TITLE: In a Paper World Full of Paper People
AUTHOR: Harper Kingsley
GENRE: science fiction, introspection

It was called “paper skin,” though its real scientific name was something long and largely unpronounceable. Everyone knew what paper skin was though. The fear of it was an ever growing concern. A rising stress level that left parents weeping in the night as they feared they or their children would be infected.

It was highly communicable. Lingering on hard surfaces for four hours and in fabric for close to ten. And once it got inside the human body, its effects were swift and devastating.

Blood that refused to clot and skin layers that became thin and brittle to the point that simply touching anything with an edge could cause the skin to split open.

A person with paper skin could die from a paper cut. A simple touch could cause the inside to come outside as the person bled and bled.

It was horrifying to watch. But hard to look away. Because there was no cure, no vaccine, no treatment other than to never let the infected ever come to harm.

The victims of paper skin lived in bubbles or muffled themselves with layers of cloth. They kept bandages on them at all times and carried injectors full of drugs that were supposed to help their blood coagulate. But in the end, it was a paper towel to hold back a river. Even if it took years, no one survived paper skin.

They were separated. Segregated. Surrounded by people wearing hazardous material suits, because their blood always seemed to want out of their bodies, and their blood carried the infection that was taking their lives.

People feared having paper skin. Dreaded it and fought the inevitably of it, this human plague that was taking hundreds and thousands of lives with every passing day.

The world had become harsh and terrifying. The invisible prickles on a maple seed became like hypodermic needles. The edge of a table became a blade. The strands of a person’s hair or the licking of a cat’s tongue could result in flesh shearing off to the bone.

Every day was a day of neverending fear. Mortality had never felt so close at hand. Yet here it was.

The world was full of paper people desperately avoiding the rain. Coating themselves in wax, but knowing that nothing lasts forever. It only exists for right now.

=END=

~Harper Kingsley

https://paypal.me/harperkingsley.

https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.

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https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog.
https://kimichee.com.

https://www.youtube.com/c/HarperKingsley.

https://harperkingsley.bsky.social.
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Hogfather at Amazon
All Systems Red at Amazon

If something ever happens, I don’t know what I would do if I found out my search results had become public.

Like, yesterday I was searching "Is it legal to eat guinea pig meat?" not because I have any interest in eating guinea pigs, but because Amazon Vine was giving away these reusable guinea pig cage pads. And then I started thinking "If you have reusable, washable pads to make it easier to keep guinea pig cages clean, is it possible that someone could farm guinea pigs?"

Like, they’re collecting the guinea pig poo to use in the garden. Or like, could someone gather a massive amount of guinea pig poo and make methane gas or do whatever they needed to do in Mad Max to turn pig waste into biofuel to run their muscle cars? Does guinea pig fur make fancy moccasins like they do with rabbits?

And at it’s base, all my wonderings can be led back to a book I read when I was child. A science fiction book where the best and brightest kids were chosen to be part of a program, and then they were all tricked into being frozen in cryostasis because the end of the world was about to happen and they were going to be used as the saviors of humanity, like Fallout before Fallout existed. Only the main character’s dad, who spent the rest of his life searching for his missing son, gathered a bunch of people and managed to save a huge chunk of humanity, who then spent centuries in the wastelands and there was some mutations and what have you’s, but when the kid wakes up, he finds out that his dad never stopped searching for him and that his dad was basically the savior of humanity.

And one of the things his dad left behind was the idea that there was a Sleeping Prince that would wake up one day, and that everyone should protect and care for that prince. And the main character realizes that he is the prince. That his dad loved him so much that he aimed all of human society toward ensuring that his son would have a good future.

And one of the things that really stuck in my mind was that his father had gathered a bunch of guinea pigs to raise for meat, parts, and fur for clothing. And I’m not sure–I was a child when I read that book–but I think the guinea pigs might have been bred (and effected by radiation) to be big, like, bigger than capybaras, and humans were using them as working animals? Like, putting saddle bags on them to carry supplies, but I don’t think they were big enough to ride around on?

Anyways, the whole point of this is that if someone just looked at my search results, I would seem like a psychopath because there’s none of the deeper explanations behind why I originally searched for the term, or what I was thinking, and basically, that’s why modern "AI" is so shitty.

People are clicking away at a massive "Choose-Your-Own Adventure"-machine and thinking that it’s sentient. When no. You’re making options, which takes you from A to B to Z. You’re filling in the blanks, "Mad Libs"-style, and thinking to yourself "Wow! This thing is so brilliant it can remember my name! We’re best friends now."

