Searching for A Heart of Gold

I’m getting headaches again. It feels like we are all just animals in the zoo. It turns out the scientist in Israel who tried to warn us about the Galactic Federation wasn’t really so crazy after all. He was actually trying to tell us about the good ones. Apparently, in the same way that humans have “good” and “bad” people, intergalactic beings do too. The “Galactic Federation” are the good guys and the not-so great guys insist on being called “Masters”. We call them “Masters” when they are around, but they're just Phobots. Just Dirty Phobes. They love watching wars and spend a lot of money to sow chaos, and the Galas just keep on protecting us. Our inter-planetary ambitions have finally paid off! Except, human hubris genuinely believed we were the most advanced species in the universe.

Truly, the most fantastic mistake. Ever.

We had it all wrong, by the way. They look exactly like us. When we used to have categories like “race,” you can say intergalactic people would look like an ad for the United Colors of Benetton. Every Galactic man --or as we say “Galas”-- speaks all of Earth’s languages. Even dead languages like Latin! Galas can read minds, communicate through thoughts, and make eerily accurate predictions of human affairs. Strangely, they are all men. Their unique eye colors are a kaleidoscopic mixture of the Earth’s bluest seas, and the forests' darkest greens. They live humbly, and all of their “Favorite Humans” wear a special heart-shaped locket made of pure gold to protect them from the meaner ones -- Golden Heart-Shaped Lockets emit frequencies to keep the Phobes away.

The spectacle of suffering is a lucrative business venture in the Phobes community. Fear-hub is a multi-billion dollar business.

Phobots, or “Phobes”, don’t understand what they call “annoying human emotions” like love, sadness and empathy. They can’t read minds from afar like the Galas do, but they can “feel” your mind up to six feet away from you. Any anxious person on the subway will have 10-15 sets of pleasure-seeking eyeballs feasting on the public display of human suffering.

Phobots have the capacity to be invisible to humans, so it is best to be careful with your thoughts if you are human. We try to have positive thoughts all the time no matter how awful we all feel about the Phobes. No matter how hungry you are, no matter how afraid you are, you need to keep thinking happy thoughts so you don’t give them a free show.

The Galas made the Phobots. They bioengineered human stem cells and edited out the gene of suffering and aging. Then they added Gala genes to the mix. They believed the Phobes would become “more perfect” than humans. But alas there have been unforeseen implications of this experiment. Turns out, when one doesn’t have the capacity to suffer, one actively seeks suffering. A famous academic intellectual was recently working on a theory that the Phobots were created by men of the Royal Gala Council in order to satisfy their ravenous sexual appetite. He argued that intergalactic sexual relations was objectively better than intra-galactic ones. He mysteriously died of a heart attack two weeks before his book was about to be published. The Phobots publicly took responsibility.

There are no Phobot men. Only Phobot women.

Phobes are the biotech apples of the Information Age. The Phobots are extremely beautiful, very-human looking women. They never age, and don’t look older than 25. They’re vain and hollow, and they are particularly thrilled by the sight of human fear. We don’t have policemen anymore. The Phobots are the wardens now, and everywhere feels like a prison. Rumor has it that watching fear is the only time the Phobes feel anything. They enjoy it more than sex. A recent study showed that 90% of men and women seduced by a Phobot kill themselves within 30 days.

It is reported that the Gala women of Mars petitioned the Royal Gala Council to do something about the Phobots when they lived in Mars “because their manipulative thoughts were particularly hard to be around”. The Royal Council sent all their bots to Phobos, which is a moon near Mars. The Phobes never believed there was life beyond their Masters, the Galas, so they never invested in space exploration efforts. They had no idea we existed until we started poking around up there. Until a Human astronaut landed in Phobos. That’s when Phobes discovered they really enjoyed playing with Human minds. Got a really deep sense of fulfillment from our trembling fear.

The Phobes were also really upset to discover they were not the only toys. Before Phobes discovered humans, they believed they were the favorites. They loved psychologically torturing that astronaut so much they started building spacecrafts to reach Earth. They got here in 2015. They kept using their abilities to interfere in Human Affairs, endlessly cultivating divisions geo-politically, making viruses to cause mass hysteria. They really wanted a nuclear war. By year 2020, we all started realizing how much violence was broadcasted on TV. It took the government another ten years to finally tell us about the Intergalactic War that was taking place on Earth.

The Galas couldn’t kill their creation. They didn’t like all of humanity, just some. So the Galas made a deal. The Gala-Phobe Peace Deal Treaty, which officially allowed Phobes to be “wardens of bad behavior” in this nation only, in exchange for global peace.

It was a very smart political move on behalf of the Galas. The time-tested move Humans used to do to divide and conquer, where you assign fake power to a small group by making them feel important. Phobots do not enjoy the act of killing, they find it messy, but they love drama, power, and fear-watching.

