I love cubes. My dream house looks like cubes stacking on cubes.
I love them so much, when I was in elementary school, I wrote a story about living in cubes.
The story was about a group of friends who lived in the far future, where cities were built in cubes. Each building was 3 cubes timed three, 27 in total. Each cubes had 27 smaller cubes inside, called units. The center unit of each cube provided all resources for the remaining units, and the center cube of each building was the commercial cube, hosting grocery stores, supermarkets, etc. A mega building consisted of 27 normal buildings stacked on top of each other in a 3x3x3 format, and so far and so on.
For the young me, it was a perfect system, for the simple reason that you never have to travel too far for most things you need. Just got to go for the center cube.
It was also a world where most of human basic needs and productions have been supported by Mega Factories (also in 3x3x3 cubes, of course). Foods were create by robots, and one of the hottest jobs on the planet was to create new recipes for these robots to mass produce. It was the dream of one of the main characters. FYI, the recipe created cubes of foods, where everyone could consume, and I wrote about the character’s daydreaming of the ultimate food cubes….
It was supposed to be utopian, but in retrospect, would have gone dystopian sooner or later. Especially when it was written by dreamy-eyes me at 7 – 8 years old. A few years later, the teenage version of me went dystopian, and wrote about something like the characters found out the joy in eating real foods versus cubes and went against the world, going crazy in the process. They realized only in the end, after destroying the world, that the world was right the whole time.
Definitely not bleak. That was totally me full of sunshine in high school.
Then came college. Or the realistic me. And one very long night. When I came to a realization.
So out of my obsession with the number 3, there was a small detail in the story that every family would have 3 people: 2 parents and 1 child. I never realized until 10 years later that in that world the populations would shrink super fast and humanity would eventually die out.
The night I did the math on that, I went to sleep full of random thoughts. And I dreamt of the last two living persons in the world having the last baby in the world. Then all alone, the last human on earth traveled for hundreds of years before sitting down on a random cube watching the final sunset. Yes, the final one, since if the sun still set and no one was there to see it, would the sun even set? The feeling of melancholy overwhelmed me and woke me from my sleep, still confused if it was the most beautiful dream or the most amazing nightmare.
These days, there have been a lot of talks on population collapse. Strange it was, since it was only recently that we welcomed that 8-billionth person. Quietly, I cheered for it. I am tired of this growth-driven global economy. If the collapse of the human population leads to the collapse of the global economy as we know it, then so be it. Watching Mr. Nobody, I contemplated if immortality could be the answer to my little cube world. Or people would simply not follow the 3-people model. Or everyone would be involved in a threesome and there would be baby factories. Or everyone just lives alone in their cube since there would be no need for a rule of three. I just didn’t even consider a growing population.
Since a shrinking world is much more interesting, sustainable, and beautiful.
Over the course of 20 years, to me there would be no definite ending for that little story. It is more like a personal visual novel where once in a while I changed a little rule and created a new path. Some already had an eventual ending, like the dwindling world or the destroyed world. Some got stuck in desperate situations where changes could no longer happen, resulting in both utopia and limbo. Some went down the dark path à la “I don’t have a mouth and I must scream,” too pessimistic for me to even think about. Some are still ongoing without yet to take on a personality.
Looking back, each of these paths represents different ideals and personas of me over the year. Each of my experiences in this world results in some changes and once in a while ends up with creations of new paths in my little cube world. Together, this collection shows me who I was and am, and its thousands of paths reflect my uncertainty of my own future.