The Beautiful Country

A Science Fiction Horror Quiz

Ladies and gentlemen, we are preparing for our descent into the Beautiful Country. If you could please direct your attention to the front of the cabin, I’m sure you know what time it is.

That’s right, it’s time for another safety briefing.

Yes, I understand the moaning and the grumbling. But please understand me when I say, these safety briefings are for your benefit.

Every single one of the points I am about to recapitulate has earned its place in this safety briefing through a real life tragedy. Trust me, you do not want to become a bullet point in the safety briefing. You do not want to follow in the footsteps of those who have.

So now I’m going to need you all to tap the I Understand button on your smart watches.

You too, Ms. Xiao.

Very good.

Now you know we here at Mercy Mission Tours do our best to keep it fun and light for some very dark subject matter, and so for your entertainment and — let me stress this once again, your material wellbeing — we have prepared a fun little interactive quiz you can all participate in through your smart watches. If you’ll all just tap the Game On button that should be appearing right about now, we can begin.

Ms. Xiao. I’m sure Mr. Godínez is fascinating company, but I really need you to direct your attention to me for the moment.

Thank you.

Okay, looks like we’re all Game On status. So, without further ado…

Question 1: True or false? We call it the Beautiful Country because everyone agrees it’s the most beautiful country in the world.

Everyone, please answer true or false on your smart watches.

Ms. Xiao, the sooner everyone can give their answer and also their assent that they did participate in the safety briefing, the sooner we can be done.

Even if you are determined to ignore the warnings of the safety briefing, I am still obligated to brief you for the liability protection of Mercy Mission Tours. If you would like to do this the less fun way, Mr. Kane can escort you to the back of the plane, and you can fill out paper waivers by hand. You too, Mr. Godínez.

Very good, it seems I have everyone’s attention.

Question 1: The answer is False.

We call it the Beautiful Country because the longstanding crisis in government has fractured the country into several politicized name blocks. Do not use any of these names.

Not even if you think you know the right name to say.

Not even if one of these names aligns with your political values.

Not even if you’ve heard someone else do it.

Passions run very hot on this topic. Very often, people in the Beautiful Country will try to induce visitors to say what the name of their country is, and if they do not like the answer they will react in ways that are often unpredictable and possibly dangerous.

If someone asks you what they think of their country or what their country should be called, simply answer, It’s a beautiful country.

Do not shorten it to the acronym. You would not be the first tourist to joke about the Beautiful Country being in the stone ages, nor the first to regret it.

Just say, this is a beautiful country. It’s a beautiful country. What a beautiful country you have.

Any other response is emotionally charged. This has been focus-grouped, people. Even if it sounds silly to you, this phrasing has been proven to reduce aggressive responses. Can we all agree that reducing aggressive responses from armed political partisans is in our best interest as individuals and to the tour group?

Yes, Mr. Shi, please do have a laugh at that. In fact, I encourage you all to have a good laugh at it right now. Come on. Have at it. Please, join in. Think of it as a laughing meditation.

Very good.

As amusing as it may be, it will be no laughing matter when we land. The subjects of the Beautiful Country are a proud people. They rarely are permitted to leave their own country and lack a basis of comparison. Many of them truly believe they live in the most beautiful country in the world. They will often adopt an attitude of superiority towards you, which you would be unwise to challenge. So laugh now. The people of the Beautiful Country do not have a sense of humor about their condition.

Which leads us to Question 2.

Question 2: True or false? There are no restrictions on firearms in the Beautiful Country.

Yes, if you could all please weigh in via your smart watches.

Tut tut. Half of you got this answer wrong. False. There are restrictions on explosive devices, flamethrowers, and large bore cannons, though in practice these legal restrictions are not enforced. Lighter arms, such as handguns, rifles, and fully automatic weapons, are cheap, plentiful, and culturally tolerated — as are the frequent slayings and massacres that result from their use.

Assume anyone you interact with in the Beautiful Country is armed, willing, and likely eager to deploy those arms.

That is why we are strict about preventing any behaviors that could be interpreted as a provocation. That is why we do these safety briefings.

I’ll say it again. Assume everyone is armed. Violence from firearms is a real and pervasive danger at any point on the tour. Keep that in mind for the next question.

