Chronocentricity

In the year 2222, a human organization emerged near the center of the North American continent in the nation that was then called the Reunited States and Provinces of DC. It was geared toward equality for domestic animals. The group’s leader, Lala Haddwell, had studied domestic animals for over two decades before she started her peaceful group, known as The Coalition for the Equality of All Civilized Creatures, also known as CEACC. The acronym was pronounced see-akk, and often spelled as Ceacc — having a capital c as opposed to being all in capital letters. Why? Because all capital letters made it sound like yelling, a perception formed in the twentieth century and still prominent even at Haddwell’s time in history.

When word of Haddwell’s plan to start Ceacc got out, numerous individuals offered her, via homing pigeon messaging, their marketing and organizing services, as well as their personal encouragement and support. She was sitting alone on her settee one afternoon. A round solar clock ticked on the wall behind her head. The French doors leading to her balcony were cracked open. Her big hazel-brown eyes blinked at the sight of blue smog, the opaque type that was made to conduct sunlight, moonlight, and starlight. It did this by a process of transferring celestial images onto its down-facing surface so people below it wouldn’t be consciously aware of it and they’d not complain about it as a result.

Lala’s mahogany lips parted in the stillness of the day. After a number of breaths, she began to hum a subdued tune to herself. As she sang a daily gathering of fast-swooping pigeons outside filled her line of sight. She watched their usual routine; they formed a wide circle in the open space between her apartment building and all the other high-rise buildings in her vicinity. From there they parted, one by one, each flying in a slightly different direction. “Oh, you poor dears.”

She hurried to the window, put her hand on the glass as she stood behind the door to shield herself from spontaneous droppings. “You deserve proper payment. That the government continues to force you to work as messengers and parcel delivery personnel without real pay is evidence to their utter selfishness. Oh?” She saw numerous pigeons fluttering straight for her doors. “Oh!” And she managed to close her doors just in the nick of time. Thirty-six pigeons hit the glass and tumbled to the balcony’s bamboo floor.

The creatures had been genetically altered to endure small accidents like this one, and to carry packages weighing up to fifty pounds, believe it or not. And on this day ten of these particular pigeons were tied by the leg, each to a hefty brown box that didn’t quite bounce off the glass the way the birds had. Instead these boxes breached the vintage glass in Haddwell’s doors as it shattered across the apartment floor around and behind her, numerous shards landing in her screaming teeth and tongue, as well as catching onto her clothes and shoes.

The thin line that ran from the parcels to the bird’s legs was wound around each of their beaks, having been set as such so the birds could simply bite down to cut the line, as several were doing now. She watched the whole flock flutter off from the mess of parcels they’d left there. “Oh, you poor dears. You don’t only deserve real pay but you deserve better training as well.” She spit a pin-thin glass shard from her lips. “Why is that so bitter-tasting!”

Urban pigeons were actually more intelligent in those days than they are now, simply because of the widespread acceptance of their consumption of a nutrient product from south central Mars. Brainrit still exists today in its generic form, kaleoxiquin, but is used only on Alzheimer III patients. In the days of Haddwell, however, it was being used extensively to increase the intelligence and personal awareness of numerous inner-city and domestic animals. In fact, her era is often referred to as the Brainrit Age.

As Haddwell brushed away the red-tinged glass crumbs from her arms, a dozen common parrots approached her closed, but airy, doors. They stopped and knocked on the door frame. She was in tears, “I have to open my packages!”

A parrot answered, “Perhaps you should wait, my dear. Greetings. We are your nursing crew. You have been injured. Please reach into my backpack and remove the orange package.” She did, then continued to follow the instructions of the birds, who together could have wrapped her in a giant sling and carried her off to the hospital had the need arose, due, of course, to their genetic modifications.

After the head parrot treated her wounds, she admitted that they had hurt moments before. Relieved of the pain now she waved them off, the gold coins she meant as their tips still clutched in her hands since the parrots insisted that they absolutely couldn’t and wouldn’t accept tips. She tossed them out over the balconies for the daily beggars and tent dwellers to find. With her flesh still reddened from the nasty little cuts, she hurried over to her packages and began to open them.

The boxes contained knock-off kitchen appliances she’d ordered the day before. As for the envelopes, half of them contained bills that she didn’t really want to pay. The other half of the envelopes contained letters from people who’d heard of the group she was trying to create and wanted to join or sponsor it.

Two hours later she sat under a blanket of the cloth pages on which the correspondences were written, smiling with bright red dots on her lips. “Finally, the time has come, the truest Age of Aquarius yet. I have been chosen by one hundred caring wealthy people to lead the final revolution of earthly equality!” She leaped to her feet, clutching mounds of letters with both rising hands as she strode slowly toward the breezy doors rasping, “I will meet with them right away. I will spread the justice that has been long overdue the animals in the city! And why not? Even children of seven are legally entitled to be paid for their chores, and ten-year-old Martian natives can vote in our great country.”

