Drop dead gorgeous

   Fur and different types of fabrics covered the floor of the warehouse. At the center, a man with tight clothes threw everything around, apparently looking for something in particular. He stopped for a moment, having a bright yellow patterned fabric on one hand and a bright pink vest in the other, covered in glitter and feathers of many colors. He gave them those to an assistant and then stepped out of the mound of clothes as if nothing had happened. He walked elegantly and steadily towards the warehouse’s exit.

 The rest of the people had to stay there and get everything in order. They had to put everything into the proper bags and boxes and those bags and boxes into very tall shelves where everything was kept in order and very clean. When the last worker left the warehouse, they realized their boss was still there and he seemed to be drawing something on a notebook, against the hood of his car. He didn’t seem to be conscious of his surroundings, only focusing on  the movement of his hand and the trace of the pencil.

 His personal assistant, the young man who had grabbed the selected pieces of clothing, touched his shoulder and whispered in his ear something about a meeting he was late to. The man seemed a bit startled at the beginning, but then he just closed the notebook and entered the car. Later that day, he attended several meetings, having to do with his next collection and with everything that had to do with the financial results achieved by the company. However, he wasn’t really there in any of them.

 Colors flew all over his brain, as well as textures and different kinds of fabrics and so on. He kept drawing in some of those meetings and people knew he had to be left alone while he was being creative. The only thing he had to say in meetings was about the clothes and the line that was about to come out was already in production, so he had not much to say in those last few meetings. They just invited him because they knew he was essential to the success of the company but not because he was actually needed.

 The truth was that some of the people on the board felt that he was losing his touch. People didn’t seem to like his most recent creations, with many critics chiming in saying that it all seemed a little bit too boring and that “it had been seen before”. He was very aware of these criticisms but the had already said, several times, that he thought creativity could not be judged by anyone and that people saying whatever they wanted without context was just an insult to his imagination and his skill as a designer. He thought he should have all the freedoms needed to create and that was it.

 However, the company was secretly against this. They didn’t tell him any of it, but it was clear that if he didn’t deliver results, he would be kicked out without any consideration to his talent of his past results. At the end of the day, the only thing those people considered was money and if he wasn’t the one bringing it into their lives, they would find some other person that could have his vision and theirs, at the same time. It was clearly a possibility and they had in their minds at all times, even if he didn’t realize it.

 In his creative studio, everything was about lights and colors and all the beautiful fabrics that could be brought from every corner in the world. Everyone there was as beautiful as what they used to make dresses and other fashion products and everyone also seemed to be young and always happy, smiling and showing their teeth every step of the way. For an outsider, it was a very strange place to be in, even intimidating because of the attitudes of the people working there, some for years.

 The biggest office there was for him, the top designer, the one that had been the head of the whole creative area for the last two years. And he was a young man but he was already tormented by everything he had done in the past and his present ideas. He felt he was being left behind by his surroundings and that his past work was the result of some silly ideas that had come up from the mind of a naïve young man. And he always felt like that, never really feeling great about any of his work.

 He would spent his days drawing and coloring and checking new products and fabrics, talking to other creative like him and with people creating new things to be used in fashion. His whole life was about being creative and imaginative and sometimes he felt he just didn’t have enough of it. He even felt he had landed his job because of some astronomical mistake, because it was often that he felt like a failure, unable to make what people expected from him. He felt he was not what he was supposed to be.

 As a designer, he was very aware that he had to bring in results in order to have the chance to have such a group working for him, so he had recently visited some stores to check out his success with his own eyes. However, he noticed the latest collection was not working as well as he intended. He had worked so had and his team had put everything on it, all at once if that was possible. But apparently people were not nearly as excited about as they were while making it. That made him feel something he had not experienced before in his very short career filled with success.

 He realized that success could have really disastrous effects in a young man. After all, he had been forced to grow up very fast in order to be the person that was needed in such a competitive world. He remembered the days when he drew several drawings every single day, the days when he would be happy just coloring some nice drawing and then buying his own fabrics to make his creations a reality. He had to make the effort and it was hard and that felt good when he had a final product in his hands.