Question 3: True or false? It is my humanitarian duty to help the many desperate individuals I encounter.

Your answers, please.

Yes. Most of you are correct. The answer is False.

The Beautiful Country has a high population of unhoused individuals. Many visitors find it shocking when they see the number of people with nowhere to live but the streets.

But I cannot stress enough:

Do not engage with any of these people.

Do not talk to them.

Do not make eye contact.

Do not respond to any gestures they might make.

Do not respond to verbal provocations.

Do not even react if someone throws something at you such as garbage, mud, or feces.

If one of these people approaches you, alert security immediately.

At Mercy Mission Tours, our hearts ache for our fellow man. And that is why a part of your package price goes to help the many unfortunate of the Beautiful Country. Mercy Mission runs soup kitchens, needle exchanges, shelters for abuse victims, and hospices for the severely disabled. Your generosity already touches so many lives. You do not need to personally involve yourselves in the direct distribution of alms.

Moreover, it is dangerous.

The Beautiful Country is a desperate country. The people do not enjoy the abundance we take for granted. Abundance that allows us to stop and think, to act instead of reacting, to reach agreements, and set aside differences. Many people in the Beautiful Country will take any opportunity to help themselves, even if that opportunity is to beat and rob a helpful tourist. We know that because many helpful tourists have been beaten and robbed.

Furthermore, if you are the victim of a crime in the Beautiful Country, your troubles will rapidly compound. Police in the Beautiful Country only respond to high-value requests, and a tourist getting mugged does not qualify.

If you are injured, it is unlikely you will be brought to a hospital with sufficient staff and equipment to treat your injuries. And you may or may not be aware that many of the bacteria in the Beautiful Country are treatment resistant.

If you survive the ordeal, you may not survive the bill. The hospitals will often charge tourists astronomical fees, assuming people from other countries have the money and knowing they will not be allowed to leave with outstanding bills.

Yes, the police will be interested in stopping you from getting on the plane. Yes, this is legal in the Beautiful Country. Yes, we can help you if you get in trouble, but the earlier we can intervene in the crisis chain, the more harm we can prevent.

Which is a great segue to our question.

Question 4: True or false? In the Beautiful Country, you will go to prison for not paying bills.

100% correct. True. That’s good. I’m glad you all understand. Because every once in a while there is someone on the tour who says they understand and then decides not to pay a bill.

It’s too tempting. The bill is ridiculous. You’re leaving and never coming back. It’s an obvious grift, why support it?

So let me take a moment to emphasize.

If you cannot pay off the debt, you will not be permitted to board the plane.

The police will open an investigation. This investigation can often be closed for a certain sum of money. If you will not or cannot afford this payment, you will go to prison. In which case, we cannot help you.

Prison in the Beautiful Country is a worst-case scenario. I don’t think I need to elaborate more than this:

When you enter prison in the Beautiful Country, for any reason, no matter how trivial, you will never leave.

I have given this speech to people who are still in prison for refusing to pay a jaywalking ticket. Please do not make me update this anecdote.

Great.

Question 5: True or false? The air in the Beautiful Country is safe to breathe for short periods.

False! All but one of you seems to know that. Mr. Milay, if you require an air filtration mask, kindly see Ms. Del Rio after we’re done here, and she will provide you with one.

We at Mercy Mission Tours believe that if air is not safe to breathe for five minutes, it is not safe to breathe for five seconds.

The Beautiful Country has no limits on particulate matter. That is to say, they allow all forms of air pollution without limit. You will notice as we exit the airport that your smart watch alarms will immediately begin going off. You may see alerts for dangerous levels of ground-level ozone, sulfur-dioxide, lead, volatile organic compounds, fine particulate matter, and many other hazards that come from having a daily air quality index north of 300.

That is why it is highly recommended — but not required — that when you are outside, you wear your air filtration mask and your safety goggles.

Yes, you will get some odd looks. Yes, people will comment. But it’s better than contracting a nasty, untreatable eye or respiratory infection that then leaves you rotting in a debtors' prison.

Please don't make me repeat the spiel about going to the hospital.

Question 6: True or false? The tap water in the Beautiful Country is not safe to drink, but bottled water is okay.

