I often find satire to be one of the most powerful tools not just to tell a story, but to simply tell the truth. What a dense policy paper might obscure with data and jargon, a brief, sharp satirical piece can instantly illuminate. It has a way of cutting straight to the absurdity of human behavior, exposing hypocrisy or misplaced priorities by merely holding up a distorted mirror. It grants us permission to laugh at the very things that frustrate us in reality, making complex, painful truths instantly recognizable.
It's why a story like Dataius visiting Stoian resonates so deeply with me. I feel they can weave together profound, human statements that last long after the specific technologies or policies they critique have faded, like the distinct flavor of a bob chorba that you can truly only find in Bulgaria. While I appreciate the need for rigorous analysis and fact-checking to build a solid foundation of understanding, I believe satire offers a deeper kind of insight—an emotional and philosophical truth.
Let us begin.
It was generally agreed, at least by the Committee for General Agreement, that the year 3025 had solved experience. It was inefficient, after all—slow, unpredictable, susceptible to dirt. The Committee found a way to replace it with something cleaner: comprehensive knowledge. Everyone wore cranial bands that hummed softly with the sum of human information. Babies were born pre-certified in philosophy; lovers whispered footnotes; wars were settled by citation. No one had to try anything. No one had to fail. No one, strictly speaking, had to live.
Enter Dataius the Great, a tall, polished man of polite eyebrows and a stainless vocabulary. His mouth was a well-behaved library; his hands were the ornamental kind that point at bar charts. He wore a white suit with many pockets, each pocket containing a smaller suit. He was the Future, appointed by the Committee to conduct an educational courtesy call on the Past—specifically, to enlighten a representative primitive in the best practices of knowledge. This would, by mandate, be a mutually respectful exchange. The Past would receive knowledge. The Future would receive gratitude. There would be a certificate.
The temporal portal opened with a discreet sound, the sort of cough one gives in a quiet museum. On the other side lay a hard Balkan winter afternoon in a small Bulgarian village that had not yet heard of hashtags, dopamine loops, or artisanal pillows. Children chased a hoop and a sheep at the same time; the hoop rolled downhill, the sheep ran uphill, and both proved equally uncooperative. Smoke stitched the sky. Somewhere, a goat rehearsed a proverb.
Stoian was mending a boot with a nail he had found in a barn beam that had surrendered long ago. He looked up at the shimmer and spat into the snow. The snow, Bulgarian as ever, was used to such treatment.
“Good day,” said Dataius, stepping out of the portal and immediately slipping on honesty. He corrected his posture and lifted his smile. “I am Dataius the Great. I bring knowledge.”
“Fair exchange,” Stoian said, testing the nail with two skeptical fingers. “I bring weather.”
They regarded each other as if both were responsible for the climate. A third figure stumbled out of the portal, flustered, carrying a clipboard with nothing written on it and everything implied. He wore a tie that apologized for its own existence.
“I’m Middleton,” he said, “from the Department of Present Affairs. I’ll be ensuring this conversation remains civil. I also handle refreshments, if the century provides any.”
“There’s rakia,” Stoian said. “It’s strong right now, but you can chew it.”
Middleton made a note: Chew rakia.
Dataius’s smile expanded until it threatened to become sincere. “Mr. Stoian, I come from an age where knowledge has been perfected. We’ve synthesized the total content of human learning. We can tell you everything about everything.”
“Can you fix a boot?” Stoian asked.
“We have ten thousand tutorials.”
“Can you fix a boot?”
Dataius’s smile recalibrated to Presentation Mode. “Boots are a legacy interface for legacy terrain. In the future we levitate over problems. There is no mud, only metadata.”
Stoian nodded, impressed by the audacity of a sentence with no oxygen in it. He finished the boot, tugged it over his foot, and stood. The boot obeyed gravity and gratitude. “Walk with me,” he said.
They passed the goat, which regarded Dataius with Balkan skepticism, and crossed to a pot simmering over a small fire. Inside, a bob chorba (bean soup) of stubborn beans conducted a quiet negotiation. Stoian lifted the lid and inhaled a history that did not require accreditation.
“Recipe?” Dataius asked, brightening. “I have databases. Not just recipes—metarecipes. Median heat distributions. Bayesian spice forecasts. Ancestral palates reconstructed from dental records. We can simulate your great-great-grandmother’s soup and correct her errors.”
Stoian dipped a wooden spoon into the pot and tasted. He winced, then grinned with the sheer pleasure of being burned. “It’s ready,” he said.
“How do you know?” Middleton asked, genuinely curious.