 The massive appeal of his designs had been his downfall; a crazy idea that had grown inside his head but that was only a lie. They had made him believe he was the only one doing fashion that young and that he was a special little flower growing in some kind of dark moat. But that sure wasn’t the case, and he noticed that from the beginning, with his first fashion show, where he was able to see how talented people was. They were better than what he was lead to believe, beautiful and creative people.

 And it was a mosh pit between them, a storm of talented souls that clashed one against the other. It was horrible for them and for the people that worked with them but they mostly never realized how vicious their world could be. They only thought about the imaginative process, about how beautiful it was to combine one thing with the other. They felt it was the best job in the world, the most glamorous and beautiful in all of existence, and that it couldn’t be topped by anything on the world.

 So he just decided to stay in his office for a whole day, working and working, not caring about anything else. He tried to create something that could really make him someone different, that could really tell others that he was a very unique soul and that his creations were much more than just clothes and accessories, more like works of art being carried around by beautiful people that knew how much effort and imagination had gone into their creation. He didn’t stop until his hands hurt.

 They found him the following day, dead on his working area. According to the doctors that examined him afterwards, he had died of a heart attack. It was very uncommon for such a young man to die like that, but his body had been under severe pressure and it was a very obvious conclusion to his story.

 However, others took his drawing and everything he had created that whole day in order to make one last collection. They said it was in his honor but it was only to make money out of his talents and his death. And people did fall into that trap, buying it in large numbers, save the company from its own demise.

The forest

   The eagle landed on top of the three, in a place towards the middle of the forest. The place was a sea of green; no piece of the ground below could be seen below the trees. However, it did not seem random that she chose the tallest tree to land and grab by the claws. She firmly stood there, looking around, waiting for something. She did not seem hungry or worried about any of her younglings. She just appeared to be making guard or something of the sort. She suddenly opened her wings and screamed.

 The sound out of her beak was not the one normally made by a bird, or an eagle or any kind of animal. The sound was strangely metallic, like something more suited to a robot or a creation of that sort. The bird made sounds for a while, alone in the middle of the forest. She then remained silent again, as clouds of storm formed above the forest. Shortly after, rain started washing away everything from the forest. The soil was turned into mud and the dead leaves were soon washed away by the flood.

 However, the forest was too silent during those moments. As the rain descended to the ground and then washed all the dirt away, no animals made sounds or tried to hide from the water. Actually, there was virtually no movement around the forest, except for the water rushing to the streams and the rivers. It was a land of trees deprived of any life. No bugs humming or squirrels hopping from one tree to the next. No other birds besides the eagle that still stood on top of the tree, being washed by the rain.

 The clouds above the forest where also strange, not moving or trembling as they produce thunder, but just frozen in the sky. The lights inside of them seemed artificial, as if they were being made on purpose instead of naturally produced by the ions and all of that. The colors of the clouds were also too perfect, too ideal. They seemed to be painted on top of the sky, not having that special quality of the real clouds, that thing when you feel you can grab them and you even imagine how soft they are.

 Moments later, the rain seemed to intensify. In some parts, tree bark began falling to the ground, revealing something very strange. The rain that was falling had changed somehow, not only being water but also something else. This did not yet affect the eagle, but she did seem uneasy, even as unnatural as she looked. More tree bark fell to the ground and also some flowers, which seemed to be eaten away by the water that carried them far away from the place where they had fallen. The floods were soon tainted in the colors of the flowers that came from all over the forest.

  Another color was also present in the water. Some red tint that was slowly carried away also permeated the water and the rivers down the valley. It was all brought down to a lake made up of still water. Many streams entered the lake and it was also surrounded by forest and large lumps of dead leaves that rotted fast, producing more color over the lake. There was a strange color in the water, towards the middle of the lake, something a bit lighter than the normal color of the water of a lake.

