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Preface to the Book "Human Inhuman Vol.2" by Luca Motolese

Mattia Motolese · 2024

At first glance it was a rocky globe like many others, classified as a planet, but too elusive to fall into the orbit of any ordinary star. It drifted aimlessly, solitary and neglected even by the most tenacious explorers of the galactic empire. Not even in the eyes of the space monkeys did L74M hold the slightest economic appeal, since on it grew nothing but colossal brambles of grey matter, stretching from the arid surface beyond the boundaries of the ionosphere, as if to protect it from the abuses of the democratic dictatorship.
Had there only been some ocean to make life on it more prosperous, thousands of colonists would have landed like ants to extract nourishment, manipulate its coasts and found commercial ports from which to draw vast sources of profit until they drained it, as had already happened to planet Earth. Yet L74M was so bare and hostile to civilised life that it was left in peace, free of any form of law or government.
In short, no one would have suspected that, well hidden in the planet's depths, a complex labyrinth of luxuriant tunnels and caves lay secretly concealed. Down there grew flowers of never-before-seen colours, entire green valleys to be ridden through on horseback, cotton clouds and linen castles, held up by wooden structures but powered by the flow of electric currents, tending toward indigo like the sky of those underground lands that the Akira called home.
It was a matter of isolationism. The desire to remain undisturbed characterised those lands; the dream of quiet ran in the veins of the people of L74M as the lust for power instead infected the space monkeys from the dawn of time. Yet even so, given the creative nature of the Akira, it proved impossible to turn their backs on the injustices of the galactic empire.
Here and there across the vastness of the infinite, worlds waged war on one another while bureaucratic cobwebs made life impossible for the hungry but easier for the sated nazis. So L74M unanimously decreed a compromise with itself: the Akira would send indigo and flowers, cotton, wood and linen into outer space, mixing them into the already overloaded postal system of the thousand civilised worlds; they truly could not let the empire win — the space monkeys who toasted after every massacre, every mockery, every appliance worn out by planned obsolescence, and on the highest note of every curse of the repressed working class.
Certainly the message would be delivered some centuries late; the galactic empire would attempt to erase those traces of divergent thought from its computer system; but somewhere, at least someone, would find a treasure on the doormat, in the letterbox or resting on the windscreen of a car run dry.
So, to be somehow satisfied with their contribution, the inhabitants of L74M needed only to think of the smile of the lucky ones who, quietly expecting to collect a fine or a tax notice, would instead think:
Perhaps a better world exists.