And this is why we do these safety briefings. The rules and norms of the Beautiful Country are perverse and difficult to comprehend if you are not used to them. Things that seem like good ideas, reasonable behaviors, or simple common sense in other countries cannot be taken for granted in the Beautiful Country.

A great many of you answered True. This is False.

The bottled water in the Beautiful Country is not safe to drink. Even if it says it is safe to drink on the bottle!

The Beautiful Country has no testing requirements, reporting requirements, or dumping limitations on bodies of water.

Motor oil, fertilizer, sewage, pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals, and animal carcasses all go directly into the water supply and there is no requirement to filter them out.

One liter of water in the Beautiful Country — from the tap or a bottle — is all but guaranteed to contain some of the following: E. coli, Salmonella, norovirus, Giardia, Cryptosporidium, lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, pesticides, nitrates, nitrites, PCBs, PFAS, chemical solvents, radon, uranium, silt, and debris that can damage the mouth, throat, stomach, intestines, and colon.

I'm not even going to bother reading this list of carcinogens, but you can peruse it at your leisure in our safety briefing email.

Do. Not. Drink. The. Water.

Only drink from the water that we have brought with us. All bottles from Mercy Mission Tours are marked and coded. You can check the barcode with your smart watch to ensure it’s genuine. In recent years, scammers have begun making counterfeit bottled water to snare unwitting visitors. Always verify the barcode of any bottle of water before drinking.

Use our bottled water when you brush your teeth.

Keep showering to a minimum.

Some people develop skin irritations when coming in contact with the water here. You can test to see if you’re one of them with the test kits provided in your hotel welcome package. This is not mandatory, but it is easier than pounding on my door covered in skin lesions because you took a bath.

Now, everything I just said for water goes for food as well. The Beautiful Country offers some very tempting or at least interesting food options.

You may be thinking, I've come all the way here, I have to try it, what's the harm? And it's possible the harm is nothing. It's also possible that you contract parasitic worms or dysentary.

There is no food safety system in the Beautiful Country. There is absolutely no way to verify that what you are eating is what is advertised. Flour is frequently cut with baking soda. Hamburger meat often includes the ground chuck of animals other than cows and pigs. And of course, everything you are eating will have roughly one hundred times the recommended level of microplastic contamination.

So, while it is not prohibited to eat the food here, we strongly encourage you to only eat at our designated meal times and meal stations, where we and our chefs can prepare the food that we brought with us and be assured of the ingredients that we are using.

Remember, we need to keep you out of the hospitals at all costs.

Alright, this next subject as your tour guide, I will admit — is not uncomfortable for me because my job is to keep you safe. But, inevitably, every tour, when I broach this subject, there is a man — and it's always a man in the audience — who is overcome with childish amusement.

So I'm just going to ask you now, if you are uncomfortable with topics of the sexual nature, that you please take this opportunity to get that out of your system. Have a chuckle. Maybe snicker or giggle or snort.

No one? Okay, good. I can see this is a mature and serious group.

Question 7: True or false? Abstinence is the only form of sexual protection in the Beautiful Country.

I am very, very glad that all of you know this is True.

We here at Mercy Mission Tours know that you are all upstanding moral citizens of the world. But not all tour companies cater to such an enlightened crowd.

Perhaps you have heard of something called sex tourism. Perhaps you have even heard the Beautiful Country is a splendid place to enjoy it. Perhaps you have heard there are many desperate people here, and that they can be induced to join you in bed for very modest sums of cash. Or bribed with coffee, chocolate, fruit, and other goods that we take for granted in the developed world, but which are luxuries in the Beautiful Country.

There are no contraceptives in the Beautiful Country. When we pass through security, two very helpful men in ski masks will search your belongings and confiscate anything that could possibly interfere with conception. They will likely also confiscate any items of value, which is why we have our group safe system for your most important possessions. And Mercy Mission Tours, by contract, is not allowed to use this system to transport contraceptives to the Beautiful Country, in accordance with the laws of the majority of the political name groups.

Anyone who perform acts of a libidinous nature in the Beautiful Country does so bereft of protection. This is in a population suffering from pandemic levels of treatment resistant venereal disease.

