Chapter 4: The Republic, by Plato – Part 1

September 16, 2652 – 376 Days Before Judgment Day

It was another perfect day in paradise inside the Columbus Server with clear skies and temperate weather encompassing the City of New Haven. Spread out all across the shingles, eaves, and ledges of the city were randomly generated birds and critters, faithful recreations complete with randomly generated droppings. Located at District 1 or the Administrative District, Aaron was making his way to the New Haven Hunter’s Association to meet his friends when he happened to notice a small crowd gathered outside the stairs of New Haven City Hall. The demonstrators were shouting something about free love and trans rights but honestly, Aaron didn’t care so he just skirted by the edge of the sidewalk and power-walked away as quickly and as straightly as humanly possible.

The New Haven Hunter’s Association was a three-story building which looked just like a rustic hunting lodge on the outside with a cozy vibe on the inside. The floors were a combination of hardwood floors, stone tiles, and thick Arabic rugs. From the entrance, a long red carpet led all the way down to the front desk and reception area with the staff offices were hidden by a set of wide doors further behind the front desk. From the foyer, numerous leather couches naturally surrounded 4, currently unlit fire places built into the sides of the walls. Two sets of wooden staircases with thick wooden balusters led to the dining hall and recreational area on the second floor while the third floor contained numerous meeting rooms and a small library. Basically, it was the kind of place the Freemasons might go to eat hor d'œuvres, play croquet, or smoke cigars.

When Aaron entered the lodge, the first thing he did was scan the foyer for his friends. It didn’t take him long to find one as Riley’s blue hair stood out like a sore thumb. He then made a beeline for the couch on which she lounged. As for Riley, she didn’t notice Aaron’s approach as she was currently preoccupied with playing Tetris on her handheld gaming console.

“Hey. Sorry I’m late,” Aaron apologized.

“Well, well, well. Look who’s finally here,” Riley remarked sarcastically without looking away from her screen.

“Is Lucius here yet?” Aaron asked.

“Nope, but he’s online,” Riley replied. “He was scheduled for exercise and showers this morning at the same time as you so he’ll probably be here soon.”

Even though the Columbus Server provided an extremely realistic and comfortable virtual environment to reside in, one’s body still needed to exist in the physical world and like the servers themselves, humans needed to periodically maintained whether that was through eating, grooming, or exercise. Automation may have eliminated the need for human labor but it hadn’t eliminated human or resource constraints. For example, people still needed to eat, shit, and breathe because those functions are intrinsic to the design of a human. Meanwhile, a farm operating at 100% capacity won’t be any more productive regardless of who or what is farming it because the constraint is not labor, the constraint is resources like land, water, or fertilizers. Thus, for the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Columbus Arcology, the economics of sustaining such a large human population with the resources available set the quality of life at the very bare minimum.

In the Columbus Arcology, food and shelter, if you could call it that, was provided in the form of dense nutritional pastes derived from plant matter and insect proteins while housing consisted of capsule-style rooms stacked on top of each other for maximum space utilization. The Deep Dive neural implant altered the taste, texture, and sensations of the food from bad to bland so as to encourage people to consume tasty, virtual food inside the Columbus Server. For every 24 hour cycle, people were usually plugged in for 22 with the remaining time spent outside being allocated for human maintenance.

“All right, then I guess we’ll wait here until he shows up,” Aaron said before he materialized a hefty-looking textbook titled “An Introduction to Fast Breeder Nuclear Reactors” and started reading that.

About 10 minutes later, Lucius finally arrived and when he did, he seemed somewhat upset.

“Hey, did you guys see that protest going on at city hall?” Lucius asked with a scowl on his face.

While still mashing buttons, Riley offered a dispassionate, “Nope.”

“Yeah I saw it,” Aaron confirmed. “Why?”

“Apparently, the Honesty Foundation’s trying to sneak in an amendment banning non-birth sex assigned avatars into the next patch,” Lucius explained.

Upon hearing about the Honesty Foundation, Riley finally looked up from her game and gave Lucius her full attention.