Haddwell’s was an era like no other. According to her diaries she wanted everyone on the planet, and even on Mars, to succeed. At this stage in history, every human lived in harmony despite any biological differences. Few had considered the animals, though. Haddwell truly was their spokesperson, pondering the fates of domestic creatures since the tender age of three.

A year after Haddwell read the hundred letters on her little turquoise settee, Ceacc became a huge success. The organization would travel city to city to put on animal-friendly conventions. Half of the audience were human, the other half urban animals with and without appointed jobs in the city. Brainrit-enhanced animals large and small cheered Haddwell’s proposals to the government and society at large as she preached on for hours. “There is no real reason why our zoological fellow citizens should be denied real payment, not sticks and twigs for the Birds and bread and honey for the Bears. Why should our hardworking Dogs and Cats – the massage therapists of our time – the meter maids, the plumbers, messengers, and the all-important, all-weather communication line techs, go with no real rewards.”

The crowd went wild, then it doubled in size with the immediacy of a tidal wave over the next five minutes.

She applauded along with them, strode over the stage, brought the microphone close to her mouth and softly asked, “Is there a vocal Hound in the crowd?”

Oddly, a dog stood up on his hind legs and yelped out. The crowd hushed to listen. She asked him, “How are you?”

He yelped out part of the tune of a popular good-time song; the specific notes to which the lyrics would have been, “I’m-a-doing good. But things could be better!” All the species in the crowd nodded. She asked, “Are you not self-aware, just as much as the mayor, the governor, the three sitting presidents of our great nation?”

The hound yelped a short segment of another popular tune, which communicated, “I’m just as wise as all the women and men! Who make the world go round. And I can hear! And I can hear! I can hear the sounds of pain and laughter. Tell me, tell me what I’m missing.” Then he skipped straight to the tune of another song, communicating in a distinctive yelping that everyone understood to mean, “I know how to do it! Tell me and I can do it! I’m the finisher baby, I can get it done.” Haddwell didn’t particularly like that antiquated last song, but nevertheless all beings present clearly understood the hound’s message.

She said in the hush, “Who supports these deserving creatures?”

People chanted, “I do!” And the creatures howled, bleated, tweeted, and growled together in agreement.

Haddwell’s lifelong message reverberated for over three centuries after her death, eventually leading to the initiation of the world’s nations in issuing real social security numbers to all Brainrit-enhanced mammals and reptiles in urban areas. Soon after, the creatures would find themselves securing the jobs of teachers, professors, scientists, even psychologists, mayors, and senators. They had won their true freedom and independence, so they thought. By 2555 they had even designed small rain-proof traveling vessels for themselves, tailored to be controlled by their specific paws, beaks, and vocal signals.

A century later, in 2655, people started to complain that the liberated animals were taking on the darker traits of humanity in prejudicing other breeds of animals, those that had never been domesticated or given Brainrit a day in their wilderness-dwelling lives. The common complaint arose from a law scholar who’d followed a Bear photographer around and noticed that he photographed everything except any wild animal. When confronted the Bear said, “They aren’t part of our life in the city. These pictures are meant for an urban calendar.”

“Yet you photograph the trees!”

“I happen to like trees.”

“Is that so,” he scowled over his inverted mustache. He shared his observations with great minds that weekend. Soon the issue was in the social limelight.

According to the greatest voices of that era, the non-human senators and governors of the land stubbornly refused to recognize the human outcry for equal opportunities for wild animals. The urban creatures ignored their own cousins in the woods and fields. Proponents of the humanization of wild breeds of bears, birds, mice, and so on, wanted all creatures to have the same unalienable opportunities as the once oppressed Brainrit breeds enjoyed.

But that same year Mars became greedy with Kale-6, its prized element, due to a fight with Earth’s government over fuel trades. The Martian element was the main ingredient in Brainrit. It made the daily use of Branrit by urban animals possible. Despite the outcry to give more beasts equality, Brainrit nearly vanished from the scene.

As governments were trying their best to secure a Brainrit pact with Mars, numerous philosophers were all asking the same question about Haddwell; whether she was right to have ever indulged in her heart’s desire in the first place. They concluded that she was a demon from Mars who had hoped to lead humans into a mass extinction by giving all their responsibilities away to non-humans. They pressured the government to give up on its attempts to secure the Brainrit, and it did. The final supplies on Earth were exhausted within months. The world wanted no more independent animals.

Indeed, it was a sad time when the thinkers of that day looked back to see only darkness when they inspected Haddwell’s motives. Haddwell didn’t see it coming when she, nestled in on her deathbed in 2313, hired a time-travel pilot to transport her entire death den with her in it to the year 2655. Why that year? Because she had read that there is a social pattern of attitudes that cycles every 433 years. She wanted to test the theory in the hope that she’d find her beloved social changes still thriving that far into the future.

