Meta & Naming

He made them in his image: blue blobs. They were blue blobs, but some were bluer and some blobber, for diversity but mainly to help him differentiate them. To be fair, some were so much bluer that, by comparison, the lesser blue ones looked green. He didn’t care so much. They seemed promising on their floating rock flying through space. Space was more of a background than anything, but it did give them something nice to look at during the night.

Then, on a Tuesday morning, he remembered because he always crafted clouds on Tuesdays, and it happened just while he was creating cumulonimbus which turned out to be a thunderous success during flood times. Oh yes, on a Tuesday morning it began. One quite green, and by green he meant not so blue, used an old pump he had found in the park, to blow his bike tyres. He pumped, pumped and pumped, so caught up in it that he forgot he was even pumping. The pump hose, under too much pressure, gave up and pumped its last breath as it unscrewed from the tyre. This last breath made its way to the birthday cake of one of the bluest families in the park. And when the kid leaned in to blow out her candles, the breeze had already done it. The dad blob immediately rushed for the green blob and blamed him, his pump and probably the careless member of his community who left it in the park.

He didn’t mind it so much. He had designed them to have quarrels now and then. Equipped with his scuba-diving equipment, he jumped into the mercury sea. He had many designs for new mercuric creatures to experiment with. The surprise came when his blobs developed fishing equipment, and a fishhook descended to scratch his back. Proud of their creativity, he made the fish comestible, which made the fish and chips way more popular than it was already. Curious about what the terrestrial blue blobs had become, He resurfaced after what was probably only a few years.

The world was at war. Two groups divided the populations between the blobests against the bluests.

A dictator blob had decided, decades before, enough was enough and the right ones, the blobests, should stand above the other and lead the planet. On the other side, the bluests had formed an alliance with a government that decreed the first group was dangerous and needed to be controlled for safety reasons. And to add salt on top of that crazy stupidity, on both sides the leaders were basically venerated. Furious at what his creation had become, He instantly wiped out every chain of command, from the lowest soldiers to the highest leaders. Those reduced to dust, He took a much-needed rest with his new creation: aspirin.

When he woke up, time had passed. How long? He didn’t know but the planet was finally silent and at peace. They had progressed at rocket speed. His blobs were flying, teleporting, talking to each other through chocolate ice creams and instantaneously changing clothes thanks to vanilla ones. But when He looked closer, He saw it, the small lines, the cracks, the divisions. Blue blobs only talked to other blue blobs in blue areas with blue walls around them, and green blobs only talked to other green blobs in green areas with green barriers around them.

Curious, he reached them. He asked a blue blob the whys and the blue blob went mad. So, He asked a green one for the same result. Then He realised who he was, and what He looked like. Finally, he crafted himself a mid-blue costume and went back on the planet in this more bearable form to confront his creations. The blue blobs found him too green to be trusted and the green blobs found him too blue to be trusted. Pissed, He burned half of the green areas and half of the blue areas.

He stopped after a century and twenty-two days of rampage. The reason was He had found two strange souls. They were named ’é(-’é”( and è-à_(), but to ease your reading and my diction let’s call them Meta and Naming, because ’é(-’é”( will transform into ‘èè)-‘) and then ‘èà)_’- and nobody wants that.

To summarize their lives: Meta was a blue-tinged blob who loved flowers, and Naming a gentle blob who loved trees. Living on the frontier of a blue-green area, where everyone kept an eye on everyone else, the two blobs forged an unusual friendship. When blue blobs went to church, Naming was inviting his friend to spend time in the local library. When the green blobs were lecturing others on how to behave, Meta dragged Naming in the forest to realise fun experimentations together.

When blue food prices were artificially inflated by green blobs politics, Naming shared his lunches. When blue gangs decided to raid green neighbourhoods at nights, Meta organised pyjama parties with his friends. During university, Meta snuck into green biology classes, while Naming slipped into blue chemistry lessons. He observed them grow, physically, mentally, philosophically. Together, they built their ideal world, just two blobs, hidden away in a secret lab of their own making. In their world, no blob would be repressed for being too blob or not blob enough, no more ridiculous preconceptions about who was more or less blue than whom.

They worked days and nights, month after month, year after year. Whenever doubt crept into one of their minds, the other’s determination crushed it. Miscalculations, ideas, and concepts were challenged in turn. In the shadow of the society, they were crafting its vaccine.

Meta arrived in their lab to find Naming ecstatic.

“We did it!” they screamed to their friend and colleague.

“It’s finally ready!” Meta realised, bursting with joy too.

“No more separation, no meaningless a priori, no more oppression.”

“Altogether,” Meta said, opening his arm to his friend.

“All united,” Naming said, hugging his colleague back.

“Quick! Let me inject it into you, and we’ll both be as blue as the sky!”

“Blue?”