Stress
Angela’s work was tough. At work, she managed people in a large corporation, responsible for their screw ups as well their failures. It was work that ground her down no matter how hard she tried. She brought the tension home. Some evenings, everything her partner did was wrong, the place was filthy, the food tasted bad, her negativity was endless.
She realized she was pushing people away.
Her success gnawed at her, underneath. Her career success and paycheque had short-changed her life. How could she enjoy life when everything felt wrong around her? She had to deal with her stress. But how? She made a list of nice things to say and do–left her uncomfortable.
She did not want her story to end this way. What she had to do was create a society where everyone supervised themselves, where a supervisor such as herself would be irrelevant. She could–Angela was a distinguished psychoneurobiophysist. She created a device sending out waves to influence the human mind, with one purpose: everyone would now take full responsibility for their actions. They would supervise themselves.
She had a long cryogenic nap and woke up ten years later, eager to see the results.
Nothing had changed. No, it was worse. Most people insecure about supervising themselves and asked others supervise them. It led to an authoritarian society, a King in power instead of an elected official. Supervision now extended beyond work. Mothers and fathers officially supervised their children until they were sixty-five. Siblings supervised siblings. Angela was grandfathered back to work only to find her supervision duties were more stressful than before. Plus now she was the head of her extended family, responsible for twenty-four people, including brothers-in-law.
Angela quit her job and opened a drycleaning store where she was the sole employee. Her lesser income demoted her from leading her family (a bonus,) especially when it came to the brothers-in-law. Her spare time was spent trying to create a new device to restore society, but she never found the key. Because she tried, the authoritarian government locked her up.
This also was not how she thought her story would end, spending the rest of her life making licence plates.