Second Transmission

The story that I am transmitting into your minds right now begins several weeks after I landed on this Earth, on the day when someone calling himself Asphalt Man tried to coat the entire city of Denver and all of the people who live there in layer of viscous, tar-like sludge.

News of that event reached me while Justine was curled up in my lap, having just awoken from a long and very pleasant nap.

Despite the urgency of that crisis situation I felt a momentary reluctance to stop being a pillow for that sweet, sleepy child, whose habit of using me as a resting place for her head has brought me such overwhelming joy in the brief time since we met.

During the first six years of her life this girl was deprived of almost all direct interpersonal contact because the external spines of her unusual skeletal structure make it uncomfortable and very dangerous for any ordinary human to embrace her.

By the time that we met she had already suffered some significant psychological trauma from that deficiency.

But my teddy bear physiology cannot be hurt by her touch – in fact I find the sharp caress of those boney spikes to be quite enjoyable – and so I was able to give her the physical affection that her metaphoric, psychological heart so desperately desires, saving her from the desolate, forlorn fate that befalls many human beings.

The sight of that very sad and lonely part of her that once knew such isolation and despair being filled with intense, unabashed pleasure and utter contentment when she pulls my arms around herself and gently snuggles her cheek into my fluff touches something deep within the part of me that pumps vital energy throughout my body and mind.

There is nothing else that I want for myself with such fierce intensity as I want just to hold her like this and share that beautiful experience with her forever.

But I will not forsake the promise that I have made to protect those people who lack the strength to protect themselves.

So I aroused her from that languid state with some gentle caresses and told her that people needed our assistance.

At the same time I projected an image of what was going on into the mind of Herberta, who at that moment was in the next room polishing her face.

Just as we were about to leave for the scene of that disturbance we heard a knock on the front door of the house where Herberta had once lived with her family, which had become our base of operations.

There on our doorstep we found Cain Johnson.

Thanks to the medicine that Herberta had given to him he was no longer the sickly, feeble, lethargic creature that we had met barely one month earlier.

When we told Cain what was going on he said that he wanted to go with us, having come there that day to offer to aid us in the mission that we had told him about at our last meeting.

I had not yet learned of the remarkable, seemingly superhuman ability that he had recently discovered in himself. But I could see the sincerity of his desire to use whatever power he does possess to help protect the people of this world and so we welcomed him into our organization of heroes.

As we headed off on our first heroic adventure Justine asked Cain what name he was going to use as a superhero.

He answered that he would like to be called Ace.

A few minutes later we arrived at the strangest scene that any of my human allies had ever seen.

Behind a vaguely humanoid figure gushing torrents of thick, black sludge from its upraised arms stretched block after block of buildings, trees, cars, and even people covered in the stuff.

For a moment we were all shocked to see dozens of human-shaped piles of asphalt, each of which had been a person who was trapped and suffocated beneath that deadly coating.

Then Hypergirl split herself into dozens of miniature incarnations in order to search the surrounding area for anyone who had not yet made it to safety.

As she did that the rest of us confronted Asphalt Man directly, telling him that we were not going to permit him to continue in his current course of action.

That prompted him to fling a large blob of tar at us.

After dodging that fist attack Bertron extended the launchers built into her shoulders and blasted him to pieces with two of her rockets.

The bits and shards of Asphalt Man quickly melted and flowed back together into a single pool from which he reconstituted himself, completely unfazed.

Then he sent a large wave of molten asphalt to envelope us.

As that wave approached us Bertron shot it with an orb of highly charged plasma, which ionized the molecules in the region that it struck - according to the data picked up by some of her internal sensors - causing those molecules to lose their cohesion and disintegrate, opening up a small gap in the crest of the wave.

When the wall of asphalt enveloped us that gap happened to be right where Ace was standing, and so he escaped that attack completely untouched, quite fortunately for him.

And fortunately for me my fur cannot remain dirty, or lose its fluffiness, no matter what happens to it. So in a matter of seconds all of that tar that came crashing down upon my head had dripped to the ground, leaving me as soft and cuddly as ever.

But Bertron was not nearly so lucky.

She got trapped under an immobilizing layer of sludge, which did not seem to cause her any physical injury but certainly annoyed her, and prompted her to use some very interesting and colorful human language.

