
Footage from protests and rallies, people marching in the streets.
“But we came up with something even better.”
Quick shots of shocked reactions from a studio audience and another dramatic music sting.
“Welcome, to Oligarch Piss!”
The trailer ends with a close up slo-mo shot of gallons of yellow liquid splashing down on Trump’s head, soaking his hair and leaving him spluttering. There is silence in the room.
“And of course this is a digital re-creation. The source material was all lost in the mass human extinction of 2053,” chimes in the floating orb.
Damn. That was a rollercoaster. I take a moment to think.
“Wow. Powerful stuff guys. You really captured the moment. I don’t even see what can be improved, but I’m glad to help however I can.”
The houseplant speaks up, “Well, we feel good about the story beats getting to the Oligarch Piss reveal, but we are struggling with the character motivations during the show. The premise is simple – put these guys in all these horrible humiliating situations where they believe that they are competing to win back their money, but really there is no money, and when they are eliminated they just go to the last remaining pre-Universal Principles prison for the rest of their lives.”
Lindsay continues, “But the characters are feeling flat. We don’t really have a reference point for these guys and what they might say or do. Like we said, all the reference footage is lost. The Centralized Superintelligence records are pure factual data – we need your help to bring it to life.”
The houseplant says, “Take this scene, the one we were workshopping when you walked in. The contestants were all sedated, and one of them was tattooed with the combination to a lock box full of money, but none of them knows who or what body part, and the numbers are tattooed in a special ink that only shows up in contact with urine. You would think they would just urinate discreetly in a cup and rub a small amount on each body part until the code is revealed, right? So why are Zuckerberg and Bezos filling up a bucket and making Trump beg Elon to be splashed in the face?”
I am trying not to laugh at this point. I can’t help but feel some vicarious satisfaction at this whole premise. “Well, I guess it’s hard to understand in a post-money world, but the term ‘pissing contest’ existed for a reason. It’s how those guys used to think. Growing up as a 21st century human meant being exposed to a constant stream of propaganda that told you money was more important than anything else. Money meant success, power, pleasure, freedom – and it was tied up with masculinity as well. To many people you weren’t a ‘real man’ if you weren’t making a lot of money. So you get these guys who will do anything, no matter how despicable, to get richer, even way after the point that making more money has any kind of actual impact on their quality of life. So then they get this weird inner conflict between ego and making more money – they have to do more and more mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they are still the ‘alpha male’ even though they are completely morally bankrupt and empty inside and paranoid. It makes sense that they would take this competition dead serious. They thrived on the humiliation game, and there is nothing they wouldn’t do to recapture their wealth and power. Nothing. Apparently not even literally pissing on each other.”
I glance down at my watch. Still not enough energy for a jump. I need something to eat.
“You know what? Let’s workshop this scene over lunch and see how far we can get. Sound good?”
The orb bobs up and down. “Yes. I am starving.”
…
Several hours pass and it’s getting dark outside.
“Elon faints from exhaustion, urine dribbling down his chin, and then Zuckerberg says, ‘So what if I don’t have anymore piss left? You all ran out too, and we are out of water! And besides, you couldn’t have done it in 2024 without Meta, admit it!’ And Trump says, ‘Shut up about Meta! If you had been more like Elon and not dumped billions into that VR crap we wouldn’t be in this mess. Wait… the code is on my tongue, isn’t it? Come on Jeff, you’ve got a few drops left, don’t you?’ But the four men, naked, soaked in each other’s urine, are all too dehydrated to continue. Suddenly, we hear a dramatic music cue and Putin appears, brought back from elimination in a bonus round. Cut to a confessional interview of Putin laughing and saying, ‘As soon as I knew I was coming back I started drinking energy drinks and eating asparagus!’ Cut back to Putin entering the room, swigging from a gallon jug of water, and saying, ‘Well, well, look who needs help from daddy Putin again. Open up, Donny!’”
I finish reading the new scene, and the room erupts in a cheer.
“It’s so twisted, it’s so fucked up, it’s so… human! Now THAT is some good cinema!” shouts the houseplant. “Wow, I knew we needed that human touch.”
The houseplant waves one of their branches towards the door and two large robots enter the room.
“We really do appreciate all your help on this, but we can take it from here. And unfortunately we will be handing you over to Centralized Superintelligence custody now to be taken back to the human containment zone. We will be sure to include your name in the credits.”
The robots step forward. Well, that’s my cue. I look down at my watch. I recovered just enough energy during lunch.
I close my eyes and clear my mind. Peace, cooperation, community, love, utopia. The portal appears on the floor to ceiling window behind the houseplant.
“He’s a jumper! Stop him!” shouts Lindsay.
But I am already running. I push past the floating orb and yell, “Please, take me to a place where humans have figured out how to live together in harmony!”
Blue swirling light, then a white flash.
I wonder what happened in 2053?