Utopia - Social Audit, part one.

On Utopia? 

CHAPTER ONE

1. Maintain humanity under five hundred million in perpetual balance with    nature. 2. Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity…”

--Georgia Guidestones, Elbert County, Georgia, USA.

Five hundred million souls.  No more.
“Back in my day, before that damned, fake, alien attack, right, global warming was hot boxing this planet, kids.  Literally.”  Though he appeared a middle-aged man, with an occasional grey dusting on an otherwise thick head of dark blonde hair, Grandpa Jax was quite old; three hundred and fifty-one years old to be exact.   In being old, he was avowed to redundancy, as though he’d run out of new things to say, but still liked the sound of his own voice.  And so it was a speech the family had endured for over three hundred years, often delivered during times, such as this particular autumn evening, when the youthful old man was feeling long jawed.  Most of his brood nodded and continued to consume their sumptuous Sunday feast, unphased.  They were being served impeccably by their personal robots of varying makes and models; reflections of the individuality of each master.
“Ice caps were melting, animals were vanishing, earthquakes leveled third world cities, and violent storms raged over the seas and land.  Now this was all thanks to human greed and over-population, right?”  Grandpa Jax glanced around the long table at his uninterested progeny, gathered in his ornate dining hall.  His steel-blue eyes burned with a passion that he’d inherited from his renowned father; a very famous Hollywood actor in the time before the Great Galactic Massacre; GGM.
“So, while one percent of the population controlled ninety-nine percent of the wealth, the rest of the billions of people squandered in debt.  And these wealthy white dudes, right, this one percent, whose bloodlines could be traced back to the ancient kings of Europe, and even supposedly all the way back to the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, used their money to buy the politicians and in-turn the world’s governments.  They controlled everything that transpired on this spinning clump of rock.   And they trumped up a world wide debt crisis so nasty that their banks had to bail out the entire global economy, right?  We should have been worried when Apple and Google merged and then swallowed Wal-Mart.  But we were all distracted binge watching TV shows on Netflix.
“Companies became too big to fail.   The Supreme Court allowed corporations to act as individuals and basically buy politicians.  And through back-room, corporate takeovers, mergers, and shady banking schemes the world’s economy ended up in the hands of only one huge conglomeration.  In the end, kids, this single corporation owned the whole world.”  It was during these fits of sanctimonious melancholy, when he’d had his fourth glass of wine, or smoked an entire joint by himself, Grandpa Jax felt the need to implant his version of history on the rest of his clan; the Pitt-Howard Family.  It was an attempt to quell the guilt he felt for having survived the massacre of the dark and the poor, as his betters would unceremoniously refer to it.  Some of the purer bloodlines would say the aliens did Earth and mankind a great favor by eliminating the weaker “sheeple” or “feeders” as they were referred to.  According to the Ancient Alien theorists it was what they’d done at the end of the last ice age as well, when they’d cleared Europe and therefore the world of the Neanderthals, to make way for humans.  You can’t check these facts because its all been deleted from the cloud, but it’s true.  They used this powerful weapon called HARP to unleash concentrated bursts of radiation, from the upper ionosphere.  Right?  That’s what those aliens’ ray guns really were.  It was an inside job.”
Grandma Sophia grinned away her silent rebuttal and pecked at her salad of mixed greens, freshly picked by robotic hands from the family gardens.  Of those gathered, she’d suffered the conspiracy rant the longest.  But unlike the others, she’d lived through the actual events.  She knew there were things he’d say that possibly held water, but she never believed the aliens were faked.  Grandpa would often say she was perfectly brain washed.  But she’d seen the mother ship above Los Angeles with her own eyes.  She saw the one over Denver as well.
“Those space ships were holograms,” Grandpa Jax said, anticipating her counter.  They’d known each other far too long.
“What was real was that those fake alien ships killed six and a half billion people, Mother.  Wiped the poor bastard’s off the face of the earth.  I had adopted African brothers and sisters!”  Grandpa slammed his fist on the table, rattling the fine silverware and China.  It was hard to tell if the outbreak was part of the act.  Grandpa Jax had also been a famous actor; the son of Hollywood’s most famous power-couple.  On his mother’s side, he was a third generation thespian and so it was embedded in his DNA.
“Of course, us select, fine bred, rich folks, the one-percenters, were sent to the secret bunkers to wait out the attack, right?  We spent over a year down there, kids, in these underground towns.  It was rumored that the corporate lords had made a deal with the aliens.  That was another conspiracy theory, but I say there weren’t any aliens to begin with, so it’s moot.  They even set that shit up, man.   Back before it all went down, for years on TV they’d show all these shows about aliens and how they were secretly watching us.  They were preparing us for the idea, so that when they did it, we’d believe them.  There was one show called Ancient Aliens, and now that show’s basic concept is a commonly accepted theory.  It was all bullshit.”  Grandpa stared at the back of his hand.  It should’ve been wrinkled and withered, this he knew instinctively, but it wasn’t.  His skin was tight and elastic.  What a world this is, he thought.  It just keeps going…