Then I asked our adversary why he was acting this way. And I used my mind scanner to peer into his thoughts.

Immediately I saw overwhelming pain and distress.

I saw that he had once been a human being named Bernie Noble, who had become Asphalt Man after falling into a vat full of an experimental paving material that had been designed to immediately repair itself as soon as it cracked.

Ever since that transformation the sight, smell, or even though of anything that is not a black, tarry, asphalt-like substance disturbed and aggravated him greatly, at times even making him feel physically ill.

Once I understood why he was acting in this destructive and criminal manner I knew how to stop him.

So I projected into his mind an image of a place where there was nothing but sand and rock for miles in every direction and then showed an image of him using his abilities to create his own personal asphalt paradise where he could live out his life in peace and comfort.

When Bernie understood that there was an easier and more effective way to deal with what was bothering him he immediately stopped his hostile actions and began to reabsorb all of the sludge that he had used to cover the city.

Then he saw the streets littered with the bodies of all the people who had died in his rampage, and he became afraid that people would hunt him down and try to hurt him for what he had done.

So I attempted to calm him down by explaining that the desire to punish those who do certain things, which is to intentionally inflict some kind of suffering on another person, is a very common but fundamentally criminal impulse which we would not allow anyone to indulge at his expense.

I told him that even though he had committed criminal acts against other people we would protect him from such retribution, which would be nothing but another act of abuse because it would not serve to undo the damage that he had caused or to protect anyone from further harm.

I also warned him that if he gave us any reason to believe that he would do something like this again, or otherwise endanger the welfare of people, we would take more drastic and potentially unpleasant steps to ensure that he could not hurt anyone else.

This assurance calmed him greatly.

Then we all went off in search of a place to make his new home.

Once we had done that and returned to our own home Cain informed us that over the course of the previous weeks he had come to suspect that he might possess a fantastic and very useful ability, which causes events to turn out in ways that he judges to be somehow favorable, or desirable, for no apparent reason and with an improbable degree of frequency.

He also told us that he has the ability to perform very complex calculations in his head, to figure out answers to problems that he doesn’t really know how to solve, and to make arbitrary guesses about things that just happen to be correct more often than seems possible purely by random chance.

Then he confessed that there are times when his conclusions or guesses are wrong, and that sometimes things do not turn out as he would like them to be, which makes him wonder if it isn’t only a coincidence when everything does go his way.

When we requested that he demonstrate this ability Cain looked around the room for a few moments until he spotted a pair of uniquely marked, 12-side dice, which were created by a friend of mine, along with a rather complex set of rules and formulas, as part of a conceptual invention that the players of a game can utilize to decide which random event will occur in any scenario that can have an infinite number of different potential outcomes.

Cain picked up those two little dodecahedrons and asked us what results we would like them to produce.

Then he tossed them down on the top of a table and rolled the symbols that we had requested.

He repeated this feat twenty-one more times, in each instance producing whatever result we asked for.

When he finished that demonstration Justine stared at him in wonder while the computer in Herberta’s head calculated the precise, infinitesimally small probability of such a sequence of events occurring naturally.

Just then a brilliant streak of light shot across the sky.

It turned out to be a spacecraft, which landed nearby.

A few minutes later an alien named Morx emerged from the ship in the company of two policemen.

The minds of these three alien visitors showed me that they had come from a world of extremely long-lived and somber people.

Before the birth of the human race Morx had purchased the entire planet Earth from the government of the USA, by which I mean the United Stars of Andromica, which is an interstellar civilization that discovered and clamed dominion over an uninhabited Earth a very long time ago.

Even though he already had thousands of other residences, some of which he has never even seen, Morx recently decided that he would turn this entire planet into a new vacation home, one which he would probably not ever use, since he had nothing better to do with his very long life.

When he came to survey his property in preparation for that construction he discovered billions of human beings living here illegally. So he called the police and arranged to have those squatters thrown off of his planet.

After emerging from that spacecraft they found the nearest door and nailed to it an official notice of evacuation, which stated that all people illegally residing on this planet would be removed from the premises at the end of one gleeb.

As soon as they had done that they returned to the ship and flew away.

