The Baulomorph 🔮 Vancouver

In the New Beginning

The Common Good

When Berry regained consciousness he was connected to everything — the Baulian next door, the Baulian on the far side of Earth, even the Baulian 283 sextillion gigaparsecs away on Baulis Prime. Previously, he had only been connected to BP by fractaled memories fed into his central core during his regenerative cycle. But now he was connected through real-time pulses of orange matter. Berry felt exhilarated because the cosmos was literally at his finger tips.

It was only three weeks since the Liberation, yet his old life already seemed like a memory. He recalled that he had once been a human, sort of. Well, he still had his human body, but his brain was deeply expanded.

He remembered a time when he was limited by the dendrites that led directly into his central core. Human dendrites that didn’t connect with the dendrites of other humans. Or if they did connect, it was through secondary and tertiary intermediaries, like voices or kicks in the shin.

That was a time of dis-integration, when the divided selves of the planet multiplied the fractures in time and space until an endemic Chaos settled over the face of the earth. No wonder humans found it so easy to put on fancy hats, pick up guns, and blast each other point blank.

Earth. What a planet! Wars, famine, pestilence! Yet now that the grey buildings and the wastelands of industry were gone, it resembled a paradise. Instead of millions of miles of cement roads with cars careening all over the place, cedar paths ran from one environmentally-integrated hub to the next. Along these paths inverted gravitational vehicles (IGVs) took Baulians to and from their places of physical communion. Instead of grey iron towers that hummed with damaging voltage, turquoise and purple strings gently pulsed from hub to hub. Above these, orange and red jets of energy streaked from city to city, from continent to continent, from world to world.

Predatory animals were extinguished and deer nibbled at the flowers that dotted the cedar paths. No longer were bushy-tailed squirrels chased by crazy dogs. No longer did humans hunt, kill, eat, and torture the animals on the land, the fish in the sea, and the birds in the air. Gone were the dark places of the earth — places where humans were objects, where everything was counted in dollars, and where objects were cheap. Now, Baulis Directives were everywhere, and every being on the planet was directed to see the Common Good.

The Seventeen Percent Solution

Still, Berry wondered about the morality of exterminating 17% of the human race. He saw the logic of eliminating 17% of a population that is belligerent or given to hyperbolic rhetoric. It was only fair to give a warning, and if the population continued to resist, then up to 37% was eliminated as a second warning. If it still continued to resist, the Baulians just keep continuing to exterminate them until the population realized that any form of resistance whatsoever is futile. The more Berry thought through this logic, the more the neuron firings cemented themselves into a pattern, and the more the chemicals used in making these patterns extinguished the errant human patterns that had controlled much of his thinking prior to his liberation.

Even though humans were clearly a belligerent species, the Baulians gave them the benefit of the doubt by allowing 83% to continue existing. Luckily, this proved enough to cow them into submission. So the Baulians set about re-organizing the planet and saving its environment.

Proving by statistics that its cause was just, the Directorate argued that while many humans were incapable of thinking about anyone but themselves, their families, or their species, a majority were able to think about the common good, at least to some degree. The Directorate further noted that there were also vegetarians and environmentalists, many of whom had demonstrated their ability to alter their carnivorous appetites and their rape-and-pillage lifestyles. The Directorate considered the human race one of the promising alien species, and therefore felt further reduction in numbers unnecessary.

Some Baulian hardliners argued that the Empire was becoming soft. Liberals counter-argued that humans didn’t habitually eat their young or exterminate other species for sport. Unlike the Phantoms of the Green Sky, they didn’t wage senseless warfare in ways that were so convoluted and treacherous that no one in that galaxy slept with their lights out.

Still, the Directorate thought it wise to flood the planet with Baulians and to make sure that the humans were just a small percent of the population. This would help them to remember that they weren’t the most important species in the universe. Yet the Directorate was quick to point out that there was always a multicultural mix, a diversity that they could all be proud of.

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Diversity Training

Berry could go along with all of this, yet when it came to questions of species purity, he had deep misgivings. The Baulians talked about diversity, but by diversity they really meant a diversity of species living beneath an overwhelming majority of pureblood Baulians. All Baulomorphs were expected to reconvert back to their Baulian roots as soon as possible. They could keep their human bodies, but their brains must be 100% Baulian.

The Directorate didn’t even mention the possibility of remaining Baulomorph in thinking, that is, remaining part Baulian and part human. Perhaps they assumed that no Baulomorph in their right mind would even want such a thing. But then again, other Baulomorphs didn’t have a sweet, fiery human girlfriend with pink hair.

So Berry kept his feelings for Juniper to himself, in an emerald green fractal hidden inside a fractal beneath his central core. She was where the Connector couldn’t look, since the lower core was strictly personal, protected by the strictest of identity laws. The lower core processed pulses that had nothing to do with the lattices linking him to everything from his fellow workers to the central processing units of Baulis Prime. The lower core was a treasure-trove of fractals the Connector considered private, redundant, and of little interest to the greater designs of the Empire.

All Berry needed to do was inverse a polarity for a fraction of a second, on the pretext of retrieving a fractal of the buildings and gardens of UBC — now The University of Baulis, Campus NA 1908. One quick inversion and the memory of Juniper flowed upward, almost imperceptibly, into the byways of his upper memory. He could spot her by her pink hair, at which point he felt a pulse that was almost imperceptible. He quite naturally associated this pulse with the colour pink.

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Twos and Sevens

According to BP Directive Earth 2.7, 80% of the retrained Baulomorph population was to continue living on Earth, while 20% were to become ambassadors and spies in the rest of the Kraslika. The Baulian population was to soar to 27 billion. The Baulians hoped that the number 27 might become an auspicious one to the humans, since Earth had the unique privilege of being the 27 billionth dominated world in their Empire.

Of course, the number 27 was a human number and didn’t have any meaning to the Baulians themselves. What sort of a species based their calculations on base 10? Surely, base 12 made far more sense! On the one hand, base 10 was based on the number 5, which was a prime number and hence inflexible in mathematical terms. On the other hand, 6 could be divided by 2 and 3. The problem of course was related to the one hand and the other hand, both of which appeared to be the origin of the ridiculous base 10 system. But still, the Baulians emphasized base ten for the benefit of limited human understanding. It seemed to make them feel important.

Some of the Baulian demographers had a poetic bent, and suggested that 27 was an appropriate number for two other reasons: it was around 2700 BC that humans started their assault on the earth and on each other. At that time, there was about 27 million humans.

In its document The Assimilation of S 2,700,000,000 the Baulian Directorate wrote the following:

1. While not required to do so, we feel that allowing 83% of humans to remain is a magnanimous gesture. It pays homage to the primitive yet promising species that once subjugated the planet.

2. While humans are of minimal cultural value (even to their own galaxy), it nevertheless remains prudent to add their small achievements to the greater riches of the Baulian Empire.

3. With points 1 and 2 in mind, we declare that 83% of the human population be granted continued existence, and that 777 locations on the planet be designated as historical reserves. In choosing this number, we would like to acknowledge that for humans the number 7 is a lucky one, and that by choosing this number we acknowledge our respect for their traditions.

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Next: 🔮 En Route to the Old Café

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