 More than that, something was moving in the middle of the lake. It looked like a fish but much larger than anything in existence in the world. The lake was far from any ocean or land populated by people, so it was very likely that creatures there would be very particular to that strange landscape, where clouds seemed to be painted on the sky and the rain was acidic and melted flowers into a mush of rainbow colors. The fish swimming in the middle of the pond was something not so abnormal after all.

 A thunder suddenly descended from the clouds and struck the fish in the middle of the lake. The light discharged illuminated the sides of the lake and made the fish more defined. After the electricity dissipated, the creature jumped out of the water, looking to have been activated in some way by the thunder. The creature started swimming around and around the lake, absorbing the remains of the flowers and the leaves that had accumulated on the edges of the lake. It ate like crazy, as if it had never eaten.

 The creatures splashed all around the lake. The eagle flew by the water and looked at the fish trashing and eating. It just moved it wings a couple of times and then disappeared somewhere on the other side of the forest, as if it had never been up there. Hours later, the fish finished eating and it submerged itself into the lake, again doing circles in the middle of the body of water. It had returned to that weird trance stage, which was apparently only one of two things it did in its strange life.

 That forest was certainly a very special place. There were signs all around that it hadn’t been created in a natural way, instead being constructed by something or someone. It was the creation of some mastermind with a plan that had never really been realized. The eagle, the clouds, the fish creature and the acidic rain could not be everything that strange place had to offer. Something else had yet to be revealed. Maybe a reason for the place’s existence or maybe the face of the creatures that had imitated the most natural place on Earth. Someone had planned something but had never finished it.

 Maybe, just maybe, they were still missing something to properly finish their project.

The elevator

   The elevator on Kartan IV had been abandoned almost a century ago. By the time human explorers had arrived to that part of the galaxy, the civilization that had built the elevator had already been destroyed. There were many traces on the planet of their former glory and power but the only real proof of their quest for knowledge was the elevator. It was ten kilometres high, made with the toughest metals and plastics, making it a very strange feature of the planet and a technological advancement the human race had not yet reached.

 The first group of humans to get there were part of a scientific mission aboard the vessel called Leviathan. It had such a name because it was massive in size, taking care of many scientific missions at the same time. Leviathan was the centre of all science being done on other systems, far away from Earth. People that worked there had never being to Earth and most had no desire of going there. They were curious, of course, but the secrets of the universe were a lot more interesting to their wandering minds.

 The group that entered the elevator had the task of retrieving samples of the metals and other materials that had been used in the structure, in order to analyse them and see if they would be viable for use in space stations all around the Milky Way. Humans had mastered space travel but they wanted to put a foot everywhere they could, even in places were life had been detected.  Of course, those were the really interesting scientific missions but they were very secretive and exclusive to those with more experience.

 The Leviathan was the next best thing and all of those inside it knew that perfectly. However, they all wanted to work with the governments that were building space stations in key systems. That’s why those who entered the elevator on Kartak IV for the first time in a millennia, were eager to find lots of new information for humanity to use in their colonization of the galaxy. They could be instrumental in the development of their civilization and some of the first to interact with new and unseen forms of life.

 The elevator, however, was very much deserted. They spent days inside, extracting pieces and information from the very old computers. It took a long time to get the elevator actually working again and a team of xenolinguists had to come aboard to decipher the ancient language of the aliens that had built the structure. It was the only way humanity could effectively replicate such a piece of engineering in other parts of the galaxy, even of Earth. However, their first discovery was not the one they were looking for but something much more sombre and dangerous. Earth was called at once.

   Leviathan was asked to stand down. They had no authorization to land on the planet or to enter the elevator again. Everyone was ordered to stand down and wait for a special team of envoys to assess the situation. They arrived in a couple of days, with their dark suits and their unwillingness to share any information about what their own team. They were given a big room to examine everything and no one was allowed to enter that space, unless they were cleared after many security screenings and had a special letter.

