"Would you like to keep walking my boy?" He asked me.

I stared at the sun overhead and thought about the day my dad moved away. I was eighteen, or somewhere around there. It was a moment that I had repressed in my memory for years and only recently had began thinking about it again. I haven't talked to him since, hell I don't even know if he's alive. At the time, I was just happy that I no longer had to deal with him. I remember coming home to him telling my mom that he could no longer look at her face. It at least seemed like he wasn't drunk, but I'll never know for sure. I do know that he wasn't yelling or throwing things across the room. He was calm and collected, something he rarely was. He left without saying goodbye, or any promise of seeing us again. It was a man who had reached the end of the road and decided to turn right onto the dirt path. Maybe he was headed somewhere, I don't know. After that day, my Mom fell apart. She had always been distant from my sister and I, but after he left she hardly spoke. If Lily left out of the blue one day, I would probably find it hard to talk too.

"Red?" I heard from an echo resonating within my skull.

"Sorry, I was just daydreaming." I replied, feeling slightly embarrassed I had ignored him.

"This spot always makes me think about my past and my failures. I can't help but reflect when I'm here, must be the nature of the thing." He responded.

"I was thinking about the day my dad walked out on us." The words left my mouth before I had a chance to catch them.

"When did he leave?" He asked me.

"I think I was about eighteen. The memory has only recently resurfaced and I've been trying to understand why." I told him.

Theo moved closer to me and put his arm around my shoulder. I knew that he would have an answer that was more complex than the situation demanded, but I was willing to wait. Very rarely did I feel any type of lesson was to be learned from talking to other people about my problems. The majority of people seem only to pretend to listen to what you are saying, while they are formulating what they will say in response. I appreciate a conversation that takes longer than normal. It tends to be this way because the other person involved is taking the time to listen to what you have to say before they respond. The time it takes Theo to answer reassures me that he is actually listening. Every time he answered me it felt like it was coming from a wise shaman, deep in the Amazon.

"The mind is one of the greatest mysteries and yet we choose to focus so much of our time on other things. How something can go missing in the mind, only to resurface years later is beyond my understanding. It is as though we are not in control of some things that happen to us, but rather a helpless bystander at will to the wants of the masked ruler." He proclaimed. "Perhaps there is a reason this memory resurfaced. It could be that your unconscious brain has felt it necessary for you to deal with it. Whatever that reason may be, it must be important."

"I wonder if there is anyone who has managed to learn how to control that part of the brain that is left in the shadows. Or is it destined for our mind to be out of our control?" I asked.

"Maybe some things are meant to be left to the unknown, or perhaps, those who have learned how to control this animal like nature of the brain are the enlightened men we learn about from the past." He replied.

I drift off again into a tangent of thought about the curse of existence. This thought has come up throughout most of my adult life and I find it hard to discard. It is as if something inside me wants life to seem pointless and mundane. The idea that an existence containing consciousness is a burden that is to be carried until your foreshadowed demise, is all that i can think of for now. Why give any conscious being the ability to foreshadow our death, if we can never escape or understand it? The thought grips my attention and I find myself helpless to its clutches. I can feel the anxiety start to roll in and fear I may never escape this burrowing idea. I take a few deep breaths and find myself back on the rock, sitting next to the wise elder I have come to value.

"Can we get going? I think I need to get away from this rock." I tell him.

"Very well my boy, follow me!" He shouted with intensity that seemed fit for a drill sergeant.

He began the descent from atop the rock down towards the beach. The path downward seems much more treacherous than the path upwards. I find humor in the comparison of these paths with the fall of great civilizations. Maybe the fall is meant to be the least graceful part, a fundamental truth that exists in the laws of nature. We eventually get back to the shore and continue our circling of the island. As I look up to the boulder we had been sitting on, I see that it appears jagged from the shore. I appreciate the curiosity it must take to journey to the top of a rock that appears uninhabitable. I question whether or not I would ever take the trail to the top, or would I simply dismiss it as a waste of time?

"Theo, you never told me why you left TyraTech." I said.

"Well, the answer to that question is quite simple my boy. Philip and the rest of the board wanted me to start developing an Assistant that could feel emotion. Not only did I think it was impossible, I refused to even try. His team of developers had been facing roadblocks in the pursuit of more advanced Assistants and he felt that I was the only one who could overcome them. We had already began to see the fallout that the Assistants were causing and I saw this as the perfect opportunity to leave. I told Philip that I couldn't do it anymore and left." He told me.

"What did Malcom say about Philip wanting to develop these Assistants?" I asked.

