Dr. Everett Clinton Raines, Jub.D., couldn’t find a single soul who enjoyed cleaning toilets. So 156 years after taking his doctorate and 27 years after playing a substantial role in the establishment of the Freude Three colony, where he remained a thought leader and a sort of elder-among-elders, he returned to academia, this time to pursue a degree—or rather to acquire practical expertise, if you asked him—in robotic engineering.
This wasn’t the first time that Dr. Raines had reinvented himself, but the stakes had never been higher. At risk—the very founding principle of Freude Three: the premise that in a sufficiently large closed system of fully actualized human beings, if every citizen were free to follow his or her joy, all discord would disappear, and a utopia—a heaven-on-earth—would naturally evolve into being.
In the early days, there had been citizens who joined the colony bringing specializations for which there did not yet exist adequate demand. In the spring of 2511, the problem had been orchids. Meyer Roosevelt located his bliss in the breeding of orchids, but the Freude Three colony could only find homes for so many cattleyas before Meyer’s fellow citizens began to question the wisdom of supporting his esoteric career choice.
Dr. Raines stood firm in his faith that orchid-distribution equilibrium could be reached, and a timely outbreak of crown rot helped bring the plant population into better alignment with the growing number of colonists. Not until the ceramic artist glut of 2518 would the foundational principle be put to such a rigorous test again. That particular supply imbalance led to a mild recession among mid-priced art galleries in 2519 and the popularity of stoneware among gift-givers in 2520 before demand once again reached parity with supply.
Dr. Raines held to his belief that somewhere in the colony there were to be found a sufficient number of citizens—perhaps among the young people just beginning to come of age—who took delight in the scrubbing of toilets. To that end, he lectured at the high school on the state of the art in sanitation engineering, wrote editorials to stir up excitement about the latest developments in detergents, and established a program to mentor prospective enthusiasts in their cleaning endeavors. But toilet cleaning as a source of fulfillment had failed to gain traction in the colony, and some of the young people who’d been persuaded to step forward by the force of Dr. Raines’ charismatic appeals were beginning to grumble.
“For want of a nail…,” Dr. Raines had muttered when the Director of Hygiene stormed into his office to bring news of the latest janitorial insurrection.
Author’s note: The assignment was to write about a utopia. This piece emerged as a sort of parody of one of my own utopian ideals.
What would happen if everyone followed his joy? When I started playing with the idea, the story seemed to flow very naturally in a silly direction.
Where am I headed with this? The utopian leader can’t find anyone to clean the toilets, so he becomes an inventor and revolutionizes the field of robotics, starting with robots who know their way around a sponge.
Ok this one made me laugh, and not just the story but your commentary at the end! I do hear the parody tone of the story, too. It reads like a newspaper story or a historical textbook. I love the crisis of orchid distribution – very clever and silly and funny! I hope to meet Dr. Raines in the book someday. He sounds like a cool dude to meet.