The Wakeful Wanderer's Guide to Disillusionment

The Dome

Marto fell into the rhythm of the community, doing chores, cooking, cleaning, and talking with the inhabitants. He was resting after a day spent chopping wood, Marie Claire cooking pork chops near him, when a memory from his childhood floated up in his mind. A moment of his lost life returned as he reclined beneath the shelter of The Dome.

• • •

The night sky glitters as he leans back in the wooden slatted chair on the deck in the mountains. His mother strokes his hair and his father stands by the grill, cooking sausages. The thick dark smell hangs on him. His mother's fingertips brush his scalp, her scent clear to him, even around the smoke of the barbecue. His father abandons the cooking to walk toward him, kissing his mom, and putting his hand on Matthew's cheek. He smells of beer and smoke and home. Home is snug and familiar, like an offered coat kept too long. This place would be their new home now. Home is wherever his parents are. Home is a foreign land.

• • •

He felt dizzy and drunk with the recollection. He wanted more, but there was only this event and the memories forced upon him by his mother's message. This memory was distinct from those. It belonged to him, drifting up through the blocks imposed on his mind as a child. The memories in the message were a key to opening a treasure of lost moments. He wanted the frozen blocks to melt, but they remained solid. He hoped they would soon dissolve and reveal what had been so bitterly taken from him.

"Matthew?" Eryc Cowling, a man with a graying beard and black hair, tall and thin, approached him. "Matthew, come to Outer Seven for a discussion of comparative economies. Jean Brun said you would like it."

The Dome had its own sort of Merit, akin to the ancient form. Jean Brun had clout here. He sent Eryc to deliver his message rather than do it himself. Structured like a modern tribe without its reliance on algorithms, it maintained flow through memory and familiarity. People offered tribute as favors to those they felt deserved it. There was a consensus about who was more or less worthy. This form of Merit had been in place in small communities since communities began. It helped that the greater Commune supplied most of their necessities. Marto felt that if he were still on his book tour, he might spend more time here, interviewing people and taking notes. Society in The Dome exemplified Merit in its primordial form.

"I'll be right over," he said.

Outer Seven was across the Dome from noon, a little to the right and close to the edge. Marto was sitting in Middle Three. He took a cup of tea and strolled over the winding wooden walkways toward the salon in progress.

"Sit next to me, mon ami," said Jean Brun as he approached. There were canvas chairs arranged in a circle. A half-dozen people already gathered, engaged in conversation.

"You like to highlight efficiency without asking 'efficient for whom?'" a woman named Delilah, a visitor from Schuyler tribe in Utica, was asking a man named Terry, one founder of The Dome. Delilah was a tall, imposing young woman, beautiful and confident. She had full lips, striking eyes, and dark, wavy short hair. When not smiling, her resting expression made her look incredulous. Terry, in contrast, was a short, slight man in his late fifties, a fringe of dark hair around his head, oval glasses over his dark eyes and a friendly grin on his lips. "I think you imagine you're measuring the returns for the whole system but you're omitting the externalities."

"Efficiency is efficiency," Terry replied, "It excludes nothing. What matters is what we measure, isn't that so?"

"What we measure and how we assign worth, Mr. Avery," Delilah responded. "Both of our societies focus on particular indices to measure collective good. Do you follow Quebec's Satisfaction Index, Terry?"

"I regard it as a positive indicator," Terry replied. "Why not measure satisfaction? Happiness may be too much to ask a bureaucracy to supply or enable. Satisfaction is more realistic. What more does a government have a right to ensure? The Satisfaction Index aims to gather a sense of wellbeing without assuming too much."