(from Chapter 2)
…Sync had talked briefly to the ship’s resident human expert, Professor InDepth, and read through the materials InDepth had suggested. What she found was shocking. The human’s world was incredibly primitive. Almost unimaginably different from the environments most aware beings come from, Sync mused. Equally as stunning, this human had somehow become at least Semi aware while living on the same planet as those with the most extreme types of MMR type mindsets. Through her research, she had found that on this human’s spacetimecontinuum, the most narcissistic and infected humans had actually harmed millions of their own species.
Humans had needed to actually create social movements to address things like slavery, labor exploitation, racial and ethnic segregation, and gender inequality. Meanwhile, incredible economic disparities had manifested, even as the humans made some strides towards equality in other areas. Support for social justice was moving humans closer towards awareness, but awareness for some in the species was still a long ways off, and all sorts of inequities were hampering the qualities of life for billions down on the planet. Plus, some humans clearly had been incredibly callous toward Earth herself and the planet’s health was clearly endangered because of it. Earth had not been exaggerating about how bad things were.
Recently they’d had revolutions with hashtags in front of words. Quite truthfully, Sync was a little unclear on what they were exactly. She supposed the hashtag was part of the humans’ efforts to create an organically arising universal language, after their perfectly reasonable attempt to implement something called Esperanto failed to take hold. As if anything of value could really take hold on a planet when Fear Based Thinking dominates.
Sync had also learned that Hubris was a shockingly common attribute. According to both Professor InDepth and the research she read on this specific timeline within the spacetimecontinuum of the planet, a fair number of humans actually thought of themselves as “rugged individualists” and “self-made.” As if thousands of other humans and all the elements on the planet hadn’t had large hands in educating them, keeping them healthy, feeding them, laughing at their stories while they were children, cooperating with them as adults, and so on.
But perhaps most barbaric of all, Sync had learned that humans still had (and used) militaries. How they’d survived this long was a mystery. In the rest of the known universes, aware beings could (and did in large numbers) major in Goodness at universities. It was a highly valued area of study. Active members of the CC could easily find quite satisfying and lucrative work in the vast arena of Intentional Goodness that protected the aware throughout all the known universes. Over the years, Goodness had been very carefully defined indeed. Beings from all kinds of aware species wrote dissertations on it. Entire mind-command centers were filled with row upon row of information, poetry, and transmittals about Goodness in one form or another. After all, it was the main trait that kept the known universes humming along. All aware beings know they are all interconnected, so the active cultivation of Goodness is a major industry in all the known universes.
And, as every school child knows, Goodness is closely associated with quality of life in all quadrants, and it is one of the only universal values that aware beings share. This poor human had none of those advantages. The environment she lived within on the planetary level was absolutely appalling in its barbarism and backwardness.
Officer Sync noted that this human was still clearly able to become at least Semi aware, despite these circumstances. As Sync assessed traits the human seemed to possess, she noted several more surprising anomalies, and wrote careful notes on them. She left the “Special Impressions” section blank for the time being. Despite her gut instincts usually being spot on, the notion she was formulating was so unusual that she did not want to put in the assessment—at least not yet. However, she was eager to discuss her thoughts with the Captain.