The remaining population of the world agreed: dishonesty, duplicity, and confidentiality were the root of humanity’s problems. They were promptly outlawed.
However, the population had learned that outlawing something doesn’t eradicate it. People never do what they’re told. So we all wore signs on our chest. They were big, crude pieces of cardboard with little truths painted on them in black letters.
The signs told people who we were, and what we were.
‘This is Micah Roberts. He likes to eat honey alone, out of the jar. He can’t stand the cold. He lost his family in the war. He is 17 years old. He’s allergic to peanuts. He was in love, once. He once robbed a convenience store. He killed a man in the war. Before the war, he wanted to go to college. Micah doesn’t trust men with beards. He likes the smell of coffee’…
People would read one another’s signs before they even looked at their faces.
But soon the signs got crowded. You can’t fit the truth of a whole human being on a piece of cardboard.
So we carried books and handed them to everyone we met. Before you said a word to anyone you read the story of his life. That way, no one got caught off guard. That way, no one got hurt. But the books didn’t work either. They got lost or damaged. They weren’t updated regularly enough, or they were updated too frequently and they filled up. Carrying around two or more books was cumbersome.
The books also left room for dishonesty. One could claim to lose his book when really he just left it at home, or he could purposely not write something down, so he wouldn’t have to share it with the rest of the world.
People started to become discriminatory with their books. They would only show them to certain people. A book could be hidden from the entire world save the woman one loves. One could be honest only with certain people.
So we few who were still devoted to the principle took to the skies. And we wrote ourselves in smoke. We all got a plane and we wrote out lives proudly across the sky —in big white smoke letters, so that everyone could see it. ‘I’m an alcoholic. I was wrong to love you, Lena Jackson. I’m grateful for the war. I hate being honest.’
We were an inspiration to the population. They cheered for us when we went up, and celebrated with us when we came down. They called us the Sky Scorchers. Everyone wanted to be one of us-- to write the truth upon the heavens.
Soon there were so many Scorchers that the air was filled with the smog of our morality. Children couldn’t breathe—they were being choked to death by the smog of so many people writing so many truth’s in the sky. They were killed by the truth pollution.
Eventually, we blocked out the sun with our honesty. And it was our frankness that sparked the fall of the remaining population of the world.