An excerpt from The Day Humanity Decided:

This tree exuded a demeanor relentlessly proud. In a strange way, the tree gave the people a feeling of hope that there was something beyond smallness. Over many generations, small had become quite wearisome. It was boring, and well, small. Of course it was against the rules to think about anything outside of small, so it was best to keep those feelings to one’s self.

The biggest problem with the tree (for Tyrannicus) was, of course, that it was altogether contrary to The Rule of Small. Here was an object that defied The Tyrannicus Rex Official History of The Land of Small (kept in a special hall, separate from The Tyrannicus Rex Family Record Book for safe keeping), which stated that everything in The Land of Small had always been small, and in fact, small was the most natural thing in the world. What other way could or should it be? If the history books said it was so, then it must be so.

The narrative of small may have stuck ad infinitum, except for that darned tree. For reasons Tyrannicus could not fathom, more and more the people were beginning to question it. If everything had always been small, and it was natural to be small, then why was that mysterious huge tree in the middle of the square? Where did it come from?

It was not man-made; it was a tree for heaven’s sake, and a tree (being of Nature) was about as natural as you could get. Beyond that, why were the Tyrannicus Rexes so obsessed with removing it? Secretly The People of the Land of Small loved that sad, big tree, so it did raise questions.

To say that this whole situation was very irritating to Tyrannicus would be a massive understatement. He just wanted to live the easy life, but when the people questioned, this required making up new rules. Rules took time to make and enforce, but what else was one to do? It was exhausting, really.

Tyrannicus decided to delegate some of the rule making work. At first it started small, just a couple of people to oversee The Records of Rules of the Land of Small. They’d come to work and pore over the existing records, and then they’d put their heads together to suggest some new rules for the King to edict.

He was very pleased with their work. What he noticed right away was that as The Committee of Rules for the Land of Small made up new rules, it was pretty much impossible to publish them daily. The People of the Land of Small would dutifully wait for the next proclamations, but if they happened to miss an announcement and accidentally break a new rule, it wasn’t his fault, was it?

He hired more rule advisors, and rule making took on a life of its own in the kingdom. The people were now more fearful, which worked in Tyrannicus’s favor. They were so preoccupied trying to keep track of the new rules and the fines they might get if they broke them, they almost stopped thinking about the big tree in the square. Almost… but Tyrannicus would soon discover that in another part of The Land of Small, Nature was conspiring against him…

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This has been an excerpt from The Day Humanity Decided. It’s a free download as both PDF and EPUB in my ebookstore. Here is the link.

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