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Chapter 2. The TaxiPilot Story

It is the year 4017 A.D. - or rather, that's the official date, but after that terrible desaster at the temporal power plant in New New Atlantis, which still serves as a popular excuse for being late on any occasion, nobody is quite sure about that anymore. However in the year 3999, scientists agreed that the year 3999 could not be off by more than some 787.3 years in the past or 543.7 in the future with a confidence of some 94% and hence took the temporal statistical mean. Since hardly anybody has too positive memories of temporal statistics in school, that settled it for the great majority of people, even some (assumed) two centuries after the desaster experiencing enough troubles in measuring medium time-intervals to be seriously worried about the exact year.

So - it's the year 4017 A.D. and for people in our time trying to understand 41st century mentality is somewhat comparable to stone age man trying to make sense of a commercial for internet banking. This might for us be a good enough explanation, why in a time when nobody can even remember who invented teleportation there exists such an utterly useless job as a taxi-pilot.

It is noteworthy though, that even under those 41st century people that ever came to think about this, there exist at least a few thousand completely different explanations for this fact, none of which being accepted by more than a handful of people. Most people do however agree, that this must have to do something with the taxi-pilots having done something very, very bad in a past or future life to deserve such a pitiful fate (this particular view is of course only held by those believing in some flavor of reincarnation, but the general direction of thought is widely shared).

To pick out just one of the especially absurd views: While it is once again becoming more and more en vogue on the segwitch-parties of the would-be-intellectual to claim that the world is really just the thing that we see, and we can - among the dozens of virtual realities - positively and correctly perceive one as the real one, there is a few people still insisting that the whole world is just a big computer simulation and so are all live-forms in it.

When the founder of this school of thought, her name now no longer being named, one day proposed, that actually, there might be a world outside the simulating computer, with some people actually steering the simulation - and yes, even taking the role of a taxi-pilot - just for fun ... ... well, anyway, her name is no longer being named.

Last modified: Apr 03 2005 17:50 (GMT)