My favorite depiction of utopia

For those who are trying to bring about a glorious transhuman utopia with the help of hopefully-aligned ASI, I think it's worth thinking explicitly about what utopia might actually look like and where it's likely to fall short. To that end, some have helpfully written depictions of utopian (or utopia-adjacent) worlds: The Adventure, Just another day in utopia, The End of Creative Scarcity, The Culture, The Gentle Seduction, The Gentle Romance, Machines of Loving Grace, Friendship is Optimal, Dath Ilan, The Maker of MIND, Failed Utopia #4-2. Unfortunately, the best utopian story I've ever read is also a massive spoiler, since it appears at the very end of a much longer story (see below for the title and author): Worth the Candle by Alexander Wales Inspired by this tweet[1] and with the original author's permission, I adapted the epilogue of that story so it can be enjoyed without 1.5 million words of context! What I love most about this depiction is its exploration of the inherent imperfection of utopia: even when you have literally unlimited power, flaws will remain, and some (many?) people will even prefer the pre-utopia world. The primary purpose of this adaptation is to recontextualize the epilogue so it's accessible and enjoyable for people who haven't read the main story. I think my adaptation does a pretty good job of it, especially the first chapter, which stands on its own and doesn't heavily reference characters from the main story. The later chapters might read as oddly specific in some places, but I smoothed out the roughest edges, and these chapters also say interesting things about utopia that weren't explored in the first chapter. The secondary purpose of this adaptation is to avoid spoiling the main story for those who might read it in the future. It's pretty difficult to do that robustly, and if you already know something about the story, there's a good chance you'll be able to identify which one it is if you read the adapted epilogue, maybe even if you just read the first chapter. I think it wouldn't much affect my enjoyment of the main story if I'd read this adaptation first, but your experience may vary. I've made changes to various details, so even things that look like spoilers might not be! I copied Chapter 1 of 6 below. The full story is here. Content warning: sex, violence, profanity. The world didn’t end the same way for everyone. Rance Su was a farmer, though not as diversified as the common conception of a farmer. He had no chickens or cows, no marbats or pigs. He had a single crop he tended to, taking three harvests of milk leaves a year from his numerous fields, and during the winter months, he did some basic maintenance, then traveled south and did some simple labor in the city. When the world ended, he was going through his fields and plucking the worst of the weeds, the ones that stuck their heads up above the milk leaves. He saw the woman coming from a half mile off, but didn’t stop what he was doing until she was quite close to him. He took a long drink from his bottle of water and regarded her, then crossed over through the field to see what it was she wanted. Normally he would have been annoyed by the interruption, but it was hot, and he found himself grateful for the break. She wasn’t dressed for the weather, but didn’t seem to mind it too much. She was a businesswoman, by the looks of it, dressed in the human fashion, though the conservative end of it, not showing much flesh, more was the pity. She was Sazon, like him, with a long, elegant neck. “Rance Su?” she asked, once he was close enough. He nodded. “That’s me. Somethin’ the matter?” “No, nothing wrong at all,” she said. “I’m an avatar of Transition Services. Do you have a few moments?” “Sure do,” he replied, wiping the sweat from his brow. The words she’d said hadn’t made much sense. She spoke the human dialect of English better than he did, in a way that marked her as possibly being a bureaucrat. There was something comforting about bureaucrats: you knew where they stood. “Are you sellin’ somethin’?” She reached into a bag at her side and produced a clipboard. “No,” she replied. She looked at the clipboard for a moment, then looked at him. “The world ended about ten minutes ago, but that’s perfectly fine, because we have a new one.” “Did it end?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. He’d have thought she was crazy, if she hadn’t been so put together, and if she didn’t have that air to her, like someone had put her in charge. She nodded. “The physical world still exists, obviously, because we’re standing in it having this conversation, but a very large number of key institutions, conventions, and foundations of reality have been made obsolete and replaced or changed. When I say that the world has ended, I mean that nothing you take for granted in your life applies anymore. The transition will be jarring for some, which is why Transition Services exists, and why I’m here.” “Ten minutes ago?” he asked, looking her up an