The year is 2025. Three years ago, the TRIUMF particle accelerator malfunctioned and created a physics-y dome over the entire campus, trapping everybody inside on the last day of classes. With no one able to break in or out of the dome, a new society has sprung up in the intervening years.
There are four factions, a messy hodgepodge of different faculties orbited by outlaw Sauderites, journalists and media studies majors. The factions have been forced to put their education to use, and have found just how applicable those educations are in real-world situations.
Science, forestry, and LFS formed SCIFOR, based out of the Chemistry and Biological Sciences buildings. This faction creates advanced food-production techniques to license to other factions for what little they can produce with their relevant education. Anyone who has ever uttered the words ‘I’m pre-med’ is set to work clambering between the lifted platforms in the Irving K. Barber Library stacks in which various root vegetables are grown in politically-neutral territory. Also with them are ‘pre-law’ students, the Young Conservatives, Eh? Capella and the staff of The Ubyssey.
Engineering and kinesiology — the “movers and shakers,” as it were — formed the most militarily advanced faction, APSKIN. Their rabidly-guarded compound, the Civil and Mechanical Engineering (CEME) building and the annexed Beaty Biodiversity Museum, is surrounded by lasers, popsicle stick catapults and big-armed kin majors. The pure kinetic energy built up by those who would by now have assumed their roles at bizarre tech startups and prestigious design firms is creating a sinkhole in the main plaza of the CEME. The flag of APSKIN is an iron ring fitted over a bicep.
Arts and fine arts — FARTs — joined together to create the most vulnerable faction, a quilted assortment of devil’s advocates, communists, trombone majors, book people, armchair psychologists and the interminable “economist.” FARTs is based out of Buchanan, which looks indistinguishable from the day it was built. This faction is inexplicably responsible for formulating and adjudicating the tenuous system of laws that maintains the fabric of the campus, holding a League of Nations (comparison drawn for its naïveté and incompetence)-esque summit once a month to maintain the balance between the four factions.
The last faction, business/dentistry, is an uneasy alliance struck after half of Sauder set out on their own to create disparate “networks” across campus, from Wesbrook Village to Wreck Beach. Business and dentistry facilitate trade across campus and collect “connections” badges from other factions in the form of old Eco2Go Carabiners. Business/dentistry operates a highly sophisticated underground market, a physical dark web that operates in the abandoned clubs rooms of the Nest.
The rest of the faculties were either absorbed into larger factions, as were some of the journalists and media studies majors, or struck out on their own. They’ve created communes in the residential areas of campus, or live out on the Endowment lands, roaming the golf course like majestic bands of Brontosauri. Professors and postdocs who have thrown off faculty allegiances create intellectual enclaves in Acadia Park, and their influence spreads outwards across campus.
The Dingbat is The Ubyssey’s humour column. You can submit completed pieces or pitches to blog@ubyssey.ca.