That's this City

That’s the thing about this city, it’s not called a city by the inhabitants, they call it a village. But it’s still a city, you can’t call a place with more than a hundred thousand inhabitants a village or even a town. But a village sounds better, it gives them a sense of brotherhood, and self-reliance. 

This is a city that runs for twenty four seven and never stops. Everybody has a designated job, and responsibility. There are actors, artists, writers, musicians, engineers, architects, farmers, doctors, administrators, teachers and a leader. This leader keeps everything in check and makes sure that nothing changes, that they continue living the way that their ancestors did. Researchers are prohibited, they know all they need to know and need not know more, lest it leads to progress.

This city’s streets are all paved with grey concrete. Even the roads for the motor vehicles. The only motor vehicles that pass through are the public buses, ambulances and work vehicles for the service workers who need to move around the city to get to places that need their services. All the public buses look the same, and there’s only five of them. They are more than enough because everyone follows the one timetable. Where you are at the moment depends heavily on where everybody else is. When you’re at work, there are some people that are asleep, when you’re at the park resting there are some people ploughing the fields. Yes, even chill time is designated and you can’t just up and go in the middle of the day to the park, or the theatre. 

The things that are abundant in the city are flowers and advertisements. The leader loves, big billboards that have pretty and colourful ads. So the city especially at night does not look too different from the cities we’re used to. Except for the lack of skyscrapers of course.

The biggest building in the city is the theatre. This place hosts plays, meetings and presentations. If the people need to gather they do it at the theatre. It’s a beautiful transparent ovalish squarish building that’s about five acres large and seven storeys high. The rest of the city’s buildings are each two storeys high, and are all completely transparent. Except for the houses and apartments. Everybody deserves some level of privacy even in this weird city.

All the young working people live in apartments closer to the city centre, when they get married and have children they move to the suburbs and live out the rest of their lives, even after they retire at seventy and up until they die at the age of a hundred. People almost always live to the age of one hundred, there are a few people that have died at the age of ninety eight or ninety five or one hundred and twelve but they are very rare cases. One hundred, their leader says, is the best age for someone to die, they have lived long enough and any longer would cause them to go into depression. Or he could just be honest that any longer would mean they are a useless burden that will just pull their society back. (It’s not like they are moving forward or anything.)

The thing about this city is that they don’t use money. When they need anything they go pick it up at a storeroom. There are food storerooms, furniture storerooms, clothes storerooms, stationary storerooms, tools storerooms, miscellaneous storerooms, and many more kinds of storerooms. I know you’re probably thinking there’s some people that might take more than they need. I was thinking the same thing too before I began studying them. But after millennia of living this way it’s almost in their DNA to only take what they need. Why would you take more, when there is absolutely no need for it? There hasn’t been anyone who needed anything and didn’t get it. There has never been a shortage of anything.

When they need their plumbing to get fixed, they call in the plumbing office. When they need their television or smartphone fixed, they call the electronics office. They always arrive in less than twenty minutes, never any later, so everything runs smoothly. No one pays for these services, because everyone also does their job for free, providing other services for other people.

Anyways that’s this city, a place that’s a utopia. But we all know that utopias are usually nightmares in disguise or waiting to happen.

For me, the nightmare is the fact that this city has remained the same for thousands of years. To be more exact, twelve thousand years. But the inhabitants might not see the lack of change or progress as a nightmare, these things don’t always bring the best out of humanity. They don’t have the same problems that we do, or did, just in the name of moving forward.

But they might also see it as a nightmare, because they don’t know! They have been kept in the dark by their leader. They don’t know that normally things change, and that even the technology they are currently using was the result of twelve thousand years of human society. They don’t know that there’s always something better. They don’t know that they are the only group of people who have never left Earth to go vacation or move to a handful of extra-terrestrial territories. Heck! They don’t even know that they are still purely Homo sapiens and nobody else really is anymore.

But we are content to observe them, they are almost like a time capsule, a portal, a trip back in time to see how we used to live and how our lives once were. But that’s not how we used to live. The humans of the past were more like us, right now than like them, even if they share the same era. They fought, there were severe inequalities and there was untold suffering. We would probably learn more from our past if we look at our present self.

But even if I barge in to tell them and show them how we live, will they really care? Will they embrace this new life? For a civilization that loves change, humans past or present seem to also hate it passionately. They may be content still living like it’s the 21st century. That’s just the thing about this city.