DE Vol. 1 pt. 71

Was there really anything better than being out in nature?

Not really.

The only way I could imagine being out in nature would be by being out in nature with a perfectly silent, wireless computer capable of still running AAA games on it.

But that wasn’t possible as far as I was aware. It was mainly the silent part that was impossible. I wouldn’t want the whirring of a computer’s fans to drown out the natural sounds of the forest, and liquid cooling was a meme.

Therefore, it remained an impossible dream.

Then again… from what I understood, there were other civilizations out there that surpassed all of our currently known technologies. What if they invented the perfect, portable gaming computers so that one could enjoy being in the middle of a forest while also getting to play all the latest games? Then there were all the different peoples with magic. What if it could be done via magic?

What if that was the next debate for computer cooling methods? Advanced technological cooling vs magical cooling?

I would probably take the side of magical cooling. I knew myself well enough to assume that. Using magical cooling just sounded more natural than advanced technology, and I always loved things being natural when possible.

Same reason why I only drank real milk, not any sort of nut “milk.”

Almond milk? There’s nothing natural about that. Almonds don’t have nipples.

A cow’s milk? Now, that’s all-natural goodness right there.

“It ain’t milk if it’s not from a nipple.” Those were the words of my old man, and they were some of the wisest that ever left his lips.

And while I was thinking of milk, I got to thinking about what sort of other milks existed out in the universe across all the different species. Presumably, anything with nipples could be marked regardless of the species, otherwise they probably wouldn’t have developed nipples in the first place. Seeing as how we were now somewhat connected to at least dozens of different civilizations and countless new species and races… I wanted to know what all the different milks of the universe tasted like.

Then Enna popped into mind.

It was impossible to think of milk without thinking of nipples. It was impossible to think of nipples without thinking of tits.

And it was impossible to think of tits without thinking of Enna.

It didn’t help that we were back at New Liberty and that Enna was sitting at the Council Pavilion’s table across from me, giving me a clear line of sight to her chest.

She must have noticed me staring at her chest since she lifted an arm up to cover it, not that a single arm, let alone both of them, would ever be able to cover up her chest, and asked, “Is—is there a reason why you are… looking so intensely at my chest?”

“I’m thinking about milk,” I answered.

“Milk?” She looked down at her chest as if to figure out why I would be thinking of milk while looking at it… and then she must have got it seeing as how her pale cheeks reddened a bit. “O-oh. Wait! I—you—you can’t! They don’t make any!”

“We can change that.”

“E-eh? We—we can?” Once again, it took her a few moments to understand what I was implying. Once she understood, though, her cheeks reddened even more and her eyes began to spin around in an embarrassed daze. “We can’t! W-well, we can, but we can’t!”

“We can or we can’t?”

“We can! Technically. But we can’t! Because—the timing!”

“The timing, huh?”

“I-i-it’s not that I—that I’m opposed to… having… you—you know! But… with how uncertain our future is…”

“First off, I’ll say that I was just teasing you. I’m not ready for anything like that yet. But aside from that, you’ve said something I’ve never been able to stand before.”

Enna looked pretty worried when she heard that. “I… I did? I’m sorry. What… did I say wrong?”

“You’re alright, don’t worry. It’s just the sentiment behind the words that has always bothered me. A ton of people my age and younger on Earth say things like that. They believe that it’s pointless to even consider the idea of having kids when the future is uncertain. War, climate change, overpopulation—people worry and come up with a hundred excuses to not have kids. It’s selfish and foolish as far as I’m concerned, and not for the right reasons. Don’t get me wrong, if somebody doesn’t want to have kids, that’s fine. Power to them. But to justify not wanting them because of concern for the future is idiotic, even if it sounds logical.”

“I’m… not sure I understand.”

“Somebody who doesn’t want to have kids because they don’t want kids is fine. Somebody who is afraid of having kids and says they won’t because they’re afraid for the future is worrying too much. Back when we were a bunch of hairy, naked apes living out in the wild, did we worry about what the future was going to be like? Times were even harder back then. Somebody could die at any moment. You could get a fatal infection from any random wound. You had no idea if you were going to be able to secure food and shelter in the future, and you had no idea when some other tribe of people or wild, starving animals might find you and kill you. Then once civilization began, groups of people rose and fell all the time. There was almost constant war and strife. Throughout history, humans have almost always been stuck in a position far more dreadful than whatever one they were currently in, but they still persisted. And if they all just gave up and didn’t have kids because they were worried about the future, none of us would be here. Now, some people might argue that the threats we face are worse than ever before, what with climate change or potential nuclear war making the world uninhabitable… but we’ve adapted and overcome everything else before us, so why stop believing in humanity’s capability to survive now?”

“I… think I understand why you have an issue with it, but I feel that it’s wrong to call it selfish. Would it not be the opposite of that? If somebody wants to avoid bringing more life into the world because they are afraid of only adding to the suffering?”

“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe it’s some bad thing to not want to bring more people into the world if you’re afraid, but it’s still selfish. It’s done more to spare oneself of guilt and fear than to spare the potential, non-existent life of possible future suffering.”

