Rissa lifted her wings slightly away from her body, producing a gesture that seemed to suggest a shrug. "We tell the same kind of stories; kobolds do, too."
Iora looked at the dragon skeptically, the pink-skinned kobold's eyes glowing with interest. "We do?"
Rissa nodded; the blue specks in her black scales glinted in the light as she moved. "I'll tell you one."
Once upon a time, this was a paradise. Once upon a time, we thought we had found a way to cheat hardship, to expel want and despair and evil from our society. It might be hard for you to imagine that living here, in this time, but I assure you this is not a fiction. All of Draluk came together; we were tired of war, tired of fighting, tired of violence and crime and oppression. Great minds, mages of incomparable power, stood with us, and offered a solution.
"We can dispel evil," they said. "With enough thought, enough power, we can cast a spell on all of society. We'll simply make it impossible for anything that is evil or unjust to happen." No evil thought would exist, no evil action conceived of, and therefore no evil would exist.
Rissa paused for a moment, red eyes sparkling with curiosity. "You know," she said, "it's kind of hard to define evil. It's easy to point at this or that and say, "Murder is evil" or "negligence is evil," but what makes those things evil?" The dragon let the question hang for a moment. "There's a value judgment, there. I'm not about to argue that murder isn't bad, but it's important to recognize that that statement is part of a frame, and that frame has to exist in order for the statement to exist. In order for "Murder is bad" to make sense, being alive has to be better in some way than being dead."
Iora furrowed her brow as she considered the idea. "Okay, so murder is evil because being dead is worse than being alive. Being alive has more value than being dead. So then we've done it, right? Evil is taking value from someone else? That sounds kind of... Mechanical."
Rissa nodded. "Exactly my point. It feels too materialistic, doesn't it? But suppose it isn't the taking of value that's evil, but the absence of it. It isn't that someone took something from you, it's that you're missing something that you should have."
Iora frowned. "I still don't think I like that. If someone steals from me, they've done something evil; I'll be upset, but it isn't the missing value that's evil, it's the act of stealing."
Rissa lifted her wings again, shrugging. "Maybe you're right. That's the problem; defining evil is tricky. The act of stealing might be evil, but the thing you're missing afterwards is what harms you. Regardless, if you were to cast a spell to banish evil, you'd have to decide; maybe you'd even choose both. But I don't think it's that easy to pin down; there's no universally applicable answer."
Wondrous though our power may be, this still seemed to be a realm of unattainable magic. Questions were asked: How could we muster the power to cast a spell to alter reality? How could we even come up with a framework by which all actions, all thoughts, would be judged? The mages assured us, however, that three simple laws could hold the tide against evil: There shall be no harm through action or inaction, there shall be no act or thought of malice or cruelty, and where it does not conflict with the first or second law, there shall be harmony and order.
Overnight, Draluk changed. Nothing was immune to this spell, and nothing could challenge it, so everything that had come before had to be dismantled. It was strange, at first; we went through a period of fervent rebuilding which lasted several decades. The old structures of power became hollow shells as we built and migrated to our new utopia.
Our new cities seemed to spiral outwards in a fractal of repeated patterns nested within themselves; a modular architecture that could always grow alongside its residents. Every new city was just as the last; one could get lost in the same exact place while in different cities. As we had built them, they had homogenized in a way that we could not see, perceive, discuss, or change. The designs, the blueprints, the structures both physical and social seemed to be nearly set in stone. They were, simply, the best they could be: Able to accommodate any needs, fully inoffensive to all tastes, no better or worse than any other.
So, too, had our culture undergone a change: Art, science, entertainment, literature, and technology all coalesced into a single thread, Our Utopia. Murals became a mirror of the landscape in which they were situated, an image of the city painted on the wall, an uncanny portrait of what had become our entire existence. Science unified under the singular aim of tuning our new society, conflict fell out of narratives, poetry was drained of emotion, and the concept of rhetoric vanished entirely. What was left was sleek, smooth, and easily digestible; picture-perfect representations of our new, superior mode of living where nothing bad could ever happen. Nothing else was believable; nothing else mattered.
"Can you imagine what it'd be like if you couldn't so much as think an "evil" thought?" Rissa paused to ruminate on the idea, and Iora picked up the thought.
"If we can't settle what's evil, what thoughts are we outlawing?" Iora furrowed her brow, concerned. "If we have to look at every thought and ask, "Yes or no," how many innocent thoughts get lost?"
Rissa chuckled. "You wouldn't even get to think that question, or any thought that would lead to it, much less say it out loud. Better be sure the definition of evil is perfect, right?"
Iora shook her head. "Perfection doesn't exist. Something will be wrong, inevitably."
Rissa nodded. "What do you do when you can't even think about that fact? What happens when it becomes impossible to wonder if it might be the case?"
Iora reached out to her tea and stared into the depths of the cup, searching for an answer. "I suppose you'd just keep on going as if nothing were wrong at all. You wouldn't think anything was wrong. You'd have to believe that everything was perfect, because thinking anything else would upset the system."
"It's even more insidious than that. You couldn't think anything that might upset yourself." Rissa watched Iora's expression as she wrestled with the concept. "You'd feel perfect. Absolutely no changes required, everything exactly as it ought to be. You wouldn't aspire to anything, because you'd have accomplished everything you were ever supposed to simply by believing it to be true."
Iora pondered the thought. "There has to be some room for self-actualization, right? Maybe you could aspire to be well-liked by your neighbors, or make new friends?"