Upon arrival Haddwell, winded and half-blind, rose from her bed. She peered out her bedroom’s door to find that the smog was orange, not a beautiful blue as it had been in her day, and was far from being wholly eliminated.

The translucent, bulbous vessel that contained her death den had materialized on top of a house whose view was of a zoo on a hill. The animals she had tried so hard to free were now locked behind bars. “I must go to them,” she said to her travel pilot.

“I’m afraid you are too feeble to step outside.”

“Nonsense! If I must die in the process then so be it. But I’ve paid you my life savings to witness this future for myself. Now help me up.”

He did as she demanded, and she took to a hover-chair then drifted out the sliding power-door of the time bubble.

“It stinks around here,” she grumbled.

“Yes. I’ve been here once before. I wouldn’t call it the rosiest…”

“Oh hush! Why are there animals locked in a zoo? The Bear, with her powers of strength and patience. The Dog, with his loyal outlook and sharp hearing. The Parrot, with her fine wit and marvelous memory.” As patrons of the zoo passed by, she announced to the group, “Tomorrow People! These creatures can do far more than you’d ever believe!”

In a group they slowed to hear her on the cobblestone path. She said, “They were once surgeons, senators, and messengers! They helped to keep the law and the order, and they were our friends. Do you hear me!”

They stopped and looked back at her without any words.

“Our friends!”

A little boy stepped forward, “Would you happen to be the woman called Haddwell?”

“I am.” She smiled proudly. “So you do remember me? All of you? Am I in the books?”

Some people nodded, others rolled their eyes and uttered yes.

“Well then. How have these creatures come to find themselves treated as the common beasts they were before my time? And who governs this time period if not the Bears and Bulls and Mules, the Bison and the wise old Owls?”

“Madam,” said the boy’s mother. “What you did was fool’s play.”

“How dare you! I was well respected in my day. I opened up new channels, redefined what it means to be a citizen.”

“But,” said the zoo guide. “You acted only out of your own guilt.”

“What I created was known worldwide as a progressive change!”

“What you did was create more like yourself! First humans treated animals as inferior. Then people like you felt guilty, so guilty that you had to try and change things so your heart could rest! It was a selfish act.”

Spectators cheered the man on, “Yeah!”

He said, “Then after you made the urban creatures our equals what did they do? They learned from humans to behave as humans, so in the human tradition they in turn treated rural creatures as inferiors. Three species went extinct as a result of your foolishness.”

“Extinct? I don’t believe it. How!”

“Your Bears and Owls conspired. They had a wild bear species rounded up and executed just to prevent any future debates with humans about sharing the Brainrit with them. Then your Labradors, always loyal to humans, murdered every Bear and Owl on Earth! One month later all the Labradors, filled with guilt, leaped into the World River together and thus committed suicide. So, we’ve brought numerous high-risk animals here to protect them.”

“No!”

“Yes, lady,” said the little boy. “It did happen. My history taught this to me.”

“But what if. If your history’s wrong! What if they aren’t extinct. Perhaps the humans drove them to suicide!”

“They are extinct, with all due respect,” said her escort.

“But. Where’s the evidence of these things?”

“It’s stored someplace, I’m sure,” said the boy’s mother.

“No.” She hovered backward slowly. “No. How can this be!”

“You,” said the zoo guide, “were selfish. Everyone today sings a mantra every morning and every night; ‘I will not entertain guilt and thus my actions won’t be selfish.”

“Please stop calling me selfish.” Her eyes were in tears. “I studied these creatures my whole life. That is how I knew how they felt. It wasn’t guilt I tell you. No! It was my empathy. I studied numerous species all during my lifetime.”

They shook their heads as if having one mind and altogether uttered, “No. You studied bees.”

“Bees! That’s not true. I studied animal biology and animal psychology and domesticated creature sociology.”

“There’s no such thing.”

“Maybe not in your time.” She turned to the pilot and said, “George! Get me out of this rotten place!”

He did. Haddwell was at least consoled somewhat when her time travel escort said to her on the way back, “Things always look different in the light of a time out of reach. And we can seldom predict how bizarre we may someday seem.”

On her tombstone was the inscription, “Pioneer in Equality for All Sentient Beings.”

The people in the zoo didn't live to see the movement that later arose to bring back equality for all sentient beings. It occurred in 2766 and started with the owner of nine loyal chihuahuas when she said to a friend, “What fools, those who lived in 2655! We should erase all their folly, change everything! They surely had no rhyme or reason. They must have been ungenuine jerks!”

And the judgement she gave them was later returned to her generation four centuries later, and that generation’s criticisms were turned back on them one century later, and so on. To date, however, no one has ever asked why.