Tollbooth Willie
The Freeman
- Joined
- Jul 27, 2005
- Messages
- 17,553
- Reaction score
- 830
the sole survivor of a civilization that becomes incredibly technologically advanced but fails to make it past the great filter and drives itself to extinction, flying into space in a shuttle and somehow ending up on an alien planet that supports life, he encounters primitive tribal creatures that show signs of slowly becoming advanced
he decides that he’ll shepherd these creatures and enact some sort of process to prevent them from getting more intelligent, instead living simple lives instead of eventually reaching an industrial revolution and eventually their extinction. for a massive amount of time he has to deal with the temptation to allow them to become more intelligent, as he wonders if he really has the right to actively prevent this civilization from advancing and developing
eventually he succumbs and somehow brings a sole creature into existence that is more intelligent. but he becomes afraid that this could be the beginning of the degradation of his commitment to keeping the creatures ignorant, or that allowing any of them to become more intelligent could become a process that he loses control of. in a panic, he kills the intelligent creature. he stares at its corpse and thinks about the fact that it was probably intelligent enough to understand that it was being murdered
he decides that he’ll shepherd these creatures and enact some sort of process to prevent them from getting more intelligent, instead living simple lives instead of eventually reaching an industrial revolution and eventually their extinction. for a massive amount of time he has to deal with the temptation to allow them to become more intelligent, as he wonders if he really has the right to actively prevent this civilization from advancing and developing
eventually he succumbs and somehow brings a sole creature into existence that is more intelligent. but he becomes afraid that this could be the beginning of the degradation of his commitment to keeping the creatures ignorant, or that allowing any of them to become more intelligent could become a process that he loses control of. in a panic, he kills the intelligent creature. he stares at its corpse and thinks about the fact that it was probably intelligent enough to understand that it was being murdered