During that gleeb – a period lasting for approximately fifty-two of what you call hours - there was much panic and hysteria on this Earth, leading to massive, pointless riots and many other forms of criminal behavior, which kept my friends and I very busy.

And among the calmer, more rational segments of the population there was much discussion and contemplation of this extreme example of what happens when a society allows people to claim the right to hoard and monopolize the world’s natural resources before someone else who needs a share of those resources is even born.

When faced with this scenario most of the people of Earth realized the basic iniquity of an economic system that would allow such a thing to happen. But as I had sadly expected, some of those who recognized the unjust nature of what was being done to them still refused to admit to themselves that this same kind of injustice occurs under the essentially identical economic system that they support.

And predictably, and unhelpfully, the people who advocate the collective, societal ownership of property took this opportunity to promote that system as the proper alternative and solution to this terrifying situation, conveniently forgetting about what had happened not even one month before when representatives from the People’s Republic of Space-China came to Earth and declared the entire planet to be the property of their society.

What happened – as you may recall - is that they tried to take all of this world’s resources and distribute them among the people of other planets, as certain leaders saw fit, which would have been just as harmful to the people who were living on Earth as what Morx wanted to do.

I had averted that catastrophe by teaching those communist aliens that any claim to own or hold dominion over the environment or resources that a person cannot live without looks essentially identical to a slaver’s criminal claim to own that person itself, when viewed from the dimension of the Jolly, regardless of who the supposed owner is or how that claim is justified.

When Morx returned to this world at the end of that gleeb I tried to teach him the same thing. But I failed to convince him to see things that way.

The ten billion armed police officers who had accompanied him to this world then prepared to forcibly remove every single person living here, tossing us all into the vacuum of outer space, callously and without the tiniest bit of remorse.

My friends and I were all prepared to fight to the death in order to protect all of you people from being cast into that inhospitable environment where you would lack all that you need to live and thrive.

But before resorting to such violence I looked into the mind of Morx and tried to find some peaceful resolution to this atrocious situation.

While the others distracted and delayed him as best they could I focused all of my attention on the memories of his long, joyless life.

I watched Morx trying unsuccessfully to fill the seemingly interminable eons of his existence with the acquisition of immense wealth, and then with the accumulation of all those things that that wealth could buy.

In all of these sad, monotonous memories I did not find even one single smile, or laugh, or moment of real merriment.

Then I had a rather ridiculous idea about how I might stop him.

I spoke to Morx and asked him if he would answer one question for me before he kicked us all off the planet, which he agreed to do.

I then looked him right in the eyes and in a very serious, earnestly inquisitive tone asked, “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

At the same time I projected an image of a chicken into his mind, making it look as comical as I could, and also transmitted some factual information about that species of bird so that he would comprehend the question.

Then he spent several moments in somber contemplation, considering the psychological motivations of such creatures and speculating about several likely reasons why one of them might decide to traverse a thoroughfare. That approach led him to no conclusion.

Eventually he shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and said that he could not answer my question.

So I gave him the answer, “To get to the other side!”

Morx looked at me for several seconds with an expression of utter puzzlement on his face.

He gave his head a quick, jerky shake, as if to toss out the baffling nonsense that I had just put into his ears. And then he experienced a sudden flash of comprehension, in which he realized that there is a certain sense to my answer.

The ironic contradiction between how he had been thinking about that hypothetical situation and the simple, obvious yet entirely unexpected truth of what I had said tickled some previously unutilized part of his brain. It produced in his mind a most enjoyable sensation.

As I stared hopefully at Morx he made the sound of a single, soft chuckle. And then there was a moment of silence, after which he began to really laugh for the first time in his long, long life.

Minutes later his fits of laughter finally subsided and he regained his composure. Then he asked me what had just happened to him.

I explained to him the concept of humor, and laughter. And then he begged me – he literally begged - for more of this wonderful new experience.

So I told him that the people of Earth have many different, very diverse senses of humor, and suggested that they might show him many more examples of funniness if he doesn’t kill them all first.

That made him call off his plan to rid the planet of all humanity. He decided instead to spend the next million years or so traveling around the globe asking people to tell him their favorite jokes.