And the guys that created the datasets the "AI" pulls from just grabbed a bunch of random shit off the Internet to train it because THAT’S where they wanted to cut corners on a technology that cost TRILLIONS OF AMERICAN DOLLARS. That’s not in yen folks. That’s in USD.

"Instead of paying a bit of money and ensuring that all the information used for our datasets is complete and accurate… We’re just going to scrape Reddit and hope for the best. We’ve even got the archive of Yahoo Answers loaded into that baby. The technology is solid. We can now depend on AI to decide which humans should live or die."

So yeah. I’m in a bit of a mood.

Please, Robo Gods, do not build my profile based on my search results or the goofy pictures I took when I was 15 years old. Please and thank you.

And also, I have no interest in eating guinea pig meat. I just had a thought and was curious about the answer… which ended up being something produced by a terrible AI. "Yes, it is legal to eat guinea pig meat in the United States where it can be viewed as game meat… [blah blah blah]… In some countries like Peru and Brazil it is a regularly eaten meat, though in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States it is taboo and illegal to eat." Hm.

~Harper Kingsley

https://paypal.me/harperkingsley.

https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.

https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.

https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog.
https://kimichee.com.

https://www.youtube.com/c/HarperKingsley.

https://harperkingsley.bsky.social.
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/HarperKingsley.

Panoply at Amazon

Yes, I realize that on one of my last posts, I wrote "Doner to the Good of All of Humanity!!!" when I meant "Donor." And you know what… I’m going to leave it.

Think what you will.

But when I looked up "define doner," the result talked about a "doner kebab." So… that definitely ties in to everything I was talking about in a semi-hilarious way.

"Eat the rich" is a very valid point of view.

And if you’re a rich person trying to get people to downplay the idea and not talk about it and "Oh, no. You shouldn’t talk like that. You’re such a pretty girl. Why are you talking about stuff like that?" you can STFU. You are not being on the side of the angels right now.

You’re not being a super cool demon in a leather jacket and kicky little boots either. You’re just being a shithead.

Get back in your lane and stay there. I’m fairly sure there are plenty of "rich" people that would like to know why they’re a few years away from being hauled out of their houses and murder-death-killed in their front yards.

Why is anger fomenting in the background of society?

Because shitheads are being shitheads. And why? For the age old reason of "buttloads of money."

So if there is a super good PR option out there that not only helps society and the world, but also has a fairly fabulous return in value, including the stock market paying out like a winning slot machine–why wouldn’t smart rich people want to know about it?

Why wouldn’t any rich person with a thinking brain NOT get on board with being a Good Person to the Public?

Now is seriously NOT the time to be a depraved maniac, not just not on main, but not at all. You don’t want to be associated in the minds of the public with THOSE people.

Think how hard Hi-nnz went to keep their ties to "him" from being a trending topic. People would talk about it. But it was never top of the trending lists.

MASSIVE amounts of money must have been spent to downplay his ties to their company and that buying a bottle of ketchup would result in him receiving end of year dividends. Because he is such a shithead, that being associated with him loses customers.

I honestly can’t believe that generations of a family could work to build a leading brand, and like, one of the family cousins can ruin everything by being a shithead. And that those brands are accepting that kind of nonsense? Unbelievable.

Just because someone has a lot of stock in a publicly traded company doesn’t mean they should be allowed to make a public ahole of themselves. Because once it’s opened to the public, there are some standards that should be maintained for the good of society.

And I know, as the recent health insurance killing showed, the stockholders did not react as normal humans would, they instead started screaming about their lost profits and wanting the publicly traded health insurance company to go back to being predatory leeches. And it’s the health insurance executive officers and other employees who are terrified of being gunned down in the street like the mad dogs they were behaving as that are like "Hey, maybe we should and could dial back on the predatory capitalism. Just a tad. We’ll still be making ludicrously massive amounts of profit. But I won’t end up being shot dead in the street and people won’t cheer at my funeral and piss on my grave so much that the soil is destroyed."

I wasn’t expecting it, but it turns out the stockholders of a cold-hearted company are cold-hearted people themselves. It wasn’t that their financial planners filled their portfolios with stock in problematic companies but that those people CHOSE to invest their money in evil. Like, masks off pure evil, and those people were like "Put my money in support of human suffering. The more gratuitous the better!"