I know this will not apply to such an upstanding group of highly moral individuals such as yourselves. But I have seen visitors mysteriously contract these treatment resistant STIs and then spend six months in quarantine in their home countries.

Do not become a medical mystery.

Okay, now on a related subject, funny, almost like we planned this…

Question 8: True or false? Vaccination is a personal choice that doesn't affect anyone else.

100% False. Very good.

I expect nothing less from you, but you may be surprised to learn that this sentiment is extremely common in the Beautiful Country. For them, culturally, all responsibility begins and ends with the individual. They have no comprehension of greater good.

Now, I know some of you were complaining about the intensive vaccine schedule required to come on this tour. And I think Dr. Xin made it quite clear why we do things this way. But, I will now reiterate.

The Beautiful Country has no public health system. None.

In fact, it has no cooperative disease mitigation system whatsoever.

While some tools of disease mitigation are practiced by some subjects — such as hand washing, masking, sanitizing medical instruments, and vaccination — it is on a purely individual voluntary basis.

Many people in the Beautiful Country reject the germ theory of disease. Yet another reason why we encourage you to only drink the water and eat the food that we've brought with us.

The population of the Beautiful Country serves as the global reservoir for almost every disease that has been eliminated elsewhere. These life-changing diseases include hepatitis A, B, and D, human papillomavirus, influenza, measles, mumps, polio, rotavirus, rubella, varicella aka Chicken pox, Herpes zoster aka Shingles, Japanese encephalitis, Tick-borne encephalitis — and be aware, Lyme disease currently has no vaccine and is treatment resistant in the Beautiful Country.

Where were we? Ah, yes: yellow fever, dengue, diphtheria, tetanus aka Lockjaw, pertussis aka Whooping cough, haemophilus influenzae type b aka Hib, Streptococcus pneumoniae, meningococcal disease, cholera, tuberculosis, typhoid, malaria, and various parasitic diseases.

You will see things in the Beautiful Country that seem like they’re out of a storybook. Or a nightmare. People ridden with disease dying in the streets. Raw sewage flowing the gutters. People urinating into water vessels and then drinking from them. Even the occasional human corpse.

Do not comment on hygiene, health, or safety in the Beautiful Country. That is guaranteed to provoke an aggressive response.

It is commendable that in the Beautiful Country, they have normalized people with severe illness participating wholly in society. You will see many people with breathing trouble, amputations, mental debilitation, and infected wounds still going to work and living their lives as best they can. In fact, many of the leaders in the political name groups of the Beautiful Country suffer from late-stage syphilis.

However, this is not a norm that other countries are welcome to adopt. Thus, our rigorous vaccine schedule is not just for your safety. It is required by law to prevent you from carrying any of these charming diseases outside of the Beautiful Country.

Okay, last one.

Question 9: True or false? You should never tip your tour guide.

Wow, I see we have a lot of cheapskates in the audience.

No, I jest. You are correct, True! There is no need to tip me or Ms. Del Rio or Mr. Kane. We are well paid and reasonably contented professionals. Our compensation is negotiated through our union in partnership with Mercy Mission Tours, and I am pleased to report that it is a fruitful and mutually respectful relationship.

However, in the Beautiful Country you will be constantly asked to tip for services that boggle the mind. You will be asked to pay prices for things that are advertised nowhere. In fact, it will be almost impossible to determine the actual price of any good or service that you are attempting to purchase in the Beautiful Country.

This confusion is normalized there. Everyone understands that the price is an illusion and what you will actually pay is whatever can be extracted from you. This system can seem quite aggressive and confusing to an outsider; therefore if there is something you wish to buy, please first approach me, Ms. Del Rio or Mr. Kane, and we will perform the transaction for you, drawing the funds from the Mercy Mission Tour Group Bank. This will almost certainly get you a better deal, and again, reduce the risk of aggressive responses.

Thank you very much, you've all been great sports in participating in our safety briefing! Believe me, I’m just as tired of them as you are, but safety is our number one priority here at Mercy Mission Tours.

I'm getting word from the pilot we're just about to begin the landing procedure, so I'll pass the mic to her and if you enjoyed my little talk and think I did a good job, well, you can all tap your smart watches now and give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down if you think I did poorly.

Ms. Xiao! You wound me.

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