You can find a version of this story that was published in the PolyKum student magazine here.
Manthan Gadhia
Walking in the morning through the streets of Urra, you would bask in the warm sunlight on the first such day of this year’s summer. The people, largely minding their own tasks and chores and rhythms of life, did not pay much attention to any other thing that was alive, shrub or bee or person, living as if in a psychological silo, accidentally gazing at leaves or wings or eyes of the other but never making eye contact. However odd this way of being may seem, you must know their minds were not blank nor their inner voices without a sense of individual depth and personality. They were thinking creatures. In fact, they thought of the architecture around them, the sky and the clouds, the warm temperature, their tasks and jobs, and some of them were even thinking they should have carried their parasols—the brightening sun of the last millennium had led to a slow but steady increase in the occurrences of skin cancer. Though they were thinking creatures, it was more complicated (or perhaps more simple) when it came to the people around them. They simply observed one another, but again you must know they were not thinking about each other. Each one, in their own way, simply observed the others’ choice of clothes, their pace of walking, their unique gaits and physical appearance, just as they observed the street of polished stone and the red brick of the transmission tower standing high above the roofs of stout one-story buildings in the heart of the city.
As people arrived at their place of work, they made no conversation with one another—not that such a thing was forbidden, but rather the practice of chit-chat had been first rejected in the century of Social Restructuring (a handful of centuries ago) and since then had slowly been altogether forgotten. Each person standing next to the other tended to their own tasks in buildings of clean geometric shapes and functional architecture, designed for use and not for adornment. And as such, their days went by in external silence filled with inner monologues.
In that impactful century of Social Restructuring, things and concepts and customs and traditions which could not be justified as useful through sophisticated Urran sciences had been slowly deconstructed by the ancestors. This transformation was thorough. So much so, as to render modern day Urrans as a people without anger or envy, without confusion or controversy, and without attachment or pleasure. For centuries they had experienced no war because they were no longer burdened by miscommunication, and for centuries they had written no poetry because they were no longer burdened by double-meanings. Ridding humanity of violence did not allow them the full preservation of their intricate cultures, it turned out. Some of the losses had to be accepted but the choice was not always easy to make. The process of elimination was arduous and the decades full of debating factions, and although the animosity of those years has now left Urra, the fundamentals of disagreement have not. Regardless, that was the age which spawned the vision for a society post-emotion.
Although no conversation occurs inside the walls of these buildings in the heart of Urra early in the afternoon, the people inside them still communicate with others—both near and far of course—and they continue to do so with polite and respectful mannerisms. Why, because there is no benefit to be brought from charging an interaction with emotion. And well they also continue to communicate because there isn’t (yet) a way to answer curiosities of the young or ask the sick what is wrong with their health or to deliver news. The news, people have found, is best delivered as a daily list of facts worth knowing either by physical means or via the transmission tower which keeps Urra close to all other people and their information. A sophisticated techno-social mechanism organises the established facts of the past day, determines the relevance of each, and scripts the list through a meticulous process of elimination developed through years of iteration, and the people all believe themselves well informed.
In fact, most Urrans work within the news industry spending their time establishing the details of that which has happened. A social responsibility they all agree to share is that of maintaining knowledge of what is fact and what is not, near and far, past and future. The daily lives of all inhabitants are consumed by dealing with the limits of each of those dimensions of knowing, although some are easier than others. It is simplest to find out what has happened near you and what has happened recently, and things get murky as distance from here and now increases. Following current events is what most of an Urran’s daytime is spent on. Quizzing oneself on how many true facts about the news they know is what most of an Urran's nighttime is spent on.
The peace and stability of the last few centuries has helped overcome much of the barrier of knowing the past since many well-kept records are available and many continue to be discovered and re-discovered. The transmission tower houses a most impressive catalogue of all knowledge, updated daily, about every aspect of the environment within city boundaries. A small challenge still lies in knowing what happens far, but only in the time it takes to hear of an event, acknowledge it, and receive a third-party confirmation for it to be added to the registry for public access. The primary challenge facing Urran life, however, lies in knowing what is true of the future, and specifically what is true of humans in the future. It turns out that the social ability to be satisfied, the concept itself, did not survive the restructuring.