When Kap Fynncraft woke up on Tuesday morning.

When Kap Fynncraft woke up on Tuesday morning, neither he nor anyone else knew that it would be different from any of the previous days. He walked to the bathroom, washed his face, brushed his teeth, had a bath, brewed some coffee, toasted some bread, boiled an egg, breakfasted, dressed up and locked the front door behind him. When he reached the last rung of the ladder he had to climb down, he seemed as if he forgot something, and climbed all the way back up. Wedged in the window grill above the first rung was a folded-up white sheet: the newspaper. He stuck it in his mouth and climbed back down. Adjusting his cap, he stood at the bus stop. It was 07.40.

As always, Chip Ramirez stood to his left, and as always, Ark Eiwen stood to Chip's left. They had nothing in particular to speak about, but a decade-old habit of waiting at the bus stop for 10 minutes in each other's presence made the silence anything but discomfiting. At 07.42 precisely, The Man In The Green Helmet would ride by on his scooter. A minute later, The Two Men With Their Briefcases would open the store on the other side of the street. Just as they reordered everything inside the shop and turned the sign to "Open", a red bus could be seen driving up and down the mounding road on the horizon. At 07.50, Kap, Chip and Ark boarded it.

The bus ride to the factory took precisely four minutes everyday because the amount of traffic between 07.50 and 07.54 was the same on any given day. In fact, the amount of traffic at any point of time was the same on any given day. In fact, nothing else about the city had changed in the last 10 years. As he rode the bus to the factory, he also knew nothing would ever change either because the smoke rising from the smelting factory a few miles in the northeast was always of the same hue, density and emotion. Sometimes, he'd look at it and wonder. Sometimes, he wouldn't look any way at all but the paper. Sometimes, he thought what it would be like to jump out of the bus onto the pavement and shatter his head. The telltale jerk brought him out of his reverie on that Tuesday morning, and a minute later, he alighted.

It was winter. The westward wind was strong and cold, unrelenting against his thin woollen shawl. He drew it tighter around himself, although it had never been of any help. But he'd had nothing else to complain about all year, and something like this was all that he had to keep himself from thinking of different ways to kill himself. He signed elaborately in the register, and as always the clerk looked up at him queerly. Before he went to his seat near the drill, he looked at the calendar. It was March 17, 2144. The celebrations were exactly a week away. Exactly 10 years ago, on March 24, 2134, the country officially declared it had nothing significant left to achieve. The standard of living was appreciable, nobody was poor, no wars seemed possible, diplomatic relations presented no challenges, research output had been steadied, diseases had been eradicated, consumption was regulated, the surplus was sold at fixed rates, the weather was shielded against, and state-sponsored festivals provided distraction from the melancholy.

Kap Fynncraft had been a journalist. When The Threshold was breached, he was reporting a story on a woman giving birth to quadruplets at the capital's government hospital. A few days later, he had been promoted to sub-editorship with the newspaper. A week later, there was nothing to go by except a repeated declaration of the government's accomplishments. A month later, the paper had shut down and he was forced to find work in one of the factories. A year later, in 2135, his wife died when she slipped on the ladder outside his door. He had tried to instigate a revolt in the factory: when they asked him what the problem was, he had said something about wages. The next day, he was arrested by the police. A few days later, he was forced to admit there was nothing he could do about it, and when he did admit it, he was released. When he went back to work,  he found they'd also increased his wages. When he tried to look intimidating, they reminded him of his wife. "This is for you to spend as you wish, Mr. Fynncraft. We've a feeling you loved your wife very much."

At 16.00, he lined up near Gate 2. The queue for the bus was two labourers long, and he joined it as he always did as the third man. At 16.06, the bus started on its six-minute journey. On that Tuesday, it took more than an hour: just as they passed the Presidential Boulevard, they were stopped behind a few other buses, some cars, many cyclists, and what looked like an upside-down truck, its underside charred and smoking. Kap Fynncraft, somehow, had sunk back into a reverie. He would be home late today, dinner would be late, he'd have to eat as he watched the game tonight. He smiled. Maybe he'd annoy that old woman downstairs by walking around at 22.00. Maybe he'd miss the bus in the morning and hitch a ride. Maybe-

Before he knew it, the bus was on its way again. He could no longer see the plumes of smoke on the southwest, the inky blue of the late-evening sky had swallowed it in its entirety. The streetlamps were lighting themselves one by one, as if they knew Kap Fynncraft was coming, as if they knew he'd want to alight and, somehow, not want to break his head on the pavement on a night that involved a postponed dinner and an angry old woman. A moist film of water had condensed on the windows of the bus, and he waited by the door lest he missed his stop. Under the bright white glare of the streetlights, he could see the patterned tiling on the pavement whip by in the oblong shadow of the vehicle. He knew they were somewhere near his house, he remembered the hexagonal patterns from a terrible day when he had reached the bus stop early one morning and had decided to look down.