 They were very difficult times in the ship, as it was the first time ever that they felt they had done something wrong and that their own government, the one that had send them hurling around the galaxy, did not trust them. Many were openly hostile to their visitors, giving them nasty looks and even saying what they thought without even thinking. But the visitors remaining uninterested in the personnel of the ship. They soon declared that their revisions would take a lot longer that expected, so Leviathan would not move from where it was.

 That decision made even more people furious. They demanded to know what it was those men were doing. They wanted to know because their lives, their profession, depended on them moving on to other missions. If the Leviathan stayed in one place for a long time, the government would not pay those that were simply not working at present time. And with so many people inside. It was obvious that not every single person was working at the same time, on the same thing. It was just how things worked.

 But that rotation system was of no interest to the visitors. They spent almost every single hour of the day checking information in their private room, sometimes calling in those who had clearance in order to ask a few questions and then sending them out again. People inside Leviathan grew rapidly fed up by that and they soon began plotting something that could be interpreted as a revolution. When humans are trapped like that in a finite space for too long, it is not a surprise that they do the craziest things.

 The first one of those crazy things was stealing one of the landing pods and travel exactly where they had been banned: the planet Kartak IV. A group of two, a woman and a man, stole the small vehicle and travelled at night towards the region of the planet from where the elevator was constructed. It was a desert and it resembled a lot like Mars, or at least what Mars had looked like in the past. There was a lot of red dust and the sun hit the ground with its full power, heating up the surface from the moment night ended. It was a beautiful place but it could also be seen as a horrible example of what could happen.

 The couple was ordered to return to Leviathan in order to be arrested but they obviously had no intention of going back, at least not until the visitors declared their true intentions in the ship. Many believed they were only there to take a look at the workers and then start firing them from their jobs. Others actually thought that Leviathan as a whole was going to be dismantled and that they would all be sent to different parts of the galaxy to accomplish menial jobs that had nothing to do with what they worked on there.

 But that wasn’t it. The visitors had come because of what the team that had penetrated the elevator had found there. The ancient language was not an unknown one and the central government of Earth had recognized with the help of their computers and artificial intelligence. The agents dispatched to Kartak IV had the responsibility to find out if the language was indeed the same that humans had already found in another corner of the galaxy and what that really meant for humanity as a whole.

 Sadly, they found out too late. The couple on the planet entered the elevator on its ground floor and discovered the truth. They didn’t have to know how to read it all: the elevator was not only that but also a weapon and an antenna. The creatures that had lived there had built it in order to transmit messages, probably to those they would obliterate shortly after. There were recordings of the weapon being deployed. But the couple was not able to see them all. They disappeared inside the elevator, leaving no trace.

 The following day, Leviathan was ordered to leave the system and, for the first time ever, travel to Earth at once. As they travelled to the centre of their universe, the inhabitants of the ship were told by the visitors that a new enemy had appeared and that they needed everyone to be on the same page to fight them off and defend what being human meant.

 The crew of the Leviathan was puzzled but they had always been a strong people, with tough to change convictions and minds that could create solutions for almost anything. They were ready to help their kind.

What is content?

   The world today is all about making things, producing whatever it is you want in the hopes that someone, somewhere, would want to own in some way, whatever it is you have made. Content creation is the biggest thing nowadays and the fun part of it all is that the ones who create that content are not even good at creating anything. They just grab the best parts of what interests people the most and they mash that up together in order to create something that will attract people to it.

 Usually, content means videos, texts and pictures, all trying to call your attention into something you are probably interesting in. There so many things around right now, that we can say for sure that there is something for everyone. Is not like in the past when people had to go places to look for what they liked and maybe what they liked was not widely available or was even forbidden. Nowadays, every single kind of content is available in your home, without even moving from your bed.

 And people complain about that. Actually, they have two ways of complaining: they want more information, even easier to attain at every single moment in their lives and every single place in the planet. But others want the opposite. As always in human history, there’s always a group, a very vocal one, that advocates for a return to the old days when everything was done by hand and when people didn’t have the same freedoms they have today. They phrase it differently but you know what I mean.

