text: I didn’t even believe that the stories were true until I saw my Grandpa’s head explode. I was young, although I don’t know what age--I asked him a question, something about spiders. I saw his face contort, scared, knowing what could happen...but he couldn’t resist reaching for his illegal encyclopedia to answer me. All it took was a few seconds of concentrated reading. I watched his head swell, and then there was a sound like a beach ball being stabbed, and another sound like a cannonball smashing a brick wall, and then the pink, white, and red contents of his head were covering me and every wall of his study, and I was crying, and my parents ran in and picked me up and brought me to a big building with white walls that they never told me the name of. I sustained a significant amount of facial trauma from various pieces of his skull (surprisingly heavy and sharp), and I was permanently, illegally referred to as “Dented Girl” by several of the other kids in the Nothing Building (naming things was strictly forbidden--but of course the cruelty of children respects no law). My parents told me to do my best to forget what the inside of a human head looked like but that was pretty much out of the question. The only thing my parents really explained to me about the whole thing was that I was lucky to be alive. Hundreds of people died from skull explosions yearly, the exact causes varying from throat lacerations from sharp pieces of bone to shock-induced heart attacks. Standard practice was to never be in the same room as anyone who could be absorbing any sort of information. This was pithily expressed through the slogan: “*If they’re learnin’, start your legs-a-churnin’!”* This was the only thing we learned in Nothing Building, as was its design. The only thing they taught you there was the name and the slogan--everything else was as boring as possible. It didn’t always used to be like this--human beings didn’t have to avoid knowledge and information like the plague just to get a chance to breed, to sit around in ignorance all day staring at plain white walls, wishing their skull would burst just to stop the boredom. There are millions of books (now banned or burned or chucked in the ocean, on account of how many people they kill) that tell of a world where humans spent their whole lives pursuing knowledge without fear, where humanity’s whole *purpose* was to gain information and share it with others and remember it and build off of it and grow. Then sometime, somehow, a few hundred years ago, things got all switched up and a finite limit was mysteriously set on every human being who was born after the year 2035-- absorb enough information, be it facts or colors or words or places or names, and Boom. Your head explodes, *forcefully*\--and no one knows why, or who, or what did this to everyone. Multiple efforts have been made to quantify the exact amount of information that makes you burst, but most of the studies have just resulted in the researchers’ own cranium-shrapnel destroying all of their work before they reach any sort of conclusion. Anyway-- Colleges, schools, employee training centers, everything that could teach anyone *anything* was shut down, and every aspect of human life was stripped down to its barest essential. All that mattered now was living long enough to produce offspring and to take care of them and survive. The human race stagnated completely, and there seems to be no hope of ever moving forward. People just don't have the capacity to figure out a way forward anymore. Three hundred years of ignorance. There are hundreds of theories about why humanity had this deadly learning limiter placed on it. Some people think we hit some sort of evolutionary boundary--the world became too dense and complex, and our brains rebelled against us, sick of absorbing so much insane information day after day, and they explosively forced us back into being simple, base animals. Some people think this has made us happier, that the human race’s biggest mistake was pursuing knowledge and growth. These people are also stupid, on account of never learning anything. Not their fault--but the truth. Others think that there’s some sort of shadow government, installing knowledge-sensitive explosives in every citizen’s brain, so that the populace can never be informed, and they can bask in the wealth of the world forever without any fear of an educated citizenry rising up against them. The theory most people came to accept that this was simply the intervention of God--like the Tower of Babel, God reached down and stopped us before we reached him. But I don’t think that theory’s right. I don't think any of them are. I’ve done research--despite what I know it’ll do to me. I’m not sure how much information it takes to pop a head, but I think I've finally found a fair amount of proof that supports one idea *why*. I’ve had to focus my research on one very particular area, for obvious reasons. I wanted to give proper exposition before my thesis, for readers who are hopefully reading this in the far future when everything is better--but before I get into that I'll say a few words on myself, to establish trust. Some book I read said it's important that the reader trust the writer when attempting to write a persuasive paper. So. My name's Penelope Evans. I gave myself that name after a researcher who wrote one of the few unburned books I've found--some book about bugs. Funny enough, it answered the question I asked my Grandpa a long time ago. I don’t know how old I am--measuring time was done away with a long time ago. I just know I look much younger than everyone I know and I feel so much older and I know that I’m going to die very, very soon. I’ve read as many books as I could get my hands on, I’ve seen new things every day--I've been so careless with my life because I just want to find the *answer*. I want to get humanity out of this 300-year rut. I’ve of course never been loved or had anyone talk to me for any period of time since I was a kid--I’m far too reckless with learning and people know to *get those legs a’ churnin’,* so to speak. They’re right to. It just feels so *unfair.* I dedicate my life to trying to fix humanity and all I get is loneliness and death. I want to say before I start that I don’t think I’m better than all the people who do the standard societal pipeline of nameless childhood to ten years in the Nothing Building staring at the ceiling until they hit puberty, onto motherhood and fatherhood to death at 80. They’re good and they’re necessary and they’re probably a lot happier than me. I'm sorry. I know I'm stalling. Now that it’s time to actually say what I have to say I realize I’m terrified to. . I’m so afraid that I'll start writing my theory on why everything is like this now and it'll spark some thought or insight and I’ll die before I finish and I'll paint this tiny basement I'm writing in with pink and white and red just like Grandpa. I can feel how close I am to popping. I wanted to wait until I had absorbed nearly my limit of information so I could have the vocabulary and experience and wisdom to write this *perfectly* but now I’m so scared that I went too far. I wish I could forget *anything.* I just need to finish this, God. I need to finish this. This is all I have. This is all I’ve been allowed to choose for myself. Excuse me for writing my thoughts but I feel that I have only a little time left and I would rather have my readers know what happened then leave them in ignorance. My head hurts so bad. No one ever tells you that your head hurts this much before it happens and now that I know that I am one piece of information closer. Fuck. Shit. I'm sorry. I need to get back on track. There are so many things I wish I could say now that I know this is the last thing I’ll ever write. There are so many things I wish I could have done. I wish I had never learned anything. All it’s given me is a yearning for everything I’ll never have. I'm sorry, reader. I need to say what I told you I was going to say otherwise I've just wasted your time. Please know I wrote this with the best of intentions. Sorry. Of course *now*, as I feel my head stretching and screaming, I realize my theory on why this all is happening is clearly, ridiculously wrong. How horrible is it that one has to be knowledgeable to know that ignorance is really bliss? I wish I could go back. I wish I could be new again. I'm sorry. My hypothesis was going to be that humans became this way because we were scared of what we could become--I thought we were so close to pure enlightenment through learning that we somehow violently regressed, just before we touched the sky of human knowledge and achievement and *figured it all out*, you know? I thought we just couldn’t let ourselves win. Humanity's always been locked in a struggle for meaning and maybe we got so close and we stopped ourselves because we were afraid of what might lie on the other side of *finally knowing the answer.* I had so many sources and quotes that I felt pointed to this...so much data... I literally lost my life for this. I thought I could find the answer if I just looked hard enough. I thought there had to be an answer. God damn it. I'm really sorry. Now the only thing I see, after my life of looking, is that my knowledge has confused me completely. I don’t think ignorance is the answer. I don’t. I don’t. But I don’t know what is. I don’t think knowledge is, either. Maybe God did do this to everyone. Maybe he was right to do this.