"The people" -- the most trusted name in lying -- responded with the silence of deathliness.

They'd had their hopes and dreams endlessly stoked and been promised a world conducive to the free-form multi-path realization of those hopes and dreams -- but only last week they'd been informed that hopes and dreams are a zero-sum game, like everything else, and so that for every person realizing his or her hopes and dreams, there would have to be many many more people not getting anywhere near realizing their least hope or faintest dream.

Still, "anything could still happen"! But, if it was any good, it could usually only happen once. And so, if it already happened to somebody else (those singular events being the source of hopes and dreams to begin with), the odds were enormous that it wasn't gonna be happening to you or anybody else anytime soon.

This caused a great letdown among the people of the world, and they started resorting to robo-sexuality. And when you asked them what was good about their species, the only thing they could say was, "well, we're over 94% biodegradable."

But the corporate CEO's and their puppet master, the market, started to worry when they saw this mood sweep across the land. People, they realized, could soon start offing themselves en masse as an act of ecology, or just to get their 5 cent deposit back.

In corporate board rooms the cry went out: the population must not be allowed to exterminate itself!

At least not until every last fucking penny has been wrung from every last fucking pocket, wallet, and bank account on earth.

So corporations started running "we love you, please don't off yourselves!" campaigns that weren't tied to selling products. In fact, they started giving all their products and services away for free. They even sent out teams of roving male and female free prostitutes to make sure everybody's sex drive was fulfilled.

Of course, to design the "we love you, etc..." campaign, they called on me, who had loved everything for all time no matter what.

"How can we show the people how much we love them so they won't exterminate themselves, now that hopes and dreams have been removed from the equation of possibility?" they asked me before I'd even had a chance to sit down and get loaded.

Fortunately I'd come prepared.

"We can invent," I said, "an infinite number of products, each of which is the diametric opposite of a popular product that currently exists and everyone owns.

"By buying these new anti-products, consumers can negate each of their hated old products, and once they've bought the diametric opposite of everything they own, they'll be officially free of being sickening vapid consumers. At that point they may no longer want to exterminate themselves out of joy over being free, or maybe they still will, but the passage of time may have dulled their ardor, one way or the other. Or maybe they'll just have totally forgotten the whole offing themselves thing in the first place," I concluded.

Since corporations have to learn to not know what the fuck they're talking about, it is only natural for them to extrapolate this skill and know how to not know what the fuck anybody else is talking about either. So they gave me the money to go ahead with my plan, whatever the fuck it was.

I quickly assembled a crack team of unrepentant hacker crack whores and, after several months, we were ready with our first product.

It was the diametric opposite of "books on tape", which had sounded like a good idea in the beginning, when we were all stoned on our asses, but when we finally released our product, "voice on paper", no one seemed to want to buy it to negate all the books on tape they'd bought, and so our project was a total failure, thereby short-circuiting all our other dependent hopes and dreams, and the course of human despair was not reversed and eventually they all did exterminate themselves.

A few, however, failed. They survived, and gradually redid some new kinda civilization-thing all over again, from scratch, just so there'd be somebody to read this fucking story of how great they once were(n't).

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