In the gleebs since then many more people have joined the Sovocratic Alliance, which pleases me very much. A few rare and valiant individuals have even made the decision to be Guardians of Freedom.

But it saddens me to see that some of you have instead chosen not to be a part of our Alliance, for many different reasons.

I see that quite a few of you have made that choice without even realizing that you had the choice, because you incorrectly believe that this organization exists only as part of some fictional story that you are reading.

It certainly may be true that I am just an imaginary conception of that person who types these words as I transmit them, who stubbornly continues to claim that he is the author of my story no matter how many times I tell him that he is actually the figment of my imagination.

But even if I am only the fantastic embodiment of certain emotions, hopes and ideals, that universal society of sovereign individuals is a real thing because there are real people who choose to be a part of it.

You might also hesitate to join the Sovocratic Alliance because even though you realize that this is a real option for you you do not believe that our goal to free this world of national governments and all other criminal institutions is a realistic one.

Many of you feel like that is an impossible aspiration which can never be realized, because you cannot conceive of any way to overcome the enormous inertia of the established order and the forces of its many supporters.

The sheer magnitude and complexity of this task can overwhelm your finite mind, leading to feelings of bewilderment, anxiety, and despair, which causes many people to dismiss the task as impossible so that they can avoid facing its many formidable challenges.

But remember that the first and most critical step in this process is actually very simple, requiring only that those of us who support this mission bring it to the awareness of as many other people as possible.

It is also essential for all of us to make it known to our societal leaders that we will only support those who honor the principle of universal personal sovereignty. Because if people just keep giving their support to whichever politician promises to provide them with the greatest personal advantages under the current system, or whichever candidate is a member of their chosen political party, these politicians will never have to make any real changes in that system.

I can see that some of you are still willing - even eager - to be seduced by the endless promises of those people who just want to gain positions of power within a supposedly sovereign government by telling you that they will then do what is in your best interest.

But it makes me very glad that some of you have come to appreciate how much more you have to gain from the empowerment of leaders who actually respect your sovereign personhood.

However I am also saddened to see that there are some other people who have decided to oppose the establishment of a human society based upon the notion of personal sovereignty.

Some of you make that choice because you derive a psychological gratification and sense of pride from your patriotic support of one such state, or from your veneration of the founders of that state, whose original, personal intentions and choices in creating that country you wrongly assumed to have some inherent significance or bearing on how people in the present should live our lives.

Many who think that way also like to devalue the happiness of individual people, and want to believe that there is something about a state or society as a whole that matters more than all of the persons in that group. They refuse to give up that conceit in favor of a philosophy that values the distinct and unique well-being of each person because their collectivist, anti-personal ideology helps them to feel just a little bit better about the disappointments and unhappiness of their own lives.

Others oppose this change because they fear the unfamiliar and unknown, and allow their feelings of anxiety about all of the potential problems or unpleasantness that might arise during this transition to prevent them from trying something new.

Or you may be afraid that if you do not support your oppressors in their subjugation of you then they will retaliate against you or target you for abuse in some fashion.

And some of you do so just because you think that you are better served by the current state of affairs, and do not care about the well-being of anyone else.

You may not realize how you are being victimized by the arbitrary restrictions that the leaders of your society place upon your freedom to do whatever makes you happy, or you might be fortunate enough to be content doing what they allow you to do.

But don’t forget that the assertion of state sovereignty can be used at any time to infringe upon your own welfare or whatever freedoms you do enjoy. So even if you are one of the many people who don’t really care about anybody else, I recommend that you support our efforts in order to help us protect you.

Or you may think that granting the state the right to exercise sovereign dominion over the people is justified in some way.

Often it is said to be justified by serving the interest of something called the greater good, or the common good, which is an assertion that is ultimately based upon the premise that harming some people in some way is somehow not abusive and criminal if it benefits a numerically greater number of individuals, or if it provides a cumulatively greater benefit to a select few.

This argument may be used to excuse many atrocities, including various forms of slavery and acts of genocide.

Certain human attitudes that condone such dreadful things in the name of a greater good are actually quite similar to the beliefs that motivate me to oppose them, perhaps ironically. But there is also one critical difference between these mindsets.

