Fiction: Christmas Lightsabers for sale.

"I can't tell you exactly when the world went to shit... or some would say it's a freaking Utopia now if you're a goddamn hippie.... but in any case it's different now. For instance, we were all connected before. I don't mean the machines. I mean the people could look at stuff other people were saying on this thing called the internet. It still exists but it's only machine to machine now, to you it's like how you're finger is connected to you small intestine. The brain might know but your finger doesn't know. So you're like a finger. Actually no, I'm a finger. You, your just living here not even plugged in."

"You've probably heard stories. But now, like people in your generation, all you know is Chinatown. Not even the whole Chinatown, just part of it. What happens in the other sections of Chinatown you've only heard rumors of.  I mean Chinatown is a lot bigger than it was, but it looks bombed to shit too, like we're living in ruins."


"Wait hold on hold on." said the Gujai guy. Gu Jai is a story. And these days young people would go around record people on cameras edit them and type stuff up and then project it onto the neighborhood wall at night. A big ass wall on the side of the building and give a little talk. Tell a little story. Children would come and sit and watch. It was something to do. You had to get someone to ride the bikes to power the generator. Tai Tung had one of the best walls around. Three people could bike at once. When one guy got tired they got someone else on the bike. There were solar panels everywhere to power necessary machines, for robot personell to plug in. But for these community walls, you need to bike.

"What do you mean Chinatown is bigger now? I thought at one point China had more than a billion people?"

"See that's what I'm talking about. You have no concept of geography or space. Hell I bet you have no concept of time. I mean Quincy and Boston used to be two different cities? Not just neighborhoods of one Chinatown? China and America are two different countries... well I mean they were."

The Gujai guy was lost. To him country meant a wilderness. But he knew he had really wanted to interview this guy. The guy was a robot. But he was the kind of robot that used human intelligence. In other words, he had been a real human at one point, and then before he died, probably right before, they had taken his brain and with some sort of surgery hooked it up to organic robotic material, which was new back then. There weren't a lot of robots like him left. Now robots were all practically organic and could simply grow brains or other organs from tree factories. There were still regular humans around too, like the Gu Jai guy and his friends and the little Tai Tung Community. But they didn't really interact with the robots. The robots were sort of just part of nature. They provided food and grew or printed little shelters. There were some humans who knew how to tap into the system and use it, actually tell robots what to do. And there were many more robots who could do that. But mostly, robots did their thing and humans did theirs. Humans had earth and some other places. Robots were busy colonizing all the difficult to inhabit space in between and far beyond. Or that's what this old timer was trying to explain to the Gu jai guy, so he in turn could explain it to the people.

"Look, I'll just tell you when it started being different. It's when they started selling those goddamn  lightsaber things for Christmas. They weren't really lightsabers. I mean there were these movies.. called Star Wars.. you know what a movie is right? No, but you heard stories. Anyway, Star Wars was like this story about space and stuff but they got it wrong because they didn't take into account how time would be all mixed up.... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Back then, people knew time bent but they thought of time, even in space and stuff, the way you think of like a day. How there is a beginning a middle and an end.  Not fluid and mixed up how it is. And they had these swords made of light in the movie. And kids had toys...but then some fucker, and I bet it wasn't an earth fucker either, made this like baton thing. You would flick it out, and it wasn't made of light I mean the thing didn't eve glow in the dark, it just reflected light like metal.... plus it had these lasers.. to tell the truth we still don't understand what that shit was. In any case, it worked like a lightsaber. I mean you flicked the thing out, and you couldn't cut someone's head clean off. But you would get to somewhere in the spine and the heat and the explosion and all that and the guy would be dead either from the electric pulse or laser or whatever the hell it was. The point is the things were dangerous. But they were cheap and people started selling them to KIDS! for Christmas! It was crazy shit man I'm telling you. The things costes about 10 bucks and man suddenly they were everywhere. They were on the internet in stores. It was crazy. Then a couple of people died and they government tried to ban them."

"What's a government?"

"Uhhhhhh shit. Well it's like...  it's like the Five Animal Alliance and the Five Family swords. Except more organized. As organized as robots. And it controlled the whole country. "

"Oh like the circuit system Gods?"

"No no, well trying to be like that. But basically people controlling other people but over a big amount of space, with like guns and tanks and bombs and like taxes.... you know what just let me tell my freaking story okay. And well I tell you all my stories you should have an idea of what a government is."

The Gu jai guy shrugged his shoulders.

