A short story of mine called "Elephants of Liberty". Jesse had always been
the most brilliant mind in the village. By the age of 7 he had invented a new way of
measuring time so classes at school were shorter and playtime lasted
longer. At 10, he came up with the idea that showers would dramatically improve
the overall health of people that live in the caves. By age 20, he devised his genius Omninet,
connecting people from dozens of villages nearby. Thanks to Omninet, cave people
and mountain people and river people were happier: they spoke more and quarreled
less. One day, when Jesse took his data line across the mountains he
found out another brilliant man had been doing the same on the other side. He
was an old man named Kevin, an inventor of a grid tying together towns from
mountains to sea. Jesse and Kevin merged Omninet and HoliArch and people from
the whole country met their aspirations and found buyers, sellers,
friends, lovers, or followers from everywhere. One day, Jesse and Kevin gathered
together in a room to celebrate their accomplishment and discussed how their
invention could bring more prosperity and liberty to people. So talented were
those two minds that they produced a list of updates in an hour. For financing
further development, they'd start charging people for the use of the system with
a food or personal service tax. They would choose rulers of the people inspired
by their genius and the cool principles of the system. They would expel from the
system anyone who hurted it or spoke badly of it because they themselves deemed that this was irrational behaviour. They would establish a mental institution to help any
irrational individuals find their balance in a perfectly balanced society.
Finally, they would forbid any expansion of the system including any other system
ideas, to prevent the almost certain detriment to its perfection, that would come
from it. So no more data-lines were erected, so talented were these two young men.