The Guardians of Freedom - Part 5 (standard:other, 9128 words) [5/7] show all parts
Author: Dan Tana	Added: Aug 27 2011	Views/Reads: 2006/1462	Part vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Teddy puts its first friend to sleep with the story of how it vanquished its own villainous doppelganger

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

find real, practical ways to transform or replace all of the 
established, state-identified agencies of government with organizations 
that exist to protect and serve free, sovereign people. 

The first change that we made was to disband the legislative branch of
government, which had served the essentially tyrannical purpose of 
creating arbitrary laws that restrict the freedom of certain people at 
the whim of others, and replace it with a council of representatives, 
each elected by a voluntarily associated group of people, who discuss 
whatever issues are of concern to people and figure out how to deal 
with those concerns. 

That organization attempts to discover and then explain in clear,
practical terms how much freedom it is possible for each individual to 
have in various situations without impinging upon the equal, maximal 
freedom of others, and determines how certain other organizations 
within the Alliance will operate in order to protect that freedom.  But 
it never, ever presumes to have the right to make up laws and impose 
them upon people. 

And we also transformed the organization that obtains funding for all of
the government's other activities, which had once been done at the 
point of a gun.  In that national society there had been certain people 
who dictated how much money each citizen must give to the state, and 
then the police of that state would do the violence of incarceration to 
those who tried to avoid paying the sum demanded. 

Yes, you are quite correct, that is a form of extortion.  All taxes are
essentially extortive, which is why the Sovocratic Alliance would never 
impose a tax on people.  Instead it sends out a yearly statement that 
explains how much money it needs to carry out its functions, and 
assesses a suggested payment for each individual based upon how much 
wealth that person holds.  And then it allows people to fund it with 
donations made of their own free will. 

Some people did not believe that any Earthly government could function
in that way, because human beings are just too greedy, and most of them 
are very reluctant to part with any significant amount of money that 
they could keep for themselves.  Fortunately, such stinginess is 
motivated less often by pure, intractable avarice than by a person's 
fear of someday running out of money and not being able to meet its own 
basic needs. 

That relentless, primal fear of supreme deprivation is aroused and
inflamed when taxes are extorted by a government that refuses to save 
certain people from living and dying in destitution, homeless and 
hungry, in abject misery, because the agents who enact that government 
obey rules and ideologies that have no real concern for the well-being 
of a person.  Which is why some people get so very upset about 
taxation. 

Conversely, much of that fear is abolished by the feeling of security
that people experience when they know that the most powerful 
organization in their society will not refuse to use that power to 
protect them from such a miserable fate.  And once it frees them of 
that apprehension, and they realize just how much they want it to 
exist, most people find that they are actually happy to support the 
Alliance. 

Of course there are some incorrigibly greedy people who still try to
hoard large amounts of money without paying their share of the cost of 
maintaining that society from which they obtained that wealth, which 
nobody has a right to do because monetary units cannot be owned by 
anyone, like any other physical or informational resource, they can 
only be possessed and utilized.  But these people do not ever face any 
kind of criminal charge for their greedy actions, because it is not 
necessary to imprison them in order to prevent the harm that their 
extreme hoarding would cause to others if left unchecked.  Instead they 
are dealt with in civil court, by an agency of the Alliance that sues 
them on behalf of everyone else, in order to recover some of that 
excess money. 

Then we had to alter the judicial apparatus of the government, in a
small but very significant way, because the Alliance would never force 
people to serve on a jury against their will.  So we did away with the 
practice of jury conscription, and instead ask people to volunteer to 
perform that vital public service, and encourage them to do so by 
offering a substantial wage to those who are willing to take that job. 

Also, the Alliance will do all that it can to protect a person from the
injustice of being wrongly convicted of a crime that it did not commit 
by a juror who lacks the mental capacity or comprehension necessary to 
correctly carry out its duty, or who has some ulterior motive for 
making that false judgment.  So we created accreditation organizations 
to certify that a particular individual is qualified to handle the 
immense responsibility of being a juror.  And we keep a record of all 
jury deliberations, which are routinely reviewed to identify any 
corrupt or incompetent jurors. 

There are many more examples of how we changed the administrative
organizations of that society, but you are satisfied with the examples 
that I have given you and want me to get on with the story, which has 
reached the point when people from all of the remaining countries of 
Earth decided that they were no longer willing to tolerate the absurd 
hypocrisy of a national government that pretends to respect their 
personal freedom while robbing them of that freedom in the name of its 
own sovereign statehood. 

Then all those people joined our Alliance, and that gave them the power
to reshape their entire civilization in order to free themselves from 
the archaic forms of government that once oppressed the happiness of 
countless human beings.  But, unfortunately, even then there remained 
some major obstacles to their achievement of that goal, the most 
significant of which stemmed from their severely limited means of 
communication. 