“So…” began Grandma Sophia, thinking he’d wound himself back down.  But she was mistaken.  And before she could alter the direction of the conversation with another word, he’d taken back up the posture of the man on stage, with his hands flourishing and fingers wagging.  She’d been away for a lot of years, traveling the world, visiting her son on the moon, even spending a good deal of time in India.  She’d forgotten how the old man could perambulate himself into such a passion.  He reminded her of a small, nippy dog, furiously humping the leg of an overly polite house guest.  She vowed to leave again, soon after her grandsons’ birthday party was over.  They were twins.  They were turning three hundred.
“And eventually we were able to come back out top side.  Let me tell you, guys, it was not nice to see…even worse to smell.  The decay.  The rot.  Just bodies and debris.  The only people left were those of us who had been invited to the bunkers under the Denver airport and other top secret locations in the various mountains around the world.  And we inherited it all, man, take as much as you want, you know, on account of everyone’s distant relatives being dead.  Oh, no body inherited that property?  I’ll take it.  Thanks.”  A loud snap of burning wood, from the enormous, marble fireplace behind him, added to the effect.
“It was something.  And then there were some hard years where everybody went back to the land of their forefathers, the places we inherited, and we sort of fended for ourselves for the first couple of years before things got going again.  Over time, nature came back to take what was rightfully hers, though.  That was the first positive thing that everyone began to post.  The water was cleansed by the natural earth and she was healed and restored to her pristine health, and everyone rejoiced.   Yay!  There were alien cults that sprang up.  People worshipped them.  Eventually the church of the alien god Baphomet became the dominant religion.  He demanded blood sacrifice and so a race of mindless clones were created to serve as sacrificial infants. Oh, and guess what, kids, Baphomet isn’t an alien god-king from another planet, he’s a god dammed powerful demon from a higher dimension.  But that’s another discussion.” Grandpa made the ancient, forbidden sign of the cross to ward off evil.
“So, when the clean up was done and the lights were turned back on, we all rebuilt.  The corporation was up and running again and in some way, shape or form, we all worked for it.  But after a little while the illusion of money became exposed and we all realized we didn’t need it.  There were plenty of resources to be had by everyone, right.  And that’s the second positive thing people began to post on the cloud.  We all sort of agreed to end the illusion of money.”  He grinned and his reddish brown beard spread open for his mouth. 
“That’s about the time the robots came to replace labor, when the money became unnecessary and totally obsolete.  Everyone retired to do what ever they desired, and that was the final positive spin that was needed to make us forget all about those angry aliens. Thank our Lord, the CEO, the great and wise Emperor Pope of the Earth, Lord Rothschild, crowned and anointed by the alien god Baphomet himself in the Galactic Peace Treaty.  
“As long as we agreed to control our own numbers and be good stewards of the earth we would be allowed to keep it.  And they all spun it as this utopian society; the dawn of the greatest age of man.  So they released the real medicines, right?  They implanted us survivors with these nanobots that float around our blood streams and cure every possible disease, including the disease of aging.  People used to get sick and old.  You don’t understand that, you kids.  Now, they’ve rejuvenated us all to our primes…” Grandpa paused for effect.  His eyes appeared glassy and feral.  He scanned the room for a face he could connect with.  All of them avoided him, but J, his two hundred and eighty-five year old grandson, his youngest heir.  J grinned down the table at the old man as though he thoroughly enjoyed the performance.
His cousin T, seated across from him, held his eyes on his plate, concentrating on his thick cut of prime rib.   It was hard to tell if he was genuinely fixated on his meat or was simply not interested in engaging the old man.
For T, it was, of course, the latter.   T knew that by making eye contact, Grandpa would zero in and then spend the remainder of the evening following him from drawing room to parlor, with encore after encore of his favorite performance, loosely titled; The Great Alien Conspiracy Theory.
“See, then here comes the catch.  They sterilized everyone so that the only way anyone can get pregnant is through licensed, artificial insemination, which they control, and it can only happen if someone registered in the region dies; which almost never happens naturally.
“The only reason why Grandma and I were spared in the first place was because we made for good breeders.  Bottom line.  And this is the unspoken truth about our perfectly balanced utopia,” Grandpa said to J.

TO BE CONTINUED…