We all lived in a yellow submarine; really, it was rather ochre in color, but ‘yellow’ is close enough. Our friends were all aboard, or so I have been told. It was quite pleasant. It meant doing quite a lot of fishing and a certain amount of hydroponics, but a lot of it was automated, and the work wasn’t bad at all.
I’d love to tell you how the submarine was made, but I really don’t know. Those were different times. It was said to have been funded by an eccentric rock star (although, at least back then, no-one had ever heard of a rock star who was anything but eccentric…which probably explains why we had a submersible nautical vessel of such vast size.)
Whoever made it wanted us to be comfortable and safe. That’s a nice way of putting it; it might also be said that the maker of the thing didn’t have a whole lot of faith in the capabilities of those who’d be aboard. It had quite a lot of devices to make us secure. The piloting was almost entirely automatic, which was fine by us, particularly since driving seemed a rather dull activity, and the sub (as befits the likely by-product of whim, cash, and psychedelics) simply swept along through the ocean, diving merrily through fish-filled passages and neat little tunnels and the ominous and nameless tentacled undersea City which (fortunately) was always asleep.
Likewise, we didn’t really have to know the tech. It was self-repairing, which is, I have read, unusual; but it’s all we knew, so it was pretty much what we expected. There were numerous helpful touches; the lights gently dimmed and lifted at regular times to give us a reasonable approximation of a regular sleep cycle. The craft was separated into various compartments, so that, should something really bad happen, the affected portion would seal itself off. Sad luck for anyone trapped in that section; but better than having it simply sink us. I talk about the hydroponics; well, I know that’s what they’re called, but the developers had done something quite clever, and all the fruit and vegetation grew very easily, fairly quickly, and quite large.
There was plenty of food, a library of all the music ever recorded (all the way from some of the proto-rock of 1951, right up the end of May, 1970), and no real authority structure. All we really had were community gatherings to deal with meanness. Sometimes, though rarely, people got into fistfights. Once in a while, people did worse things. Somebody killed someone over an exceptionally great tomato plant once, and that wasn’t okay. That person was locked in their room forever and only fed three times a day. I hear she’s pretty bummed about what she did.
From what my folks say, we started out pretty excited, but made a lot of dumb mistakes. (Like, with the mean people thing: originally, it was figured that there’d be no crime at all if everyone had what they needed for themselves. I mean, we’d notice if anything big and public went missing, and you just couldn’t hide all that much in your room. When we had gatherings sometimes, there was usually a vote by roll call. But you got a sense of who had good ideas, or at least, who had the ideas most of us liked, and we generally went with their ideas. Sometimes, they made decisions first and told us later, and it was usually pretty good.
Our parents thought it was a nice life.
But they were, you know, old. They didn’t really understand the world. They came from places that they said were much scarier, but as far as we can tell, they had it pretty good. They got to be on land. There are some pretty convincing speakers who’ve been talking a lot about how good land it, lately.
And then there are those wackos who want us to go find Atlantis. They argue that if we live underwater, we should live in a real city. Oh, sure we should. Cities don’t even move! That’s so crazy!
A lot of people fell under the sway of these fast-talking crazies. And they started pushing a whole bunch of crazy views. They actually hate us, they hate all of us. And we hate them, but only because they hate us.
When I say “we”, I mean, there’s one smart person who knows where it’s at, and the good people follow her. I mean, there aren’t a lot of us, but at least we know we’re good people, because we all understand that she’s smart, and her friends are smart, and we’re smart for listening to her, and it’s obvious that the others are all either just stupid or flat-out psychopaths. Some of them want to grow more food in our hydroponics; don’t they realize that could make some of us get tummyaches? Some of them want us to take the submarine deeper, and some of them claim the submarine has always been at the perfect depth; but it’s obvious that the only good thing to do is actually go up and down in a series of slow dives and slow rises. It’s clear that the ones who want us to go down actually want us all to crash into undersea icebergs and sink, and the ones who want us to go up intend for us to get eaten by giant Eagles. No, no, the only good way to stay safe is to avoid doing either one for too long.
I can’t even begin to illustrate how many crazy ideas they have. And, even more nuts, they call our ideas crazy, and AAAAAAAAAAAAAGH.
But eventually, we realized something:
If all of the ‘good’ people gathered in one section of the sub, and set it on fire, set fire to the furniture and the food and stuff, then the automatic systems would kick in, and we’d be able to blast free of the rest.
Nobody knows who thought of it first. But honestly, it was a win-win situation, because the psychos were already going to set the WHOLE sub on fire, and the only way to save ourselves was to set SOME of it on fire to save the rest.
And once one fire started, they all started. Nobody knows who did it first, but it happened everywhere, apparently. Each segment of the sub blasted away from every other part.
Some got more of the farming and some got more of the medical gear and some got more of the books, but that stuff’s all lost to us; we know those bastards will never share.
That’s okay. Now the people who think right are all together, and the others are off to go do whatever they’re going to do.
It turns out that not all of us are as good as we thought, and some people thought that we should actually start talking to some of the other subs.
That’s when our leader showed us that, if we wanted to, we could push those people out of the airlock.
What a relief!
We almost had bad people here.
Instead, we have only good people.
I think.
And if not…well, now we know what to do.
It’s a little hungry in here, and things are a little singed, but at least we’re all in tune, you know? And we have the best leadership, and our leaders are picking out some assistant leaders, and they’re real smart, and everything’s going to be real great, real soon.
Now we each live in our own yellow submarines, along with just a few other people. We can’t do all the things we were able to do when the original craft was intact, but really, the original thing wasn’t all that great. I mean, who wants to live with a bunch of jerks? Now I know better. Things may be horrible—they must be—but it’s only because everyone in the other subs is a greedy, inconsiderate son of a gun.
Someday, they’ll magically pop like bubbles, and everything will be better. Until then, I guess I just have to be miserable; but it’s not my fault.
We all lived in one big yellow submarine once; but now we live in many little yellow submarines, and we’re going just where we should be, and doing just what we should do, and someday, we’ll like it, and anyone who doesn’t like it, well, that’s what airlocks are for.
My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.
I write books. You should read them!
My new book, “I Hate Your Time Machine”, is now available! Go pick it up!