Their use of imprecise, convoluted and sometimes inconsistent, narrow
bandwidth forms of communication - like this language - makes it hard 
for humans to synchronize their thoughts and actions in furtherance of 
a common objective.  They may speak the same language, and think that 
they understand and agree with each other, but two people might still 
interpret their communication words in significantly different, 
conflicting ways, leading to conflicting actions.  And even when they 
do agree on the meaning of their vocabulary, the words that humans use 
to think about and discuss the concepts that I have tried to teach them 
are just not sufficient to capture and express all the nuance and 
detail of those ideas that once freed your people from their long 
history of barbarity. 

So many of the human beings who have heard my stories told in their
language still have a lot of trouble understanding how to implement our 
form of government, especially as it concerns things that are not 
clearly included in the sovereign dominion of any one single person, 
such as the utilization of natural resources and the treatment of 
non-person life forms.  Some of them have even reached the mistaken 
conclusion that a society based upon the principle of personal 
sovereignty would never stop anyone from using such things in any way 
at all, so long as that use causes no direct, immediate, physical harm 
to another person. 

They make such mistakes because they do not realize that the concept of
individual sovereignty is really just a metaphysical tool, or 
guideline, that we use to organize our minds and society in a way that 
promotes the psychological well-being of people and eliminates that 
wasteful, irresolvable conflict that occurs when people misdirect their 
desire to have that which will bring them happiness – often without any 
conscious awareness of that underlying motivation – into arguments and 
squabbles over which laws it is proper and righteous for society to 
impose upon individuals, or who should get to make up those laws. 

This profoundly consequential concept that lies at the very heart of our
civilization is based upon the idea that there is no just limit to any 
person's freedom from whatever makes it unhappy except for the equal 
freedom of everyone else, combined with the recognition that each 
individual person has the exclusive and inviolate – sovereign – 
authority/ability to decide for itself what it is happy about.  It is 
not the kind of sovereignty that is claimed by a state or monarch, 
which supposedly gives that entity some kind of right to incessantly 
torment certain innocent people and even ruin their lives with its 
capricious edicts, but is in fact the antidote with which we refute and 
negate such arbitrary, unsubstantiated, and immensely hurtful claims. 

And another very significant obstacle that the humans face in their
attempt to create a society like ours is their inability to solve the 
equations that precisely calculate the maximum possible freedom that 
can be shared equally by all people within the constraints of the 
elemental potentials of reality.  They lack the thinkutational capacity 
to comprehend the logical symbols that form those highly complex 
equations, lack the tools that enable us to gather the information 
necessary to solve them, and do not even possess sufficient imagination 
to conceive of a simpler formula by which they could estimate those 
solutions in most situations. 

Due to these severe limitations they must rely on an imprecise and
somewhat improbable process of earnest contemplation, honest 
discussion, and experimentation in order to figure out which policies 
will maximize the freedom of all people.  For that approach to have any 
substantial chance of success it is critical that the Earthlings be 
very clear in their understanding of the goal that they are aiming for, 
and constantly watch over those who have assumed roles of leadership 
within the Alliance in order to make sure that they are approaching 
that task with honorable intentions. 

So the Guardians who inhabited that world during those days spent a lot
of our time helping the organizers and administrators of the Earthly 
branch of the Sovocratic Alliance to coordinate their efforts and 
resolve their disputes, educating those who did not fully grasp the 
concepts behind the form of government known as sovocracy and ferreting 
out those people who were trying to corrupt that organization to make 
it serve some nefarious purpose. 

My friend Ace was probably the most proficient at this task, out of
everyone who is not me, thanks to his ability to make current events in 
his local environment turn out just as he wishes, without any apparent 
cause, as if by what the humans would call luck.  A PET scan of his 
brain had recently revealed that that power comes from an unusual gland 
in his head that produces and stores minute quantities of a highly 
energetic liquid substance that can subtly and covertly alter the 
quantum waveform of reality in accordance with his intentions. 

For someone who lacks my ability to see and transmit thoughts to
successfully prevent a congress full of politicians from confusing the 
issues at hand with meaningless doubletalk and rhetorical tricks that 
are meant to distort or obscure certain truths in order to manipulate 
the thoughts and behavior of others typically takes a whole lot of 
luck, which frequently exhausted Ace's power, as well as his patience. 

As he left one such meeting, with his reserve of that remarkable liquid
completely depleted, a supervillain named Facet attacked Ace.  He 
nimbly dodged the first attempt to grab him, even without the 
assistance of that power, and then used a judo technique to send that 
much larger assailant crashing to the ground.  But then Facet caught 
him around the throat with an unyielding, viselike grip, and squeezed 
until he lost consciousness. 

A few hours later Facet telephoned the Guardian called Set, who had
previously developed an acute fondness for Ace and moved to the Earth 
dimension where we were living so that they could see each other on a 
regular basis.  Since he arrived in that dimension Set had uncovered 
and foiled each and every one of Facet's inept and bizarre criminal 
capers, earning him the animosity of that villain. 