"It was just before Philip asked me to do this that Malcom had gotten into a terrible car wreck. He had been severely injured and was left in a vegetative state. The doctors said that he had irreversible brain damage and would never be the same. I wanted to use our resources to try and find a way to fix him, but Philip refused. Malcom seemed to be the only thing that was keeping Philip contained and with him gone, our differences grew ever more apparent." He explained.

"No one tried to stop you?" I asked.

"No my boy, towards the end Philip and I grew to resent each other. He had lost sight of our original goal, or maybe he was finally able to realize his. The board took his side when I protested the development of a sentient machine. They were always the ones who cared about profits, so I wasn't expecting them to take my side, but it was a sad moment when I realized I had lost the thing I created. I had hopes of trying to fix the company on my own, but with Malcom gone I knew that it was near impossible." He told me.

"I'm sorry Theo, that must have been awful." I said. "Was your son already working at the company when this all happened?"

"Oh no, he was still figuring out what he wanted to do. He had just left medical school and it wasn't until a couple years after I left that he told me he wanted to work in the philanthropic division. I had no intention of ever talking to Philip again, but my son wanted to try and help the people who had begun taking the medication. At the time, I thought that he might be able to fix some of the problems I had created. I called Philip and arranged a meeting between him and I. I thought that he would refuse my request to give my son a position in the department, but he insisted on having him. He seemed to have forgotten our troubled past and told me he could start right away." He said.

"He could've been using him as a way to get back at you for refusing to help on his project." I said.

"Philip was a lot of things, but deceitful was not one of them. He wasn't, and still isn't, a bad man Red. He simply has a twisted viewpoint on the future of the human race. Then again, maybe he's the one who is right. After all it was me, a human, who may have started the demise of the species all together." He replied.

"I think that we will find a way to survive Theo, we always do. Maybe you are right about us being complacent creatures who are useless when given the burden of leisure, but there's always something we could do. Perhaps we cannot save the reality we find ourselves in, but we can always start again. Think about the societies you've researched, they were all reborn from the ashes of another. Why is this time any different? Yes, the circumstances are different, but they always are. To give up and say that we are doomed because of our nature is accepting defeat before we have lost." As I was talking I couldn't help but notice I had no control of what I was saying. It seemed that the universe itself was speaking directly through me and what was being said was a fundamental truth.

"How do you figure a new society will emerge my boy? Everything has been lost to the Assistants. If they were to be taken down, our economy would come crumbling down with it. Who would fill their place? You know that those on the medication wouldn't be able to re-enter the workforce." He said.

"There are still people like you and me Theo, those uncorrupted by the medication. I'm sure there's still people out there willing to start again. Economies are not some divine gift, but only a realization of man's ambitions. A new one will always come about. Regarding those on the medication, I'm not sure if they will ever come back..." I stopped talking and began to think about Lily. I would give anything to have her back. I knew that no matter the circumstances I couldn't just leave her to wither away into nothingness, but I knew that there was probably no saving her. I thought back to a story I once heard about an insect called a tarantula hawk. The name is deceiving because it is actually a wasp that prays on tarantulas. Only once you learn the nature of the creature do you understand where the name came from. The wasp stings the tarantula, paralyzing it and then plants its larvae into the victim's abdomen. The larvae hatch and feast on the still living tarantula for up to two weeks before the tarantula finally perishes. While the reality of this situation is troubling to think of, there are some scientists who have been able to revive the tarantula after the larvae have feasted for a few days on its innards. The once paralyzed and slightly eaten tarantula can regain movement and regrow essential organs once lost to the appetite of adolescent wasps. The hardiness and perseverance of this little creature reminds me that hope is never lost, only forgotten.

"Do you think there is any way to take the Assistants offline?" I asked him.

"Well, of course my boy, I'm the one who wrote the code after all. I left a few holes in the code in case I ever felt like things got too far and I needed to take them down." He explained.

"Why didn't you say that earlier?" I exclaimed. "We could shut everything down and start again, don't you think Theo?"

"I suppose so my boy, but I'm not sure that shutting off the Assistants is the best course of action." He said.

"How do you figure?" I ask.

"Maybe it would be best to let the Assistants run for a little while longer and start a new society somewhere else. Perhaps in the mountains, or the country." He said looking down at his feet covered in sand.

"The longer we wait, the more people will die. Don't you see that?" I asked him.

"Yes my boy, I do see that. But don't you realize that if I were to take the Assistants down now, there would still be billions of people left to manage? I know that it is not easy to think of, but it might be for the best if we let them slowly fade away before taking the Assistants down." He said.

