Collected Works ✏️ Vancouver & Paris

Au Bord de la Seine

I’ve been reading about Paris, a place I lived when I was 15 and 16. I was worried that the Baulians would turn it into every other city. But to my surprise most of Paris has been spared, as have Rome, Padua, Borobudur, Bagan, Suzhou, Cuzco, etc. Luckily for humanity, the Baulians love to travel.

Since the Baulians have very different standards of beauty and historical value, they weren’t sure which places to change and which ones to leave alone. So they picked the sites based on the way humans ranked them in pamphlets and guidebooks. The unfortunate result of this method was that popular tourist traps with beautiful beaches (like Cancún or Benidorm) remain completely intact, while lesser-known places like Guanajuato have been rendered almost unrecognizable.

To the Baulians, the original Guanajuato seemed a mess of colourful houses, with little to recommend it in the brochures of the time-share companies. After its terregeneration, the Baulians even believed that they had improved on its colourful nature. They couldn’t understand why some residents thought it looked better the way it used to be. And yet every unique feature the residents pointed out — the opera house, the serene Plazuela San Fernanda, the stunning steps of the university — merely confirmed to the Baulians that they were right to build bauplexes right in the core of the city. Finally, more citizens of Earth would be in a position to appreciate the antique splendour of the place.

Most of the places on the Baulian list of 777 Historical Parks are completely intact. I was particularly interested to see what they’d done to Paris.

The Baulians left intact most of what was inside the eight-lane Périphérique. They replaced the Ring Road itself with Orange-Maglev (OM) circuits and OM junctions, most of which remained at the traditional gates of the city, such as Porte de Clignancourt. The Four key junctions of Place de la Nation, Place d’Italie, Gare de Montparnasse, and Batignolles were razed to the ground. In their place the Baulians built bauplexes three and four hundred stories high. The bauplexes overlooking the charming primitive town were especially prized by Baulian curiosity-seekers and anthropologists.

The whole depressed and industrial area of Paris that lay north, east, and south of la Goutte-d’Or was annihilated. The Gare de l’Est and Gare du Nord were recycled and in their place the Baulians established a massive OM Central Station. Rising on both sides of the Station was a twin-peaked tower called Sèvres-Babylon II, modelled on the Great Temple of Baulis Prime. Crisscrossed with tropical gardens and sinuous rills, the New Tower was 96 stories deep and 370 stories high. At the top was a pleasure dome where Baulians could relax in orange essence pools, communally joined and free to get up to whatever they pleased.

In some places, extensions of Paris proper were permitted to remain, such as the extension of the Champs-Élysées along avenues Grande-Armée and Charles de Gaulle, leading to La Défense. I initially suspected that the planners were mocking the French, with their La Défense, their Foreign Legion, their Résistance, and their Force de Frappe nuclear weapons. But then I realized that the Baulians had no such intention. Their historical notes make it clear that defence is a logical and admirable trait they share with humans.

Once, la Grande-Armée and Charles de Gaulle were clogged with cars, trucks, and buses. Now, OM corridors create rainbows above the pedestrians. Gardened pathways crisscross all the way from Bois de Boulogne to the larger park of St. Germain. The railway line that once ripped through the Forêt Domaniale de Saint-Germain-en-Laye was recycled and now the series of watery loops northwest of Paris constitute a vast leisure park. The Baulians call it The Five Loops. Pleasure boats, called Bateaux Mouches et Abeilles (Fly and Bee Boats) ply the waters and forests, which hum and sing with insects from a thousand compatible worlds.

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I now see the beauty of it all. And even the necessity. Who knows what sort of Armageddon would have occurred if not for the deus ex machina of the pink cubes? Luckily, from the Baulian point of view, the worst problem of all was that humans were destroying their home planet at an alarming rate. They polluted the water, ground, and air, and they tortured, killed, or ate any living thing that wasn’t human.

Prior to the Invasion, the world was indeed in a hopeless state. One doom-laden sign of this was that the American president, the most powerful man in the world, pulled out of the Paris Agreement to stop global warming. Nick-named ‘Trumpet of Doom,’ the president proceeded to envelope Iran in a cloud of toxic fumes. The contagion spread to the neighbouring countries and eventually blew up all the oil in the Middle East. Israel, including its trumpeted capital in Jerusalem, went up in smoke.

And then there were the intractable problems of demography and violence. Demographically, if humans remained in their abysmal economic state millions would continue to suffer and starve. If, on the other hand, they improved economically, and started consuming like the fat cat counties of Canada and Saudi Arabia, then the environmental dangers would multiply like cancer cells. China was the most obvious example of this, yet similar consumption explosions were occurring in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Brazil, and Nigeria.

The Sixties’ dream that peace will guide the planets /
And love will steer the stars never turned into reality. There was hatred between Muslims and Hindus in the Indian subcontinent, tribal horrors in the Congo, a Sunni-Shia split in the Muslim world, a trigger-happy America, Islamic extremists, Maoist Naxalites in India, and gang violence throughout Central America. There was racism, sexism, inequality, ethnocentrism, nepotism, cronyism, organized crime, and fraud.

Considering these never-ending problems, many of us hoped for some alien power to come down and straighten it all out. But what, I wonder, now that the aliens have descended, will we lose?

I remember fondly the old universities of central Paris. I wonder what they’re teaching now.

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Next: 💍 The Soul Star

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