“Because it burned me the right amount,” Stoian said. “And because beans don’t lie. As the old women say, ‘Every bean has its Sunday.’”
“We eliminated error rates,” Dataius offered.
“You eliminated the way,” Stoian said.
Middleton lifted a tentative spoonful and blew on it as if negotiating surrender. “Perhaps,” he ventured, “perhaps there’s a synthesis: knowledge to guide, experience to verify—”
Stoian waved him quiet. “Let the man demonstrate.” He handed Dataius the spoon. “Taste the beans.”
Dataius glanced at the spoon as if it were a complicated document requiring signatures in triplicate. “We generally consume in pill form,” he said. “Standardized nutrients, perfectly balanced.”
“Balanced means boring,” Stoian said. “Taste.”
Dataius tasted. The chorba startled him. It was not correct; it was alive. It did not align to policy; it aligned to appetite. It spoke of beans that had argued with frozen soil, of a hand that had learned fire by blister, of a tongue educated by scarcity.
“We can produce this flavor in a lab,” Dataius said, coughing up a fraction of humility.
“No,” Stoian said, and the word landed like a log thrown onto the fire. “You can produce this taste. Flavor is memory. Memory is pain remembered with affection. You can’t synthesize affection.”
Middleton scribbled again: Flavor ≠ taste. Memory = pain + affection. He underlined affection twice and circled it until the page felt dizzy.
They moved on to the edge of the village, where a field kept a strict diet of snow. Stoian pointed to a line of stones. “That’s where my father died. That’s where I learned the weight of a shovel. That’s where my mother taught me that grief is what you do, not what you feel.”
Dataius adjusted his cuff, where the nanofabric hem kept trying to invent an applause function. “We have coping frameworks,” he said gently. “Validated models. Scales for grief intensity. Protocols for grief efficiency.”
“Did you bury anyone?” Stoian asked.
“We outsourced burial centuries ago,” Dataius said softly, surprised to find a bruise forming under a word.
“Then you’ve measured grief,” Stoian said, “but you haven’t carried it. As we say here: ‘A full belly does not believe in hunger.’”
Middleton cleared his throat. “Perhaps the distinction here—”
“Middleton,” Stoian said, “you’re a bridge made of fog.”
“Thank you,” Middleton said reflexively, then considered resigning the century.
They returned to the center of the village, where three men were noisily debating the economics of goats. The goat maintained a neutral expression that suggested both guilt and innocence. One of the men asked whether Stoian’s guests were useful. Another asked whether he could borrow their coats for a few minutes to investigate “modern warmth.”
Dataius brightened. “I can forecast goat milk yields across decades with my cranial suite,” he said. “I can optimize your herd allocation. I can eradicate randomness.”
“Randomness keeps stories interesting,” Stoian said.
“It also kills children,” Dataius said, sharper now, the edge of his suit finally meeting the air.
“Sometimes,” Stoian agreed. “And sometimes it kills cowardice. Sometimes it kills illusions. Do you plan to optimize those too?”
Middleton stepped between them, palms raised like two white flags stitched together. “Gentlemen, if we could avoid—”
But the men had already softened. Dataius realized the Past did not respect him, and discovered the experience of humility—its temperature, its texture, the way it filled the lungs and sat down beside pride without asking.
A bell rang: a piece of metal hung from a beam and obeyed its vocation. The village gathered, the way Bulgarians do when the day remembers it is finite. A young woman stood with a parchment that looked like a rumor made solid.
“Reading lesson,” she announced.
Stoian gestured. “Come, Dataius. Teach them.”
Dataius smiled the way a man smiles when asked to donate blood: agreeable, pale. He began with phonemes. He told them about the marvelous history of letters, how alphabets migrated like stubborn birds. He explained how reading rewires the brain, which was technically true and practically irrelevant to the children blinking at him with the purest boredom in the Balkans.
Stoian stepped forward. He picked up a burnt stick and drew in the snow: a crude goat, a man, a fence. He drew the fence open. He drew the man smiling. He drew the man sleeping. He drew the goat outside the fence, also smiling.
“What does it say?” he asked.
The children laughed. “Close the fence,” one shouted. “Or you’ll be hungry!”
“And that,” Stoian said, “is reading.”
The children broke into a horo, circling the goat until even the goat began to shuffle its hooves in rhythm.
Dataius felt something in him tilt. He realized he was not demonstrating; he was being demonstrated to. He had come to deliver knowledge and had received a boot to the idea that knowledge arrives only in books. The boot fit.