This world is wrong. Wrong in its bones. Wrong in its math. Nothing here is straight, obeys reason or lines up. I keep reaching for angles and the place hands me curves. I try to draw a line and the ground giggles under it like it’s laughing. You can’t build anything on curves or reason with curves. Curves are treachery disguised as aesthetics. They bend when you’re not looking. They refuse to stay solved. The world is supposed to deliver oblique certainty on time and on budget. Give me a world that snaps to grid. But this place—this stupid, smug, organic place—keeps giving me shapes that don’t have the decency to bend into clean angles. Everything loops, arcs and refuses to meet me at a clean intersection. How am I supposed to live in a world that won’t hold still long enough to be understood?
そんな態度は似合わないよ、インガー。俺を拒む理由なんてないだろ。
Were You There at the Beginning?
Yeah, okay, Damian. You want a world that snaps to grid, a place where everything obeys the angles you trust. You want oblique certainty because certainty feels like safety. But the world God made isn’t a drafting table, and it never promised to behave like one. It isn’t masculine in the way you imagine, and it isn’t obligated to stay still long enough for you to solve it.
Creation is built on paired opposites that refuse to collapse into a single, obedient shape. Adam and Eve weren’t a hierarchy; they were a tension, a necessary contradiction that made the world possible. Adam alone is half a creature, and Eve alone is half a cosmos, and neither one can pretend otherwise without breaking something essential. The world is not wrong because it curves; it curves because it is alive.
Your misery isn’t proof that the world is flawed. It’s proof that your geometry is too small for the place you’re standing in. You keep demanding edges and corners from a creation that was built on complement, not control. And until you can accept that, every curve will feel like treachery instead of invitation.
Wiggles and Hips
The zealots won. Those whose Five Pillars—grievance, malady, kink, addiction, and atheism—entitled them to high status had succeeded in wrecking the USA and damaging Canada. Quebec gained its independence. Saito-Gumi chose the wilderness west of Calgary, AB, because it was loosely governed—still strictly part of Canada in 2125, but the relationship between Calgary and Ottawa was… erm… difficult.
Out here in the Badlands, the eroded hoodoos and winding coulees formed a geological sneer at Damian’s obsession with straight lines. This was his new prison camp after the debtors prison in Norfolk, VA couldn’t contain him. Saito-Gumi offered him a job with a prayer of maybe someday paying off his debt. He answered their kindness with stealing Mikako model robots, customizing them to be fantasy creations of his obsession, Inger, and doing NSFW things with them. Rather than pay down his debt he increased it.
So Damian leveled up to a more severe prison. One without walls located in the wilderness west of Calgary, AB. Freedom! Damian could just overland to wherever the fence was, cross it, and be free. It’s not that easy. Tate already experienced a nanite attack defending his girlfriend. Damian tried and was laid out by nanites once he got a few meters from his drop off point.
A clever fellow could use what the land provided to create fire, build shelter, and find food. Sponsoring organizations like Saito-Gumi could subscribe to provision plans that would support their prisoner. Great idea the locals loved because theft of donated supplies was a vibrant underground trade.
Fresh Meat
The locals treated every newbie the same: like a slave with benefits. The benefit was whatever supplies the system still bothered to send, plus whatever labor a body could provide before it broke. The village stole Damian’s supplies within minutes. His arrival was announced along with an AMEN offer of work on-boarding him. He was too annoying, too rigid, too consumed with ranting about grids and treachery to be worth assigning to a work crew. So they gave him the bare minimum—just enough calories and shelter to keep him alive, but never enough to dull the sharp edge of his discontent.
He sat hunched in his palette wrap poncho while the Alberta wind carved layered strata and organic arches that refused to align with any mental grid he tried to impose. The world curved because it was alive—wind-sculpted stone, resilient grasses clinging to impossible slopes, the slow, patient violence of erosion turning sharp edges into soft, mocking undulations. Damian only saw betrayal.
Attracted Opposites
Creation was built on paired opposites that refused to collapse into a single, obedient shape. His misery wasn’t proof that the world was flawed. It was proof that his geometry was too small for the place he stood in. He kept demanding edges and corners from a creation built on complement, not control. And until he accepted that, every curve would feel like treachery instead of invitation.