“I think that may be true, sometimes, but… I don’t believe it’s always selfish. And… pardon me if I’m overstepping my bounds here, but… I believe it’s wrong to assume it’s selfish by default.” Enna lifted a hand up to rest it over her chest. “I… have wanted children for as long as I can remember, but I would never dream of having them if it is not possible to guarantee a good life for them. I would never subject them to the same life I had to live. Not only would it be throwing somebody into the same system that wore me down, but it would be rewarding that system with more potential labor. Even without this game, I would be hesitant to have children unless I know they will be able to live a better life than me. If anything, I believe that’s being responsible if not selfless.”

Well, one could argue that everything was ultimately selfish no matter how selfless it might have appeared. Even something like donating to charity or donating organs to somebody in need was ultimately a selfish act at the most basic level. But that was a boring way to look at things and removed all debate over whether or not something was selfish or selfless. “First off, don’t worry about stepping out of bounds or anything like that. You’re allowed to disagree with me, not that you need my permission to do so in the first place. Having different perspectives is one of the ingredients to greatness. It’s by having a bunch of different people who all think differently in the same place that you’re able to come up with new, better ideas that somebody on their own would never be able to think of. That aside, I’ll agree with you. I was thinking about what I could say to support my point, but I’d just be disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing at that point. I shouldn’t assume that people are selfish by default for not wanting to have kids because they’re worried about the future. Though, what do you think of people who have children knowing that they may face a lifetime of suffering?”

“I think they’re brave, but also selfish, and maybe too confident.”

“You could just call them a bunch of fools, then, which is probably an accurate way to describe them. I mean, let’s be real here. Foolishness is the main reason species survive as far as I’m concerned. Humans never would have evolved to become as successful as we are if it wasn’t for us being a bunch of idiots trying everything out. How else did e find out what’s poisonous to eat back in the day? How did we discover that eating rotting food is bad for us? If anything, we’re all a bunch of fools who only know how to not be foolish through trial and error, which is a pretty primitive way of figuring things out.”

“I feel like that’s underestimating people’s general intelligence… but I suppose I can’t disagree with it.”

“Maybe, but I don’t mind assuming everybody is naturally stupid, myself included. We’re a bunch of brave, foolish, lucky idiots to have gotten this far. There are countless other species out there that evolved to be smart or specialized in some way, but then they all got dominated by a bunch of hairless monkeys with sticks who thought that eating mushrooms would give them magical powers. Maybe it’s just a matter of personal taste, but rooting for the hairless monkeys with sticks and magic mushrooms sounds funnier to me than rooting for a bunch of smart tryhards.”

I could tell from Enna’s expression that even though she was amused, she didn’t exactly get it. “I—I see. I think I prefer the idea of everybody being smart and deserving where they’ve gotten to instead of getting lucky in foolish ways…”

“And that’s a perfectly valid preference.” Part of me was tempted to get into the topic about how wishful it was to hope that everybody actually deserved to be where they were in life, but I didn’t want to just be needlessly negative by reminding her of how unfair life could be. Besides, given what I knew of Hell, I was sure she understood that every bit as well as me. She just wanted to believe in it regardless for the sake of her mental health, I assumed.

More importantly, I wanted to give Enna confidence in our future. I wanted her to feel like she’d be able to relax and think ahead about what to do and how to live after our time in the “game” was over. I wanted to give her a future to look forward to rather than one to be afraid of. For now, that meant winning the game. Everything else could be figured out once we had that in the bag.

And if I wanted to win, then I needed to go over the latest intel we gained from sending out those scouting units.

There wasn’t much, but there was the discovery of the region to the south of Mount Hound. And it was… more ocean. The original layout of the previously discovered ocean made me think that there might have been something else there, since the ocean was sort of curling around what looked like an undiscovered landmass, but no. It just turned out to be more ocean. As far as I was concerned, though, that was a good thing. The ocean stretched from the mountains to the next ocean over, meaning that the chokepoint created by the mountains was still valid. People were either going to have to travel south through the valley which we could fortify in the future, I assumed, or they would have to sail around the mountains to reach us.

Of course, having that chokepoint wouldn’t really matter if there wasn’t anything on the other side of it anyways. Furthermore, if there was land over there and somebody else fortified their end of the mountains before we could get there, then we’d be the ones suffering from a chokepoint. The other side of the mountain actually served as a far more effective chokepoint than our side seeing as how there was only a single tile-wide exit on the other side whereas our side’s exit was three tiles wide.

But again, it wouldn’t matter much if the region north of the mountains wasn’t also ocean. I had no idea what the chances of it being ocean were, but I was hoping they would be. Otherwise… again, anybody could just walk right along the northern side of the mountains to bypass any potential, future chokepoints there.

So, to find that out, I took the unit that just discovered the ocean and had them go north to check out that direction next. If we could end up being a sort of small island with only a single land bridge connecting us to a larger chunk of land, that would be great. I doubted we were going to get that lucky, but I could still hope for it.

As a one-city player who always played with extremely defensive strategies… nothing beat a good chokepoint to serve as a meat grinder for countless enemies to uselessly throw themselves against.