part 8: day three

FROM THE ARCHIVES:

I was #5K7^♠︎, a geological engineer at Saarbrücken, the capital city of Saarland. I gave a hand when Germany decided to not be tethered to the rest of Europe anymore —— we pissed off the countries on the west side of us: Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland and France. Spain and Portugal were not very happy too because they had to shift their country coordinates but they did not care too much; they still had a lot of sea and sunlight anyway. The French went bonkers though. 

Other than the protests because that is what they are good at (and also because they just wanted to seize another opportunity to oppose the Germans), they especially tried really really hard to claim Saarland as their own¹ again. When the untethering was about to begin, the demonstrations grew wilder. They somehow gathered enough people to sit on the border, believing that we would not storm over with our heavyweight machines and then unalive² them. Oh how much we would have loved that…after all we just wanted to do our job and then go home. They were also harassing us a lot: egging our office premises and spamming all of our email inboxes (even our personal ones) with threatening messages; though some tried to “talk some sense” into us and a handful attempted to bribe us…but we were just employees following orders. It escalated to one point where we had to work from home, and we all got free pay while the politicians solved the dispute; oh wonderful times. 

Well you know what happened, Saarland remains hinged to Germany. However, the very teeny tiny minority in Saarland who wish to be governed under French rule had their hopes revived when the superpowers emerged. They tried to use their superpowers to physically remove Saarland from Germany again —— a shallow thought-out thought really, since you need geological engineers to patch the lands together again. What they did was essentially turning themselves to an island…a German island. They gave up eventually because: i) their combined abilities were still too weak to achieve that, ii) the best geological engineers work for the German government, iii) my superpower. 

Universal bridge. I could communicate with all living things, including those who are not humans. It was amazing although very overwhelming at first because the plants and animals were basically shouting insults at us all the time; but I then learnt to meditate and can block out negativity as I wanted. To finally convince the rebels, I talked to the soil —— which was itself controversial, because is soil living or non-living? In short, it is not alive, but they host a whole heap of biodiversity³ —— thus I held a referendum with the tardigrades, fungi and all sorts of minuscule cells. Their representative issued a statement saying that they have always lived in harmony without human interference and therefore they would not welcome any more changes. 

Not everyone took me at my word, and tried to search for another person with the same superpower to act as a witness. Lo and behold, I was a Loner. And what was the point of lying anyway? I would be getting paid even more if we were to release Saarland again and theoretically I could dishonour the soil’s wishes, but ever since I started to be more zen, I became more spiritual —— I now respect all living things, regardless of their size and shape. 

This experience has honestly changed me for the better, I grew to be a more altruistic person. On my Day, I went to the zoo and acted as an interpreter between the kids and the caged animals. The animals were not pleased at all at first but even the fiercest of beings softened at the sight of happy kids. The sheep and goats humourously wanted everyone to know that they are not the same thing. The penguins hoped that it would be colder because they want to huddle. The owls told us to sod off. One of the ponies did not want a particularly large child to ride on him (yes the ponies use pronouns), but I explained what fat-shaming is and he wanted to show me how humans are not that much better than ponies. The meerkats could not stop screeching with excitement and I struggled to follow.

1. not fiction, proof on the Internet ↩︎
2.  coined by a true crime Youtuber as an euphemism to “kill” or in this case “mince them to death” ↩︎
3. https://youtu.be/Q-J2FErZHuA ↩︎

to be continued…