Dear Mr. Cola [Dreamworld Edition]

I recently had the opportunity to try your new, “limited edition” Dreamworld Coca-Cola, and while I’m tempted to say I don’t know what in the John Dee Hell is going on over there, it’s more disturbing than that – I have an idea what’s going on over there, and I don’t like it. Whether my educated guess is correct or not, I do know one thing: Lord Morpheus did not suffer seventy years’ imprisonment by a series of grasping, grifting fake magii to be insulted like this.

Listen man, let’s be straight about this. You’ve got all the different Coke flavors, right? And I don’t mean this in a Georgia-twang kinda way where there’s Sprite-Coke, Dr. Pepper-Coke, hell probably even Pepsi-Coke if someone’s a heretic. I mean like Vanilla Coke, Cherry Coke, Diet Coke – all those fine brands. You know what they all have in common? They taste like Coke. Dreamworld Coke tastes like Coke in the same way an unexpected email from the distant CEO of your multinational employer that reads “I need 47 Hot Pockets, a Dick’s Sporting Goods gift card, and a fine alpaca cashmere sweater in the next 15 minutes or this important sale isn’t going to go through AND YOU’RE THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN SAVE THE DEAL” is a real email from your real CEO who you’ve never met.

I don’t know what the Dreamworld tastes like, Mister Cola, and given this – I hesitate to call it such a thing, but if I’m pressed, I do have to admit it’s a beverage, so I guess I have to say it – beverage, I’m guessing you don’t know either. My friend B—-e, with whom I shared a case of this…. beverage, suggested immediately upon sipping it that it tasted like drinking cleaning products, and given your current track record, sir – I did try the SpaceFlight flavored Coke, please see my last letter to you – I wouldn’t be surprised to find out you contaminated a batch of cola with safe for consumption but unpalatable cleaning products and decided to save a couple bucks by not dumping the batch and instead relabeling it as “limited edition” and moving on. But to be honest, I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I think what’s going on is more complicated than that, and I have a theory. But before I explain it, I’m going to have to bring to the front of our minds a few supporting points that we all know:

First, we all know that while Lord Morpheus was bound in that glass egg in the basement under a British country house, his three symbols of power - the helm, the pouch of sand, and the ruby - were stolen from him and sold off for mere profit.

Second, we all know that Coca-Cola is so named because its original formulation was made using an extract of the coca leaf, a plant from South America, and an extract of the kola nut, a plant from western Africa. Obviously, back in the day, the Coca Cola Company employed a department full of colonizers explorers who went to great lengths to “discover” new flavors that indigenous folks had long known about.

Third, we all know that corporations these days are outsourcing as much human work as they can to artificial intelligences, also known as AIs. Now mind you, those AIs are intelligent in the same way that… well, in point of fact, that DreamWorld Coke is recognizable as Coke, but since that’s the convention we’re all using, guess I may as well keep it up. I reckon y’all have been figuring out cost saving techniques to keep your small concern afloat in these trying times – don’t have to worry that AIs don’t want to work anymore, amirite? – and that you, Mr. Cola, or your busy-bee loyal subordinates, have been investing in AIs. While I guess I can’t fault you that, I think the problem is where you decided to deploy these cost-saving machines.

After all, can a machine know what it is to love? Can a machine know the beauty in a simple flower? Can a machine suffer from PTSD and need therapy? Given what you’ve made this machine do, I think the last may be true, because I’ve tasted DreamWorld Coke, Mr. Cola, and here’s what I think happened.

I think you still have those colonizers explorers out hunting for new flavors, and I think that in their explorations, they came across either Lord Morpheus’ bag of sand, or his ruby. And I think those “intrepid” explorers either stole or bought one of those two items… and I’m guessing you bought-stole his Ruby of Dreams. After all, it’s pretty canonical that the bag of sand never runs out, and this is a limited edition cola, right? So you’d have an unending supply of the sand to use for artificial flavoring in your Dreamland Coca-Cola, and then it wouldn’t have to be limited edition, would it? In fact, I’mma guess that if you had some never-ending ingredient that you didn’t have to pay for, you’d find a way to use it in everything and market it to us forever, and make us like it through sheer weight of celebrity endorsements. So a limited edition flavor has to mean a limited quantity of ingredients.

So here’s what I think happened. Your unabashed colonizers dauntless explorers found-bought-stole the Dream King’s ruby, and brought it back to your secret headquarters and development labs in the shadowy subbasements and laboratories under your Atlanta lair. And once there, your research AIs started doing what they do: experiments.

In other hands, an item of power like the Dream King’s ruby might have gone on to be used to terrible effect… but we know what you do, Mr. Cola. You make beverages. And so your AIs have been trained to do the same thing, but more efficiently… and possibly more incompetently. Because – does a machine know what a raspberry tastes like? No, a machine does not. So after grinding that Ruby of Dreams to dust, that machine put a little bit of that dust into a nice, tall, ice-cold glass of Coca-Cola, stirred… and started sampling. And what it detected was: raspberry. The rest, I am sure, is history. And marketing. Given the ingredients in the cola, your marketing AIs – well trained on using ingredients to name your products, see the previously-mentioned Vanilla Coca-Cola – named it DreamWorld Coca-Cola, presumably because calling it Coca-Cola: The Dreaming would have been a copyright violation.

(And do not let me forget your utilization of graphic design AIs, sir. I know graphic designers, and there is no way on God’s green earth that any human graphic designer would ever sign off on the bizarre and awful design of either the can, or the case.)

Unfortunately, Mr. Cola, now that this “beverage” is in the hands of consumers… That raspberry flavor isn’t what raspberries taste like. It is incomplete. Much like an AI will never know the gentle caress of a lover’s touch on their shoulder, an AI will never taste a raspberry. And so, we train our AIs, and we train them to determine approximations. Best guesses. The raspberry flavor of the DreamWorld Coca-Cola is the Uncanny Valley of raspberry. It’s a close AI-built approximation of raspberry… but it’s subtly wrong. It’s exactly what an AI would assume a raspberry to taste like, without ever having tasted one itself.

And there are other flavors too. Metal. Dust. Perhaps a hint of watermelon. The slightest waft of vanilla. And – it no longer is recognizable as Coca-Cola. I think that you may have inadvertently done yourself a favor and given the Dream King more power by doing what you, or your AIs, have done; after all, your marketing campaigns are the reason we Americans picture Santa Claus the way we do, so perhaps, through small childrens’ greedy capitalist holiday dreams, Coca-Cola has some power in The Dreaming… and perhaps the micrograms of the Ruby of Dreams dust in each can has robbed your refreshing cola of something eternal, and given it back to Lord Morpheus.

We can only hope that this is the case.

Whatever happens, you, Mr. Cola, sir, had best hope that the Lord of the Dreaming does not escape that glass egg he has been confined in for so very long. Once he is released, his retribution will surely be swift and terrible, and I cannot imagine what form his rage may take when he learns what you’ve done to his precious Ruby. Hopefully, your AIs that have properly maximized their paperclip production, as it were, by converting a mystical artifact to an artificial flavoring have in fact sent more power to Lord Morpheus than he had in the first place, for else, I fear for what he may indeed wrought upon your Atlantan secret lair.

Sincerely,

Alex Parise