Even though I agree that the happiness of one person has the same fundamental importance as that of any other I categorically reject that philosophical pretense that the personal happiness experienced by one individual is interchangeable in some realistic way with the happiness of anyone else.

I have seen nothing in any dimension of reality that would allow me to conclude that the anti-happiness caused to one person by a given act can be somehow summed with the happiness that that act brings to others and thereby negated, which leads me to the conclusion that the essential abusiveness of a given act is not changed in any way by the mere fact of how many people profit from it, or approve of it, or by how much they profit.

The only thing that can negate the innate criminality – as I understand that term - of any act that infringes upon the sovereignty of a person is the necessity of performing that act in order to prevent or undo the harmful effects of a criminal act perpetrated by that person.

I can see that many of you are now thinking that anyone who holds such beliefs would never intentionally inflict even the tiniest bit of harm on an unwilling and innocent person in order to prevent someone else from suffering much more severely, and quite a few of you find this to be a very uncomfortable notion.

But that conclusion is entirely incorrect.

It is based upon the erroneous assumption that a person must care about its own sense of virtuousness more than it cares about the well-being of other people. A person like me does not think that way, and so I would willingly sacrifice my own conscience and commit an act of minor criminality against someone in order to save another person from much more serious harm.

If someone were about to get hit by a car, for example, and I needed to shove a bystander out of my way in order to rescue that person I would almost certainly do so without any hesitation.

But I would not push a person in front of that car just to save someone else, or even to save several people, unless that person was made out of living rubber, or protected by a personal force field, or more powerful than a locomotive, or something like that, so that it would not get seriously injured by the impact.

And if I ever did do that to you I would never trivialize your feelings of being hurt by my actions – I would never satisfy my own ego at your expense - by pretending that what I had done for that noble purpose is not still a criminal assault upon your person, of which I am personally guilty of choosing to perpetrate.

Instead of denying my own responsibility for committing that small crime against you, or trying to somehow justify and excuse it, I would simply apologize for what I had done and try to find some way to make it up to you.

This attitude is confusing to some of you, and seems to be somewhat paradoxical, but when I give the matter some serious thought it is the only perspective that makes complete sense to me.

Of course I cannot make you agree with that conclusion if you do not want to accept the ideas upon which this mindset is based, because my thought-projector only allows me to share information and images from my mind with you. It cannot control what you choose to believe.

All that I really can do is try to explain my beliefs as articulately as possible, and suggest that you give some honest consideration to the validity of that viewpoint, which I earnestly encourage all of you to do even though I can already see that some of you will not.

Those of you who want to maintain the personal power, profit, or psychological satisfaction that you derive from the current state of human societies usually don’t want to think about whether or not the philosophical basis of that social structure makes any sense. Or else you just don’t care.

Way in the back of your minds, hidden away, often, in some dusty corner of unexplored awareness, many of you do understand the logic of what I am telling you. But you are still determined to use whatever influence you have over other people to try to discourage them from joining the Sovocratic Alliance.

Some of you do that by making all sorts of allegations against me, ranging from the merely implausible to the absurdly preposterous and paranoid, attributing my actions to sinister motivations and casting them in the most negative light possible in an attempt to discredit me personally so that people will not give any serious consideration to the things that I say and do here.

And for thinking that it is even possible for people to change the social institutions of this world in order to make the individual happiness of all people their chief concern some critics have called me everything from hopelessly naive to utterly insane.

But even though I cannot be sure of my own sanity, or the ultimate efficacy of my efforts, I can assure you that I do honestly think that it is possible for people to accomplish this objective.

That does not mean that I expect that it will be achieved quickly or simply.

Reforming earthly societies in such a profound way without causing severe and injurious disruptions to the lives of the people living in them is a truly monumental, complex, and difficult task, which only just begins when the governments of Earth are made to admit that no state can ever really be a sovereign entity with any rights of its own.

After th

I am sorry, but I have to cut this transmission short.

A mad scientist has just unleashed a herd of giant, mutant chinchillas to wreak havoc on downtown Denver, and stated that she will not call off the attack until the city council appoints her to the position of comptroller-for-life. So I am going to go see if there is anything that I can do to help deal with this crisis situation.

Goodbye, for now.