Comparing And Contrasting...

Hey Everyone!! :-)

Here's a little bit more of the third installment in the Petri Dish Chronicles! As always, the disclaimer is that this is a draft and, as such, it's unedited and likely full of errors and is subject to revision, revamping, and being completely scrapped and rewritten. But, with that in mind, I'm reasonably satisfied with the basics of it, at least at the moment, or I wouldn't have bothered posting it. Enjoy! :-)

Excerpt from the third Petri Dish book:
Life on Zanzibar was similar to life on Upworld in some regards. There were spectator sports that provided quasi-violent entertainment similar to, but less than, what the snuff houses in Under City had offered. Participants in the sports might be injured, but there were rules and protections in place, with medical treatment given afterwards. And anyone who participated did so of their own, free will. There were mind and mood-altering substances available for the populace to amuse themselves with, but they were manufactured under carefully controlled and regulated conditions with strict adherence to guidelines regarding potency, so the often extreme and bizarre side effects suffered by the customers of the dust houses on Upworld were absent. Zanzibar had its dollies, but they were unionized and protected under the law. A world that guaranteed sex workers rights was a particularly pleasant surprise for Petri. All the same drives and desires were present, Petri guessed they were just universal to most intelligences, but they were all just…softened. All the harsh, hard edges of things on Upworld had been rounded and smoothed on Zanzibar.

It had taken her a while to figure out why, when people clearly wanted the same things, there was such a difference between the two worlds. But it wasn’t until she spent several weeks wandering the streets of Zang, Zanzibar’s capital city, that the reason dawned on her. There were no real slums here. There were parts of the city that had larger homes and other parts of the city that had smaller homes, parts of the city where the apartment buildings were older than the buildings in some of the other parts of the city, but everything was well-maintained and in good repair. And the city was clean. Not just free of garbage littering the ground, but truly clean. The air was fresh and free of pollutants, the water was pure and sweet, and there were no vermin infesting the structures or streets.

The people themselves were taken care of as well. There were no sick or injured people to be found lying in gutters or alleyways waiting for time or those who preyed upon the weak to end their suffering. Everyone had a home and enough to eat. People who required medical assistance were taken to hospitals and received the treatment they needed.

It wasn’t that it was impossible for people on Zanzibar to have bad luck or make bad choices and end up in trouble; it was that there was a limit to how deep that trouble could get. The society the people on Zanzibar had created provided a safety net to catch those who stumbled on their path in life. There were still rich people and people who were not rich, but no one on this planet was destitute. And since there were no deep pits for people to drag themselves out of, it was much easier for those who wanted to work to pull themselves up the ladder of success.