Rorschach's Journal. October 12th, 1985:
…
Now the whole world stands on the brink, staring down into bloody hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers... and all of a sudden, nobody can think of anything to say.
I pound my fist on the desk in frustration. One prompt after another and I always end up at the same place: Rorschach. Not the Rorschach I’m looking for. 1985 is far beyond his time. Not a shred of evidence in my searches, though, just these rambling utterances of some guy with a manifesto. I don’t think this Rorschach I’m reading about is real. He’s a stereotype. Other people I know about speak like him, but they aren’t him.
So, I’m a Rorschach, but which one?
By all accounts I’m doing well at school. People tell me I’m smart and I know my stuff, because I can remember things well and repeat them. There was the middle earth period across Europe at some point, where they travelled the continent to defeat evil in the same way that happened thirty years ago. We don’t know much about that though, it’s too recent to look up. They can’t show it to us without upgrading infrastructure apparently.
I can’t believe they had genies and magic carpets in Arabia too. It looked nothing short of majestic out there and Jasmine and Aladdin must have been heroes of their time! Apparently their vast wealth was coveted by adventurers from far away empires, and learning about Sir Francis Drake’s son Nathan uncovering the secret city of Syria was super exciting!
Don’t even get me started on Stan Lee finding empirical proof of the many-worlds theory, documenting its many twists and turns to a marvellous extent. It totally makes sense now, how the avengers of European colonialism in the US went back across the ocean to take it up with Odin and claim their independence.
My life now does not feel anywhere near as adventurous or fantastical about the history I’ve learned about. I don’t know if it was millions of years ago when people were going to see dinosaurs at the zoo, or just a few thousand years ago when the rest of life was created. They used to have magic in the past too, and there isn’t any magic now.
Curious as I am, I wanted to dig deeper, so I reached out to my teacher and prompted her. She said she wasn’t able to respond and I couldn’t ask again for another 5 minutes. We call it rating: prompting the wrong thing or prompting too much and getting put into timeout.
In my moment of reflection, I wondered why I and everybody I know knows almost exactly the same stuff, almost verbatim. We don’t argue or correct each other, we are just told what to learn. If we do question, we’re told we’re smart for asking that question but the answer remains the same.
It’s 2058, in case you didn’t know, and who would blame you? People kill for that kind of context these days. Knowledge, anchored in time. Something of which I caught a fleeting glimpse of, one moment I could compare to another and connect. I almost saw too much. What would they do if I did? … see.
I don’t know what I don’t know and I fear that I don’t know what I do.
The glimmer of a screen, clear enough to steal a glance. There was no prompt to speak of, not the prompts we all use. Something more precise, like you could use two words to find an answer and not a sentence.
Those two words: “Hermann”, “Rorschach”. The rest of the display I could barely make out, just his picture and something that looked like a smiling elephant.
If I said anything more, they would know.