For one of those capers Facet had trained a bunch of guinea pigs to
sniff out and bring him all of the tea in Chinatown, so that he could 
hold it for ransom.  Set ruined that plan by dousing him in several 
gallons of the highly potent Camellia extract that he had used to train 
those furry little tea-obsessed rodents, which caused the whole hoard 
of them to return to his lair and swarm all over him, relentlessly, 
until he ran away and jumped into a river.  Following that very 
upsetting, ignominious defeat Facet decided that Set must be his 
arch-nemesis, and began to act accordingly. 

Shortly thereafter he concocted a plan to build a device that generates
a kind of radiation that mutates the DNA of any nearby human beings, 
turning them into platypuses, which he planned to subsequently sell as 
rare and exotic pets.  Set discovered that plot, as usual, and 
apprehended him after he had planted the device but before it 
activated, and then he turned Facet over to some officers from the 
local police department, telling them where they could find a lot of 
solid evidence of his involvement in that criminal enterprise. 

After collecting that evidence those policemen tried to convince or
trick their captive into telling them where he had hidden the device.  
But he refused to divulge that information, no matter how often, how 
cleverly, how politely or how rudely they asked him for it.  At the 
time I was not available to scan it from his brain, unfortunately, and 
they refused to do everything in their power to extract from that 
criminal the information that would have enabled them to stop his 
scheme. 

Meanwhile, some other police officers apprehended a person who happens
to look a little bit like Facet, who had not been involved in any 
criminal endeavors – or any illegal ones, for that matter, which is not 
necessarily the same thing.  Even though he was not participating in 
any kind of criminal plot they decided to ship him off to a place where 
he could be subjected to various painful and traumatic experiences in 
order to extract from him any information that he might have about such 
a plot. 

Then the timer on Facet's device ticked down to zero, and a small town
full of human beings became a small town full of duckbilled monotremes. 


After that happened some of the remaining humans began to argue with
each other about the acceptability of using torture – what the less 
honest of them insisted on calling ‘enhanced interrogation techniques' 
- as a means of coercing people to give up information that can be used 
to stop ongoing criminal activities.  Some were categorically opposed 
to this practice, no matter what the circumstances, for philosophical 
reasons.  Others liked to think that such brutal forms of interrogation 
are always acceptable, because of their effectiveness in certain 
situations. 

I tried to resolve that dispute by explaining to these people that an
act of torture is really just a matter of someone deliberately hurting 
another person, in some way, for some reason.  So when a criminal 
chooses to make it necessary for someone to torture it in order to 
protect victims from its malfeasance then there is no injustice in 
doing so, as is the case with any other necessary defensive action, 
however grotesque or regrettable it may be.  And to torture anyone who 
does not make that criminal choice is itself an unjust act of base 
criminality, no matter how the perpetrator may try to rationalize or 
explain its behavior.  But, sadly, many human beings are blinded by 
their own sadistic predilections, and moral conceits, and cannot see 
the simple rationality of this conclusion. 

Then a jury in a court of the nation in which Facet was imprisoned
declared him to be not guilty of that crime which he had perpetrated, 
even though there existed copious amounts of evidence of his guilt, 
because they obeyed that nation's law that commands a jury to ignore 
evidence of someone's innocence or guilt if that evidence has been 
obtained through certain prohibited means.  And then, five minutes 
later, the police discovered some evidence against him that the 
operators of that court would have been willing to consider if he had 
not already been wrongly acquitted, but they refused to correct that 
mistaken verdict by retrying and convicting him based upon that new 
evidence. 

You are bewildered by this part of the story, and doubt that it really
happened, because you cannot comprehend the mindset of a jurist who 
would be willing to act with such disregard for the truth, which means 
disregarding the question of whether or not justice has been truly 
served.  Some human beings actually believe that it is necessary for 
them to act that way in order to protect people from the abusive 
actions of corrupt civil servants, but you are just not deranged enough 
to think that ignoring evidence of the truth of a given situation - so 
that the innocent may be convicted and the guilty acquitted - is the 
best way to protect people from injustice.  So you will just have to 
suspend your dumbfounded disbelief and take my word for it that such 
things really do happen, routinely, in the human world. 

So those people turned that villain loose upon the world, and he
immediately used the freedom that they gave him to take away the 
freedom of Ace.  Then Facet called Set and informed him that the 
captive would be killed if he did not agree to take his place. 

Set promptly complied with that demand, in order to save the life of his
dearest friend, not knowing that Facet planned to kill Ace anyway as 
part of his plot for revenge.  But Facet himself did not know that the 
seemingly inert and ornamental bands that Set wore around his four 
forearms when he allowed himself to be taken captive were made of 
bloop, the versatile, animate blue substance that is linked to the mind 
of the Guardian called Blooper, who you know as Marcia Schlupenpheffer. 


As soon as Set was bound securely within his lair Facet revealed his
duplicitous intention to murder Ace.  But then, rather than just 
shooting him in the head, as any serious, sensible villain would do, he 
strapped his victim into an absurdly complicated contraption that would 
kill him, maybe, eventually, using a pack of bubble gum and some 
ping-pong balls.  And instead of immediately activating the device he 
began to explain all the details of his schemes to the prisoners, 
semi-consciously trying to impress them, hoping that they would 
ultimately come to recognize and appreciate his superior brilliance, 
and general awesomeness. 

