A Rule For The

Time Being

Image and color by Joe Broome. Inked by Ani-man.

Author Joe Broome II

There is only one rule for the Time Being. As long as you don’t mentally or physically hurt anyone you can do anything you want. The transition to this utopian state however involved more than that one rule and was born out of an international Fantasy War.

Changing from the old ways to the present exposed the fact that human beings are more different and more the same than they thought they were. It was improved communication systems that let everyone see the differences and similarities. Besides the obvious personality types, like the conservatives vs. liberal, there were psychological differences, which seemed more complicated because they were communicated so rarely.

The most powerful example of psychological variance was fantasy.

Most cultures socialized the majority of their population to leash their fantasies to some degree. Well-trained individuals politely controlled the ideas that filled their idle moments, their sex lives and their life shaping visions, in spite of the fact that fantasy is humanities most powerful tool. Every invention, every building, every city, every culture, and every change of any kind began as a fantasy. But as communication techniques shrank the earth, fantasies began to collide.

An excellent way to illustrate the source of the Fantasy War is by examining human extremes.

On one end of the spectrum there were serial killers that developed violent fantasies as a result of frustrated, confused and/or neglected socialization or training in fantasy control. At the opposite end of the spectrum were the religiously chaste who squelched their developmental milestone fantasies for their local cultural philosophy.

Somewhere in the middle is where most individuals dwelt in delight and/or frustration relative to their social status. Alpha males and females had their fantasies better fulfilled whether they were well adjusted or not.

Much of the world population concealed their fantasies as best they could until they met a mate or a work-team with similar fantasies. Just as often individuals waited until their responsibilities took over enough of their time to replace their fantasies. This common frustration was somewhat manageable until everyone knew what everyone else was thinking.

It happened like this. Popular digital communicators of many kinds made the Internet inexpensive enough for most of the worlds population. Then a clever video game replaced the communicator/toys with a Biological World Wide Web (BWWW). The biological Internet was a product of a networked video game.

Part of the game included instant rewards to players simultaneous game responses. The game inadvertently developed our ability to communicate our thoughts brain to brain. It was the birth of the BWWW or telepathy that made the Fantasy War inevitable.

Many old-world cultures would not tolerate the intrusive thoughts of even conservative western fantasies. The poorly educated and intolerant western majority couldn’t bare the oppression-spawned hopelessness, violence and religions, which they unwillingly perceived in their thoughts from all over the world.

There were frightening moments as the skill of telepathy spread over the earth. The contagious nature of brain to brain communication crossed every boundary and it wrought fatal confusion for the idle. No one was truly prepared for the flood of unexplainable mental images, voices, thoughts and unfamiliar memories. But the individuals who dealt with it best were an interesting mix. The only common characteristic of the survivors of the first few minutes of telepathy was that they were productively occupied.

Those unfortunate individuals who were idle or those who were unchallenged or unfulfilled by their tasks were overwhelmed with intrusive thoughts. Individuals who tended toward making excuses fell into their habitual response and never found their way back to focused thought. Addictive personalities fell to the subject of their addictions, which were not adaptive to the storm of international thoughts.

The survivors didn’t plan to come to a consensus but it seems that it is a function of a telepathic society to vote. The survivor’s newfound ability to communicate evolved into a system of constantly adapting rules for citizenship. A Jungian style Collective Consciousness vitalized the less skilled masses by providing them with access to valuable information. The highly skilled survivors were motivated by tasks to fit the extraordinary moment by moment challenges of an auto-information age.

Personal improvement tasks came first. Everyone found them selves exercising, eating properly, erecting their posture, breathing smoothly and deeply, relaxing their bodies, and further focusing their attention.

Next came civic tasks. Ironically it was a cleaver politician that allowed the survivors to navigate the system of ideas that began to jell. It was ironic because throughout history most government officials and administrators lost their objectivity shortly after they stopped having to associate directly with the public. This Ex US President still had an excellent grasp of checks and balances because he was in the process of creating web pages to share the concept with the world. He discovered, as a saxophone player when he was young, that there is no way to remain objective without constant feedback from the public. That kind of objectivity combined with a vigorous checks and balances and market tempered system was the vision he wanted to share in his spare time.

The ex-president’s contribution to the new telepathic society became a personalized checks and balances system. The survivors began to use it as a personal tool for the times when one type of thought started to dominate their personality. It’s something like an adaptively objective conscience.

Still there was confusion created by the fact that each person could accidentally cause problems for others.

In spite of their growing strengths the survivors sometimes tired and as their spheres of influence grew the individuals could cause damage. Add to the mix a new ability, which was growing in the survivors that, was even more challenging to control than telepathy. The survivor’s telepathic skills were evolving into mind over matter or telekinesis.

Now the weakened populations of the earth were continually surprised when they would find themselves in the location about which they dreamed when they fell to sleep. Any particularly explicit memory, dream or fantasy transferred the individual to the place and time of that memory or fantasy. It was during that time that we stopped being Human Beings and we entertained ourselves momentarily by voting ourselves to be called Time Beings.

Individuals now created complete time period environments that included everything in the reach of their widening areas of perception.

The odd shaped environments created by individuals overlapped where memories and fantasies overlapped with the memories and fantasies of other individuals. But the complexity of the overlapping memory/fantasy systems was too great to maintain in its early forms. At last the one rule was finally voted for the Time Being. We could see the light at the end of the tunnel when the new rule fell into position in our thoughts like a stone that was replaced into its original position on the land.

The rule is not even as complicated as the Golden Rule, as bossy as the Ten Commandments and not as nebulous as any of the holy writings of any culture. When the survivors distilled and began to practice the ruling concept, “Hurt No One.” the remaining inhabitants of the earth began to relocated each other’s fantasies into an overlapping patchwork like they were singing a familiar song.

Row row row your boat, gently down the stream.

Merrily merrily merrily merrily…

To Be Continued