Human Nature

“Come to the table, children.”

Grandfather beckoned us all into the dining room; it was supper time, time for one of his stories. We were finishing our after-dinner duties; straining the water left over from the boiled vegetables into the recycler, and putting the dishes into the sonic dishwasher.

We sat down at the table where steaming mugs of hot chocolate were waiting for us. This was a family tradition of sorts; a way to get the younger ones settled down for bed. Those scallywags would be running around the house for hours if they didn’t get their story.

“When I was a young man, there was a disease that was spreading throughout the planet. We tried to run from it, actually. We went to the moon, but it followed us there. When we abandoned the moon for this planet, it followed us again.”

Grandfather sniffed at the tray of powder on the table. He looked at us solemnly before carrying on.

“We called it AIDS. It destroyed lives, families. As the decades wore on, it grew stronger, harder to catch. Harder to kill.”

Grandfather’s stories were often stories of adventure. He was one of the first colonists. You know, a brave adventurer.

But tonight his face was hard. Stony. This was not a story of adventure.

“When we came to Mars, almost half of the population was dying of it. We knew we couldn’t beat those odds. The top scientists had given up looking for cures; they were just looking for new ways to make the pain bearable when the old ways stopped working. We were sure that humanity would be gone within a century or two.”

All the children looked each other up and down. Nobody at the table seemed to have any AIDS on them, right?

“But there was one man who wouldn’t give up. He worked day and night, looking for a cure. He never stopped. His mother died of this plague before we came to Mars. His father was bed-ridden – and in a few months he too would take his father’s place.

“It drove him, so he never stopped. Up at five every morning, and he didn’t leave the labs until the wee hours of the morning… until the day he found the cure. He was a smart man, though, and once he found it, he stored the information every where he could before telling anyone in person.”

We had to wonder – how did that make the man smart? Why didn’t he just tell everyone?

“Of course, storing so many data files across so many networks alerted the powers-that-be to the strange activity. The government, the corporates, they were all aware of what he’d done as soon as he did it.”

“Grandfather, what’s a kawprit?” asked one of the little ones.

“In the past, there were very rich people who used their money to control everyone else’s money. Anyway, the man was found dead in his home the next day. It was ruled a suicide but everyone knew that it wasn’t. He had just found the cure, after all!”

The children were shocked; even in his adventure stories, even when he talked about the colony wars, he always avoided that word. Dead.

“It was the corporates. See, they used AIDS to make money. People spent almost all of their money trying to deal with the pain of the disease. More than they spent on housing, or on food, AIDS medication was the biggest market in all of the worlds.

“The corporates had discovered the cure a very long time ago. A few scientists had also come up with it, but they weren’t quite so smart; they went straight to their bosses with their breakthrough. They all ended up dead, but we didn’t know why until much, much later. See, if the cure was to get out, their entire business would dry up.”

The children had heard about money in grandfather’s stories before, but it always seemed like such a silly idea.

“But this time, the cure was everywhere. People knew how to make it; it could be made from some simple ingredients, if you put them in the synthesizer in the right order. Within a few weeks, AIDS was a forgotten disease, except for the loved ones we had all lost for the corporates’ gain. So the people found new life, while all the corporates took their money out of the business and declared it bankrupt.

“Over the next few years, our technology boomed. Some of it had been in the corporate databanks for a long time, hidden well beneath the information that we had access to. Some of these things were new inventions that the corporates had suppressed over the years—they didn’t make them any money, of course.”

The little ones had dozed off, their hot chocolates sitting on the table half-emptied.

“We cured every disease. We found new ways to grow plants that didn’t require water, which, like today, was very hard to find. All the things that afflicted our societies had been eradicated, and at last, we thought we were a happy people.”

“But grandfather, why are people still unhappy? Why does mother cry?”

“Because, my dear, they fixed the world, and the world didn’t need fixing. It was human nature that was broken.”

~

I didn’t understand what grandfather was trying to say that night, but sooner or later, everyone figures it out. Even now, as I lay in the bunk of my prison cell, charged with sedition, stripped of my dignity for doing the job of exposing the truth, I know that he was right; our technology can’t fix what was already broken.

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