He was too distracted by his own boastful words to notice when the bands
of bloop slipped off of Set's arms, floated over to the terminal that 
controlled the bonds of the two captive Guardians, and pushed some 
buttons to release them.  In the instant that those bonds clicked open 
Set sprang at his captor, raking him with all twenty of his clawed 
fingers. 

That savage attack did not cause Facet even the tiniest scratch, because
his body is composed of living, organic crystal, which is bloodless, 
lacks any discrete organ structures, and is immensely strong.  
Multicolored sparkles of energy constantly flash throughout that 
semi-transparent form, which he concentrated in his left arm and shot 
out through his hand, at Ace, as a massive bolt of energy. 

The intended target of that destructive blast grabbed the bonds that had
held him and used them to swing up out of its way, avoiding it so 
narrowly that it singed his butt a little as it flew past.  Facet then 
filled his hands with sparkles of energy and used them to form a small, 
shimmering, rainbow colored ball, which he configured to explode in 
exactly three seconds.  He tossed that orb under Ace, who hit the 
ground just as it detonated and was thrown all the way across the room. 
There he landed on his feet, luckily, unharmed. 

Set then realized that Facet was still trying to hurt his friend in
order to get revenge on him, and that made him very angry.  In that 
moment a halo of green flame burst from his flesh, which imbued his 
bodies with incredible strength as it consumed them.  His claws began 
to glow with the energy of that fire, and were then able to cut through 
Facet's crystal flesh. 

My scaly, legless, flaming friend attacked his foe, ferociously, from
two sides at once, overwhelming his defenses.  That relentless assault 
rapidly backed Facet into a corner, where he stopped fighting, threw up 
his arms to protect his head, and cried out his surrender. 

Then Set took a couple of deep breaths, calmed himself, and extinguished
his fire before it burned his bodies so badly that he had to regenerate 
them by shedding their skin.  At that same time the bloop pushed some 
more buttons to open up the front door of Facet's compound, letting 
Blooper and me in. 

Before taking him away to a prison that had been specially constructed
to contain supervillains I looked around the mind of Facet, whose human 
name is Mikhail Sheriba.  I found that he has a generally selfish 
personality, like most human beings, and an emotional callousness 
toward other people, although he is not terribly scarred or unusually 
insane.  I then discovered that he had made the choice to be a villain 
primarily because he thought that it would be fun, and exciting. 

I also discovered that he has very limited social skills, and finds it
rather awkward and difficult to interact with people in a friendly 
manner, which helped to isolate and psychologically alienate him from 
the rest of humanity, increasing the appeal of villainy as a personal 
and professional path.  And beneath that sense of isolation I saw the 
part of him that likes to play with other people, which deeply resented 
the fact that in all eight years of his life he had never had even one 
friend. 

When I saw how his resentment and sense of isolation reinforced the
antisocial condition that was itself a primary source of those very 
same feelings I decided to break that cycle by asking him if he would 
be my friend.  I also invited him to join the Guardians, telling him 
that he could have just as much fun playing the part of a hero. 

As he considered that possibility I suggested that we could orchestrate
a dramatic, exciting scenario in which he faces a choice between 
completing some villainous scheme or doing something decent - when I 
discovered his intense fondness for kittens I mentioned that that 
scenario might involve rescuing someone's pet kitten from certain doom 
– and then he could have some sort of epiphany, abandon his criminal 
pursuits, and dedicate the rest of his life to heroic adventures. 

It then occurred to Facet that that would be an amusing and very
satisfying end to the story of his villainous exploits, and he very 
much wanted to accept my offer of friendship.  But he was not quite 
ready for that to happen yet, so he rejected that opportunity, very 
angrily, vowing to escape from prison and get his revenge on Set, and 
promising to destroy anyone else who dared to stand in his way. 

Set then decided that he would move back to the Earth on which he had
been born, so that the rest of us would not be endangered by Facet's 
hostility toward him.  Ace decided to go with him to that other 
dimension, because he had developed a great fondness for Set and wanted 
to be close to him. 

So I contacted the nearest manifestation of Hypergirl, who was several
miles away, with Neon and Avian, rounding up the members of a street 
gang that had been taxing and terrorizing the people of their 
neighborhood, and I asked her to use the bit of her hyper-dimensional 
self that had remained on Set's native Earth to ask Thumper to come get 
him and Ace.  She then informed me that she had just done so, moments 
before, after Neon had informed her that we would be having this 
conversation. 

Some of the neurons in Neon's brain and peripheral nervous system are
sheathed in an extraordinary form of myelin that accelerates the 
propagation of neural impulses along those cells to greater than 
infinite velocity, causing each impulse to reach the end of the nerve 
several milliseconds before it fires, which, presumably, is what allows 
her to perceive the present in such a way that she can do things like 
that.  I know that that detail doesn't really have anything to do with 
the story that I am telling you, but I decided to mention it because I 
suspected – quite correctly, it turns out - that you would find it 
interesting to know. 

