There's an island in the far Pacific where the homes look like books. Their walls have words printed on them, so that the people living inside can read them. These people have a passion for the subjects the books are about, whether they be on things as diverse as science, language arts, music, etc. Each city on the island has its own subject of books, like sections in a library. Every field of study is covered in the island's network of intellectual cities. The largest cities are in the biological and historical districts, where the vastness of such subjects grow to the greatest extent. This is the island of Morphologica: a compendium of human thought.
The island is inhabited by a race of geniuses who all take the first names of history's most brilliant minds. Darwin is a popular one, so is Newton, Socrates, and Descartes. All their last names are derived from the subjects their families are interested in. For example, someone in a family that studies Einstein's theory of relativity as it pertains to warp travel might be named Einstein Relativistichyperdimensionalson. If such a name seems absurd, then you must consider the complexity of the island's language. It's a language of infinite morphologies, where every word is a conglomeration of morphemes. An example of one such word in our language is antidisestablishmentarianism, which can be broken up into seven morphemes. Some words on the island are made up of 20 or more morphemes, and there's even a linguistics clan that has an infinite number of words of infinite length. This has made communication a lot easier and more efficient among the people of the cities. Entire sentences can be made up of a single word, and some of the linguistics clans have been able to write whole books using them.
I traveled there in the year of Our Grace, 17629 AD. I wanted to learn more about these people and how they'd gotten there, so I consulted a migrations historian in the city of Anthropologica, whose name was Heyerdahl Informigrarchaeolson- "info" for information age, "migra" for migrations, "archeol" for archaeology, and "son" for a son of the clan. He told me that the founders of the country had been seeking a land far away from the continents, where barbarians had been slaughtering each other after the Information Wars. What were the Information Wars? I asked. He told me there came a time in our history when all the facts of mankind became blurred by the ability of people to manipulate them using technology. Most of them did it for power, influence, and money; many were the heads of online corporations that sought to control nations by promoting a luxurious lifestyle for their consumers and distract them from facts about the world. Since the corporations represented the politicians that they'd funded for elections, there a came a merging between profiteering and politics, called Globecorp Conglomerates. The most reliable information sources were soon laden with falsities that helped them promote a world order in which laws, governments, and even the innovative power of science bended to their will. Because each of these new nations had different ideas about the facts, the struggle of permanently settling them was dubbed the Information Wars. They battled for years in this manner. Eventually it got so bad that they resorted to using weapons of mass destruction, which caused the largest extinction in the history of the Earth. Nuclear fallout blacked out the sky, and chemical warfare caused a disease so deadly that the population of the human race declined, invariably reverting itself back to the state it was in during the Middle Ages: a time when literacy was low and bureaucratic government weak. There were those few learned men who still knew about the past and all the glorious things that humans had attained in the realms of their disciplines. They were the ones who organized a massive exodus called Atlantis Found, which only consisted of people who passed certain tests on mental capacity. It was the largest case of eugenics since the genocides of the Nazis during the 20th century.
Sociologically, the island might be described as a Platonic utopia, governed by philosopher-kings and Marxists. There is no corruption because profiting off other people's hard labor was written into the constitution as unlawful. That's not to say all the forces of labor are owned by the state; businesses are alive and competitive. The difference is that businesses aren't motivated by profiteering like they are in our part of the world: instead, it is by the honor of sport. Annual seasons are "played", awards are given out, playoffs and championships are held- all of them based on positive reviews and sales statistics, much in the same way any of the common sports or academies recognize greatness. All wages are equal, even the owner's share. If a company earns more than the wages required to pay their employees and operating costs, the proceeds are automatically invested by the government into creating jobs, meaning that failing businesses can’t be bailed out with tax money. They are also given to charity organizations and the many research facilities that the government sponsors. Everyone is given paid time off and equal savings allowances, so that people even in failing businesses are free to spend money as they choose. Trust in the government is the key to the island's success. Officials are elected, but if any scandal occurs, they are required by law to step down, putting a lot of pressure on them to perform well. The system of checks and balances that Old World countries had, like the United States, prevent any person or group of people from controlling the country. Morphologica is as well-run a place as any in history. Much of it is due to their uncanny absence of selfishness and greed; the champions of business are always happy to allow their profits to be dispersed among the masses, instead of hoarding it for themselves. The establishment would crumble in a country like ours, where people will stop at nothing to exploit others.
When I returned home, I was reluctant to face the world I'd left behind. I felt like I was part of the problem, not the solution, and I desperately wanted to return to that place of perfection. But instead of feeling sorry for myself, I decided to act by becoming the first disciple of Morphologica's utopia. I wanted to write books about them and preach their teachings to the uncivilized world that had bred me, in hopes of changing it for the better. Everywhere around me I saw unnecessary poverty and violence; I was sick of it all. The rich were still taking advantage of the poor, and those with power were abusing it in all the ways they had in centuries past. Had anything really changed, had we learned nothing from our bestial origins? Only one place had, and that was on an island in the middle of the ocean. If there was some way to get these people to listen, some way to help them live in a better world, then I had to find it. Blessed with the ability to travel, I had seen the only thing that could change their minds for good, and if they believed in my stories then they could surely believe in the ideas that had made Morpholigca successful.
It came to pass that very few believed what I told them. Humans weren’t that smart and all governments were hopelessly corrupt. Anarchy was the only way that people could live freely; the ability to defend yourself in a dog-eat-dog society was the only thing you could depend on. Only a small group of people believed in the places I'd seen and the ideas of the geniuses. There were 12 of them. They said I could perform miracles and that I was chosen to lead people to a promised land, but they were merely exaggerations. The only miracles I could perform were miracles of thought; those small seeds of illumination could bring more hope and peace to the world than a thousand holy gurus. If only they could listen, if only they cared. I told my followers that with enough fortitude and courage, the teachings would live on as we continued spreading them from city to city. But quite recently, one of my brothers sabotaged the mission; he was paid by a clan leader to assassinate me, and I am dying from his wound as I write this. It's all over now, the dream is dead. My words will have no bearing on the course of our civilization. Even as the brightness of the sun encourages me to shower its light upon others, I still lay here on the hearth of death's door, shattered by the revelation that it has forsaken me. It is with an ounce of optimism that I depart this world believing that the remaining 11 will work on realizing the dream we once shared.
