EPT
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Pokemon. You know it. You love it (or else). But… kids game, right? It certainly appears very innocent. However, like so many things, Pokemon is far more than what it seems.
The Pokemon universe is a utopia. There is no war, no slavery (we think), and no apparent misogyny or racism (very few racial characteristics at all, but no matter). Parents allow their children to go on city-spanning, life-changing adventures without fear of murder, mugging, or, at the very least, education deprivation. You’d think that’d be incredible enough. But the Pokemon universe has also cured all illnesses. Burns? No problem. They can be healed without the need for skin grafts, leaving no scars. Paralysis is a thing of the past; a quick visit to any basic medical center can fix what we know to be a lifelong condition. MIRACLES, but that’s not all. Poisons… please. All varieties, from rat to arsenic, are no cause for concern. Narcolepsy and all other sleeping disorders: irrelevant. And confusion? Everything from dementia to Alzheimer’s could fall under that label, all vanish like the common cold. Easier, in fact, since the cold has no cure. On top of all of this, any flesh wound, no matter how dire, is mendable.
How are these feats of medical science accomplished? Why, through the Pokemon Centers, of course! That’s right: completely free clinics that are in every major town. As an aside, this implies that AT LEAST the provinces of Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, and Unova have some sort of socialist, if not communist, if not anarchic mode of government (I tend towards the latter since there are no discernible authoritative bodies save the Pokemon League, who spend all their time in strangely decorated rooms, and the “International Police,” who enlist 10-year olds). But that’s not the point. The point is that every town has a 24-hour hospital that treats the injured without need of payment. (You can argue that this is only for Pokemon; we’ll get to that) But how do they do it? Well, Pokemon retreat into their balls and after a few seconds on a hexagonal plate, everything is just fine. …wait, WHAT? There’s no invasive surgery, no debilitating medication, no casts, needles, or gauze? Just pretty-pretty lights and suddenly everything is better?! YUP. And while we’re on the subject, how do these potentially massive creatures get into those balls anyways? I mean, some of them weigh thousands of pounds, are large enough to dwarf buildings, or, you know, have created the universe. Through what mechanism do monsters that far exceed human size fit into palm-sized capsules and heal miraculously in seconds?
A scientific breakthrough that I’ll call data transformation or digitization is the root cause of these physical improbabilities, as well as the technological locus of the Pokemon universe. If Pokemon training, catching, and utilization is the most important aspect of the Poke-verse, it could only be so through digitization. Somehow, someone figured out how to turn inanimate objects (like potions and TMs) and living beings into data. Thus, gigantic and terrifying Pokemon can be stored in Pokeballs, sleeping as trillions of 1′s and 0′s until recalled into existence as matter. And those Pokeballs themselves can be digitized, allowing hundreds of Pokemon to be stored in computers, along with Paralyze Heals, Chesto Berries, Exp. Shares, and HMs. This ability to transmute matter into data packets may be the most astonishing part of the Pokemon universe. Imagine being able to move your entire apartment by turning furniture into lines of code, then carrying your laptop to your new place. Food could be digitally synthesized, coded then made real, eliminating hunger across the globe. Terminal illnesses and devastating injuries are simply bugs in the code, bugs which are resolvable through a simple Pokemon Center hotfix. Easy as pie.
But digitization has other, more fiendish, implications. We’re told that Pokemon have complex personalities, great intelligence, and powerful abilities. If this is true, then we can assume that they are at least as physically and mentally complex as humans. Neither of these intricacies stymie the digitization process. So we can discern that if Pokemon can be stored as data, so can people. On one hand, this means that people can benefit from the boons typically attributed with Pokemon, such as free and instantaneous health care. On the other hand, there could be many nefarious uses of this technology. At the very least, items and currency (less complex than either Pokemon or people) can be widely counterfeited, perhaps explaining why health care is free and government is essentially non-existent: any attempt to govern or tax could be simply circumvented and collapsed by enough trade in counterfeit goods. (Note that this doesn’t explain why items still cost money; perhaps they are just sold to those too poor to maintain digitizing hardware). Slavery could be rampant and wide-spread, since human trafficking simply requires someone adept enough to capture people with the human equivalent of a Pokeball. (We can assume that the protagonist of the series never comes into contact with this because, you know, the protagonist is 10) And anyone who is digitized could be modified in the same way that “disease bugs” are patched. Upload a captured human and add a few new lines of code, and evil-doers (this is the kind of activity Team Rocket would support, I’m sure) could completely alter someone’s personality or physical form (which might be cool… imagine having a few extra arms or being able to breathe fire)
Yet these are suppositions, natural extensions of the idea of digitization. With what evidence of data transformation do the protagonists of Pokemon interact every day? First of all, there are rampant indications of human data recreation in the hordes of Nurse clones that populate the Pokemon Centers. Pretend they’re cousins all you want, Brock; they’re reproductions of the same Nurse code, installed in towns to ensure the exact same care in each center. If one ever fails to perform the expected and necessary functions, another can be downloaded from the PC to replace the malfunctioning unit. Clearly the various Teams across the provinces employ the same strategies: each grunt is more or less the same, down to the Pokemon they possess. The only purpose of breeding (Pokemon or otherwise) is to create new genetic traits, strengths, and personalities through random mutations, which still seem to be beyond the technology of the Poke-verse.
This technology also provides an answer to question a long-unanswered question: why would the parents of the protagonists would allow them to venture out into the world alone at their age? The answer is now simple: Parents have nothing to fear because their children’s data is already stored within their computers, a backup of their lives merely a click away. If their child were to be harmed in any way, they could be rebooted from the latest backup, a perfect recreation of that child immediate before they left home. Furthermore, it explains why schooling is unnecessary: Children (and, by extension, all people) can be programmed with all the information they’d ever need. Such knowledge would be inserted directly into their brains to guarantee they were set for life in terms of arithmetic, geography, Pokemon care, and more. But that’s not the only place your data could be used. At the end of Pokemon battles in which you are defeated, the protagonist mysteriously “whites out” and comes to in the nearest Pokemon Center. How do you get there? Why do you “white out”? This cannot be chalked up to the mere loss of consciousness. Instead, we can surmise that when your final Pokemon falls, there is nothing to protect you from the incredible might of the opponent’s Pokemon. Without defenses, the flames or ice or steel overtake and kill you, causing the “white out” effect. Then the Trainer Backup Program initiates, and all your memories are loaded into a new body, ready to continue your mission (albeit with a bit less money).
Pokemon is not a world without death, as we are led to believe. It is a world where death is commonplace and effortless, but unimportant. Trainers and Pokemon die every single day, but no one cares because their bodies are thoughtlessly downloaded and redeployed. In the Pokemon world, we are immortal. So long as the servers hold our data, there can be no death, much less disease, hunger, or even age. But humanity itself has changed drastically: clones are widespread, memories are alterable and reproducible, and you can never know when a human poacher might stalk you from the shadows and put you in a Person-ball with neither warning nor compassion. You might even have contingencies for that, and, while your “original” was subjected to forced labor, you could fork yourself off your main branch of memory code and pick up where you left off. Maybe this time you’ll program yourself to be a bit more careful. But hey, at least you’ll never be sick!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
You can find this post and many more at the N3rd Dimension.