A few seconds later Thumper materialized in front of us.  His long,
silky, floppy ears began to twitch at the sight of me, and then he 
surprised me by saying, “Whoa, dude, you will not believe the crazy 
stuff that some other you has been doing!” 

Before he could explain the meaning of that odd statement I looked into
his mind and saw that he had taken some very potent hallucinogenic 
drugs the previous evening, and had been thinking about the 
circumstances of our first meeting when he began to trip.  As those 
chemicals stimulated his mind he had started to wonder how our first 
encounter would have played out if it had been he who was a hero in 
that scenario and I the corrupt, misguided Guardian who had enslaved 
the people of an entire world. 

Then he had tried to imagine what that world crushed under the fluffy
heel of a tyrannical Teddy might look like.  Under the influence of 
those psychedelic chemicals that image had grown more and more vivid 
until it was as clear as any scene that he had ever observed with his 
clairvoyant perception, and then he realized that he really was seeing 
with that perception, and in that moment he envisioned the vector that 
connects to that place, making it possible for him to teleport his body 
there. 

After taking Set and Ace and their luggage to the place where they were
going to live Thumper reappeared, grabbed my arm, and teleported us 
away to a bleak, depressed world, which was being smothered by the 
pitiless brutality of a fanatical dictator who called itself Master, 
who had previously been known as Teddy and looked like my own mirror 
image. 

I scanned the mind of that tyrant and saw that it had once been an
unusually happy and friendly person, very much like me.  But our 
histories had diverged, drastically, after we landed in our respective 
Earth dimensions and made some Earthling friends, because in that 
alternate world a paramilitary gang of human supremacists who call 
themselves the Human Liberation Front murdered most of those friends. 

That organization, often referred to as the HLF, had been founded upon
the premise that human beings are the only people who are really 
people.  Its members aggressively and vociferously asserted that all 
non-human beings who seem to possess the attributes of personhood – 
which includes those humans who have an unusual physiology or any 
extraordinary abilities – are inferior, dangerous, despicable imposters 
who contaminate an ideal, perfectly human society and must be 
eradicated for the good of all humanity. 

After planting the bomb that killed its superhuman buddies some agents
of the HLF kidnapped that other Teddy and took it to an isolated, 
underground location, where they locked it in a cage and tried to force 
it to extract information from the minds of other captives that could 
be used to locate more non-human victims.  When it refused to help them 
find any more people to murder they made it watch as they tortured 
those other captives for that information, which inflicted a horrible 
psychological torment on that Teddy, which went on for many years. 

During those long, miserable years it received none of the substance
that is our primary source of nourishment, which is the psychic residue 
produced when a mind experiences feelings of happiness.  As it starved 
for that healthy sustenance it began to feed on the poisonous byproduct 
of the malevolent satisfaction and sadistic pleasure that its captors 
took in their campaign of terror and destruction, which did sustain its 
existence but also made it very sick. 

Then the supreme leader of the Human Liberation Front came to tour that
facility, and the imprisoned Teddy discovered a very interesting secret 
in his mind.  It discovered that this man named Cory Dicorbi, who had 
created the HLF to destroy anyone with superhuman abilities, was 
himself a superhuman, with the ability to shoot twelve different kinds 
of kinetic energy beams from his eyes and the capacity to see in 
spectrums beyond those perceptible to normal human senses. 

Cory had gained that power many years before, after being bitten by a
radioactive optometrist.  For about two minutes he was delighted by the 
discovery of this fantastic power, as most boys would be, but then he 
remembered how his conservative, judgmental, generally obnoxious 
parents routinely claimed that anyone with any superhuman powers should 
be killed, which turned that delight to terror. 

In response to that rabidly cruel, murderous ideology he developed a
pathological shame of that very useful but unusual ability, triggering 
a chronic, paranoid fear that someone might someday find out the truth 
about him.  These feelings drove him to embrace that same creed that 
condemned and tormented him, leading to his formation of that criminal 
organization that spread his terror to other people. 

The other Teddy threatened to reveal the truth about Cory to the rest of
the HLF if he did not let it go.  It then assigned him the name Sentry 
and ordered him to serve as its own personal bodyguard and muscle.  
After that it took over the rest of the organization, coercing everyone 
in a position of leadership to support its rule by finding some secret 
in each of their minds and threatening to expose it if they did not 
cooperate. 

You are wondering now how someone who is so clearly not human could be
accepted as the leader of an organization dedicated to the eradication 
of its kind, which really is a rather comically absurd scenario, though 
it is not too hard to comprehend if you understand the kind of mind 
that is drawn to such an organization.  Most of these minds don't 
really care about the specious, flawed logic of the underlying ideology 
itself, though many like to think that they do, but are actually 
interested in the feelings of superiority, anger, pride, and 
satisfaction that they experience when they think about that hateful, 
supremacist philosophy. 

