The Commonality

Dr. Hu stood back. "Fascinating," she said, looking at her chalkboard. She'd made a Venn Diagram of every group of people—smokers, vegans, pet skunk owners, Lutherans, chillwave musicians, sticker collectors, shower pee-ers, cheese lovers—and every circle overlapped on one point.

All of humanity-every person alive and every person who ever has lived- could be described by the center of the amazing diagram. We all share one trait:

Selfishness! Promptly, we disabled the simulation. Thousands of cycles—the results always the same. Every intelligent species converges on the same attributes and you don't need a complex venn diagram to tell you that. "Come on," I said to my eel sidekick. "Let's look elsewhere."