Rissa shook her head. "You're already well-liked, and you like your neighbors back exactly as much. You're all friends; everybody is, because there's no reason for anyone to not be friends."
Iora shifted uneasily. "So everything stagnates, nothing ever changes, nothing ever hurts, and nothing can be aspired to?"
Rissa simply continued telling the story.
Tym woke up to his alarm, precisely on time, as always. He rolled out of bed, turned around, and made the bed; he smoothed out the gray sheets and white comforter as he pulled them up. He smiled at his work, and went to the bathroom. White cabinets, white sink, gray toiletries. He washed his face, took his pills, brushed his teeth. It was a practiced routine, executed exactly the same way every single day.
Tym lifted the toothpaste to his brush, but something wasn\'t quite right. He wrestled with himself for a moment, making minute adjustments to how he held the toothpaste, struggling to find the alignment that would produce the picture-perfect bead of toothpaste on his toothbrush, that small glittering sphere with its tail curled over on itself. He squeezed. The toothpaste missed and landed on the sink without a sound. Tym stared at it, frozen. The harmony around him rang out as it shattered, a cacophony of noise only Tym could perceive, because only Tym was there to witness it. When he finally blinked (It felt like an eternity, to Tym), it was gone. Tym exhaled.
His entire life had been this way; even when he had lived in other cities, other houses, other rooms, everything had been exactly the same. He'd go outside, greet his neighbors -- they exchanged the exact same greeting with the exact same enthusiasm every morning. Anything more or less was simply unimaginable. Today was the start of the week, so Tym made his way to the lottery.
The lottery was, completely understandably, busy; everyone was there to pick up their tasks for the week. It didn't matter what tasks you got -- They were all equally worthy, and completing any task made one eligible to participate in society. If one had a disability, it was taken into account when distributing tasks; if one couldn't complete any tasks, they were simply given the task of existing. Tym waited in line -- he could've received his assignment on his mobile device, but that was mostly a service for exceptional circumstances (His friends might worry if he didn't show up in person, not that he could even have conceived of the idea.) He chatted with his friend in line ahead of him; it was, after all, the only thing to do.
"Hey Gerry, ready for the week?" Tym spoke in an even tone; perfectly amicable, perfectly inoffensive.
Gerry laughed. "You know it! Another week of living, another week of serving society. Whatever I'm assigned, I'm ready for it!"
Tym laughed in response; it didn't matter if it was funny, the only proper response to laughter was to laugh in kind. "Same here, friend. I'm gonna get my tasks done early this week, and then I can relax for a couple days." He stretched his arms out above his head.
Gerry nodded. "That's the way we do it! Get the work done, then relax. Perfect system, if you ask me."
Tym smiled and nodded. "That it is!"
They continued to chat as they stood in line; they explored the weather (they agreed with the forecast), the tasks they had the week before (perfectly acceptable tasks, completed to perfectly measured standards), what tasks they might get this week (all equally desirable), and many more trivial topics which all had the same trivial conclusions. Then, finally, Gerry stepped up to the attendant.
Tym peered around Gerry to try and read his card; it didn't matter, and Gerry would have happily shared, but the task lottery was the most exciting thing in their lives. It was the duty of the person behind you in line to be excited for you, and in turn the person behind them would be excited. There was nothing else to do. At first, Tym was puzzled; the card Gerry had been given seemed to only have a single task on it. Tym read three quiet letters: D-I-E. Gerry turned around and smiled at Tym. Tym felt his mouth lift into a smile, heard himself say, "Hey, great luck, Gerry! I'll see you around, okay?" He could see Gerry smiling back at him, but it was like looking at a far-off scene through a distant window.
"Thanks, Tym; I'll see you around!" Gerry's voice didn't even tremble. Tym barely heard it for the chaos echoing in his head as it was quelled by the enchanted harmony of their society. All the pain of ignoring what Gerry was being asked to do, all the hate towards a society that made him do it, all the depression of the countless times this had happened before were simply unintelligible noise to be swept away by the magic. By the time his mind was quiet, he was accepting his new tasks from the attendant. He turned around, and his friend Ash was behind him.
Ash smiled at Tym. "Hey, looks like you'll be handing out tasks next week! Looking forward to seeing you here again Tym! Same time, same place?" They laughed together.
"Yeah, hope your tasks are good, too!" Tym answered. There were no bad tasks, but they said that sometimes anyway. As he walked away, Tym wondered why they said it. Everything was exactly as it ought to be.
Rissa finished talking; silence hung in the air, heavy and cold.
Iora shivered. "That's not living. That's not anything; just...subsistence." She wrapped her arms around herself, and Rissa leaned in to touch her nose gently against the kobold's shoulder.
"If it bothers you, then you can be certain that you are living. You and I, having this conversation, are alive. Possibility stretches out before us, constrained only by what we are willing to do." Rissa smiled at Iora reassuringly.
Iora didn't seem entirely convinced. "Tym didn't choose that society; he was born into it. We didn't choose our society, either. Is it just a stroke of luck that we aren't Tym and Gerry?" She continued to stare into her tea, the steam having long since vanished. "...We're not under a spell like that right now, are we?"
Rissa's brow furrowed with concern. "We fight against this kind of thing every day. Refuse to be flattened; be yourself, and fight for it. Everyone who has fought for it before you made a choice to be themselves. It isn't by chance that we have the space to be who we are."
Iora nodded slowly. "So as long as we refuse to be flattened, we can avoid something like this?"
Rissa hesitated. "If we're strong enough---collectively."
Iora took a sip of her tea; it was completely cold. She grimaced.