Master understood the nature of such minds, and knew that it could
subtly alter the ideological foundation of the HLF in such a way that 
it became entirely self-referential, so that its followers would not 
really believe in anything but the virtue and correctness of anyone who 
affirms the correctness of that ideology and the fundamental, 
contemptible wrongness of anyone who opposes it.  That would make it 
possible for those people to accept my counterpart as their leader 
while still satisfying their desire to hate and feel superior to other 
people. 

To accomplish that objective it first loosened the group's obsession
with biological humanity by having the old leaders teach their 
followers that any human being who does not understand the obvious 
righteousness of the ideology of the HLF must surely have some kind of 
mental defect, or impurity, and therefore must be looked down on as 
less than a completely pure human, despite its biology.  Then it had 
them introduce the idea that other creatures who are not ordinary 
humans in a classic, biological sense can purify themselves, morally, 
by embracing the cause of the Human Liberation Front, making them 
‘spiritually human', and therefore worthy of life. 

It then blackmailed the leaders of many similar organizations, and some
small countries, and bullied them into joining the HLF, absorbing all 
who were willing to be assimilated and mercilessly destroying anyone 
who would resist.  Each one that joined the HLF made it larger and more 
powerful, helping it to absorb even more pieces of that world, until it 
came to rule the entire planet, which had been Master's plan all along. 


In its disturbed and despairing, tortured state of mind that Teddy had
concluded that all Earthly happiness is nothing more than a fleeting 
illusion, which does not matter because it does not last.  It then 
decided that the best thing that it could do for the people of Earth 
would be to spare them the aggravation of struggling futilely to create 
a happier state of existence for themselves, which it would do by 
constructing a society in which all people believe that there is no 
point in trying to improve the way that things are because Master rules 
and controls everything in that society with absolute, unchallengeable 
authority. 

It also began to obsessively tell itself that people often don't even
know exactly what will make them happy, anyway, and it tried to use 
that truth, as many despots do, to validate its false assertion that 
everyone would be better off if they were forced to do whatever it 
decides is for the best.  Such domination, despite its pretense of 
benevolence, brought immense misery and harm to the people whose 
well-being Master claimed to be looking out for while actually 
disregarding. 

Over the following years, for the sake of its political ambition, it
casually ordered the execution of countless people who it had caught 
thinking disloyal thoughts, and promised a gruesome, agonizing death to 
anyone who ever harbored even the tiniest notion of opposing its rule, 
which terrified and psychologically oppressed the people of that world 
worse than any other legislator, warlord, or terrorist ever had. 

When I saw how the mind of that other Teddy had been twisted and scarred
by the torment that its abductors had inflicted upon it I tried to help 
it understand and overcome that pain.  I projected images from its own 
memories back to it, showing it how its actions were an unconscious 
reaction to what it had suffered and how they ultimately increased that 
suffering.  But it did not want to face that terrible truth, and so it 
clung to its blinding, delusional belief in the benevolence of its 
oppressive, hurtful ways as tenaciously as I cling to my belief in the 
value of personal freedom and genuine happiness. 

At a mental command from his Master the villain called Sentry attacked
Thumper and me, grabbing us with a pair of tangerine colored tractor 
beams that enable him to move and rotate an entire target object in 
whatever direction he wishes.  He shifted each of his eyes to the far 
outer edge of its socket, separating us by more than one hundred feet, 
and then crossed them, bringing those beams together, in order to slam 
us into each other.  That collision, fortunately, did not harm either 
one of us, due to my very soft and well-padded physiology. 

Then Thumper teleported himself away, breaking free of the grasp of that
beam.  In that instant Sentry activated his Q-ray vision, which enables 
him to see everything around him within a radius of several dozen 
meters.  He also turned around one of his eyes to point inward, at his 
own body, and projected a navy blue beam of energy from it while the 
other eye, unblinking, continued to emit the tractor beam that held me. 


That form of energy that he projected at himself reinforces the
integrity of its target's molecular structure by counteracting the 
motion produced by any external force that would break that structure.  
So when Thumper appeared behind him a moment later and punched him in 
the back of the head Sentry did not try to dodge the attack, even 
though he saw it coming with his superhuman vision, because Master had 
transmitted to him all of the information about us that it had taken 
from our minds, which convinced him that the blow would not be strong 
enough to overcome the power of that protective energy. 

Then Sentry turned around and shot Thumper with a purple beam of energy
that inhibits subatomic motion, reducing the velocity of all particles 
by the same factor, effectively decreasing the amount of time that the 
target experiences relative to everything else in its environment.  
That beam slowed my friend considerably, reducing his speed to that of 
a typical human being. 

As those events transpired some other minions of Master showed up and
prepared to shoot us with laser guns.  A moment before they opened fire 
Thumper grabbed my hand and teleport us away. 

Following that encounter Master became very afraid that my power could
be used to negate its own, freeing its victims from the psychological 
grip that formed the basis of its government.  So it had the students 
at a nearby school brought to it as hostages, in order to compel us to 
surrender ourselves to it.  After securing those captives Master sent 
out a message, through all available channels of communication, 
threatening that it would slowly and painfully kill them all if we did 
not immediately declare our unconditional submission to its authority. 