"So we're going to just let billions of people die?" I asked him, afraid of what his response would be.

"As much as I wish there was another way, I think it is the only scenario in which we survive as a species. The society we find ourselves in now can only be saved by sacrificing those that I have doomed." He said.

"I don't know if any of that is necessary Theo, I mean you've seen how high suicide rates are and they don't seem to be going any lower." I began to explain. "The universal income may be the only thing that's keeping them around. Most people I know on the drug don't even remember what they had for dinner by the time they go to bed. If the economy fell, they would most likely die within a few weeks. It might be more humane to take the Assistants down now. God, I can't believe I'm even saying something like this."

"Perhaps you're right my boy." He said and walked closer to the water. I followed closely behind him.

I could tell that Theo felt overwhelmed. I saw in the way he moved. I once read that male lobsters fight for dominance and that any lobster that loses one match has a significantly higher chance of losing the next match, even if it is against a much smaller opponent. On the opposite end, the confidence that the winning lobster has makes it all the more likely to keep winning. Sometimes all it takes is one setback to send a winning man down into the depths of despair and isolation. Theo doesn't seem to have suffered a loss. The reality he has created appears to have made him more resolute in winning the next battle, the battle to save the human race.

Before I know it, we had almost circled the whole island and I can see Theo's boat in the distance. I notice him looking behind us, as if checking to see if anyone is following. I debate whether or not I should ask him about his paranoia, but seeing as we are almost at the boat, I know that it won't matter in just a few minutes.

"You know Red, looking back at it I see my lack of maturity in the idea of the Assistants." He said.

"How so?" I asked.

"Well, to think that everyone would seize the freedom I tried to give them was foolish of me. We are given the power to do whatever we want the second we are born. The only reason people accept averageness is because it is force fed to us everywhere we look. Our society shuns outcasts and great thinkers and instead propels averageness into the spotlight. We are inexplicably drawn to those who are different, but are reminded that they are the outliers and we are those that must succumb to complacency." He said. "I should have foreshadowed what was to come in giving people the freedom I always wanted them to have."

"I don't know if there is anyway to solve that problem. It seems to me that no matter the circumstance, people tend to follow the path of least resistance and that has always been an average life. Even during the Renaissance, or during the Ancient Greeks, the masses believed themselves to be destined for an average job and an average life. I suppose it is a law embedded in nature, averageness is necessary." I said. "I mean, do you really think that most people aren't just average?"

"It's difficult to answer that question my boy. I think the idea of averageness itself is constructed by people who need some type of classification in order to put a value on someone's relevant skills to the society that they find themselves in." He explained.

I finally saw what Theo was saying. This idea had been engraved in everything he did. He believed that we all possessed inherent greatness within us, but failed to recognize this because we had been made to think that we only contained averageness. However, the idea of averageness was contingent on what society deemed as average. This was why the freedom the Assistants brought, did not bring about a revolution of great artists and thinkers, but instead brought about a mass of people destined to become complacent with growing more idle everyday. They failed to recognize the areas they are most gifted in because those areas did not prove valuable to the society they were born into. So, when given the chance to pursue these forgotten gifts, they chose instead to accept the idea that had been forced upon them from birth, that they were only average and lacking in value.

"So you think that's why people failed to follow their dreams when you created the Assistants?" I asked him.

"It is the only thing that makes any sense my boy! Why else would people not pursue a life of creation when given the chance?" He asked.

"Maybe people chose to not follow their dreams because they are scared of failure. And I know you might think that there is no risk when you have the insurance of financial security thanks to universal income, but failure can come in many ways. People are scared to follow their dreams because of what other people will think." I said.

"But that is exactly my point my boy! The reason we are scared of what other people think is because we are made to believe that those who follow unconventional paths are 'outliers' and therefore different than average! Imagine for just a second that we were brought up in a world where we were told that only those who were average were the outliers! No one would want to be a data clerk, or an accountant, or a financial advisor. We would want to be painters or authors or scientists, don't you see my boy?" While he was talking, I could see the energy refilling his body and his voice once again felt powerful. "All fear of failure is related to our ego and that only exists because of our desire to fit in. To fit in our society means to be normal, don't you see?"

I was too busy thinking about the decisions that I had made throughout my life that were dictated by my ego to respond. I felt regret over the sacrifices I had made in order to get a "good" job and a "secure" job. It seemed that within just a minute, my entire existence had been made to feel pointless. The only thing my life has brought value to was the economy. Everything I had done in life was to try and fit in.

"Can we go back to the boat now?" I asked.