“Really!? God, those guys are the worst!” Riley expressed with disdain. “Why do they even care so much about what gender you identify as? My hair’s not really blue and you guys aren’t really buff. None of this is honest – we’re all virtual avatars.”

“Yeah I know, right?” Lucius uttered in agreement. “Why does being trans even matter? There’s no functional difference between being man or woman – all our base stats are the same. The only difference is personal preference.”

Inside Butterfly’s Dream, the default virtual avatar is based on a biometric scan of one’s physical body but it’s possible to modify the virtual avatar through customization options such as applying cosmetics or outfits applied to your default model. It was also possible to use a virtual avatar which wasn’t based on biometric scans through customized creation, pre-generated avatars, or rare lottery drops.

“Okay, I hate the Honesty Foundation as much as anyone else but that’s just not true,” Aaron opined. “Customized avatars do provide a functional advantage. Beauty and lookism is a thing – people who are beautiful get treated better. In this case, being trans is a casualty of honesty, not the focus.”

“But cosmetics do the exact same thing,” Lucius argued. “But are they railing around cosmetic options? No! They’re targeting avatar customization because that’s the only way you can change your gender. They’re targeting trans people.”

“Yeah! Exactly!” Riley said with an emphatic nod. “No one chooses to be born. Not you, not me, and we certainly didn’t get to choose the circumstances we were born into either. We might all be equally stuck on this planet at the same time but it’s pretty obvious that life’s not fair. But in here? We get a choice and we all have equal access to the tools to modify our appearance. The Honesty Foundation’s trying to take that away.”

The Honesty Foundation was a special interest group which was ostensibly dedicated to the principles of transparency and honesty but honestly, they were all a bunch of self-serving hypocrites. The vast majority of their platform was based on oppression, not freedom and they took advantage of free speech and tolerance to propagate their toxic world view. It was the Honesty Foundation which made all customized avatars be tagged as “Custom” but now they’re going a step further to try to ban the practice all together. Why? Because they didn’t believe it was right so no one else should be able to do it either.

“Guys! I’m not arguing in favor of the Honesty Foundation!” Aaron yelled defensively. “I’m just saying that being beautiful does have an advantage and customizing yourself to be beautiful translates that advantage.”

“Even if that’s true, it doesn’t justify removing that option for trans people,” said Lucius. “Everyone has the option to be modified and be beautiful! That’s fair!”

“You moved the goal post! You said the only difference was personal preference but it wasn’t,” Aaron argued.

Lucius looked a bit huffy but then he exhaled and collected himself.

“Okay, fine! I was wrong about that. But I wasn’t wrong about trans rights or fairness,” said Lucius.

“Goddamn right you’re not,” said Aaron.

“They’re holding a referendum right now in city hall about introducing the amendment,” said Lucius. “I already voted. Did you guys vote yet?”

“No,” said Riley.

“No,” said Aaron.

“All right, then let’s go down there so you can vote,” Lucius proposed.

“Okay,” said Riley.

“Hold on – we were supposed to go grinding for trophy spawns. If we miss the spawn timer, this is going to set us back a cycle,” said Aaron.

“It’s worth a cycle,” said Lucius.

“It’s a cycle,” Aaron reiterated. “You know I’m trying to get promoted. I’m still borderline and the season’s almost over – I need to work super hard just to maintain my position. If my metrics aren’t high enough by season end, I’ll have to restart and everything we did so far would have been wasted.”

“We can afford a cycle. If it’ll make you feel better, we’ll skip lunch and grind for an extra half-hour,” said Lucius.

“Don’t worry, we’ll make it,” Riley said reassuringly.

“I just don’t see why we should care – we’re all biometric anyway. Since when did you guys care so much about politics and trans rights?” Aaron asked.

“Uh, since always?” Riley expressed incredulously. “Besides, Bee is trans.”

“Huh. Really?” Aaron uttered in surprise. “I didn’t know that.”

“Does it really matter?” asked Lucius. “I mean, even if she weren’t, since when did we need a reason to help people?”