To rescue those innocent victims my companion and I teleported to the
place where they were being held, finding them chained up, all around 
the room, under the watch of Master, Sentry, and several armed 
henchmen. 

Thumper's initial impulse was to immediately teleport all of the
hostages to safety, but because of their separation he would have had 
to take them one at a time.  Master knew what he was thinking and 
assured us that the rest of the children would be dead before he 
returned from rescuing the first one. 

Then I noticed that one of the hostages looked a lot like the boy who
had unintentionally given me the name Teddy.  I scanned his mind and 
saw him accidentally naming that other Teddy when it first landed on 
his Earth, and also found some images of the time that the two of them 
had spent playing, happily, together.  I projected those images into 
the mind of Master in the hope that they would cheer it up a bit and 
maybe make it reconsider its villainous choices. 

But in its emotionally malnourished state the visions of that innocent,
carefree happiness triggered a reaction that I can best describe as 
nausea of the mind.  Rather than nourishing its psyche the substance of 
that happiness made Master sick, and was forcefully rejected by its 
consciousness.  As these indigestible images churned within the guts of 
its mind it became very angry at me for inflicting them upon it, and 
angry at that boy for being the source of those unbearably sweet 
memories. 

In a fit of rage it turned to Sentry, nodded toward the boy, and said,
“Kill him.” 

Sentry then projected a pair of concussion beams at that defenseless
little boy.  I saw his decision to do that an instant before his eyes 
fired, and in that instant I threw myself in front of the shackled 
child.  Both of those ruby red beams of force struck me in the chest, 
transferring all of their energy to me as a single blow of massive 
force.  That attack knocked the stuffing out of me, literally, but 
caused no harm to the intended victim, probably due to my intervention. 


Then I looked up from where I lay on the ground and saw Master staring
at me, stunned, in a state of profound shock. 

My heroic act had reminded it of what it had once been, and gave it the
perspective to see just how enormously damaged it had become.  It was 
then able to understand how its choice to assuage and placate its own 
unhappiness by embracing the pessimistic notion that suffering and 
misery are the fundamental state of Earthly existence had led it to 
unnecessarily increase the unhappiness in that world.  And it 
remembered that a moment of pure joy, as it had once shared with that 
boy, however brief and transitory in nature, is the most rare and 
precious treasure that that world has to offer. 

After that it renounced its criminal ways, reclaimed the name Teddy, and
rededicated its existence to our singular objective of creating 
happiness.  It immediately freed all of the hostages, and then it 
helped me to collect my lost stuffing and stitch up my ripped seams.  
Then we said goodbye and Thumper took me home. 

That other Teddy then freed the minds of all those people who it had
manipulated and coerced into serving it, starting with the one known as 
Sentry.  It first apologized to him for what it had done and then 
helped him to sort through the conflicted, shameful, twisted feelings 
that he felt about certain aspects of his self.  It showed Cory the 
resentful egotism that lurks behind the condemnation of those people 
who want to vilify him simply for being as he is, and explained how 
things like jealousy and fear drive people like his parents to think 
and act as they do. 

It also explained how it had nurtured and exploited his feeling that
there is a fundamental wrongness about some part of him – a part that 
Master had taught him to call his ‘dark side' – that must be kept 
forever shrouded in secrecy, which had been the root of its power over 
him.  And it apologized for teaching him to demonize darkness itself, 
to think of it as a symbol of absolute negativity, which it had done to 
manipulate his feelings and reinforce his tendency to think negatively 
about that concealed part of him that he conceptually associated with 
the absence of light. 

Then, with the assistance of a Teddy, Cory was able to understand all
the delusions, lies, and entirely baseless assertions that formed the 
basis of the crippling negativity that he had learned to feel about 
himself.  He rooted out and rejected all the thoughts and assumptions 
that caused him to feel that way, and then he stopped feeling that way, 
and stopped allowing that negativity to control his actions. 

There were still some parts of himself that he did not choose to share
with anyone else, but he no longer suffered from a pathological 
obsession with keeping those parts hidden.  And because he no longer 
believed that there is anything innately wrong with that which has an 
affinity for darkness, or concealment, he was able to simply accept the 
existence of the part of him that prefers to remain cloaked in 
metaphorical shadow, so he no longer threatened and tormented that 
aspect of his self with a perverse, conflicted desire to reveal and 
destroy it. 

Then, when all of that psychological static had been cleared from his
mind, Cory made the decision to use his powers as a Guardian of 
Freedom, to help others free themselves from the people and ideas that 
hurt them.  Many of Master's other victims made the same choice, once 
their own minds had been freed, and soon they were able to create a 
branch of the Sovocratic Alliance that is large, organized, and 
powerful enough to protect all the people of their world. 

The Teddy of that dimension was very pleased to see how those humans had
chosen to structure their civilization, but even then it was not really 
happy.  The events of its Earthly life had scarred it beyond its 
ability to heal, breaking the part of it that had the capacity to 
experience feelings like happiness and contentment.  So even as the 
world around it became an increasingly free and joyful place it felt 
little more than a restless, relentless, irritable depression, which 
quickly smothered whatever tiny bits of merriment it ever felt. 