 I won’t say that these kind of people want less freedoms and less information, because many of them just want to be freed from things like social media and the pressures of modern life, but I bet there are some of them who don’t really like the fact that information gives freedom, it gives us power to know that there’s something better out there. Information is knowledge and knowledge is a big power that can never be underestimated. Just ask the ones that have used it to their advantage.

 Of course, not every single piece of information is valuable; just as not every single piece of content is good or even worth a look. We are being dumped tons and tons of shit every single day into our mind, by people and even by computer generated automatic services that read into what we like and enjoy, deciding then to sell us whatever it is they are pushing somewhere in the world or maybe closer to home. Maybe they want us to buy tickets for a sport event, or music from various artists. Maybe they even want us to buy time with some other person or a game that can shield us from the pressures mentioned before.

 This world is surprising in that it has some things that are surprising, amazing if you will, but there are others that have always remained the same. For one, our naiveté is still a big problem when someone else wants us to believe in whatever it is they are talking about or whatever they are trying us to do.  We are still very much a silly little creature that had the luck to evolve into something a little bit more versatile and interesting. And yet, we still like to believe what we know are lies.

 Maybe its because people have gotten used to having everything at hand, just in front of them, so they have left their defense mechanisms in a dark corner inside their minds, where it cannot help them when someone wants to take advantage of them. Humans have decided, actively, to let their guard down and just enjoy all the good things of being the most evolved creature on the planet’s surface. Sadly enough, there are bad things too and there are many bad humans around to make our lives not like a dream.

 But we were talking about content. And how does this all relate to that? Very simple: the content machine that has been created, where people ask for “community managers” in their companies, is all about trying to make us thing one thing that may not be true. Actually, it’s mostly never true. We are now offered various options and we have to decide which one is the real one, which will make us happy for sure. And when we decide, we mostly choose the most visual striking option.

 That’s because we are humans, we are attracted to everything that goes inside our heads through our eyes. It has always been like that, ever since publicity was created and all the attempts to sell whatever it is they were selling. Because you can better believe that every single piece of content today wants to sell you something. Only a small fraction has been created for your pure enjoyment and even that can be put into question. It’s all about buying, about exchanges between people that can go right or wrong.

 But the truth is that we don’t really mind at all. We don’t care what it is they want to do with us. We just conclude that it is all a tale trying to make us feel scared about big companies and the government and how the mighty God of capitalism works. Our reaction is one of contempt for the ones that try to warn us about the bad things behind this society that has become a huge marketplace where everything is exchanged, no matter what. There is always a buyer and there is always someone selling exactly what we are looking for, what we want the most.

 We don’t know how else to live anymore. If everything disappeared tomorrow, many people would collapse on the spot, not knowing what to expect from the world. And that’s very important, because people feel safe in this huge marketplace, they know how everything works and they like that. The unknown has only ever attracted a very small amount of people, the real adventure of not knowing what lies beyond. Most of us like a good routine and we stick to it even if we complain daily about it.

Well, that’s what content is all about. It’s brings a cozy feeling to people that sometimes think the world might be going down any day now. That’s why even the news coverage in general has changed, in order to adapt reality, those things that we always thought that they couldn’t be manipulated. History changes or at least the way we look at it. Our perspective is no longer ours, but someone else’s, someone behind a computer who wrote exactly what we are going to think about a certain subject.

 And I have bad news: they have succeeded. Because people are not critical anymore, they just listen and listen, read and read, they think they are building their own opinion but they are not. They are just choosing what they like from what they’ve heard and seen, not really digging deep into anything. That’s too much work.

 That’s how we live nowadays. So if we can still fight, making the kind of content that is free from everything and every form, maybe that way we can still have a little window of hope. Maybe that way we can actually give people hope for the future and even for a present that looks like one thing but that is most likely something else.