Two thousand three hundred years ago, humanity had reached perfection.
That was it. There was no corrupt government. There was no elimination of the individual. There was no rigid rulebook or crippling sameness. It was perfection in unity and diversity, perfection in the very definition of the word. It was perfection and that was it.
There were flying cars. There was no pollution. There were space stations on the moon. There were no aliens. There was peace. There was no war. Two thousand three hundred years ago, people had simply decided to start thinking logically.
And that was it.
Trudy McGary didn’t think it was strange when people went around wearing slick suits of adaptable metal or helmets for anti-gravity safety or translucent rose goggles that shaded their eyes and plugged their ears. She didn’t think it was strange for the exact reason that you don’t think it’s strange when men tie long strands of fabric around their necks in gangly bows or when women drag sharp blades against their legs to remove the dead protein filament protruding from their follicles. That was simply what it was, and that was it.
Like anyone who had been born in the last 2,300 years, Trudy drove flying cars and didn’t pollute. She went to the moon and didn’t witness aliens. She was at peace and didn’t go to war.
There was an endless amount of possibilities for every second of every minute of every day. No one had to work anymore; unlike olden days, when food was grown locally, people decided food should be manufactured and bought from stores instead. And, unlike the Imperfect Times when water sometimes got contaminated with bacteria and chemicals, people decreed that water should always be clean, because that made life easier. And since the price of everything had changed from being expensive to being free, everyone could spend every day doing whatever they wanted.
Trudy spent this day playing sports.
The game was tennis, and that was it, except that the gravity was turned off so you had to swim through the air to send the ball floating lazily over a net that wasn’t there, since there would be no point because the ball could go in literally any direction from the fifth dimension on out.
Her tennis partner was named Petey Tiller, and he wore a fashionable pair of rose-tinted goggles that shaded the eyes and plugged the ears. These goggles, a fad that had begun 2,300 years ago, were still popular today, and Trudy had spent her whole life looking to buy some of her own. Unfortunately, she hadn’t been able to find a pair anywhere.
It was maybe Trudy’s poor eyesight that made her so bad at tennis. She’d lost to Petey, who was a perfect tennis player, 2,304 times, and that was it.
“Maybe you have a problem with your eyesight,” Petey had suggested. “Maybe you need something to help your vision? Why don’t you get a pair of goggles like mine? They help me see.”
So Trudy looked, but she couldn’t find a pair anywhere.
“It’s forty-love, dear,” Petey said. “Game point.”
“Game point,” Trudy murmured. She wriggled through the gravity-less air toward the ball. Anti-gravity didn’t make you float, it made you stay. If you heaved yourself to the floor, you were on the floor. If you went in the air, you were in the air. You were where you went, and that was it.
Trudy went squirming through the air like an earthworm through molasses instead of earth – not difficult, just sticky. She clamped her glove around the lounging tennis ball and hammered it madly with her racket. It burst through the air like a rocket. Trudy was a terrible tennis player, but she had one hell of an arm.
“Aw, Trudy, this is a new one!” Petey moaned. “Look at it! It went right into the air vent!”
Indeed, it had gone right into the air vent, and was clattering at that very moment through the shaft, among puffs of violet anti-gravity gases, and gradually making its way toward the realm of gravity.
“We can still finish the game,” said Trudy. She wormed through the air toward the vent. “I’ll get it.”
“Well, hold on!” Petey squiggled after her. “You can’t just go shimmying through the vent!”
But it was too late; she had already gone shimmying through the vent and had disappeared.
“Well, for goodness sakes!” Petey groaned. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance you can get it by yourself without my chivalry, is there?”
Trudy was too deep in the air vent to answer, so Petey took the inevitable silence to mean no, there was no chance she could get it by herself without his chivalry, and he shimmied in after her.
Petey caught up with Trudy a ways down the shaft. So far down, in fact, that down was actually a concept. They had shimmied out of the anti-gravity tennis court and were no longer suspended in molasses. They braced their arms and legs against the narrow walls to keep from pitching face-first into whatever there was at the bottom of the tunnel.
“I don’t see the ball. We should go back.”
“I know it’s down here,” Trudy said, her face hard-set in the shadows. “I heard it hit the bottom.”
“There’s a bottom?” gulped Petey.