"Anyway, so kids started like dying because they were playing with these weapons like they were toys. So they banned them. But then some people got all pissed off like the Second amendment and right to bear arms and all that... ah ah ah! Don't ask I'll explain that later. So then only adults could own them. But these idiots in the suburbs blew each other up by knocking two  lightsabers against each other. So then lightsabers became illegal. So now people are really crazy for them. You got all kinds of lightsabers now. Some are 10 dollars... some are freakin  ten thousand dollars. There are some that are so powerful you just open it once and on all sides light will cut like a whole block.  Some will cut up a whole city. And some are just totally freakin fake. Everyone wants one but only crazy people will actually flip them out. And then there are like preventative crazy people that carry them around 'just in case a crazy person whips out their lightsaber.' So the first place that gets flooded with this new explosive lightsaber is the middle east. I'm telling you everyone did all these lightsaber attacks at once and then bam! the middle east is like back to pre-Islamic times. Are the radicals light sabered themselves to death and a good number of regular normal Muslim people as well. A ton of kidd survived because they were shorter and statistically the suicide light saber cuts were aimed  high like adult chest level. Wel I don't know if you could say 'aimed' really. But that's what happened. I knew because back then they still had the internet and network news."

"So then some people state side are like 'goodriddance' I'll tell you the truth, I was one of those assholes. I didn't really mean it though if I thought about it. But then what happened next is there is a rise in Buddhist Terrorism. All of a sudden you get these crazy suicide Buddhist Lightsaber guys going around freeing everyone from the illusion of this world and granting them instant enlightenment. They were like this splinter group of Falun Gong called San Gok Ying. They believed everything that Falun Gong believed, except instead of a wheel inside them it was a triangle, and instead of nonviolence, they believed in achieving nonviolence through peaceful death. I.e.. suicide lightsaber attack."

"So China, still has like a billion people because they didn't have a lightsaber problem (and I found that highly suspicious)and the San Gok Ying cult pops up in the middle east. So then they ship all the Falun Gong people (not just the splinter group but everyone) to the middle east, like all of them, high speed train loads full hadning out free newspapers. They sent a bunch of evangelist Christians too. At the same time the portal letting all the alien dragons and shit through happens and the internet goes to shit. But we still had a system of news and somehow pulled radio back together off an on and we had newspapers. So you can't blame it all on the dragons and kei luns and all those other crazy animal things. I'm telling you it started with the lightsabers."


"So the middle east is crazy as ever and as religious as ever, except now it's this weird mixture of Christian Buddhist Fundamentalism and there is a resurgence out of nowehere of Manichaeism.. you know the Mau Gau guys. Yeah now their in Chinatown too right? Except over in the middle east back in that time they were nuts. So people dying and people passing out free newspapers whatever.... and then suddenly everyone just calms down and order is established. Yeah the Dragons, the real ones that act like humans, and the Phoenixes, they create some order over there. They set up little temples and guess what the new religious practice is? It's all work in factories. That becomes the new prayer, the new meditation. And learning Programming and scinec that's the new mysticism. The middle east jumps ahead of everyone unexpectedly in Technology. They start colonizing space and the other countries can't say a damn thing because of the Dragons. I mean those guys say they have weapons that could blow up the sun and hell we believe them. So nuclear power look slike no big thing anymore. So everyone else comes to their senses and they start pushing for Scince and space travel real hard too. So right aronund that time they realize, C'mon it doesn't make snese to do all this work to keep humans alive in space. Justmake robots that are more human. I mean this was later on and I was getting older and so yeah I volunteered to be art of that, with my brain going into a robots body. I'm glad too because I've seen a lot of stuff and I'm talking to you yeah? I mean some people said there are other ways to immortality. Like the tranposrt thing. But they didn't have that yet. So I chose the option they did have."



"Anyway, so hundreds of years as a robot and you know what we're doing now? We're developing this new technology to send through the pportals to the Dragon world. Brand new shit.. can you guess what it is? Fucking light sabers! I mean now, with the Dragon technology and some of our magic stuff mixed now we can make these things, and they are innovative, something to do battle in space star to start, sysytem to system. But if we are just inventing it now, where did it come from so long ago? That's the shit I'm telling you about Star Wars getting it wrong because time is all fucked up. Now see how you don't even bat an eye at the time thing but you're head was spinning about Goverenment and Newspapers. You can't wrap you head around those conceots but time being all messed up and fuid, that' sno problem for you. And the reason for that is those goddamn Christmas lightsabers they had sfor sale all othose years ago."


The Gu jai guy took his notes as fast as he could and took video and pictures butthat night when it was his turn to present at the wall he didn't even use any of it. He stood up and blew on aconch horn and his friends played some drums and did some lion dance to get peoples attention. And then speaking very lowly, drawing his audience to sit closer and lean forward to hear, he played his Chinese Zither and told a story of Chinatown long ago. The people looked forward eyes glaxzed over, seeing things in their mind's eye that the Gu Jai Guy revealed with words and music. And the wall became an obsolete technology of the past.