Lightspeed: Year One

We learned about the Dunbar number at school today. The Dunbar number is the number of people that you can have in your social group and still know who they all are. How big the number is depends on how big your brain is. The bigger your brain the more people you can know. Monkeys don’t have very big social groups because their brains are very small. A long time ago people’s Dunbar number was very small too, like 200 or something, and it caused a lot of fear because most of the people in the world were strangers, and strangers are afraid of strangers because they don’t know each other. And there were lots of wars because people didn’t know each other and were afraid. Now that everyone knows each other there are no wars and everything is okay.

March 15

Allison is crying. I don’t understand. I’ve never seen her cry before. Now I feel like crying. She took me to her office after class and tried to say something but she just cried instead. I ask her what is wrong and she holds up her hand and cries some more. As I wait for her to get done I start crying too. I can’t help it. Allison is hurting. We are both crying and I don’t know why. Crying feels awful. I am scared and I am very sad.

March 28

The other children and I are in a shed picking out garden tools to use as weapons. I grab a rake. Tom and Sammy and Lydia get shovels, and Katie finds a hoe. The others are finding the same type of stuff, but I am not paying attention anymore because my mind is confused, and I am scared, and it is hard to think and make my mind unconfused when I am scared.

We need the weapons so we can kill Nick. The adults say that these garden tools will work as weapons. There haven’t been weapons for many years because no one has needed them. But now we need them because Nick is a sociopath.

It was almost two weeks ago when Allison took me to her office and started crying. After she was done crying, and I was done too, she taught me about sociopaths and how they don’t love themselves. There is something bad in their genes that scientists haven’t been able to find yet. When sociopaths look at their own profile they do not see any red hearts. I have five of my red hearts in my profile, which is good because Allison says that if you don’t love yourself then you can’t love other people. That is what’s wrong with sociopaths.

Allison says that our world stays together because of empathy. People are always selfish and they always do things for selfish reasons, but that is not bad, that is just how we are made and it cannot be changed. Allison says people don’t hurt each other because of empathy. She doesn’t hurt me because it would make her feel bad to do that. And it would make her feel bad to do that because then she would be able to imagine my pain, and she would feel that pain even though it wasn’t happening to her. And because she loves me that pain would feel even worse. It would be like she was doing something bad to herself. That was why she was crying two weeks ago, because she was hurting herself through me.

It made her very sad to ask me and the other children to kill Nick. Nick had stopped loving himself, and that made him a sociopath and a danger to the social group. He hadn’t killed anyone yet, but the adults could not take the chance. Allison said that when I was very little there was a man who stopped loving himself and became a sociopath. He killed men, women, and children, and he took over the whole province of France all by himself and made the men, women, and children worship him and do strange things. And they called him a dictator. I remember asking my dad when I was very little what the word meant and my dad pointed my mind to the sociopath’s face and said, “That is what it means.” There was nothing the people of France could do about the dictator because their empathy training made it impossible for them to hurt another person. The training was glued in their brains and they couldn’t get it out because they were too old and their brains were too set. That’s when someone thought of the children, whose brains had not been set. And so they gave the children garden tools to kill the dictator with. And that was how they saved the province of France and maybe the world.

Now there was a new dictator rising in the sub-province of Ohio and his name was Nick. Soon he would start killing people and making the ones that lived do strange things. And there was nothing the adults could do about it. That was why they asked me and my classmates to pick up garden tools like the children of France.