M notices my conflict and resolves it for me. Three strips of moral ambiguity disappear into his mouth.
There is no further conversation at our table. Food is a delightful novelty for me, but for these three women and their fully Living appetites, it’s serious. They’ve subsisted on little but Carbtein since we left the stadium—much longer, in Tomsen’s case—and despite providing all the nutrition of a proper meal, there is some aspect of human hunger which that miraculous chalk never satisfies. I can see a few patches of sunken skin on Tomsen’s neck, translucent brown like apple bruises, revealing the phantom malnutrition of a Carbtein diet, the body insisting “I’m fine!” until the very moment of death. All three of them are literally starving, and the meal proceeds accordingly. The minutes tick by in wordless chewing.
So I settle in to wait, feeling full in a way I never have in this life, and as I gaze idly around the diner, studying faces and skimming conversations, my ears perk to the sound of an escalating debate in the booth behind me.
“It won’t work,” says a man says with a faint East African accent. “Maybe with a dozen people in a house, maybe a hundred in a remote compound, but once it tries to be a society, it will always implode or be crushed.”
“And you’re so sure of this why exactly?” says another man with an Irish lilt.
“Because history! People have been trying this kind of thing for centuries. It does not work.”
“With all due respect to your field, love, history is overrated.”
“Oh is it?”
“History isn’t long enough to be an accurate predictor. It’s a statistically insignificant sample size. An idea fails a few times in a single century and that means it will always fail, no matter how much things change around it? Bollocks!”
“Okay, but—”
“You can’t take a handful of examples and call it universal law. Our entire recorded history amounts to a few thousand years—a nanosecond on our evolutionary timeline. We have no bloody idea what’s possible.”
I notice the rest of our table has tuned in. Julie sits upright and cranes her neck, trying to catch a glimpse of the speakers.
“Okay,” the other man says. “Valid point, if you want to zoom out that far. But right now? You really believe this could work right now?”
“It’s the post-apocalypse, Geb! All the old systems are gone, the rubbish is swept out. There’s never been a better time to try something different.”
The other man pauses. “Let’s take a poll.”
He turns around, smiling at us over the top of the booth, and suddenly we are participants. “Excuse me. My name is Gebre and this is my husband Gael and we are having one of those windy debates about how to rebuild society. Can we get your opinion?”
“Sure,” Nora says with an odd note of unease, perhaps fearing a repeat of the Julie-Abram conflicts.
Julie, Tomsen, and I twist around on the bench to face our neighbors. Gebre is slim and dark-skinned with short, tufted hair and a neat goatee, dressed for the wrong decade in crisp khakis and an improbably clean blue button-up. Gael is nearly his opposite, with fair skin and shaggy blond hair, his ratty mustard t-shirt revealing tattooed strings of numbers spiraling up his forearms. He gives us an apologetic smile as Gebre launches into his “poll.”
“So in the Old Gov days, society was a machine, yes? Each law was connected to another law leaving no empty space between them. There had to be a law for every situation, no loose parts, no gaps, because if there was a gap, someone would exploit it. You agree so far?”
No one confirms this, but he continues.
“We know that many people are good, but we designed the machine to assume everyone is bad. Most people wouldn’t choose to hurt others even if they were allowed to, but some would, so we had to design the machine around those ones. We couldn’t leave anything to choice. We couldn’t use soft human ethics for any of the machine’s gears. They had to be hard, made out of law and force.”
“Which severely limited the possibilities of the design,” Gael interjects.
“Yes,” Gebre agrees, nodding. “There aren’t many designs to choose from when they have to be this rigid. But what are you going to do?” He shrugs. “If you live underwater, all your vehicles must be submarines.”
“See, this is where Geb and I part ways,” Gael says to our table. “He thinks people are a mindless erosive element like water, that we’re always working to break down society, so the only kinds of societies that can survive are watertight ones.”
“No, no, no,” Gebre says. “This is not what I think, it’s what they think.” He waves a hand around the diner, taking in everyone. “What most people think. And whatever most people think becomes reality.”
“Our idea of what ‘most people’ think hasn’t been updated in a long time.”
“Well, this is my question for these people, isn’t it? So. You people.” He swings his hand back to our table and looks us over, taking in our haggard appearance, our bandages and scars. “You look…well traveled. You look like you’ve had your share of experience with humanity. What do you think?”
Julie leans forward against the bench, cocking her head. “About…what, exactly?”
“Would you want to live in a society that uses altruism and cooperation for some of its gears? A system that contains opportunities for exploitation but expects people not to choose them? A society based—at least partially—on goodness?”
Julie thinks for a moment, but not a long one. “Hell yes.”
Gebre hesitates. “Hell yes?”
“Fuck yes!” Her eyes glitter. “Sure, it sounds crazy, but we’ve been using sane systems for a long time and look how that turned out. If we’re not willing take a big leap, we’re going to end up right back where the apocalypse started.”
Tomsen raises her hand. “I say aye, concur and agree. Break stuff open and show what’s in it and make new stuff from the pieces.”
Gebre has lost some momentum but he continues. “It would be very difficult. People would have to rely on each other—not just their own groups but everyone together. We’d have to give up some security and independence. We wouldn’t have what we had before.”
“Fuck what we had before!”
I smile at the half-crazed passion in Julie’s eyes. Nothing gets her revved like a windy debate, no matter where, when, or with whom. Combine it with untold quantities of caffeine and…
“What we had before is what burned the world down. I’m ready for a whole new everything.”
“Chairs on the ceiling,” Tomsen adds. “An otter for president.”
Gebre looks at us for a moment, then tosses up his hands and turns back to his husband. “Well. Okay.”
Gael erupts with laughter. “You’re out of touch with the youth, old man.”
“I might even agree with them,” Gebre says with a shrug, “but they’re hardly representative of the general population.”
“We might be someday,” Julie says. “Maybe sooner than you think.”
Gebre grunts and resumes eating while Gael holds back a flood of gloating.
“But is this a real place you’re talking about?” Julie asks the couple, all but climbing over the booth. “Is there a enclave like this out there somewhere?”
“No, no,” Gebre says, waving dismissively. “Not a real place. Utopia means ‘no place.’”