This made Phobots ideal for the community policing role, they said. They welcomed the role to psychologically torture a human that has been “bad.” It took us about five years to get them to leave human kids alone. One Halloween, all the Phobots got together and decided they will lace all Halloween candy made from the Gala Mars chocolate company so they can feel the suffering of mourning parents. 6 Million of our kids died that day. The Royal Gala Council shipped all their women and children back to Mars. Gala men stayed behind to create a new “control technology” for the Phobots.

We stopped celebrating Halloween, and we sent all the kids to Gala-protected boarding schools. It was only after this Human genocide that Gala men started selecting “Human Favorites” - a class of protected human wives that get to live in nice houses in the bordered up city of what used to be New York.

We don’t know much about the human Gala wives, but they are just so lucky. Humility and Kindness are very attractive to Gala men. The President is a Gala and his wife is this very beautiful and curvy woman.

Gala men in general typically look for wives during the Summer. Apparently no one really knows how it works, until you’ve been chosen. And when you are deemed worthy, you get to live in New York. The proposals are always broadcasted on television. I think it is propaganda to make everyone nicer. Very few human men are left because of the Phobes and mass suicides. And the women have never been so kind.

Free will, if there ever was, is certainly now a relic of human existence. The Galas and Phobots restructured the constitution. All humans here still have the right to be “free.” As a society we decided that we don’t tell children about perpetual surveillance. Laws were drafted to define what bad behavior entailed. Since they can read minds, there are also a lot of forbidden thoughts. So in the past things like stealing and killing were punishable by time in prison, now the punishment is psychological torture so pronounced that you will be reduced to a perpetual crying and shaking mess. The more you shook, the more they broadcasted your subsequent punishments in the Phobot Square. A lot of us never recover, and mass suicides are pretty common.

The word “Aliens” is no longer allowed. Anyone who says the A-word gets 90 days in the green simulation, or “The Green” as we Humans call it. There’s something about the A-word that Intergalactic beings really hate. You can steal bread from a store and get 2 weeks, but just call anyone an A-word in your mind --without even saying it out loud!--- and you spend 90 days in The Green.

Anyone charged with a crime gets a green heart necklace that everyone can see, except for the person wearing it. And because we really never know when we have committed a crime in our thoughts, the sentenced human can be reading the paper, and randomly feel a heavy thud on their chest. Any human that makes the mistake of pointing out the Green Necklace of the newly sentenced human gets one too.

No one wants a Green Necklace, it signals to every Phobe that you are ripe for exploitation. The Green is the new prison. A torture that you get to enjoy in the comfort of your own home. But they need you outside so all their fellow Phobots can feast on your suffering. That’s when they use their invisibility. The Phobes are so good at what they do, that they can curate the proper psychological conditions to drive you out of your home. When the sentence is over, the Green Necklace stops becoming invisible and in the heart-shaped locket you find out what you were in The Green for. It looks almost like one of those fortune cookie strips of paper from back in the day. Remember those?

Mine read: “Crime of fantasy. Wished for a golden necklace, hope she enjoys THE GREEN one instead.”

They love their own sense of humor. Makes them feel clever.

I’ve been having vivid dreams lately. Just deeply magical and breathtaking dreams of galaxies and traveling in spectacular forests. It doesn’t seem natural, but I’ve been secretly sleeping in my schools basement, so I know it isn’t the Phobes. I write children's books and teach philosophy to kids at this boarding school. I have a very noble job. Phobes aren’t allowed to be in any academic setting because these establishments are protected by the Galas. The Galas think that inadequate education is the reason this country morally disintegrated, so they expanded philosophy and civics curriculum. So long as you are on academic premises, you are free from the surveillance of the Phobes. The really brilliant teachers get recruited to stay on campus where they have the chance to be free from the toxic wardens. The Galas, of course, still surveil the premises. But I guess one form of surveillance is better than multiple. I’m getting a housing review next week.

Any homeless person can be a Gala in disguise. They said they are trying to “fix” our concept of human values, and use numerous techniques to spot-check our thoughts and deeds. Will you share your last few dollars with someone hungrier than you? The next time you want to be selfish, you better hope you didn’t do it around a Gala in disguise.

Not many humans in the former-United States own much of anything nowadays. They renamed our country The States. The Phobes only live in The States. They said that people in developing countries were more mindful of their neighbors, less xenophobic, more hard-working and more deserving of intergalactic providence. I personally think the Galas bought the Phobes here to punish our country specifically. There used to be so much chaos, luxury, and greed here. Now it’s relatively peaceful since we are all the same. Tired, hungry, and perpetually afraid. If only I had a Golden Heart-Shaped locket. Maybe I’d sleep better.