A Brief History of the Septhausians, Who Believe Numbers Stop at 1,000

by Karl Lykken

The first recorded history of the inhabitants of Septhauser comes from the much revered Mille, who, after developing their first writing system, also developed a counting system. She recorded the numbers 1 through 1,000 before the onset of her last known development: carpal tunnel.

Little is known of the period directly thereafter, as most of the texts were destroyed after a logician, upon being asked how many words appeared in a certain tome, deduced that since there could be at most 1,000 words in a written work, anything that appeared to have more than 1,000 words could not then be a written work, but could be burnt for warmth. A second purging, this time of appropriately short texts, came about after a precocious student posited that if a text could have 1,000 words, and a word could have more than 1 letter, then a text could have more than 1,000 letters, resulting in the widespread adoption of a new writing system wherein single characters represented entire words, resolving this apparent paradox.

Some time later (it is difficult to say how long exactly, for the Septhausians stopped recording time due to the issues inherent in only being able to measure one thousand units of something that simply refuses to end), the Conference of Elders convened to discuss the troubling spate of murders committed by aspiring parents to free up room in the capped population. While murders for this purpose were nothing new, the recently adopted idea of reincarnation (a logical solution to questions about how there could only have been 1,000 people alive or dead if there were currently 1,000 people alive) led to the specific targeting of individuals the prospective parents would like to have reincarnated as their children, which led to a noticeable decline in the average likability and usefulness of the remaining adult population.

The Conference of Elders, after the bickering that inevitably arose during their discussions since their more affable and charismatic members were all murdered, decided to make a list of 1,000 factors that determined how a child turned out. Upon completing this list, they showed it to the prospective parents, who agreed that every factor included was a valid, if often minor, contributor. After reaching this consensus, the Elders pointed out that if there were 1,000 factors contributing to how a child turned out and the soul to be reincarnated was not among them, the soul in question could not then also be a factor. This conclusion was universally accepted, and murder victims were once again targeted primarily based on opportunity.

After another indeterminate period in which little societal progress was made (unless one counts an increase in brevity stemming from an increased consciousness of the number of words spoken during one’s lifetime), the Septhausians received a visit from an alien race. A spaceship landed in a valley near their town (of course, the Septhausians didn’t accept the concept of valleys due to counting concerns, instead contemplating their planet’s surface only as a whole), and three lifeforms emerged from it. This caused widespread panic, at least until the expectant mothers murdered two of the lifeforms, at which point the panic became the sole property of the last remaining alien (in keeping with the Theory of Conservation of Emotion that explained the senselessness of trying to count mood changes).

How the alien communicated with the Septhausians remains unclear (or, more accurately, became unclear once crammed into sparse Septhausian prose), but somehow he managed to express both shock at and grudging admiration for their way of life. The alien, coming from a planet stripped bare of all its natural resources, marveled at how the Septhausians rationed their supplies without question or complaint. All items being considered inherently limited in number, everything was valued and consumed sparingly, if at all (except for the dead, who were consumed quickly before they went bad). With a stable population that reduced, reused, and recycled everything (even its own members), the Septhausians seemed to the alien to be that rarest of intelligent species: the kind that didn’t threaten to drive itself to extinction (provided no one questioned whether breathing occurs through distinct acts).

Perhaps more than their fitness for survival, though, the alien envied their sense of contentment. At first, he attributed it to their consciousness of the interconnectedness of their world that grew from a refusal to acknowledge its many countable parts. Later, though, the alien deduced that their inner peace had more to do with their belief that they lived in a world of finite (and easily countable) possibilities. There was no pressure to do anything new, given that all 1,000 things had undoubtedly already been done. There was no unending drive to amass more wealth or goods, given that one ran out of wealth and goods to amass fairly quickly. There wasn’t even much to read. There was only to live, die, and be eaten and reborn.

While the Septhausians didn’t put much stock in the alien’s opinions (they deemed him insane due to his insistence that there somehow existed additional living beings besides the alien and the 999 residents of Septhauser), they did appreciate the compliments he paid to their way of life, and that appreciation lived on well after the alien (which, granted, is not much of a milestone given the birth rate on Septhauser).

As such, the fact that little in the way of “societal progress” has been made since the alien’s consumption does not weigh heavily on the inhabitants of Septhauser (particularly not on the writers of their more complete histories). Indeed, when a young scholar proposed the concept of fractions and, by logical extension, that one could define a loaf of bread as a thousandth of a megaloaf of bread rather than a full unit, his peers didn’t get caught up in his excitement. They merely pointed out the clear contradiction that arose if one used his theories of fractions and division to divide 10 by 1/1,000, then proceeded to stone him 1,000 times. 

Bio:
Karl Lykken writes stories and software in Texas. His humor has appeared in Little Old Lady Comedy, Down in the Dingle, and The Big Jewel.