The Infinite Matrix | Michael Swanwick & Francisco Goya | The Sleep Of

Reason 7

04.22.02

the sleep of reason

by Michael Swanwick

with illustrations by

Francisco JosÉ de Goya y Lucientes

Click image to enlarge

Digital image © copyright

Davison Art Center,

Wesleyan University

DAC permission required

for any other use.

7. [Plate 4]

The Children of Utopia

In Utopia, there are no laws. Everyone works for the common good, and the

government is so well-integrated into society that most people aren't

even aware that one exists. When the people collectively want anything,

it simply and by natural processes comes into existence.

One thing the people collectively wanted was eternal youth.

As if by themselves, the gears were set into motion. Medical technicians

produced elixirs, friendly truckers distributed them to doctors, and

doctors in the course of their regular house calls prescribed them for

their patients.

There is of course no education in Utopia. Education is tedious. It takes

years. Who would give up years of their blissful lives to acquire skills

that no one really needs? The med techs operated machines that knew what

to do. The truckers drove machines that were intuitively simple. The

doctors received instructions that even an idiot could easily follow.

So of course something went wrong.

A card was placed in a machine backwards. Or was read upside-down. Or

somebody fell asleep halfway through explaining to the machines exactly

what was needed. It hardly matters how. What matters is that instead of

making people eternally youthful adults, the elixirs made them eternally

youthful children.

Imagine a world run by a children! A world of sudden temper-tantrums and

oceanic needs. A world without maturity. A world with no sense of

perspective.

Such became Utopia.

Had there been some kind of bureaucratic apparatus, of course, this

mistake would have eventually have been sorted out. Hearings would have

been held, papers issued, regulations enforced. Only a fraction of the

elixirs would have been parceled out on schedule. The rest would have

been held up by mismanagement and lawsuits.

But in Utopia, of course, there is no bureaucracy.

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This is the seventh of 80 stories by Michael Swanwick written to

accompany Francisco Goya's Los Caprichos. For a listing of the most

recently available stories, go to The Sleep of Reason.

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