Black, white, black, white, black, white, black... the lines between the colours trapped his eyes, and he could feel himself moving through the Universe one coloured tile at a time.

The Persistence Of Vision

There was once a little man, a man of short stature and quick to temper, who lived somewhere in the suburbs of London, weathering cold weather or a hot summer without smile or frown. He had a quick and crisp moustache so fiendishly red that it frightened away the children who wandered into his wide front-yard, and they would run and they would run lest he spot them trampling his leaves. The neighbours did not know much about him nor did they have any complaint, and the little man kept his house and his nose quite clean. While he wished they would only leave him alone and not suffer the pains of company, he would decline tea and biscuits completely politely.

Once it so happened that, returning from the grocer an evening, an old man walking the other way tipped his hat at him, and the little man was overcome by a sudden but freakish curiosity, and so stepped up to enquire: "Good evening, sir!", quoth he, "The sun is too high in the sky although August is nigh gone. When is winter to come?" In reply said the old man: "Good evening, sir, to you! The chap on the radio said winter would be here, quite strong and bleak, before the week after is done!" The little man thanked and set off once more, thinking of the weather to himself when the old man called: "Have a day as wonderful as you are, sir!" The little man, now, he was swift to anger, and turning back, he called in reply: "Why, sir, why! What have I said to earn that curse? What have I spoken to deserve something as terse?" The old man knew not what dragon he had poked and stood so still as to surprise winter before it arrived. In receiving only silence, the little man finished: "As wonderful as I am, you say to me, but the town knows, oh, the world knows, I am no wonderful man but as devilish as they come to be! Lest you fear anything, sir, let us have it clear. Speak not to me again for a madness is here. My madness of your futile attempts at persistence is here."

[caption id="attachment_785" align="aligncenter" width="277" caption="All those who wander are not lost"][/caption]

A Smart Man's Utopia

I wish most people just shut the hell up and walked away.
Instead of sticking around like geniuses wanting to give me advice.
I hate it when that happens.
When caution is mistaken for weakness.
When patience is mistaken for hesitation to grab an opportunity.
I hate it when people consign me to idiocy.

A friend of mine once proposed what can only be called a pogrom.
Jovially, of course, please don't go hunting after him. He's a nice chap.
He's not a hard worker but a smart one, which I think is the new hard.
He said let's wipe out the stupid people from the face of the earth.
Smart people spend half their time cleaning up after the idiots, he said.
Which is mostly true.
Jeremy: "How do you decide who's stupid and who's not?"
The IQ score was proposed and accepted.

To wit: Jeremy has always refused to take an IQ test.
For all his adult life I'd say - a period of 22 years.
Jeremy is also one of the smartest people I know.

Anyway.

We assumed that the pogrom was executed.
That a hegemony had transcended into utopia.
There were smart people everywhere now.
A smart man no longer had to clean up after his less-endowed predecessors.
Now that we were after the first hurdle - our own imagination - we were up against the more urgent ones.

1. Without stupid people, isn't a more dangerous hegemony in the offing?
   When everyone has an IQ of more than 100, the new stupid are smarter than the old stupid.
   When everyone has an IQ of more than 100, who's going to want to do the old stupid's work? 
   
   When the new stupid are smarter, the issue of re-executing the pogrom is raised.
   The new stupid are going to do things that won't find appreciation from the new smart.
   The new smart are still going to have to clean up after the new stupid.
   Is the pogrom re-executed?
   Or does the executor promise that the pogrom will be halted after the first generation?
   Or can one trust the executor with anything at all?


2. How is the man who condones a pogrom a smart man in the first place?
   By extension, the new smart become the new stupid and there is a massive population inversion.
   I could go into it but am holding back because it would be a heavily mathematical affair.
   Let's keep things light.
   Like killing stupid people off? Sure. 
   
   Can't a smart man have a smart man's utopia?
   Isn't it unfair that the smart man immediately becomes a fool when he desires a smart man's utopia?
   Isn't it even more unfair that the fool can desire anything and yet remain a fool and not worse?
   It's like a spiral that descends downward.

Being smart is like being in a set with an upper limit.
You come all the way from negative infinity.
All the way from being an abject moron to being smart.
The moment you realize you're smart, you start all over again.
It sucks to be smart.
There, I've said it.
I've to start all over again.
I do that everyday, anyway.
Being an idiot is much better than being smart.
An idiot's utopia does last longer.

You might notice how it could be the world you're in right now.
It is.
You might wonder if the idiocy manifests as mediocrity.
It doesn't.
The idiocy manifests as the tolerance of mediocrity.
And other such things.

Sigh!

This chancy, chancy, chancy world.