The Joy Rebellion

In our collective folklore, time travel was supposed to be invented by a secret government agency, a mad scientist, or both. It was to be a tool used in secrecy to effectuate sinister or altruistic objectives, depending on who held the key.

We were half right.

But it would not be used in secrecy. Time travel was always destined to be a tool of industry. In this country, profit was the only true religion; even churches embraced prosperity theology. Profit was our North Star, our guiding light, and the metric by which we measured everything, including the worth of people. It was a foregone conclusion that time travel would be monetized, controlled by the highest bidders.

Moving physical bodies proved risky, often fatal, or so damaging to the mind of the traveler that they wished it had been fatal. Instead, it was information that would do the traveling.

In 2027, the CIA went public with an invention capable of communicating across time: the TimeNet. We could reach out to the future, gather information, and make choices based on that information.

Communicating back in time was only possible back to the date that the TimeNet was invented (a date kept secret by the CIA), but it carried the inherent risk of disturbing our current reality and thus was prohibited. The TimeNet became a prospective venture.

Of course, gathering information from the future did pose its own ethical challenges. It was argued that the people of the future did not deserve to live in a laboratory in which every detail of their life was subject to change upon delivery of data to the past, which would inevitably create uncontrollable butterfly effects that could alter or even erase their lives.

However, the CIA was able to demonstrate to Congress with sufficient certainty that the long-suspected theory of the multiverse removed all ethical concerns; there existed infinite potential universes and that each decision made using data collected via the TimeNet created a new universe or moved us to an existing universe, new to us. Thus, we were free to travel through infinite new universes, each presumably better than the last, while leaving the universe from which we gathered information intact and unchanged.

Time travel became a ship on which we sailed through unchartered universes of our own creation. Our new manifest destiny. What could be more American than colonizing space-time?

Only profit. And there was money to be made in sailing into a curated future.

The TimeNet was first licensed to pharmaceutical companies, as they had both the means and incentive to corner the market. They began running trials, gathering future data to ascertain the effectiveness of certain drugs, and promptly returning to tweak their formulas in response to data collected 5 or 10 years in the future. FDA trials could be concluded almost instantly, removing the largest financial and temporal barriers to a new drug’s entry into the market.

Upon the colossal profit of the pharmaceutical industry, congress passed the TimeNet Licensure Act, which allowed the government to license and regulate access to the TimeNet through a series of carefully scrutinized applications and grants.

And science, as we know it, existed in fast forward.

Like all things aimed at profit, it did little more than enrich the richest among us. They didn’t cure disease, they perfected lifetime treatment plans. They didn’t solve climate change, they invented biospheres for billionaires. They didn’t travel through galaxies for the purpose of scientific exploration, they mined planets for resources.

Climate refugees numbered in the millions, with large swaths of Florida, Texas, and New York rendered uninhabitable due to rising sea levels, concrete-induced subsidence, or both. The US had long ago closed its borders to international refugees, making them someone else’s problem.

And even with gargantuan leaps forward in medicine owing to the TimeNet, the life expectancy of Americans decreased by nine years, because the working poor had minimal access to healthcare, and factory farms unleashed pandemic after pandemic.

Fires raged unchecked in the west, hurricanes turned once-thriving southern cities into ghost towns, and the National Guard had expanded three-fold as it sought to quell water wars in Arizona and Nevada.

Despite that the wealth gap had already reached the pinnacle of human existence, billionaires seemed more insatiable than ever, wielding their autonomous power without restraint as they marched us towards extinction.

The able-bodied spent most of their scarce free time on various forms of activism; sleep and recreation were luxuries that no one could justify in the face of abject suffering.

The United States had reached its darkest hour. And most of the world had it worse.

Until.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, and spoiling fun is not something we practice in the Joy Rebellion!

Ruby’s life work was dedicated to helping the working poor, a group that included 79% of Americans. The average work week for this group was 63.2 hours, the vast majority of them working in the gig economy without any employment protections. She was the covert lead of an underground hacking alliance and the public face of a non-profit organization for climate justice. She knew the CIA was aware of both, but government hackers pretended to be unable to catch her breaking any actual law, because all of them had family in the working poor, even if they themselves had escaped into the last sliver of the middle class. Ruby was a hero to everyone but the .01% and few outside of that group would turn on her.