In my perfect world, the ways of Rome still carry the day. Women run the house and men run the business. In this world, while the men fought over how to govern, the women still had children to raise, assets to protect, and wealth to build. Since the zealots tore much down, and life still needs to happen, an alternative had to arise. The alternative has a name, AMEN. The acronym means, Ashby Market Equity Network. yw 😂
Recapping quickly, AMEN is a trading network like eBay where there are three primary attributes: feminine, anarchist and anabaptist. Nothing is free. No money? Barter something. It is relevant here because after the zealots burned it all down in the 2120’s, people still needed commerce. Currency became worthless. Canadian and USA dollars were worth nothing. But kids need to be fed, and the man has justified needs so instead, barter arose in place of fiat currency.
Continuity
Inside the fence where Damian is, prisoners are free to live or die. It’s up to them. Provincial and national governance is weak. That leaves municipal and county government to pick up the slack. Also families to cooperate so people can thrive. Prisoner sponsors ship supplies in good faith. Delivery? Depends on how the prisoner behaves. In AMEN, your reputation is worth more than your money. So dickheads like Damian struggle with lost shipments and chronic theft.
Damian tried reporting the crimes to the prison guards. They replied, “that sounds like a personal problem.” He countered with, “do you know who I am?! I have RIGHTS!” A guard laid him out with a night stick then liver kicked him for confirmation. Plus one first for Damian. Damian believed with zealous passion that the prison camp owed him. Sure. Owed him what?
The misery eased slightly. They brought a whole roll of pallet wrap to him. That, with the pallets stacked as firewood, could have been the start of a shelter for someone so minded. Not so Damian. He struggled to tear off more pallet wrap to cover himself, wrapping it tighter around his body like a self-imposed shroud. His drone drop of gruel would arrive soon. Then he could eat, curl up, and go back to sleep. Live another day in his little hell.
Un Agneau Chétif
Life is seldom static. Things take a direction. We can move toward entropy, or we can move toward light. The melody we breathe can bring us closer to the light or further away. Some of us, despite all efforts, fall deeper into entropy until one day our breath stops and we become cautionary tales.
Damian woke to see the girl standing over him, « Tu vis trop dans ta tête, toé. Tu vas crever si tu fais pas de feu, que tu te bâtis pas un abri pis que tu t’occupes pas de toi. Après ça, faut qu’on t’enterre, pis ça coûte de l’argent. »
He didn’t understand her. His ankle monitor beeped and then said in English, “You live too much in your head, you do. You’re going to freeze to death if you don’t build a fire, put up a shelter, and take care of yourself. And after that, we’ll have to bury you—and that costs money.”
“Why do you care if you have to bury me? It’s not your problem.”
Some Fools are Terminal
« Idiot. C’est notre problème parce qu’on nous paye pour te garder en vie. Arrête de sucer ton pouce pis fais donc quelque chose d’utile. »
The ankle monitor translated flatly: “Idiot. It’s our problem because we get paid to keep you alive. Stop sucking your thumb and do something useful for a change.”
Damian tried to bargain for an advantage, his voice weak but still arrogant. “Little girl, you do it. You make me a fire, give me better shelter, and pay me back for the steak you took.”
« Fine. Meurs donc. Je m’en fous. » The girl headed north through the meadow toward town. This stretch of land was pasture for the wool sheep of her father. If the man wanted to sleep in sheep shit, then by all means. South, and meters from where Damian sat was the tree line and better conditions. One of the trees had low hanging branches that could be arranged to keep the weather off of him. Damian stayed put and cursed God.
He stayed there long after the girl vanished into the meadow, shivering under his pallet‑wrap shroud, waiting for the world to apologize or correct itself or at least acknowledge the injustice of his existence. Nothing did. The wind kept blowing. The sheep kept grazing. The ankle monitor blinked its indifferent green pulse, tracking a man who refused to move three meters south to save his own life. In the Badlands, creation didn’t punish stupidity; it simply stepped around it. Damian mistook that mercy for cruelty, the way he mistook every curve for treachery. And the world, patient as ever, kept curving.