And here we are.

Rich people doing evil shit and thinking they’re going to get away with it because someone else already did something as equally if not worse evil and faced zero backlash. And they’re such dumbshits they don’t realize those other guys got away with their nonsense because they were doing that stuff in secret, and in lots of cases the vast majority of the public doesn’t even know they happened.

But here you are with your more than 1.3 million followers making a public spectacle of yourself being a shithead on main. And you somehow think that’s fine.

So yeah. I meant to write "Donor to the Good of All of Humanity!!!" but instead wrote "Doner to the Good of All of Humanity!!!" and that actually seems like a more apt name.

Rich people either better start slicing off a bit of their wealth and sharing it with the 99% themselves, or everything they have and are is going to be gobbled up by the angry poor–at least until the other richy riches come cruising around and snatch the whole carcass, bones and all.

Like, "They" like to go around saying that they’re the "silent majority," but really it’s only a chunk of "comfortably wealthy" people that WANT to be the stereotype of a "Greedy Boss"-type. Smoking cigars while "talking business" in a hot tub with hot women on standby. Sitting mostly naked in a sauna with a bunch of other dudes, owning the room with his alpha male presence, like muscles upon muscles with his little titties being the cherry on top.

For reals: Does anyone really want to sit around stewing in the juices of other people? Forced to lick the metaphorical asshole of a guy you would really prefer to not have to hang around, but you need to get that business deal signed or it could effect your job? Forced to do Benjamin Franklin-style diplomacy, but it’s with a bunch of hangry muscle dudes that want to smoke weed, flex, and lecture at you all. night. LONG? That’s your life goal? Your measure of success?

I know people watch those types of YouTube videos at home. But you can hit fast-forward or rewind ("What did he just say?!? I need to hear that again") and you’re not being forced to experience "that Type of Guy" in real life.

Being forced to experience a guy LARPing as "an ALPHA MALE" and having to clap and cheer along because it’s part of your job.

And I’m not even talking about all those incredibly attractive people they hire to stand around them and "act" in their videos. Those people are practicing quislings and class traitors and anything else someone wants to call them based upon some weird dude’s YouTube video, whatever. To me, they’re people that got hired to do an acting job and unless they know who the guy is beforehand, they’re not going to be aware that they’re props in a "life coach" flex video rather than as the background in a music video or something. They are working for money to pay rent and buy groceries or pay off medical expenses.

If you want most of all that to stop, then vote for a Universal Basic Income. A lot of that happens because people have a desperate need for money to pay rent or for travel expenses to visit a sick relative or friend. Or maybe they blew all their money on concert tickets and they HAVE to get that money back in the bank before bills need to be paid. ("What, you get to go to AMAZING LIFE CHANGING concert, and your phone is going to be shut off the whole time because you spent ALL your money and couldn’t pay the bill?")

There are plenty of reasons why a person doesn’t have any money, and some are a lot more serious than others. And the point is that no matter the reason, in a successful society, NO ONE should have to worry about homelessness, hunger, or financially crippling medical expenses.

In today’s society, old people have to either sign their house over to someone else THREE YEARS before they can seek out financial aid when applying for a retirement home OR they can lose their house and everything they ever owned. That’s a hard choice. Especially since most parents would rather leave an inheritance for their children and grandchildren than giving it to someone else’s predatory bank.

And like, rather than dealing with real, systemic societal issues that are causing real and generational-level harms… We’ve got weirdos demanding to look at children’s genitals. For gender critical science!

It’s frustrating when you realize that things won’t be allowed to change because the people at the highest levels of the societal hierarchy are fucking short-sighted idiots willing to kill someone for a dollar even if it costs them $20 in return.

/RANT

Sometimes I’ve gotta get everything off my chest. Otherwise one day I’m going to start screaming and I’ll just keep screaming and screaming and SCREAMING until I drop dead from the stress.

And it’s like, just because you can’t hear someone screaming, doesn’t mean they’re not screaming.

We’re all screaming right now.

And rich people can keep pretending they don’t hear. But they can’t say later that there weren’t any warning signs and that everything just came out of nowhere. There were plenty of signs and warnings and Internet essays.

Be a donor or be a doner. It’s all the same to me.

~Harper Kingsley

https://paypal.me/harperkingsley.

https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.

https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.

https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog.
https://kimichee.com.

https://www.youtube.com/c/HarperKingsley.

https://harperkingsley.bsky.social.
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/HarperKingsley.