“Everything must have a bottom,” Trudy answered. “Just like every day must have a night
and every person must have a mother.”
Only, in the perfect world, lamps kept the day going all through the night, and babies were grown perfectly in labs, with no mother at all. Just a test tube and that was it. So Trudy and Petey began to wonder if the shaft really did have a bottom after all.
“This is it. I’m going to fall.”
“Petey!”
“Then we’ll see if there’s an end to this tunnel. If there is, then we’ll fall into the bottom and find the ball. And if there isn’t, then there will be nothing for us to hit and we won’t get hurt. We win either way!”
Before Trudy could argue, Petey compressed his limbs and dropped into her. Gravity pushed his fashionable goggles into the back of her head, and they tumbled down the shaft.
There was a bottom to the air-less vent, and they hit it, and, of course, it hurt. They landed in a liquid patch of muck, which got in Trudy’s eyes and made her wish more than ever that she had a pair of rose-tinted goggles.
“Well,” Petey demanded, slinging mud off his pink lenses, “Where are we?”
“I don’t know. Let me find that ball.”
Trudy rose, dusted herself off, and plodded away, leaving mucky footprints for Petey to follow.
The shaft opened up into a field unlike any Trudy had ever seen. It was imperfect, but that was not it. It was also filthy, and crowded, and smelly, and utterly foreign.
A look of realization came over Petey’s face. “Haven’t you ever been here before?”
He smiled, and lifted up his goggles to peek at the scene. He sometimes began to believe that Trudy knew everything, since she knew so much that he did not. He had trouble differentiating between the things that only smart people knew – that even in the presence of test tubes and lamps, every child does have a mother and every day does have a night and every fall does have a bottom – and things that no one knew, like how in the world there could exist a place so filthy and crowded and smelly and utterly foreign.
There were people everywhere, strange people, with wet faces. There was water on the foreheads and water in the eyes.
“What is this place?” Trudy asked. The wet-eyed people marched in timeless circles around a splintered wheel, longer in diameter than a flying saucer. They were the ugliest humans she had ever seen, with skin that hung in curtains off their faces and sharp, hungry teeth that couldn’t be contained by their lips. Their arms were made of bone and papery flesh, and that was it. Not a single
one wore fashionable rose-tinted goggles.
The sharp-edged wheel turned a smaller wheel, which turned a smaller one, which moved a crank on a big metal canister labeled “DI 9FFTR731 Anti-Gravity Gases.” Puffs of violet air coughed out of the machine and into the shaft.
Similar wheels went on for miles, turning cranks connected to wheezing and sputtering canisters of all sizes. Some oozed glues, some smoked gases, some bled waters, some vomited food. Each one was manipulated by the same cast of sallow, bony creatures.
“What is this place?” Trudy whispered again. “And those – people? Are they living down here? What are they turning all those wheels for?”
Petey began to laugh, and suctioned his goggles back over his eyes. “I can’t believe it,” he snorted. “This really is your first time! You really are naive and a horrible tennis player on top of that.”
“Where are we?” demanded Trudy. “We’ve got to help these – er – humans!”
Petey shook his head and clucked his tongue.
“Here.” He flicked a switch on the wall and a pair of rose-tinted goggles popped out of a hidden window. They were very fashionable. “Put these on. They help.”
Trudy took the goggles in revered silence. After years of searching, they’d been here all along? She slid them over her head. The rose-tinted lenses shielded her eyes and the straps plugged her ears and everything became rosy and clear. Those baggy animals, those starving people, those splintered wheels – she couldn’t see any of them. She could believe, if she really wanted to, that they were not there at all. And who in the world wouldn’t want to do that? She couldn’t hear the creaking or see their wet faces; she heard fuzz and saw pink. She glanced at Petey.
“See?” He smiled. “All better.”
Trudy retrieved the tennis ball from the empty field and made her way back to the shaft with her brand-new, fashionable goggles suctioned over her eyes. The two were lifted back through the tunnel to the tennis room by coughs of anti-gravity gases. The sweet violet clouds came from perfect oval canisters that were not attached to wheels that were not
attached to larger wheels that were not attached to the largest wheels that were not turned by the dirtiest and saddest humans that no one had never seen, and that was it.