After giving much consideration to its predicament it reached the sad
but honest conclusion that there might not be anything in that world 
that would fix the damage that had been done to it.  It asked itself if 
life in that condition is really worth living, and quickly realized 
that it did not have any idea how to answer that question, which 
actually increased its distress.  Then it began to consider the 
possibility of having itself euthanized, in order to free it from a 
life of chronic misery that holds no substantial happiness for it. 

Then the Goo who had dropped it into that dimension of Earth snagged
that Teddy with a graviton hook and reeled it back to the place where 
they came from.  There it repaired the broken pieces of its friend's 
mind, using precisely attuned, harmonic tones of focused energy, in a 
process that I can only describe in human language as being a little 
bit like a combination of psychotherapy and brain surgery. 

As it recuperated in that fantastic dimension of indescribable delights
that Teddy transmitted some thoughts to me, which told me of everything 
that had happened to it since we last saw each other, and thanked me 
once again for helping it to defeat the villain that it had become. 

That transmission reached me while I was sitting in the lap of a large
manifestation of my friend Jakinda, who was showing me pictures of the 
outfits that she had made for some of those other Guardians who choose 
to wear clothing.  Even though she never wears one herself, because it 
would interfere with the utilization of her unusual abilities, she 
enjoys creating those unique, stylized, often ostentatious costumes 
that most superheroes put on when they pursue their heroic endeavors.  
And she really likes to show off her creations to me. 

The suggestions, compliments, and primarily positive feedback that I
offered her as we looked at those pictures made her very happy, which 
made me very happy, and by the time that we had finished viewing those 
images we were both in an extremely cheerful, silly, and affectionate 
mood.  Then we talked for a while about my recent adventure into that 
parallel dimension, laughing and petting each other as much as we 
spoke. 

When I told her the part of my story in which I saved the life of that
boy by throwing myself in front of the shots meant for him - and in 
dong so saved that entire world - she became silent and very still.  
Intense feelings of love and admiration flooded the emotional center of 
her brain as she squeezed me very, very tightly in her arms, which, as 
a stuffed animal, I find to be an incomparably delightful experience. 

After releasing me from that extraordinary hug she announced that Teddy
is an excellent and very endearing forename for someone like me, but is 
not colorful or unique enough to be the moniker of the greatest 
superhero ever, which she sincerely believed that I have the potential 
to be.  She scrunched up her face into an amusing look of intense 
concentration, thought for several seconds, and then suddenly 
exclaimed, “You should call yourself Superteddy!” 

In the moment that followed that unexpected exclamation she looked at me
with a quizzical expression frozen on her pretty, purple face.  And 
when that moment had passed she burst into fits of laughter at the 
inane silliness of that suggestion, which made me start to laugh, too.  
When our laughter had subsided, just to delight her, I declared that 
that mildly ridiculous name would henceforth be my official superhero 
alias. 

Then I grabbed a fluffy, plush blanket and threw it around my shoulders
like a cape, struck a dramatic pose, and suggested that I could dress 
up like that whenever I go out to fight my hopefully-not-never-ending 
battle for truth, justice, and the sovocratic way. 

Jakinda smiled and chuckled a little bit at that cute and comical image,
and then she shrunk down to about half my size and instructed/invited 
me to sit beside her, which I did.  She curled up next to me and laid 
her head on my shoulder, closed her eyes, and reveled in the complex, 
euphoric sensation of being close to someone she loves very much while 
nuzzling her cheek into a pillow of very soft fur.  Then her 
consciousness drifted off into an endless ocean of comfort and bliss, 
and soon she fell into a sound, utterly contented sleep. 

As I sat there watching her dream an iridescent, ethereal,
trans-dimensional ladder appeared in front of me, because you put it 
there.  I put my friend to bed, without disturbing her rest, kissed her 
goodbye, and softly whispered, “I will be right here when you wake.”  
Then I used that ladder to climb out of the Earth enclosure, back to 
this place, ending the story that I have been telling you. 

Of course that is not the end of my mission to teach, tickle, and defend
the people of Earth, which will soon continue, whenever we are ready 
for that to happen.  At that time you will drop me back into that 
narrow, rigid dimension, as you did once before, which we like to 
pretend was an accident but I know that you really did intentionally.  
I can see that you would have gone yourself, to bring the people who 
live there the peace and protection of our sovocratic social 
organization, but your kind is no longer able to survive in such an 
environment, so you made me to go in your stead, which I then chose to 
do. 

Now I see that you want to rest.  So, as the humans would say: Good
night. 

While you experience the dormant state I will transmit this story into
the mind of that fool who thinks that I am just a figment of his 
imagination, and will ask him to write it down for me, so that it can 
be shared with the other inhabitants of that giant sandbox called 
Earth.  And then, when you have completed this cycle, we can go back to 
the zoo, to watch those silly and peculiar, chronically clueless but 
occasionally brilliant creatures known as human beings create a less 
repressive and more delightful world for them to live and play in. 


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