Activism merged more tightly with art; creative minds put to the task of undermining the power of the .01%. Social media provided opportunities for grassroots activism on such a large scale that rendered the billionaires impotent against the masses, for a while. Websites were crashed, marches were organized, and doxing of sinister power brokers reached an all-time high. They were gaining momentum, and momentum is a powerful beast.

Ruby’s crew had strung together several high-profile wins: among them, they ended the careers of over a dozen politicians by exposing crimes or ethics violations, and they organized the first ten-million-person climate march and consumer boycott, resulting in billions in lost profits. She began to entertain the possibility that they would win, that even moneyed power could be brought to its knees with the right amount of pressure from the masses.

Ruby allowed herself the indulgence of hope. She wore a smile as she strode into her team’s midnight meeting.

Her smile expired instantly. “What’s wrong?” She asked, her eyes flitting around a room of solemn faces.

George nodded in the direction of their guest, a tall red-headed man with round glasses.

“Hi Tomalie,” she said, nodding a curt welcome to their CIA mole. “Lay it on me.”

“It’s bad,” he said. “They’ve petitioned for use of the TimeNet to predict and shut down activism, specifically yours.”

“The TimeNet can only be used for scientific inquiry,” she said, mentally rolling through basis for their petition like a Rubik’s cube, trying to see where it could line up.

“They’ve argued that activism is the greatest modern threat to scientific progress.”

“Fuck.”

They all let the word hang there. Half a minute passed.

“But the first amendment,” she offered weakly, loathing how naïve those words were.

“The first amendment means nothing to this Supreme Court; they’re little more than a tool for consolidating power,” Tomalie said.

Ruby continued, “but the TimeNet has to be aimed with precision at the consequences of a specific event, it can’t scan broadly.”

“That’s true,” piped a strong voice belonging to person who went by ‘J.’ “But they’ve definitely infiltrated us at some level, so they know where to aim it. They will just watch us, aim the TimeNet, determine if we’ll be successful, and if we will be, they shut us down.”

Ruby was slapped with the urgency, the desperation clicking into place with the full realization of what this meant. A sharp ache wrenched her heart as she did the math that Tomalie and her crew hadn’t yet done. Her eyes shot wide in panic and she looked towards the door, screeching out the word “run” a mere three seconds before it flew open. Blue jackets, yellow lettering, big guns.

“Tomalie Anne Morten, you are under arrest for treason, you have the right to remain …”

The words trailed off as Ruby’s circulation left her ears, shutting off sound and dragging her into a familiar panic attack.

By the time she came to, the room was full of pale faces and shallow breathing.

“They’ll kill him for this, just to make an example of him,” J said.

“I know,” Ruby whispered, her eyes on the floor. She heaved a muted sob and sank into the ground. She looked at her team, their eyes pleading for leadership, but she had none to offer. Despair was too insufficient a word.

The pendulum swung back. Tomalie’s public execution had its intended consequences. It was followed up with arrests of organizers on trumped up charges, their only real crime being their effectiveness. They lost their informants, hackers went deep into hiding, and by definition any protest that was allowed to proceed was one that the future had shown to be ineffective. With the TimeNet aimed at activism, any effort which would bear fruit was exterminated before it could start.

They were bleak years, hope violently wrenched from the hands of people who had nothing else. Suicides skyrocketed, workers fled cities to eke out meager existences living off polluted land and water, choosing to face extreme weather events without social services rather than embracing the restless lives of the overworked and underpaid.

Ruby went into hiding, knowing that any movement she touched would be shut down, that any idea traceable to her would draw the aim of the TimeNet. She moved into an off-grid cabin in the woods amid the realization that if she were ever to organize again, it would only be after she’d fallen off of their radar. She occasionally posted despairing thoughts on social media to make them think that she had given up. Some of them felt too true to post, but she did it anyway. Ruby was playing the long game, the only game available to her.

At first, she fought a daily battle to hold on to her hope. She kept telling herself that it was always darkest before the dawn. She repeated the mantra like a lifeline, her sole source of sustenance.

Eventually she fell into something adjacent to peace. There was a calmness in accepting one’s fate; when only one avenue is available to you, you waste no worry on whether it’s the right path.

One day, after weeks of playing in her subconscious, the idea asserted itself. It was obvious in retrospect, having been tried before in other forms. There was a reason it still called to us.

She would not name it, she would not create a paper trail around it, she would not form an organization. She would keep it shapeless and out of the reach of the TimeNet.

