(OMG I was looking for some picture for this microstory, and when I saw this guy, I fell instantly in love. Isn’t he hilariously disgusting? No pornographic picture would come close to the tickling of imagination that the picture ellicits. What is this dude watching?! Yeah, whatever you’re picturing in your mind, that’s on you, my dear dirty reader!)

This scene was originally placed after the chapter “The Carnival Committee” (Dreamtech #3), but I decided to remove it. It was superfluous to the plot, and didn’t quite bring the tone I was looking for at that point. Still, I think it’s fun, so here you go.

“Porn,” Professor Miyagi begins, as he sweeps a serene look across the amphitheater, “is humanity’s secret weapon.”

The frozen scene in the middle of the auditorium is still displaying in full sensual detail the orgy of sweat, bodies and sex of Aline’s permascape, attracting far more gazes than the professor, pacing the stage with his hands behind his back.

“Some branches of academia sustain that porn rams through history as a side effect—an accident of our primal drives hidden beneath the currents of human progress. I say that’s a pile of bull, people. Porn is much more than that. Porn is powerful. Porn makes human progress. History gives us many examples to name. Anybody dare a try?”

The students exchange puzzled looks and giggles, but nobody does, indeed, dare.

Miyagi smiles. “Okay, what about, say, literature? Writing? The printing press? Yeah, bible printing was a good business after Gutenberg’s invention, but the real money was in the clandestine presses, spreading erotic fantasies like fire in the dry fields of illiteracy. And what do you say about the cultural revolutions of the nineteenth century? Photography and then cinematography finally turning every human into a voyeur. And we’re just getting started. The twentieth century brought the television, the computer, the Internet. Thirty percent of the infrastructure of the Information Age was built to feed nonstop porn to the masses. Try to wrap your heads around that number, people. Thirty! Percent! I mean,” he chuckles, “porn made the Information Age. And then, porn made the Golden Age of the twenty-first century. Think about it: miniaturization, robotics, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, brain-machine interfaces, the Sensonet, you name it. Each new advance inevitably propelled into every home, into every pocket, into every brain,” he allows a theatrical pause for maximum effect, “by the power of porn.”

Miyagi walks patiently until the laughter finally wanes.

“Yes, yes, you laugh. But I’m dead serious. What porn touched, thrived. You know what porn couldn’t touch?” He tilts his head at his audience, as if it wasn’t a rhetorical question. “Environment, climate, space. Yeah. Those. And what have we got to show for today, huh? A depleted planet in intensive care, and a third attempt at getting our asses off Earth. Ah…” He lets out a dramatic sigh, and raises his brow to the ceiling, shaking his long gray hair aside with the exaggeration of an amateur actor. “If only we could get more porn into ecological engineering or space exploration, there would be no stopping humankind!”

He raises both hands in a dramatic gesture at the floating scene. “That, people—what we’ve just witnessed—was the first documented usage of dreamtech porn in history. And once more—as our nature dictates—it happened mere days after humanity’s first encounter with the new technology.”