John Krygelski - The Aegis Solution

“So what brings you to hell?”

Taken slightly aback, Elias asked, “Hell?”

Wilson chuckled. “Hell, purgatory — what would you call it?”

“Aegis?”

Snorting with derision, Wilson came back, “Because you and everybody else call a pig a rose doesn’t mean I have to go along. Ever since man quit cowering in his cave, he’s been trying to usurp the natural way of things. All the science, all the technology, inventions, you name it…it’s all been nothing but an effort to say ‘I can do anything you can do better.’ That’s all this is. That idiot Walker building this place because he was so broken up about his daughter — it was plainly meddling with yet another thing that was already tried and true.”

“What’s that?”

“Killing yourself!” Wilson exclaimed as though Elias was a dunce for asking. “All the stuff we do has a reason. It’s all been fiddled with and tested and the bugs worked out of it for centuries, no, millennia. That’s the reason it’s all still around. It works! But we can’t stop ourselves from tampering with it.”

Elias could not help but be amused at the comments. “You’re serious?”

“You bet I am. You want some examples?”

“Sure.”

“Names!”

“Names?”

“Yeah, names. For hundreds, maybe thousands of generations, when people got married, they took the husband’s name. It wasn’t perfect. Sometimes, some poor woman with a perfectly fine name like Mary Jones married some guy stuck with a last name of….As my guest, maybe you could suggest what might be a suitably embarrassing name.”

“Boner!” Elias chuckled.

“What?”

“You heard me. It’s a common name.”

Wilson’s face twisted in a grimace. “Very well. But I am using it in the classical sense of ‘blunder,’ as in the dictionary.”

“As you wish,” Elias consented, smirking at the old man’s discomfort.

Wilson glared at Elias.

“Anyway, as I was saying, she married him, and became Mary Boner. I’m sure she wouldn’t be happy about that, and I’ll bet their kids would all wish that they were little Joneses instead of little…you know what I mean. But that was what society had figured out, and it worked. Yeah, I know it was male-oriented, but don’t get me started on that. Anyway, all of a sudden this generation, for the first time in the history of the whole world, decided to change things — only because they cared about themselves and didn’t give a hoot about the rest. Self-centered little cusses!

“Now, they hyphenate. So now, Mary Jones gets married and becomes Mary Jones-Boner!”

“That’s true. What’s the problem with that?” Elias asked, playing along.

“The problem?” Wilson almost barked at Elias. “What do the kids get to call themselves? Are they Johnnie and Susie Boner…or are they Johnnie and Susie Jones-Boner?”

Enjoying the process of following Wilson’s train of thought, Elias said, “I think the norm is that they would be Jones-Boner.”

“You think! See, that’s the problem. Suddenly we don’t know. As long as civilization has been around, we would have known exactly what little Johnnie and Susie would be called. There wouldn’t be any thought, any decision required. It was all worked out long before they were born, and if somebody didn’t like it, there wasn’t anybody to get mad at; that was simply the way it was. But now, they pick. And, initially, the parents decide; they’re required to put something on the birth certificate. So they pick Jones-Boner, and Susie grows up and decides she doesn’t like Jones-Boner — she just likes Jones — and then she’s mad at her parents for the choice they made. But forget about that part for a minute.”

“Okay,” Elias said, grinning.

“Let’s say that both of the little brats grow up and love the name exactly the way it is.”

“Got it.”

“What happens when Johnnie Jones-Boner falls in love and gets married to Wendy Kalinsky-Pratt?” Wilson’s voice was louder now and more animated as he reached the point of his soliloquy. “Why, I guess they have to become Johnnie and Wendy Kalinsky-Pratt-Jones-Boner.”

Elias burst out laughing.

“But wait, making one little change to how things have always been done makes it even more complicated than that. There isn’t any custom dictating which of the surnames goes first. So maybe they are Johnnie and Wendy Kalinsky-Pratt-Jones-Boner, or maybe they are Johnnie and Wendy Jones-Boner-Kalinsky-Pratt! So they get to decide, which is only right since it is all about them, right?”

“I guess.”

“Now, and I want you to think about this, whichever way they choose is going to either hurt or anger one set of parents.”

“Because,” Elias added, “both sets of parents will want their name to have the better placement.”

“Exactly! So somebody’s parents lose and somebody’s win. Not only that, but either Johnnie or Wendy is a winner — or loser — as well.”

“That’s true. They can’t both get their way. One does, and the other gives in.”

“Right! So now this young couple, just starting out, has a resentment brewing and one set of ticked-off in-laws.”

Laughing, Elias agreed, “Makes sense.”

“Darn right it does. And then, what about the next generation?”

Elias held up his hands in surrender. “I get the picture.”

“Do you? I mean, do you really see what I’m driving at here? We took a system, a custom, which had been worked out long before we were born and had functioned perfectly for countless generations, and we ruined it. Part of the beauty of the custom was that it worked without cluttering up people’s lives with details and extra names. The other important part of it was that it recognized the inherent tendency of certain acts or decisions within a society to cause pain and hurt feelings — like picking a name — and it removed that decision and made it a given…made it a custom dictated by people long dead. So there wasn’t anyone around to blame or get mad at. But if it becomes a decision made by a living, breathing person, then everyone involved in the situation is watching to see which way he or she will choose. Winners and losers!”

“I never thought about it that way. But what does that have to do with Aegis?”

Wilson paused and took a sip from his mug of tea. “Well, obviously it’s a little different from the name thing, but society had sorted out the whole suicide thing, too. Suicide is, or was, what it’s supposed to be.”

“What’s that?”

“Death,” Wilson exclaimed. “It’s supposed to be death, not this namby-pamby institution.”

Although Elias agreed with Wilson, he wanted to hear what the man had to say. “You don’t think this was a good idea?”

“Nope. I don’t. Let’s talk about people who might consider suicide. Before, if people screwed up their lives, they always knew they had the option of suicide. It was an unpleasant thought and a scary one, but people always knew that no matter how bad things got, there was always that back door they could slip out through.

“You know, Mr. Death, I bet you that if you could somehow remove the option of suicide from the minds of people, the whole civilization would grind to a halt.”

“Why is that?”

“People would be afraid to do anything…try anything risky. Suicide is the net under them while they go on the high wire. Remove the net, and who would be stupid enough to go up there and learn those tricks?”

“Makes sense,” Elias concurred.

“Darn right it does. But the deal is, for the whole program to work, suicide has to be tough; it needs to be scary and final. And what’s more scary to people than the unknown? So they all need to be scared to death, no pun intended….”