“J!” She exclaimed over a phone line that might have been tapped.

“Well, look who it is,” a friendly voice responded.

“How is life treating you these days? It’s been a while.”

“I’m doing well. I have a good job, coding. The family’s good.”

The monotone response communicated what the words did not. The choice not to use her name was similarly intentional.

Ruby continued, “Hey so I’m back in town for a bit. Care to go on a hike?”

There was a light chuckle. “Sure a hike sounds dandy in this beautiful city.”

They left their phones, smart watches, and ear phones in the car. Ruby sped her pace as she got closer to her old friend, catapulting herself into J’s arms for a long overdue hug.

“My my my, if it isn’t the leader of the rebellion herself,” J teased with a wink. J held Ruby at arm’s length, taking stock of her small frame. “You’re the palest damn brown person I’ve ever seen. Where the hell have you been hiding?”

“Somewhere cold,” she said. They started walking through the dusty trail that used to be a favorite hike of city-dwellers before the drought turned it to desert.

“Have you been alone?” J asked.

“I’m surrounded by friends. Just none that speak human.”

“Finally started that animal sanctuary?”

“Nah, I just gathered some cuties who needed homes as much as I needed company. No paperwork, no fundraising. Trying to look inconsequential.”

“Aha! So you are up to something. Well hurry up already because there are a lot of people who have been waiting on you to rise like the phoenix you are.”

“This won’t be like anything we’ve done before. It will feel trivial, indulgent even. At first.”

J offered a smile bordering on hopeless. “I will follow wherever you lead. There’s nothing left in this life that’s worth anything.”

“So things aren’t that great after all?”

“I’m a freelance government contractor that makes a third of what this job paid two decades ago. I eat. I have walls. That’s about it.”

“And Sandra?”

“She’s fine. Still mourning the kids we can’t afford to have.”

“What if I could change that? It would require a leap of faith.”

“You act like we have something to lose. You ask me - that’s their biggest mistake. When no one has anything left to lose, you can’t control them by threatening to take something away. The entire world is living at rock bottom. So yeah, we’re in.”

“Do you need to ask Sandra?”

“No.” J grinned.

Ruby gathered other trusted allies, and they got to work building what appeared from the outside to be another off-grid commune deep in the forest. But this was no mere commune; it was pleasure for no purpose other than pleasure itself, joy for joy’s sake.

Recruitment began and it was surprisingly easy. Most people were willing to abandon their lives of incessant stress because even good jobs paid insulting wages. Bringing in highly-skilled workers and knowledge keepers proved far easier than Ruby had anticipated. Fundraising was similarly seamless; there were already ample crowdfunding sites and plenty of people were willing to support the cause since each donation, no matter how small, came with a weeklong visit to their utopia upon completion.

Gourmet chefs were paired with master gardeners to create frivolously decadent meals. Artists of all kinds filled the modest huts and vans and yurts, quickly turning each abode into adorned works of whimsy. Convention gave way to quirk, practicality ignored. If it could be dreamt, they would build it. The more fanciful, the more urgent.

Writers, actors, and directors put on vibrant plays; books were acquired and libraries erected; comedians brought laughter back into style; story tellers captivated fire-circle audiences; sex workers taught the art of love making, passing on tantric practices and meditative eroticism; magicians dazzled and eastern and western medicine practitioners healed. Shamans lead adults on mushroom journeys and therapists healed old wounds.

Music bellowed, love flourished, and tender buds of happiness were lovingly cared for until they grew larger than fear.

Their numbers were small, a few thousand, but that’s all Ruby could afford to risk. On the three-year anniversary of Ruby’s first visit to this land, she addressed its inhabitants.

“Friends, what we have done here is miraculous. The joy you carry is potent stuff, more than you know. It is time I reveal the real purpose behind our community. We are here to change the world. We are here to normalize joy.

“Joy is our birthright, the only thing that makes this life worth living, and the only thing that can save us. We must spark a million little flames of joy, tending to them until they grow into a fire capable of burning it all down. They have stolen our rage but they cannot take our bliss. We must give people something to move towards; focusing energy against something is a fool’s game.

