The Empty Head

The Utopians

Bliss was changing fast. A new day was dawning in the land where everyone did pretty much whatever they wanted to do, anytime they wanted to do it. Men of strong conviction had seized control of the reins of power but the people hardly noticed. They were all crammed full of life, and candy bars and vodka, and some of them had lots had money to spend.

The citizens of Bliss couldn't be bothered with all that stuff because they had a million things to do all the time. Really important things.

They had to go to work every day. They had to go to the Laundro-Mats to wash their clothes. They had to shop at enormous Food-Marts and buy cheap groceries and boxes of wine. At night they had to watch their Viso-Screens so they would know what to think and say the next day at work. When the wars started, pictures of strangers getting bombed to bits evoked little response. There was a terrible lack of empathy caused by various factors. Without empathy nice people turn into monsters practically overnight.

It was a strange nightmare. But it was real too.

“Things are pretty damned good,” the men of conviction, the Utopians, declared boldly in speeches. “So there's no need for you to worry. Eventually, things will get a lot better. Your taxes will be cut, and there will be new programs to watch on your Viso-Screens.”

And the people of Bliss were all like “whatever dudes!” and kept on doing whatever they wanted, which was to buy better Viso-Screens with the tax money.

But things weren't good at all really, and things were never going to get any better because the Utopians had all gone secretly insane and didn't know it. Nobody else knew it either, though some people, mostly the poor and desperate ones, suspected it. So the Utopians were free to keep on thinking their jazzy, funky thoughts, and to act all crazy-like, and to mess everything up like a bunch of idiots, which they did.

This major freak-out was caused by Spores—alien life-forms living in the 4th dimension where it was possible, among other things, to think around corners. The Utopians with their rigid, three-dimensional thought patterns had no resistance. It was all a terrible accident though. The Spores were peaceful but needed brain-wave energy to live. Wild fluctuations of the solar winds had marooned them on Bliss.

The Spores found the thoughts of the Utopians—so full of violence and nobility and sex—supremely delicious. They were hairless and only a couple of millimeters long, so it was easy as pie for them to quietly burrow deep into the brains of the Utopians without being noticed. It didn't hurt the Utopians at all physically, but the Spores totally messed up their brains because of alien chemistry, causing them to snarl like mad dogs all day long and tell strange lies, and be unfaithful to their wives with whores and secretaries, but it was totally not their fault.

They never asked for the tiny aliens to come and live in their brains.

Meanwhile, thousands of people were dying in the wars for no good reason, and the ones who were left hardly had any food or money or Viso-Screens at all. "Why why why!" they would scream all day long while looking through piles of garbage for food. They never found out about the Spores so they blamed the Utopians for everything. They got so mad that they wanted to kill the Utopians, but they couldn't. The Utopians lived far away across a wide blue ocean full of sharks. All they could do was scream and starve and make babies.

They made lots of babies. The babies grew up after the wars were over.

Of course years later, after the trials were finished and all the Utopians had been convicted of horrible war crimes—and sent shrieking to their deaths, some people, scientists mostly, got suspicious. They decided to dissect the brains of the dead Utopians hoping to find something rotten in all that grey matter. They never found the Spores though, or anything else, mostly because they didn't look hard enough. They were pretty lazy scientists.

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