The town council of Happy Pleasant Hills, Indiana was getting increasingly worried about how the town seemed to be losing its wholesomeness, its purity, its inner beauty. Young people and some old weird ex-hippy types were trying to make changes.
They’d congregate in the town parks and talk to each other. What could they be saying? Old people and young people don’t talk to each other in Happy Pleasant Hills. Young people ride their skateboards and try to knock over the old people and the senior citizens, feeling under attack try to run them over with their cars.
But something was changing and the council decided it was important to keep an eye on things.
The town had a multi million dollar grant from the US military for some of its surplus equipment. Happy Pleasant Hills already picked up a couple of nice tanks, an armored car and 40 assault rifles and a grenade launcher for its 8 man police force but it knew it needed to be more proactive, to know what was coming and shut it down before any of their police got hurt.
It decided to pick up a massive, bionic eye with artificial intelligence and mount it on the water tower where it could see the whole town. The eye, called HORUS-1 also has hearing capabilities and can pick up a whisper from across town, filter out any traffic or wind and record exactly what is being said and identify the speaker.
It’s been a huge success. Ever person in the region has been observed and all their biometrics recorded. Every single conversation in town has been recorder and audited for about 12,000 keywords that indicate grumpiness. Grumpy people are usually not very happy.
Naturally this has made everyone in Happy Pleasant Hills feel much more secure and even happier. They thought about renaming the town Happier Happy Hills but didn’t want to spend the money to redo the signs.
The crime rate has dropped to below zero. They’ve hire 4 more police officers and picked up another surplus tank. The local paper is full of feel good stories and no one every stands up and makes a scene at school board meetings or town hall. No one ever speeds and there hasn’t been a parking violation in ages.
This has attracted some attention from the national media who’ve done a few stories on the town. Every time Happy Pleasant Hills gets featured on national news, tons of people come to town looking for places to buy and move in. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them do not qualify. Occasionally an unqualified person moves in but HORUS 1 quickly identifies them and they tend not to stay.
It’s the perfect small town.