“We bring people in, under the guise that it’s a vacation, but we don’t charge. We light them up, and send them out to spread their fire. They come back as frequently as they need to in order to recharge, to remember their entitlement to happiness. You must all build similar communities of light, love and laughter, dotting this nation from sea to shining sea with communities so humble on their own that they don’t draw the aim of the TimeNet. We sever all connections with one another, for now. We trust one another to build little worlds of light, knowing that if we do it well, they will eventually merge into something bright enough to light humanity’s path forward.

“Joy belongs to us. It is not frivolous in the face of suffering as we’ve been conditioned to believe; it’s the remedy.

“You are my joy ambassadors. Go forth and start fires.”

The hippie movement petered out the first time around, but it did not fail. Seeds can stay dormant for generations before the conditions become ripe again for fertilization.

Ruby and her people planted those seeds. She planted them slowly and sparsely at first, careful not to draw the attention of the TimeNet.

Meanwhile, Ruby saw to it that organizers in cities continued to stage fake activism to busy the TimeNet and keep it aimed firmly away from what history would later call the Joy Rebellion. As the Joy Rebellion grew larger, so did the activism charade, noisier and noisier, a misdirection of epic scale.

The powers-that-be knew about these forest communities of course. But they could not fathom that their inhabitants were doing anything more than cosplaying hippie. Ruby knew some of them would be infiltrated by the CIA, so the most political thing that happened in their communities was a performance of Hamlet. She knew that these communities could accomplish their end without so much as a whisper of politics. Joy could stand on its own two feet without needing the support of a political movement. So she kept the focus singularly focused there, to the exclusion of anything that might draw unwanted attention.

It was a good life, beautiful even. It was enough, for most people. But as long as billions of humans suffered outside the boundaries of their enchanted forest, Ruby would refrain from calling it a victory.

And then it happened.

The cold was biting, and her community was awash in the dual excitement of celebrating the first snow and preparing for the hardships of winter. Children made snow angels while their parents chopped wood, everyone carried away in a flurry of activity.

So it didn’t register at first when J bust through her door, body taught. It was the tone of J’s voice that snatched her attention.

“Ruby! You have to come. Now.”

Ruby followed J into the only yurt with internet, powered by satellite. As her eyes traced the headline, her breath caught. She felt as if she were suspended in time, frozen in the eye of a tornado.

SWEEPING LEGISLATION PASSED FOR WORKER’S RIGHTS, INCLUDING A THREE-FOLD RAISE OF THE MINIMAL WAGE, MEDICARE FOR ALL, UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME, IMMEDIATE PRISON RELEASE OF ALL NON-VIOLENT OFFENDERS, AND COMPREHENSIVE CLIMATE JUSTICE AND REFUGEE FUNDING.

“How?” Ruby croaked, not yet trusting what her eyes saw.

“It finally happened, Ruby. They pointed the TimeNet at the Joy Rebellion. My contacts have confirmed it.”

“I don’t understand.”

J smiled assuredly. “They finally asked the future the question: what would happen if the Joy Rebellion continued? We don’t know what they saw when they looked forward but we know two things: one, whatever they saw was far worse than overhauling the entire economy and two, it was too late to stop us.”

Ruby said softly, almost to herself, “too many had awakened to their true nature, and they could no longer be bought or bullied into compliance.” Tears poured from her eyes, their saltiness welcomed by her tongue.

“We did it. We really did it.”

Ruby would never find out what the TimeNet saw when it finally aimed at the Joy Rebellion; it never became public knowledge. Perhaps it was innocuous: as people found true pleasure, their social media and metaverse use dwindled, and with it, marketing revenue. Or maybe instead of just visiting these joy centers as she had intended, a sizable enough volume of people would have moved into them and started their own. A relatively small amount of people opting out of the system could be enough to cripple it – a workforce of millions was required to feed the economic growth demanded by billionaires. Or maybe there would have been a violent overthrow of the government, fought by people refusing to part with the joy that they knew was their birthright.

The only thing Ruby knew was that when the CIA aimed the TimeNet at the future of her Joy Rebellion, what they saw brought them to their knees.

In her lifetime, cities became green breathing things teeming with art and play. Technology was led by ethical considerations, not the other way around. Disease was virtually eradicated overnight once the TimeNet was put to its proper purpose. Factory farming ended, and sanctuaries for farmed animals proliferated. People rested.

It took a few generations to infect the .01% (who were now millionaires, not billionaires) with joy; they resisted at first, clinging instead to their money and power, believing happiness hid there.

But it didn’t.

And joy had a talent for selling itself. And so it did.